- 19 August 2022
- by aasthashaw
- Blog
- 0 Comments
Lead generation is an enormous challenge faced by SaaS businesses. 30-50% of income comes from sales and marketing in this industry. Such a vast budget means you have room for quality and quantity, which not every other industry can do.
Using this opportunity wisely is the most crucial part. Even high-growth companies will fail to grow their sales without proper strategies to generate qualified leads. The road is competitive to get leads, but it’s winnable.
Of course, pipeline marketing methods will differ depending on the industry and product types, but B2B SaaS marketers who stick to best practices will almost certainly find the leads they require. SaaS B2B lead generation still has a lot of possibilities, whether it’s through SEO and content marketing or a variety of other methods.
Lead generation is the most significant content marketing goal for 85% of B2B marketers. So if you’re looking to grow your existing business or kickstart your new one, then you are in the right place.
What Are Qualified Leads?
A qualified lead is a potential future consumer who meets specific criteria your company sets. Qualified leads are those that provide information readily and freely. Depending on their criteria, they are divided into three categories: MQLs for marketing-driven, SQLs for sales-driven, and PQLs for product-driven.
Inbound lead qualification is an old notion. It is necessary for prioritizing sales operations and maintaining a productive and efficient sales system.
Why? Because qualified leads have a higher chance of becoming paying customers.
Now, how to pick your leads? The first and foremost thing to take care of is your ‘quality’ of leads. It’s possible that having a large number of leads in hand would feel like you’re off to a great start, but focusing on lead quality will take you to a higher road.
Here are some of the best practices to help you grab qualified leads
1. Validate your leads
Before starting on how to get more leads, the first and most important thing to remember is – always validate your leads, regardless of where they come from. This is important to ensure you have a way to reach out to genuine, qualified leads and not spend your resources on trying to reach out to fake, spammy, or invalid leads.
The best way to do so is to validate their email addresses and phone numbers while they are filling in their data on your forms, landing pages, etc.
With email validation and phone number validation, you can be sure that there are no typos or invalid entries in your database, and also be assured of keeping away all those fake and poor-quality leads.
2. Pay attention to SEO
SEO is important for every business. It is well known for its free-of-cost approach and can be an incredible source for qualified leads when used to its fullest extent. It helps to get your product or service at the top of the SERPs.
The goal of SEO services is to increase traffic to your website, ideally from people interested in your service or software. It is a long-term and reliable approach.
You’ll get the best results if you generate content for low-competition keywords with a high monthly search volume that your target audience is searching for.
For example, your SaaS has key features such as analytics and growth measures. And you want to reach out to people looking for fundraising and venture capital information.
You’ll be up against huge websites like Investopedia and Wikipedia if you try to rank for the term “venture capital.” According to an Ahrefs keyword study, ranking in the top ten results requires more than 100 backlinks.
However, if you target the term “how to raise seed funding,” which answers a specific question, you’ll only need about 15 backlinks to reach the top result.
3. Repurpose content into videos
54% of consumers prefer watching video content from their favorite brands.
Undoubtedly, videos are a great way to engage with the audience and keep them hooked. Engaging videos with various styles can boost your audience and their engagement rate. You can play around with different video styles – Product demo, Q/A, website/feature walkthrough, customer interview, etc.
By repurposing content, you may gain new organic traffic and reach out to more potential customers. Converting your content into a video may prove to be more effective. Compared to any other sort of copy, people are twice as likely to share video material with their peers.
Say, you have been blogging for a while, then you are likely to have a lot of content repressed in the archives. And repurposing the blog content into video doesn’t even take much time. Using an online tool, you can easily convert text to video and quickly repurpose your blog posts into videos.
Depending on the blog article, you may choose the type of video content to accompany it and bring these blog posts back to life with new content. You can even make modern videos out of them to re-communicate their message to new audiences. HubSpot suggests how to achieve this goal efficiently.
How to Turn a Blog Post Into Video Marketing
4. Live chat on your SaaS website
Live chat is equivalent to a store assistant if your company has a physical store. Adding live chat software to a website often results in a 20% conversion increase.
Answering the queries right away with the help of a chatbot or even a live conversation produces more leads than a phone, email, or social media assistance, with a customer satisfaction score of 92%.
To put it another way, make yourself available to your website visitors so that meaningful engagement might occur. As a result, you may direct them to areas of your website where they can download a resource or sign up for a trial, converting them into leads.
5. Social media
Every B2B SaaS firm should ensure its social media approach is up to standard.
Using LinkedIn as a promotion channel can be the most effective, with the highest conversion rates for lead creation. Targeting based on buyer personas and constant ad changes is the major strategy.
You can also target your audience on Facebook. Many individuals are unaware that Facebook ads are intelligent and perform extensive optimization for you. For instance, If you want to gain users/ subscribers, you can set your campaign’s goal to “Website Conversion” (i.e., new signups on your website rather than just clicks to your website).
Always remember, to effectively use social media for lead generation, your ad must direct visitors to a precise call-to-action. Otherwise, the audience won’t know what next step they are supposed to take, and the purpose of your ads will never be fulfilled.
Also, if you find your ideal lead and are unsure how to reach out to them, you can use an email finder tool to find their email address and craft an engaging email for them to initiate the business talk.
6. Write guest blogs
Writing guest posts is another brilliant technique to improve your organic search rankings and establish trust. Guest posts increase your backlink profile and gain exposure to a larger audience by using other bloggers’ audiences and Domain Authority (DA). It allows you to reach out to the audience who might be already interested in similar products as yours and will have higher chances of converting.
You need to be picky when choosing to write for a guest blog. . You can’t just write on any topic or for any website. The guest site should have a good reputation or publish related content to your domain.
