Lead generation has never been easy. And with increasing competition, has led to market cannibalization. Companies couldn’t earn the required profit as they are competing against each other.
Bob Hooey, a motivational keynote speaker, once stated:
“If you’re not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.”
And it has become a reality now!!!
While it is important to understand the strategy of your competitor, it is far more crucial to focus on your lead generation process to become the best version of yourself.
You should take this as a challenge and make yourself a part of a healthy competition.
Making the necessary improvements in your marketing approach could effectively guide the process on the right track. Remember, this is just not you; many other SaaS companies face this unique challenge of generating quality and a good number of leads for their process. The COVID-19 crisis could be the major reason for the same. But you can still be motivated.
As per a Gartner report, almost 72% of the surveyed businesses are spending at the same rate or are accelerating the software’s purchase amidst the pandemic.
So, you just need to find the right strategy that can accelerate the process. First, let’s understand what a lead-generation ecosystem is?
A lead-generation ecosystem includes all the components aligned together to form a cohesive campaign- it makes all the customers, whether new or old, aware of the recent changes, such as a new product or service in the company, and modifications in the existing product, among others. As a marketer, it is necessary to understand the current ecosystem as it is changing fast.
Take a look at the below image:
Source: StraightNorth
As observed, the lead generation ecosystem involves generating leads from search engines, social sites, referral sites, off-site content, display networks, and others. The social sites include getting leads from social media platforms; the search engines include PPC and SEO, from which you can generate a good number of leads. The referral sites include getting the leads from referral means. Marketers can make their customers aware through all these modes.
Some of the top companies that account for more than half of the total SaaS market share are Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, and SAP. In 2020, the total SaaS market share was 157 billion US dollars.
The high-performing SaaS start-ups in 2020 were Shopify, CoSchedule, NetCrumb, Docurated, CompStack, and Setapp, among others. This shows SaaS ecosystem would grow significantly. So, companies should adopt the best lead generation strategy to make it to the top in a short time frame.
We have some unique takeaways in this blog, which you could integrate into your campaign to make the lead-generation process easy and efficient.
Table of Contents
The Top Lead Generation Strategies for SaaS Companies are:
1. Segmenting Your Audience:
Acknowledge audience segmentation is highly required if you want to reach the best and most relevant customers across the world. Also, if you want to outreach both SMBs and large enterprises simultaneously, you need to segregate these customers and target them accordingly.
According to a finding, almost 41% of SaaS companies consider the company’s size while segmenting the audience.
And we just know why so?
Because, if the company is well-established and has more resources, it could invest more in purchasing a specific product or service. Both buyers and sellers could have a long-lasting relationship and ensure generating more deals in the future.
Marketers also look into this factor to shoot out the right emails, develop the right content, and plan the right strategy concurrently for these companies.
2. Focussing on Lead Quality:
In the quest to generate more leads, marketing representatives often overlook the quality of leads. This is a blunder if there are no quality leads; companies would never get to generate the right sales and revenue for the organization.
Remember, only 27% of the total generated leads are willing to become your customer, and only 2% of the prospects would choose your services just after the first meeting.
So, it becomes highly essential to generate leads that really matter. Software as a service company would always require high customer engagement to convert the sales-ready prospects into customers.
3. Using Webinars in Your Marketing Strategy:
Almost 29% of the respondents stated that webinars are one of the useful lead-generation marketing strategies. Although it still lags behind email marketing, where 45% of respondents considered it crucial, and content marketing where the same 45% considered it crucial, the significance of webinars can’t be ignored.
The more you integrate webinars into your marketing strategy, the easier it becomes to communicate with SaaS customers across the world.
Employees working in an organization like to participate in the knowledge imparting sessions so that they can improvise their knowledge in different areas. It’s just not the mid-level executives or the entry-level professionals, even the C-level executives want to be part of the webinar so that they can grasp the latest technological developments in the business world.
And why is it so?
Webinars educate the customers, help share the real-time experience, answer relevant questions and much more make a good relationship with customers, and amplify the lead generation process.
Almost 93.5% of SaaS companies offer webinars that give educational experiences to their audience. And 85.8% of them implement the webinars as demos and 74.3% use them to communicate their features. And if that was not enough, almost 17.9% of them use it for onboarding their customers.
