SaaS Lead Generation
What is a Lead?
What is the Marketing Funnel? The Journey for SaaS Leads
Why Qualified Leads are Crucial for SaaS Brands
14 of the Top SaaS Lead Generation Tips
Upgrade Your SaaS Lead Generation
SaaS lead generation is a complex process. In fact, 61% of companies say generating consistent leads and traffic is one of the number one business challenges. Take a look at our ultimate guide to a successful lead generation strategy below.
However, investing in the right lead generation strategies is crucial for any brand hoping to generate sales, opportunities, and growth. Simply put, companies can’t thrive without leads. Without interested prospects to convert into customers, your company will cease to exist.
It’s little wonder why 53% of companies spend at least half of their entire marketing budget on lead acquisition. While most organizations understand they need to generate a consistent flow of high quality leads to maintain consistent growth, many struggle when it comes to determining how they can effectively capture, qualify, and engage leads in a scalable way.
That’s why we’ve developed this list of the top B2B SaaS lead generation strategies, tips, and hacks, taken from some of the top experts in the lead-gen space.
What is a B2B SaaS Lead? Defining Lead Generation for B2B SaaS Brands
The first step in mastering effective B2B SaaS lead generation for your SaaS company, is understanding what lead gen actually is.
Essentially, a quality lead is a person, buyer, or company who shows interest in your B2B SaaS product or service. They may not be ready to make a purchase as soon as you encounter them, which is why SaaS companies need to invest time into educating, and nurturing each lead.
“SaaS” leads are B2B clients or customers who have demonstrated interest in a “Software as a Service” product. These B2B leads can sometimes be particularly difficult to convert because they’re often making crucial decisions on whether to engage in a long-term relationship with a company.
According to Gartner, B2B buyers engage in an average of 27 “steps” during their software purchasing journey, to ensure they’re making the correct decision. Not only is the SaaS lead generation, nurturing and conversion process particularly long, but it’s also challenging for a range of other reasons.
For instance, SaaS buyers often need a lot more information before they’ll be willing to make a purchase, because they’re shopping in a relatively new environment. Additionally, as the SaaS market evolves, the number of competitors companies have to consider is greater than ever.
What is the Marketing Funnel? The Journey for SaaS Leads
In almost all instances, SaaS lead generation strategies work best when they consider the needs of prospects at every stage of the “marketing funnel”.
A good lead generation strategy should ease customers from one part of their purchasing decision to the next, with valuable content, guidance, and support. In fact, 95% of customers say they choose a vendor because they’ve helped them to navigate every stage of the buyer journey.
The stages of the marketing funnel can vary, but often include:
Awareness: Awareness is one of the core stages in any SaaS lead generation strategy. At the “top of the funnel”, the focus is on capturing the attention of potential customers, often with content marketing, advertising campaigns, and sales strategies. Your lead generation strategy will focus on building awareness about the solutions you can offer and the problems you address.
Consideration: In the consideration stage, B2B SaaS customers are looking for information. They’ve recognized they have a problem or issue they need to address, and they’re looking for information about how to overcome their concern.
Intent: During the “intent” stage, prospects have already entered the “lead nurturing” stage of the funnel. They have the intent to purchase a solution, and are now exploring options with demos, and questions sent to sales teams.
Decision: In the “Decision” stage, SaaS customers choose a solution from a SaaS provider, and begin exploring options in regard to pricing packages and subscriptions. This may be the stage when conversations with a sales team begins.
Action: Finally, customers take action when they’ve picked the ideal SaaS product for their needs, and purchase their service.
In the SaaS funnel, there’s usually an additional stage, called “retention”, wherein the focus becomes maintaining audience loyalty following a purchase. This can involve signing customers up for regular newsletters, offering subscription discounts for recurring clients, and using reward or loyalty campaigns to increase customer lifetime value.
Why Qualified Leads are Crucial for SaaS Brands
Notably, when working on your SaaS Lead Generation strategy, your focus shouldn’t just be on generating as many leads as possible. While quantity does matter in lead generation, “quality” is much more valuable.
