As the internet takes charge of the world, it changes almost every way people do things, including buying things. While many people are buying things online these days, very few buy things just from seeing advisement.

They spend awesome time researching the product or service they are about to purchase online. This buyer behavior means that you will be at an advantage if you have traps you set online to lead them to you when searching about your product or service online. These ‘traps’ are now what can turn these people into leads. 

Simply put, a lead is someone, a business, or a company that has shown interest in your SaaS product or service. While such a person or business might not have set up their mind on purchasing your product yet, it is up to you to entice, educate and encourage them to buy from you and become a customer.

However, since the proliferation and growth of SaaS software and applications due to the emergence of APIs, App marketplaces, AWS and other technologies that have made it easy and low cost for SaaS vendor companies to build SaaS software solutions and applications, it has become more complex to generate leads as the competition has grown. For many other reasons, you can spend a lot of time, money and effort on lead generation and get no results.

There are so many ways to generate a lead for SaaS products and services. The most famous ways include pay-per-click ads, cold emails, cold calls, but there are other ways for you to up your lead generation game and your product in the mind of people and businesses when they think of who to buy from.

To help you up to your lead generation, we have listed the best lead generation strategies here for you to help you get more users. However, let’s, first of all, take a look into what SaaS lead generation is all about. Let’s dive in.

What Is SaaS Lead Generation?

In its simplest form, lead generation involves the process of attracting people or businesses to your business for them to become leads or prospects, intending to convert these prospects to profitable customers eventually. Just as stated before, this means that a ‘lead’ has only just shown interest in your products or service. You must know that a Lead can be a person, business or organization.

Regarding the SaaS space, SaaS lead generation can be explained as the efforts made by a SaaS vendor company to increase its website visitors and obtain their contact information. The contact information needed in this case is usually their email addresses.

The fact is that even though these people had not made a purchase yet, they can be making o e in the future. Hence, you must nurture and educate, do that when they are ready to make the purchase, all they will think about is you. And your SaaS company.

>>More: How to Create an Effective SaaS Platform

The 2 Stages of SaaS Lead Generation

The Process of getting people to come to your website and finally converting them into leads generally involves three stages. They include;

Attracting people to your SaaS company’s website. The first and foremost thing is attracting as many people as possible to your website. The major idea here is to move them to a place where you can give them a form to fill in their contact information.

Your website is the most powerful place for you to obtain the information you want and educate them on what your business is all about, what it offers exactly, etc.

Engage and Encourage People to Take Action

As stated earlier, your website is the most powerful pls e where you can convert these people into a lead. You have to old and keep them on it with high-end, engaging content. 

When you have gotten hold of their attention, you can entice them with a good CTA (call-to-action) to finally turn them into prospective customers.

One of the ways of doing this is by offering them a lead magnet. This lead magnet is an attractive and valuable offer rated to your SaaS solutions. A typical lead magnet used by most SaaS companies is gated content, which can be in the form of a whitepaper or an ebook.

Convert the visitors into leads

The purpose of the lead magnet or CTA is to take these visitors to an opt-in form or your landing page, where they can easily enter their contact details. You must ensure that the process is simple and swift so as not to discourage the visitor.

Note that it is necessary to give them more information concerning the lead magnet if you have directed them to your landing page.

You must know that the process of generating must be done the first time accurately. Visitors or people would have a hard time going through the process if they had some issues or difficulties the first time they tried.

>>More: Essential Definitions of SaaS Abbreviations

Some Common SaaS Lead Generation Mistakes

You must know some common mistakes made by many SaaS companies when they engage in SaaS lead generation. Let’s take a look at some of them.

1. Using the wrong metrics and KPIs

The fact is that many marketers in the SaaS space are looking at the wrong KPIs and metrics, and this is greatly affecting their lead generation efforts.

You and your marketing team have a proper understanding of what a lead is and who is considered a leader when it relates to a particular SaaS product. What’s more? The whole team must know the primary goal of your lead generation processes, and this should fit into the company’s objectives.

For example, as with many lead generation, if your goal might be to obtain your website’s visitors’ email addresses, you must look at the email conversion rate and the number of return visits. The return visitors can be prospective leads; therefore, you must think up how to obtain their information.

You must set up a system to analyze the data you capture; using data charts and graphs would help you understand them more. However, make sure to define your metrics and KPIs.

2. Ignoring the Use of SEO

Content is king when it comes to lead generation and even o any particular lead generation strategy. It is the best tool you can use to attract people to your website, where you can obtain your contact information.

However, while your content can be exceptionally good, it won’t work nor give you good lead generation if you don’t use search engine optimization (SEO). Technically speaking, without SEO, people won’t see your content. SEO promotes your content.

Hence, SEO should be a key foundation of your content creation for any lead generation strategy you intend to employ to get the most customers for your SaaS product and services. 

3. The Excessive Fear of Failure

There is always room for improvement in your SaaS lead generation strategy, even if you had attained new heights or converted many prospects.

