How B2B Lead Generation Strategies Work For SaaS Companies
As with any SaaS organization, your annual contract value or ACV is going to dictate which strategies make the most sense to acquire customers. This means that with a higher annual contract value, you can spend more on expensive Google Ads, for example. Inbound lead generation strategies are more important for SaaS businesses with lower ACV that cannot justify the high cost of outbound lead generation. Even for a higher ACV, inbound is more sustainable and gives you more options in addition to outbound channels.
In this post we will look at six strategies that, in our experience, can successfully increase lead generation and deliver high ROI.
1. Inbound Marketing & Content Promotion
Inbound marketing focuses on attracting, converting, closing and delighting the prospects. The initial step is to attract prospects to your business, preferably through your site. The absolute best approach to attract people to your product is to create remarkable content. This should be valuable, actionable and intriguing content that enables your prospects do their jobs better and addresses their unique pain points and challenges.
However, as more companies continue to adopt content marketing as a strategy, this space may become increasingly crowded. Beyond creating remarkable content, you need to promote it to focused influencers and audiences. Create a content-promotion methodology that will empower you to reach your target audience at their digital watering hole, so to speak. Outline what additional resources need to be created in addition to the content itself, such as a SlideShare presentation to accompany a whitepaper for example. Incorporate this process into content production so once your campaign is finalized, all the pieces are set up for your marketing team and other individuals to appropriately share it. Keep in mind, don’t promote content just for the sake of promoting it, ensure that you are adding value to the conversation.
Also, create an influencer outreach list that you can use to share your content.
2. Website Conversion-Rate Optimization (CRO)
Your website is the first impression your organization makes on a visitor. It should be clean, responsive, actionable and built with the user in mind. Your site is also where the entirety of your content lives; it is a library of your remarkable content, and like a library you can showcase your best work. Utilize this for your potential benefit. Discover areas on your site where visitors tend to focus and add CTAs promoting your highest-converting content. Small percentage point increases from visitor-to-lead conversion rate can deliver profits farther down the funnel.
They key to CRO is providing basic and logically relevant next steps for visitors to take throughout your site and to continually test and optimize your funnel.
3. Real-Time Support via Live Chat Support Reps.
VTL Design found that 91% of users loved live chat after real-time communication with a customer support agent and 63% of users would like to come back to a website that offers live chat to assist with questions. Moreover, it supported them in making a purchase decision.
A live chat support on your website can boost your lead generation efforts through the following:
- Real-time communication
- Improved customer service
- Reduced bounce rate
- Higher probability of lead generation
- Ability to build customer trust and loyalty
- Cost effectiveness
Live chat also offers robust reporting capabilities that enables you to track visitors’ activity on the site and feed data to the sales team, and to internally audit the effectiveness of the program and make ongoing improvements.
4. Marketing Automation, Lead Nurturing and Management
Since your website is generating leads, your focus can shift to moving them down the funnel. This is accomplished through a combination of email marketing, content marketing, content promotion, calls, and chat support reps. Marketing automation makes these processes more productive, effective, and measurable.
Automation can assist you learn more about your leads as people, and how they collaborate with your business. Set up work processes for premium content offer downloads, expired trailers and other key attribution exercises that have driven leads to purchase in the past such as viewing your pricing page. Incorporating automation into your lead-nurturing strategy will help keep a lead alive longer and improve the probability that they will convert to a paying customer.
5. Closed-Loop Targeting Based on Lifetime Value
Closed-loop focusing on leads is going beyond tracking the sources of your website visitors, likewise recognizing whether they took the action you most desire. This kind of targeting gives you a 360-degree perspective on your campaigns and where your most (and least) profitable customers are coming from.
A great place to start is with monthly cohort analysis of your new customers or free-trials to define which strategies are driving leads to acquisition and which channels are bringing customers with the best lifetime value for your company. Segment these partners by channel, campaign and persona to start. Use these insights to build a highly targeted and optimized marketing strategy for new possibilities that builds off the same strategies that generated the best customers you have today.
6. Customer Success
The responsibilities of marketing and sales no longer end when a deal is closed, but instead shift to keeping customers happy and educated. Frequently, your customer base is an opportunity for second-order revenue. Here is the place referral programs and partner networks come into place.
Despite cutting-edge marketing strategies and tools, verbal exchange is still, by far, the best type of marketing. Friends referring friends or colleagues referring colleagues, either way you can encourage your customers to suggest your product by offering added features, discounts or trials of premium product.
The other procedure would be to execute partner networks similar to HubSpot. By partnering with your customer base success, you can motivate customers to sell your product for you with included advantages. Benefiting from your happy customers can be a strategic way to generate greater ROI.
Which strategies and channels are most effective for your B2B SaaS company?