5 Effective B2B Lead Generation Strategies for SaaS Startups
SaaS startups are becoming more common these days as computer users are increasingly shifting towards using online services instead of desktop apps. Thus, SaaS marketing is a fiercely competitive industry and only the most savvy companies survive.
In the SaaS industry, you have to constantly remain on top of your marketing game if you want to gain an edge over the competition. Online services companies are able to spend upwards of 40% of their overall revenue on sales and marketing.
They also tend to have really talented marketers who have a wealth of resources on their disposal. With money taken care of, strategies come into play. SaaS companies have little room for failure in their marketing strategies.
But for all its complexity, it is still possible to successfully market a SaaS company and acquire new customers.
SaaS lead generation is therefore a multi-faceted strategy, one which will rely on organic traffic (SEO), content marketing, traditional lead prospecting and so on.
The goal with a SaaS lead generation strategy should be to acquire high quality qualified leads that have a high chance of conversion.
In this guide to prospecting leads, we’ll share effective strategies SaaS startups can use to acquire new customers.
1. High Quality Leads
Many marketers fall into the trap of concentrating on the number of leads they can acquire, no matter what kind of lead it is.
The reality is however, low quality leads that have no chance of converting into revenue generating customers are useless.
These days, the emphasis of lead generation efforts should be on acquiring marketing qualified leads. This is an approach for quality over quantity.
Total number of leads is a meaningless statistic these days. Qualified leads are what matter.
A low quality lead is one where the person in question has no intention of buying your services. Spending valuable sales and marketing resources for this is of course wasteful.
So with this shift towards marketing qualified leads, how do you actually do it?
That’s what we’ll discuss in the next section..
2. Ideal Customer Profile
Before you can even think about generating leads for your SaaS startup, it’s time to think about who you want your services towards.
What is your ideal customer’s income? How about their age bracket?
Creating an ideal customer profile will help your lead generation efforts later on, as you can execute campaigns that are targeted at a certain portion of people, rather than everyone.
3. Website SEO
Organic traffic from Google and other search engines can be a great source of lead generation.
What’s great about SEO is that it’s not like traditional marketing where you’re bound to spend lots of money.
Great SEO can be done by tweaking your website for best practices and a great user experience. A part of SEO also heavily relies on content.
Creating content that’s targeted towards your ideal customer profile will help you attract visitors who already have an interest in your services, or services similar to what you offer.
The key is to create content that’s geared towards buyer intent topics, such as reviews.
SEO is a great strategy but what it does require – and lots of it – is time.
Google will recognize the topics and content of your website and rank it based on how relevant it is.
This is a time consuming process, but you don’t have to spend a lot of money for it. There are a lot of great SEO resources and well-priced SEO experts to hire.
4. Case Studies
Case studies are a great idea for generating content for your website. Nothing builds trust more for potential customers than reading about case studies in which it is communicated how your startup helped another company through its services.
Focus on building detailed case studies which highlight the before and after effect of your SaaS services.
Case studies can also help convert warm leads into ‘hot’ leads. Customers who’re having second-thoughts about your services might feel reassured after reading case studies and looking at the results your services got for other customers.
5. Personalized Email Campaigns
Email gets a bad reputation because of how misused of a medium it is when it comes to lead generation.
If you sincerely want to help potential customers through your SaaS however, personalized email campaigns are still a powerful lead generation strategy.
For SaaS companies, email campaigns are useful if they have a sizable readership on their blogs.
This is why having content and call-to-action for email newsletter signups is so important.
If you have a good email list to work with, you can often generate leads by sending personalized email campaigns.
The chances of success with this are higher since the recipients have read your content and shown an interest in future content by signing up for the newsletter as well.