While you must run tests before and continuously to know how you can improve your content, the opt-in form, and the landing page, you should also know that there is the possibility of failure happening.

However, it would be best if you didn’t let fear overcome your attempt to try out your lead generation strategies, ideas, etc. Remember that it is an opportunity to learn when you fail. What is important is that you don’t stop improving and optimizing your lead generation efforts after failure.

You must know that you must overcome the fear of failure before you can think outside the box, achieve real growth, and scale high.

4. Focusing on Lead Quantity Over Quality

Even though generating myriad leads might sound great, it can be a problem later on.

The reason for this is because attracting, educating and nurturing these leads can cost you a lot of time and money. Therefore, you mustn’t waste your limited resources on low-quality leads. Even though these poor-quality leads might later convert, there is a higher probability that they will churn. Watch out for them.

What’s more? If a potential lead had an awful experience with the SaaS product you want to sell, they tell other clients or potential clients about it, which will greatly affect your lead generation efforts. This behavior of talking about their bad experience with others is always a feature of low-quality leads.

5. Lack of Adequate Understanding of Your Target Market

The lack of complete understanding of your target market is another major lead generation mistake that most SaaS marketers indulge in. They keep ignoring to acquire a thorough understanding of their buyer persona.

A buyer persona had to do with the features of your SaaS Brand’s ideal buyer that I based on data and research. An ideal well-researched buyer persona will let you know the ideal people who want to buy your SaaS software and applications. It will also help you understand their buying behavior and habits.

A good understanding of who these people are will help you build and deploy targeted content with SEO features to convert leads and, eventually, customers. 

>>More: What Is SaaS Integration & Why Is It Important To Businesses

Tools Needed for the Implementation of SaaS Lead Generation Strategies?

Before we list the best lead generation strategies you could to bring more customers and clients to your SaaS platform, it is rational to let you know if the various tools you will need to implement the strategies in your marketing. They include;

  1. Subscription management tools: these include Software you will use for managing, optimizing and testing your payment strategy.
  2. CRO toolkit: to help you improve the most important page elements and pages.
  3. A Marketing planning system: A efficient system to be used for predicting, planning, and calibrating the outcome of campaign ideas and strategies.
  4. A Landing page builder:  this is to be used to effortlessly build and launch good landing pages for every SaaS lead generation campaign.
  5. Email marketing: An email automation and marketing, as well as an all-in-one CRM platform.
  6. Live chat software/Chatbot: this is an important tool you can use to communicate with your leads and prospects continually.

1. Subscription Management Software

Many of the SaaS lead generation strategies involve plan structures, pricing pages, and pricing models. Therefore, to be efficient at them, you will have to employ a good subscription management tool to test variations, create different models, and improve pricing strategies.

There are many subscription software that various SaaS companies use in their lead generation process. However, you must ensure that whatever subscription software you use must the following feature to make your lead generation subscription management efficient.

  • SaaS subscriptions: the subscription management tool must offer exclusive and extensive subscription features specially developed for SaaS companies and businesses.
  •  Managed payments: It must also access well-established domestic and international banking infrastructure for easy payments by local and international clients.
  •  Billing models: it must also include a Smart subscription logic that will help you develop metered, on-time, recurring, and other models just with few clicks.
  • Downgrades & upgrades: it must let you easily manage customers as they upgrade or downgrade between the plans.
  • Freemium & free trials: the subscription management software or tool should also include and manage free plans, free trials, and freemium strategies.
  • Checkout integration: it should include the capacity to make payments utilizing built-in checkout.
  •  Invoicing: it should also be to create and send invoices to clients automatically.
  • Sales tax automation: it should also calculate, remit and files your SaaS software and application sales taxes on your behalf.
  •  End-to-end dunning:  the subscription management software should also automate dunning across the customer journey to help recover any lost revenue.
  • A good support team: there must be a stand-by support team of the subscription management software to help you resolve both technical issues, set up your payment strategy, among others.

2. CRO Toolkit

It is not always at the first trial of a SaaS lead generation process that it generates positive returns. Even though some good lead generation strategies will give you good output at the first interaction, you should use conversation rate optimization to get the best performance out of your SaaS lead generation campaigns.

3. A Marketing Planning System

It is always a challenge to plan large lead generation strategies and campaigns. It is even harder to put them into action. For example, it is easy to track the available resources when trying out multiple lead generation campaign ideas. In most cases, you might up with multiple campaigns that you can create good content for or in extreme cases, you start a campaign that starts, loses traction and continue to slide that you then realize it isn’t going to hit any of the set KPIs or targets that you had set.

To deal with these problems, it is rational that you create a platform to plan and manage all your marketing, lead generation campaigns, and make predictions before you launch any process.

The market planning system will simplify creativity by building a goal-driven collaborative space for team members to fine-tune and share lead generation campaign ideas. This feature of the marketing planning system ultimately stops you and your team from just trying out campaigns ideas as they come.