4. Putting the Right Case Study content:
A collection of good case studies on the website could make all difference.
So, what exactly the case studies do?
Case studies are the content that showcases the real-time problem an organization or the B2B customer faced and how you helped resolve the same.
How do you develop this content?
It’s very easy. You just need to introduce the client’s specialization and the specific challenge the organization faced and how you came at the right time to resolve the difficulties the company was going through. With real-time proof such as statistics, and numbers you can win the hearts of your audience.
5. Executing the Right Keyword Research:
You should execute the right keyword research which means you need to think like your customer. What are they thinking? And how would they search for a specific service or product?
Use all types of keywords, the long-tail, and short keywords to find the target audience. Now do you know, people search with different keywords on social media platforms? You need to find out which keyword would shoot up the lead-generation process. And that keyword could be used as a hashtag while posting the content.
Hashtags are mostly used for short-term promotion, so you should efficiently use the right keyword or hashtag on social media platforms. On all these platforms, find out what influencers, C-level executives, and other decision-makers are expressing. Check how the audience is reacting, giving feedback, and others. This could help you understand the pain points, and further, you can use that keyword as a hashtag while outreaching the audience.
With a step-by-step approach, you can make the right impact.
6. Being on the Review Sites:
When you have the best reviews on the review sites, it significantly shoots up lead generation. It is observed that most customers like to know the user’s feedback before purchasing any product or service. So, have a strategy to include some excellent reviews by customers on these sites.
You could then relax back and see the lead generation flow in a few days. It would surely improve.
7. Chatbots to Generate Leads:
We have always known chatbots to provide excellent customer service, by answering customer queries, but do you know chatbots can also help generate leads?
Upscope, a startup company, was struggling to generate the right sales number. Their team faced the challenge of answering repeated questions and working more like customer support, instead of improvising the lead flow.
This was immediately looked into by the founders and they integrated the AI chatbot to resolve their challenge.
Find the following conversation:
As you can see the conversation of the cofounder seems. He was happy with the service, as not only it offered great customer service but also helped generate the right number of leads.
8. A Fresh and New Approach to Social Selling:
Marketers have always been at the forefront of putting the spotlight on the products and services of a brand. They showcase the product on different platforms, shoot out emails and execute other promotional strategies to improve brand awareness. Now to increase the effectiveness, the sales representative can also take center stage.
They can sell the product on different social media platforms to increase revenue. This is what is called social selling.
The fundamentals of social selling are social listening and sentiment analysis, sharing & interaction, research and content curation among others.
With social listening, you come to know what is being said about the brand on different platforms, become aware of the competitors in the market, execute the right research for content creation, competitive watch, and then act on the data based on which it is performing better on social media channels.
As per a finding:
“78% of the social sellers, outsell the peers who don’t use the social media.”
As they track potential customers, follow them, post comments, and execute other strategies, one can understand why they could perform that well.
The social selling process has recently become more useful for many sales representatives. It is actually seen as a positive sign. Given the trend, more number of sales representatives should jump on this bandwagon. It would be for the overall benefit of the organization.
9. Creating the Face of Your Brand:
When you humanize your brand, it makes a good relationship with the customer. They can relate to your brand. They can understand what you want to convey.
This strategy is very useful for a growing company, such as a small or mid-sized business. Obviously, you’d be looking to increase profit, but that doesn’t mean you have to ignore creating a face of your brand.
A large enterprise would always look that its business never has a faceless disposition. They know it works like brand awareness.
So, how do they do that?
They follow a strategy and implement the following rules such as:
- Genuineness: Remember to always stand for what you stated while promoting your product or service. It can give the right impression about your brand to the customer. They would start trusting your product.
- Having a consistent approach: You should follow a consistent approach while promoting your brand. It makes the customers think that you have level-headed people at the senior level, who make sensible and planned decisions. Thus, it motivates the customers to trust your brand.
- Engaging in the right conversation: Always make the conversation a two-way one. Just shooting out emails, with no response would do no good for the brand. Getting reciprocation from the other party could also boost your confidence.
So, implement the same in your marketing strategy to shoot the results.
Conclusion:
SaaS or software as a service company has many challenges generating the right number of leads. But with efficient lead generation strategies, one can drive itself to the success path at the right time. The blog explores some of the best lead generation strategies that could help any SaaS company outreach the customer worldwide.