Publishing high-quality material is also critical for generating leads. As you are writing for someone else’s blog, don’t scrimp on the depth and quality of your writing. Otherwise, the blog won’t get published, or the audience might not find it interesting enough to read.
7. Referrals to customers and leads
Here comes the power of referrals.
One of the simplest ways to promote your product is to give clients referral benefits. Referral incentives can take the form of immediate rewards, future billing savings, or even premium features of your product.
Referrals are practices that make it easy for users to share your app with family and friends. These incentives are effective because they produce a “chain effect.” 1 customer refers to 5 customers, who then refer to another 25 customers, and so on. For example, a simple referral program by Dropbox allowed them to grow 3900%
8. PPC Ads
Don’t pitch your SaaS solution to your audience directly using this lead generation strategy. Direct advertising is not as effective as indirect advertising. People dislike being marketed to.
Instead, use the “value first” strategy to run your PPC advertising because it
suggests that you want to help your prospects (those who visit your website after clicking on your ad) before pitching your product.
For example, an advertiser paid $100 for a Google PPC ad. Over 10,000 individuals saw the advertisement, and 100 people responded to it. That means each ad click costs the advertiser $1.
Let’s see a few real-life examples to give you an idea of how PPC ads would work on Google and Facebook.
A Google Display Ad
A Google Adword
A Facebook Ad
9. Outsourcing lead generation
It may take 6 to 12 months for inbound leads to pay off. That’s why a few things should be left to the experts.
If you’re having trouble generating enough high-quality leads on your own, or if you’re in a hurry to get leads and get your business up and running, lead generation pros can help. Their job is to generate high-quality leads for their clients through different sources.
Because lead generation providers have more knowledge, outsourcing leads is 43% more efficient than producing leads in-house. It also helps you save time, increase quality, and save money.
10. Target website visitors
Outbound leads are 39% more expensive than inbound leads, so it’s no surprise that marketers strive to increase their lead generation efforts and attract more likely convert clients. Visitors are already your leads but may be sliding away for one reason or another.
You can get the most out of your lead generation strategies by including website visitor tracking in the mix. You’ll be able to see the exact profile of companies browsing your website, look at their typical pre-purchase behaviors, etc., which can help you identify potential high-value leads and customize your content accordingly to reach out to them better.
You can start with website visitor tracking tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, or email finder tools. These tools assist in the identification and tracking of visitors and help you get their contact details.
11.Provide a demo
An instant demo is the quickest approach to acquiring a SaaS lead. Not only will you be able to clarify any issues the prospect may have, but you will also be able to converse and answer questions.
Getting a glimpse of the product before using it makes perfect sense. It also opens up a doorway for more customers to come and stay. And the better you treat your customers, the more leads you’ll get.
There’s no need for a complicated setup. You can schedule an instant demo session with the potential leads simply by sharing your desktop or smartphone screen.
12. Email subscribers
One of the most common lead generation strategies for B2B companies is email marketing with 78% of users.
People who have subscribed to your list are potential clients. Tracking their behavior and keeping a close eye can make them part of your family.
Subscribers who begin to act like leads can be tagged or flagged by a good lead rating system. Of course, it can notify you when a “cold” lead becomes a “hot” lead and when a hot lead requires a call from a real salesperson.
13. Account-based Marketing (ABM)
Rather than creating and distributing the same content to everyone, ABM provides customized content for each type of lead or account. This method aids in the development of more qualified leads that are ready for sales follow-up.
For SaaS companies trying to establish a more robust development strategy, ABM is crucial. This approach is often employed in four main business scenarios: penetrating accounts, influencing brand perception, pursuing large prospects, and winning new accounts.
Tactics like finding the right contacts, tracking KPIs to gauge account penetration, creating customized content accurately, and developing a high-end marketing plan can uplift your ACVs (Annual Contract Value) by 171%.
14. One question surveys
All leads aren’t created equal. Further down the funnel, one-question surveys can be of great help to sort out leads in terms of classification.
Your leads can be divided into two stages:
1. The willingness of the lead to purchase.
2. Other characteristics of lead. For instance, which aspect of your business piqued their attention, what they learned about the product on the website, their familiarity with your organization, and so on.
Create a list of all contacts who agreed to receive emails but have yet to be assigned a persona. They will be automatically added to the selected persona, and the process of providing them with the most relevant content will begin.
15. Content marketing
Content marketing is an important aspect of every company’s marketing strategy, not simply SaaS marketing. Organic traffic can be increased by blogging about relevant themes to your target audience.
It helps you increase website engagement, analyze them, and achieve higher credibility. Remember that a healthy website is the backbone of content marketing. To nurture your leads, you must keep your website updated.
16. Content suitable for mobile devices
Another important thing to consider in B2B marketing is mobile. As of 2019, the world’s mobile device owners number over five billion, with smartphones accounting for more than half of them. You want to reach these users, so your campaign should strive to meet their requirements while ensuring a pleasant experience.
If you’re starting afresh, your entire marketing campaign may need to be targeted to smartphone owners, ensuring that your website, advertisements, and other marketing channels are mobile-friendly to generate new leads.
You now have a variety of techniques to implement in your SaaS for generating leads. While each of these methods can produce results independently, don’t be afraid to experiment and combine some of them to get even better results. Keep testing and tracking the strategies to find which lead generation strategy best works for you and where you can improvise.
Aastha Shaw is immersed in creating & developing content at Clearout & ClearoutPhone, Saas products used for email verification and phone validation, respectively. She has been creating content for websites, blogs, and videos for marketing. You can reach out and connect with Aastha on LinkedIn.