SaaS marketers will typically work with a few different kinds of leads throughout the purchasing funnel. Qualifying each type of lead helps business leaders to determine the next best actions for nurturing and conversion. The three most common types of leads for SaaS companies are:
Informational Qualified Leads (IQL: Cold Leads): Informational qualified leads, or IQLs are often referred to as cold leads. They exist at the top of the buyer journey, within the “Awareness” stage. Usually, they’re prospects who have engaged with your content, and have handed over their email address in exchange for a lead magnet, such as a valuable newsletter, or a free download, webinar, or eBook.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL: Warm Leads): Marketing Qualified Leads are slightly further down the marketing funnel. They’ve started the “consideration” stage of their journey, and they’re closer to making a purchase. They’ve expressed interest in your product, may have watched a webinar, or downloaded a whitepaper.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL: Hot Leads): Sales Qualified Leads are the most valuable of all. They’re your “hot leads”, which have entered the decision stage of the buyer cycle. They’re ready to start exploring options and actively engaging with your sales team. Typically, Sales Qualified Leads are handled primarily by the sales team, who focuses on getting them to close a deal and take action.
14 of the Top SaaS Lead Generation Tips
Now you have a basic understanding of leads, SaaS leads, and lead qualification, as well as a knowledge of how the marketing funnel contributes to your demand generation strategy, it’s time to start working on boosting your leads. Here are our top tips for better SaaS lead generation.
1. Set Your Goals
This is the number one first step any SaaS company should take when planning a lead generation strategy. Setting goals means you know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish from day one. It gets your entire marketing and sales team on the same strategy, and guides you to making the right lead generation decisions. Plus, it helps to identify the metrics you need to track.
Ask yourself:
What is the end goal: What do you want to accomplish exactly? In other words, don’t just say you want to increase leads, determine how many leads you want, of what quality, and by which time. Eg: We want 20% new SQLs within the next 3 months.
What is the shared vision for the team? What will everyone in your team be doing to achieve your goals? Whose responsibilities lie where? Who will be making marketing and sales decisions, and do individual teams have their own specific goals?
What are your resources? Do you have the resources you need, such as pitch decks, free demos, and marketing campaigns to achieve your goals? What do you need to create before you can get started? Where do you need to access extra help?
2. Define the Main SaaS Lead Generation KPIs to Track
Once you have your goals, you’ll be able to start determining which crucial Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you need to track as you accelerate towards your targets. Determining your KPIs is essential to ensuring your lead generations are actually successful. KPIs tell you which of your strategies are working, and where you’re missing out on opportunities.
Some of the most common SaaS lead generation KPIs to track include:
Organic traffic: Your inbound marketing strategies should be constantly generating new levels of “organic traffic”. Organic traffic is made up of people who find your product by searching for keywords online and discovering your content, without the need for paid ads.
Landing page conversions: Your landing page conversion rates tell you whether your customers are actually impressed by the offers you provide on your landing page. If you’re not getting enough conversions, you may need to experiment with different designs.
Clickthrough rate: Your clickthrough rate or CTR tells you how many people are clicking on your links, ads, and emails to visit your website. If your click-through rate is high, but your conversion rate is low, you know it’s your website and offers that are losing customer interest, not your marketing campaigns.
Bounce rate: Your site’s bounce rate tells you how many people visit your website then click away rapidly without taking action or visiting another webpage. The higher your bounce rate, the more likely it is you’re losing customer interest by not providing the right information or content. Bounce rates can also be a sign your ads don’t align with your landing pages.
Cost per lead: Cost per lead tells you how much you’re investing in marketing, technology, and professional labor to generate leads. Your cost per lead should be as low as possible, while the average lifetime value (AVL) of each lead is as high as possible.
