How to Generate More High-Quality Leads
Every marketer I have ever spoken to has always strived to generate more leads, and there are very few situations where they would get a lead and say “no, thanks.” Lead generation is a critical factor in the development of small B2B companies. It is frequently the most difficult aspect of the job, but once you are able to generate sufficient leads for your enterprise, your work will become much easier. At some point, you get to know the number of leads you’ll generate per week, month, and even annually. This is referred to as predictable B2B SaaS lead generation. When you have a predictable lead generation pipeline and consistent conversion rates, you can start to accurately predict business growth and the investment needed to achieve it. How to Create a Predictable Lead Generation Pipeline To have a successful B2B SaaS lead generation pipeline, you’ve got to use a mix of marketing channels. Feel free to combine SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with SMM (Social Media Marketing), word-of-mouth marketing, and PPC (pay-per-click), among others. You should think of it as hedging your bets to ensure that if one channel falls short, others will compensate for the loss. The most common error marketers make in this area is to excessively rely on one specific tactic they’ve used in the past. To begin developing a predictable lead generation strategy, you must consider these critical things. Discovering Channels that Work for Your Brand The first step here is to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is an imaginary character that reflects your business’s typical customer. Typically, a B2B firm begins with three buyer personas. A buyer persona helps you identify the best channels for reaching your target audience. You get to find out the channels they prefer and their specific demographic groups. Using this data, you can begin to target your desired audience. By combining your buyer persona with your ideal customer profile, you can construct your targeting. A persona can give you clues about the platforms and publications they consume. For example, if you are developing an ad campaign for a 25-year-old London fashion buyer, you may discover they use Snapchat, Instagram, read certain blogs, or follow certain YouTube channels. You can then build an idea of how to reach them. There are so many types of marketing channels that it would be impossible to compile a complete list. You can discover the ones that suit you best by working out your buyer persona. Importance of Measuring Cost per Lead You can calculate the cost per lead by dividing the amount spent on acquiring leads by the number of leads acquired. For instance, if you ran an ad campaign for $1,000 and got 10 leads, your cost per lead would be $100. You must determine cost per lead to gauge how effectively each channel is performing for you in terms of pure B2B SaaS lead generation and marketing ROI. It’s also valuable to track cost per lead because you can tell when you’ve saturated a channel or audience. If the cost per lead on a channel that was $50 crept up to $100, you’ve over-saturated the audience and should make some adjustments. Making Long-term and Short-term Investments Don’t leave out the most effective lead generation techniques for your brand for short-term benefits that are more expensive. For instance, content marketing and SEO are effective lead-generation tactics, but they don’t generate results in a few days. In these cases, marketing ROI is calculated over months rather than days or weeks. You might want to use Google Ads, Facebook, or some other paid advertising channel for quick results, as they generate leads on a daily basis. You should balance this with SEO and content marketing, from which you will see rewards further down the line. By investing in long-term lead generation tactics, you can reduce your cost per lead in six months by reducing spend on paid campaigns. How to Increase High-Quality Leads for B2B SaaS Businesses 1. Referral Programs Your current customers are your best advertisement. Case studies on your website are one of the most popular pages because they prove that your product works. A prospective customer sees them as proof that they, too, had the same problems and that your product solved them. The closer the case study subject’s profile is to your ideal client profile, the better. Source: HubSpot According to HubSpot, salespeople say that the top source of most of their leads is referrals. Referrals are an important source of B2B SaaS lead generation. Referring someone to a hairdresser or to a product you like works the same way as referring a friend to a piece of software. 2. Define Your Product’s Users and Buyers It is crucial to know who your buyers are and who your users are. In big businesses, the purchaser of a piece of CRM software may be the CTO or Head of Marketing, but the users may be sales reps or secretaries. While most users currently have little buyer power, engaging them is still important because people frequently switch jobs, and usually move to a higher position. If someone has used one piece of software in one company and found it successful, they are very likely to recommend it to a new employer looking for the same solution. 3. Content Marketing Creating and distributing quality content is key to successful marketing. It may be too simple, but one of the common issues B2B technology businesses face is not having enough relevant content on their website to rank in Google. There are two primary methods that B2B companies can use to generate leads through organic search traffic and SEO. The most effective ones rely on Inbound Marketing. People seldom create content because there is little short-term reward for doing so. Those who do not produce enough content will not generate enough low-cost leads for B2B companies. 4. Blogging You can outsource content if you don’t have the time or resources to produce it in-house. There