Saher Naseem — December 9, 2016 Follow @SaherNaseemDSaaS businesses are vividly taking over a massive part of the economy. This change has possible due to technology, as it has now become easier and cheaper than ever before to develop software. With over 3.5 billion users having access to the internet, the potential customer base for SaaS businesses is gradually increasing. An open and wide access to more customers has made it easier for companies to develop software instead of hardware.
While technology advancements have triggered software development, it’s the subscription model preferred by a lot of SaaS businesses, which has dramatically transformed it into a booming industry. SaaS businesses usually charge a subscription or signup model for their product, which is delivered and stored within the cloud. The subscription business plan means organizations reach profitability over time and should constantly provide valued services, otherwise your clients will not buy your products.
Whenever it comes to business growth and success, it is critical to strengthen your marketing and lead generation efforts. Here is a list of some smart strategies that every SaaS startup should consider in order to ramp up their lead generation effort that will ultimately generate huge revenue.
1. Tools that Help You Accomplish Your Goals
For any startup, nothing is more important than ensuring every project and resource is on the right track. As businesses grow, they want to efficiently manage their teams and monitor the collaborative efforts made by them in the most efficient way possible. Luckily, the internet is full of online task management software, collaborative tools and business applications.
Startups have a great opportunity to simplify their business processes, accomplish their goals and get the desired result with these tools and services. Savvy startups can take the maximum benefits of these tools and do things faster, smarter and effectively. Here is a list of a few tools that can help SaaS companies to manage their teams:
– TaskQue
TaskQue is a web-based task management software that ensures your team stays on top of their tasks. It offers several functionalities that are important for every emerging startup. Business owners can smartly utilize this tool for assigning tasks to their resources, communicate with one another, track projects, manage complex workflows and monitor user’s performance.
– Optimizely
This A/B testing tool helps startups to improve every experiment. No matter if your marketing team is looking for the best ways to invest in advertising campaigns or your product team is learning how to build the most engaging product onboarding experience, Optimizely can greatly help businesses. The key features of this tool is: mobile website testing, cross-browser testing, visitor segmentation, multi-page funnel testing and more. The plus point is, the intuitive dashboard can easily be integrated with other analytical tools like Google Analytics and KISSmetrics.
– Agile CRM
Agile CRM is an amazing CRM solution that helps startups to manage relationship with customers and prospects. It is a connected rolodex that can help businesses to automate their sales and marketing efforts in one platform. It avoids data outflows and enables consistent messaging. This super-fast CRM solution can enable you to easily track customers and keep comprehensive notes on deals. The marketing automation and tracking functionalities of this agile CRM not only provide great customer support but you can use it for any marketing campaign.
– MailChimp
MailChimp is a comprehensive email marketing platform that offers a myriad of email templates you can use to create targeted campaigns, automate products follow-ups and send back-in-stock messaging. It’s robust marketing automation ensures your email gets to the right people at the right time, so that you can get targeted customers for your business. It offers advanced reporting features that help you monitor sales and website activity with revenue reports, thereby helping your business to grow.
2. Realize the Real Power of Content Marketing
Organizations all over the world are leveraging content marketing to build their brand, gain new visitors to their website and drive more leads. The plus point of content marketing is that it has an obvious return, making it a smart investment that will gradually increase value.
Content has the real power to generate leads, whereas other types of marketing such as PPC advertising, email marketing, social media marketing will only do so for as long as you make efforts or investments. That is the reason, content is an asset that businesses own, while online advertising is rented. Below are some well-known SaaS business that understand the real power of content and use it smartly to generate leads.
– HubSpot
HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that develops and markets a software product for inbound marketing. Their products help marketers to achieve their business goals in a more personable and empathetic manner. It attracts its potential audience by offering valued content on HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot Sales blogs. The HubSpot Academy and certification courses offer a myriad of user guides, documents and training courses for creating and promoting content that converts into leads and new customers.
– Moz
Moz builds SEO software and tools that make inbound marketing easier. It has established a standing for its thought leadership content. They run a Moz inbound marketing and SEO blog , offer Moz tools , Moz products, beginners guide to SEO as well as offer Workshops and training that help businesses to generate leads.
– Buffer
Buffer frequently shares thoughts and insights on social media and online marketing on its blog. They know the trick of attracting potential customers by using the targeted and quality content which help their brand and drive quality leads. Buffer products make it super easy to share any site you are reading and manage accounts on social media.
While content should be an important part of your strategy it’s important not to overlook content sharing. In short, there is no use investing in content creation if you don’t share it. Therefore, it is highly recommended to invest your time in content distribution in order to get more leads.
3. Product Trials for Lead Generation
Product trials are basically an effective lead generation tool that enables businesses to generate leads with little ongoing marketing investment. For the SaaS industry, product trial has now become an important factor for generating qualified leads. Therefore, SaaS startups should consider making a product trial to ensure your audience have a perfect experience while trialing your product.
If truth be told, product trial can give SaaS businesses a clear indication of buyer intent. All you need is investing your time to get to know your product, because if people running a trial, there is a great probability of buying your product. With ongoing optimization of product trials, SaaS companies can easily get highly qualified leads.
4. Run Google AdWords Campaigns
Inbound marketing can greatly reduce the efforts and money spend on AdWords, but there are millions of people who still click on search engine ads. If you don’t want to miss out this great part of generating potential leads you should run PPC campaigns, because ads will always become more prominent in Google search results. PPC is an effective marketing strategy for a number of reasons. It delivers only targeted traffic to your website and you can increase or decrease the cost based on the requirements of the business on any given time.
Moreover, it has a lot of intrinsic probability in terms of cost and results that attract many businesses to opt for this strategy, especially if they have a limited marketing budget. It is highly recommended to run a series of test and analyze what activity generates higher ROI for your company. Since there is a variation in between different industries and their competitors, but the fact remains the same: you can generate significant level of traffic and leads from PPC campaigns if you pay for it. You can run inbound and paid campaigns both and reap the maximum benefits out of your business.
5. Convert Leads into Customers with Retargeting Ads
No matter if your key conversion metric is a free trial, an eBook, PPC campaign or a task management software, the fact remains the same that most website visitors never take the action that you desire. However, using retargeting also called remarketing can dramatically increase conversions by re-engaging users that left your business.
Remarketing monitors the website visitors and then displays online advertisements whenever they visit different sites around the web. There are many online shopping stores that pave the way with retargeting ads that displays related offers to attract website visitors. Regardless of the industry, you can utilize remarketing to turn a website visitor into qualified lead.
Believe it or not, retargeting is a valuable tool for SaaS startups as it gives your brand a golden opportunity to establish trust and credibility with website visitors. You can retarget anyone who comes to your website by using personalized ads based on the visitors’ interest in your products and services. This will make sure that you are showing the right offer to the right audience.
Bottom Line
These are the best and proven strategies to help SaaS startups to grow and establish, but it is highly recommended to test, evaluate and optimize according to your business requirements in order to check what strategy drives a huge ROI for your business.
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