3. Develop Your Buyer Personas
Your SaaS company’s buyer personas are essential to successfully generating leads. Some smaller SaaS organizations may have a single buyer persona. For instance, you might only sell solutions to small businesses in a specific industry. However, many SaaS brands have multiple “target customers” to address. For instance, you might sell productivity tools to enterprise, mid-sized, and small brands.
Try to avoid targeting too many different personas at once. There should be a clear commonality between all the groups you want to reach, such as a shared industry or need. To map out your buyer personas, you’ll need to collect as much information as you can about each possible customer, outline their pain points, needs, goals, purchasing power, and industry.
Once you’ve defined your buyer personas, try to imagine what their purchasing journey might look like using the map above. What kind of websites will they visit, or resources will they use during the awareness and consideration stage? How will they narrow down their decisions and make choices about which solution to buy as they become a qualified lead?
4. Map Customer Touch Points
As you try to imagine each stage of the buyer journey for each buyer persona, make a list of where your ideal customers are likely to go throughout their journey. For instance, when your customers have questions to ask about a problem or solution, where do they go? Are there specific forums in your industry that are particularly active? Do you know of any question platforms like Reddit or Quora where your customers spend a lot of time?
What sort of social media platforms are your customers visiting when they’re researching options or just browsing through products? LinkedIn and Twitter are common choices for B2B lead generation, but don’t be afraid to explore other areas too, such as Instagram, Pinterest, and even Facebook.
It’s also worth thinking about the interests your customers have, and how these may affect their purchasing journey. For instance, will your customers spend a lot of time visiting news and report websites to learn more about their marketplace? All of these locations are potential touchpoints where you can generate leads, and build relationships.
5. Build Authority with Quality Content
With a clear view of your potential touchpoints for reaching your target audience in mind, the next stage is developing the high quality content you’re going to use to convert prospects into leads. Ideally, you’ll want to be creating content for each stage of the purchasing journey.
For instance, if your company sells accounting software, content marketing for the Awareness stage might include blogs about common accounting issues. In the consideration stage, you’d introduce how-to guides and information designed to highlight your solution’s value. In the decision stage, you might produce videos comparing the different services you offer.
Some of the key types of content you’ll need for any SaaS lead generation strategy include:
Optimized product/service pages: Pages outlining the core benefits and features of your products, with targeted keywords. Focus on addressing your potential lead’s pain points on these pages, and showing the genuine value your offering can deliver.
Blog posts: Blog posts are the core part of any content marketing strategy. They help to keep your website fresh in the eyes of Google, and improve your ranking potential. They’re also fantastic for demonstrating thought leadership.
Gated content: Gated content is a phenomenal way to increase your number of leads. By creating something of high value, like a webinar, a downloadable eBook, or a guide, you can convince customers to give you their email address in exchange for access.
Case studies: Case studies, customer stories and testimonials demonstrate your credibility. These forms of “social proof” show your customers evidence that you can solve the problems they’re facing. They’re crucial for the consideration stage.
6. Develop Your SEO Strategy
One of the core parts of your SaaS lead generation strategy will be “Search Engine Optimization”. Remember, anywhere up to 93% of online experiences start with a search engine. When SaaS buyers are searching for solutions to their problems, they’ll begin by typing a query into Google.
There are a number of ways you can optimize your website for SEO. The first step is usually researching the right “keywords”. These are the words you’ll aim to rank for when you’re producing website pages and blog posts. The ideal keywords need to be specific to your target audience, deliver high “search volume”, and have low competition.
Experiment with tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to find potential keywords to rank for, and check out what your competitors are already ranking for with tools like BuzzSumo, to see whether you can take advantage of any content gaps. Remember to experiment with a range of different types of keywords too, such as long-form and question-style semantic keywords.
Outside of building your keyword strategy, you’ll also need to think about:
On-page SEO: On page SEO revolves around optimizing every page you produce for the search engines, and for your customers. You should include your keywords in your meta descriptions, title tags, body content, meta tags, and alt text for your images. You’ll also need to ensure you’re using internal links to help connect your pages, and make it easy for Google and other search engines to track the connections between various pages.
Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO generally involves focusing on back-links. You can submit your site to directories to help push more consumers back to your website, or consider investing in guest posting opportunities. You might also work with affiliate marketers to help drive more traffic to your website, and use social media to increase your backlinks.
Technical SEO: Technical SEO usually involves making specific fixes to your website’s performance. For instance, you should ensure your website loads quickly on any device, or you’ll risk increasing your bounce rate. It’s also helpful to make sure all of your images have their own alt-text, and all of your pages work (with no errors).
7. Invest in Video Content
Often, when B2B SaaS companies start looking for new ways to generate leads, they focus heavily on written content like blogs and articles. While these forms of content are great, it’s important not to underestimate the power of video too. Around 92% of marketers believe video is crucial to their strategy, and 87% say it helps them to increase traffic.
Creating great video content starts with research. Find out what topics are trending in your industry, and talk to your sales team about the questions customers generally ask. It’s also worth looking at videos created by competitors to determine how long the average video should be for a customer in your industry, and what style of content you should be producing.
Typically, videos should be entertaining, resourceful, and valuable. They need to provide actionable insights, while giving your customers an overview of what makes your business unique.
8. Leverage LinkedIn
There are various social media platforms which can help to increase your traffic and support B2B SaaS lead generation. However, LinkedIn is likely to be the best tool for your needs overall. It’s the go-to place for business buyers and professionals. In general, businesses achieve a 33% increase in purchase intent, just by investing in LinkedIn ads.
So, how do you get results from LinkedIn? Simple, start by building out your network. Connect with customers, clients, and similar thought leaders in your space, and post frequently on both your leader’s professional pages, and your company’s pages. Share plenty of helpful resources, such as tips for buyers, case studies, and videos which engage and delight your audience.
Your aim on LinkedIn should be to become a valuable resource for your customers. Try to avoid constantly focusing on making a sale, and instead use your content to deliver value. Where possible, look for ways to engage your community too. Join groups in your sector and answer questions shared by customers, respond to comments, and host polls to collect data about your clients.
9. Offer a Free Trial
Offering a free trial is easily one of the most popular ways to generate SaaS leads. In an environment where customers are often concerned about making the wrong decision with long-term purchases, a free trial is your opportunity to prove yourself to your target audience.
A free trial not only shows your customers what your product is capable of, it also increases the chances they’ll become reliant on your service and its benefits. Plus, it’s a chance for you to capture email addresses and contact details, so you can nurture anyone who doesn’t convert.
Decide what you can reasonably afford to give away for free. For instance, you might give your customers limited access to a handful of features permanently, or you could offer complete access to all of your software for a short period of time.
Ideally, you’ll need to create a landing page for your free trial, where you can highlight all of the core benefits of your solution, and use a contact form to collect addresses. Once you have your landing page, promote it on your social media, website blogs, and advertisements, and even in your email marketing campaigns. The more interested people you can get signing up, the better.
10. Explore Advertising
While it’s important to generate as much organic traffic as possible, don’t underestimate the power of paid ads too. Paid advertising can give your online presence a significant boost, particularly when paired with other forms of inbound marketing. There are a few ways you can enhance your brand reach and inbound lead generation with advertising including:
Google AdWords: Google AdWords is one of the best ways to start generating larger numbers of leads rapidly. All you need to do is make sure you’re targeting the right keywords, and keep a close eye on your budget. Google can even help you to position your ads in the right environments to boost your chances of attracting the audience with the right intent. You may need to experiment a little before you see the best results, however.
Social media advertising: You can also pay to promote your ads on social media. Channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all offer options to “boost” your posts and target specific audiences. Once again, experiment with things like ad placement, copy, and offers, to get a better idea of which campaigns generate the most success.
Retargeting: One of the most valuable advertising tools for SaaS companies, retargeting allows you to position your products in front of a website visitor who already visited your site, but failed to make a purchase. With retargeting, you have multiple opportunities to pull your customers back to your website when they don’t instantly make a purchase. Explore retargeting options with Google, Facebook, and other social channels.
11. Power Up Your Email Marketing
When most marketers consider email for digital marketing and lead generation purposes, they focus on creating elaborate drip campaigns. Automated email marketing can be an excellent way to nurture your leads and increase sales. However, it’s important not to overlook the importance of a single email from time to time too.
The key to sending successful emails is ensuring you target your audience members effectively, at just the right moment. Segment your leads into different groups based on where they are in the purchasing cycle, their buyer behaviors, and their general preferences. Wherever possible, it’s crucial to personalize each email to suit your audience.
Marketers see an average 20% increase in sales revenues when they make their messages personal. With that in mind, ensure you’re sending offers to customers based on their specific interests, and always use their name when you can. It’s also worth A/B testing different campaigns and call-to-action buttons to see what generates the best results.
12. Add a Chatbot to Your Website
One of the reasons converting prospects into leads in the SaaS landscape is so complex, is that many business buyers will have a number of questions they need to ask before they’re ready to make a purchase. Adding a chatbot to your website means you can quickly deliver the information your customers need to make confident decisions, without spending a fortune on support.
In the past, chatbots were relatively difficult to get hold of, but now it’s possible to add a conversational widget to virtually any website with minimal coding. Once you’ve installed your chatbot, you’ll be able to deliver a type of 24/7 service and support to every potential customer that comes your way.
You can even use live chat tools to send proactive messages to customers, asking them questions about their needs, or suggesting potential offers based on their browsing history.
13. Create More Referrals
No matter how good your marketing campaigns are, they’ll never be more effective at generating leads and sales than authentic, word-of-mouth referrals. Studies show that referred customers are 18% more loyal to the companies they buy from, and they have a 16% higher lifetime value.
Most referred leads will spend up to 13% more than non-referred customers. Plus, you’re more likely to get warm leads straight away, because your existing customers can provide your prospective clients with insights into how your service works.
The best way to improve your chances of earning referred leads is to create a dedicated referral campaign. Find your loyal VIP customers, and offer them rewards, discounts, and other bonuses every time they send a new customer to your company.
14. Consider Partnerships
Finally, while it’s tempting to assume every other company is a “competitor” in the SaaS lead generation space, there are times when partnering with other companies can significantly improve your chances of conversations and sales. This is particularly true when you’re a relatively new company, trying to grab attention.
You can partner with other SaaS brands offering complimentary products and services to deliver unique offers to customers. For instance, an invoicing company might partner with a payment provider. Alternatively, you can consider working with influencers to boost attention for your brand and showcase your trustworthiness.
It may even be worth looking for partner marketing brands who can help you enhance your B2B lead generation with dedicated campaigns built specifically for your business.
Upgrade Your SaaS Lead Generation
SaaS lead generation can be a complex process, particularly in a market where there’s so much mounting competition. However, knowing how to consistently bring new qualified leads to your SaaS company is crucial to ensuring your ongoing success. Make sure you:
Set smart goals and track the right KPIs
Develop buyer personas, and map customer touch points
Build authority with quality content and work on your SEO
Invest in video content and social media marketing
Offer free trials to capture audience attention
Explore a range of different paid ad platforms
Connect with customers through email marketing and chatbots
Leverage word of mouth marketing with referrals and partnerships
Alternatively, if you need help taking your lead generation strategy to the next level, consider getting some extra support from a dedicated B2B marketing team. Amplifyed can ramp up your SaaS lead generation strategy, upgrade your traffic, and give you the tools you need to stand out online.
Scott Johnson
Founder
Hey! I live in San Diego and have been involved with SEO since 2010. Our amazing team at Amplifyed specializes in helping SaaS and tech companies dominate the search rankings. We serve as an extension of your team to make sure your content ranks and drives the right people to your website. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and schedule a chat.