It will also help you set weekly milestones, measurable and timely goals to help boost the continued growth of the campaigns. What’s more? You can now prioritize campaign ideas by projected impact, leaf quality, your confidence in KPIs and targets, as well as the efforts needs to put it to work.

Any efficient marketing planning system can help you forecast SaaS lead generation campaigns results and help you tweak some things like the budget and KPIs to see how the changes can affect results. It should also show you where changes in these factors can generate better results.

Ultimately, a marketing planning system will create a framework for successful SaaS lead generation campaigns.

>>More: SaaS Hosting: Definition, How To Choose & Best 7 Services | SaaS Project Management: What it is, Benefits & Top 5 Services | B2B Saas Marketing: Ultimate Strategy Guide | Saas Customer Support: Importance & Best Practices

4. A Landing Page Builder

Another tool that every SaaS lead generation must have and use is a landing page builder. While your website’s home page can fill this role, and your pricing page can act as another SaaS lead generation page, some of your campaigns will require dedicated landing pages. With a landing page builder, you can get numerous landing pages running, and these will help you test and improve pages without much hassle.

However, while you can build landing pages with ‘landing pages builders,’ you can also contract a web developer to build a more personalized one. Doing this will help give you an upper hand over landing pages from landing pages builder software and applications.

5. Email Marketing Software

A lead generation is complete with the website visitor giving his or her contact information such as email address. Often this will involve primary conversion goals like free trial signups, account creations, or app downloads. It could also include secondary conversation goals like emails inquiries, newsletter signups, or content downloads.

After obtaining their emails, you now have direct access to them. You can educate or nurture them concerning the SaaS software or application that they had shown interest in at an earlier time.

Due to the large number of emails you might collect, you should use an email marketing software test to automate your email marketing communication with prospects.

For the best SaaS lead generation campaigns, we advise that you use email marketing software specially designed for SaaS companies with SaaS-compatible features. It should be able to help you turn your leads into repetitive customers.

6. Live chat software/Chatbot

Chatbots or any live chat software is important for SaaS companies in their lead generation process. It will help provide instant responses to clients. The live chat software or chat is vital because it will help keep the customers or prospects even while your customer support team is busy. 

These are the top tools you should have for efficient and hassle-free SaaS lead generation campaigns. Now that you know these let’s look at the top SaaS lead generation strategies you can deploy.

>>More: Tools for SaaS: Analytics, Live Chat, Monitoring, and More

Top 13 SaaS Lead Generation Strategies

1. Use CTAs in the Email You Send

This use of call-to-action in the emails you send takes us to email marketing. You must know that this isn’t just plain emails. However, unlike elaborate drip email campaigns, these emails can work more wonders for your SaaS software and application marketing. Therefore, in your lead generation campaigns, you must not take emails for granted.

The key difference between here and elaborate drip emails is that you take you time to craft expertly and cleverly written Call-to-action (CTA) that will capture readers’ interest and make them click. 

2. Practice Good Lead Nurturing

Building good relationships through communication and other actions with prospects are known as lead nurturing. Here, you have to continuously engage with these prospects in all stages of their buyers’ journey of your SaaS product or service. How? You can do this by continuously giving them valuable and relevant content.

You must know that this is one of the most powerful SaaS lead generation strategies. It is powerful is because it allows you to build trust and credibility by showing these prospective customers and clients that you are an expert in your business.

Any lead nurturing well done will keep you in such clients whenever they buy that product or service.

3. Use Influencer Outreach

Use can also generate more leads by using influencer outreach to target customers in the SaaS software niche. 

Using influencer targeting to extend to those outside your outreach lets you access people who might represent your ideal SaaS customers.

These people can be the closest personalities closest to your company’s buyer personas, and your customers may look to them as representatives of the field or authorities in tool, software or applications recommendations and use.

Hence, they are more likely to listen to them when they recommend your SaaS software or applications.

4. Do Appropriate Keyword Research

A keyword is simply a word or a string of words (though many would call this a key phrase) that people use when searching for something on the internet. keywords will serve as a bridge between different content on your blog or website to your target customers.

During your research for keywords, the first step is to make a list. You can make a good list of keywords to up your SaaS lead generation campaign with the following tips. 

  • Think just your customers would – put yourself in the shoes of your prospects and think up the words and phrases that they would use when they type to search for a product or service.
  • Target a particular group of people – for example, if you’re offering invoicing software, include in your list of keywords something like “invoicing software for startups” and “best invoicing software for German businesses.”
  • Include general terms – although long keywords or key phrases are efficient and effective than general keywords, adding general keywords to your list can get you leads.

Once you have made your list with the above tips, the thing is to check which ones will best fit the lead generation strategy. You can use Google keyword planner, SEMRush Moz software to help you make the best decision here.

Generally, there are three things you must consider to find you best keywords for your SaaS lead generation process. They include;

5. The Monthly Search Volume

This metric shows the average number of people that have used a specific keyword to search for something online in a month. We advise that you chose long-tail keywords or key phrases that have up to 50 monthly search volumes. Again, you can use Google keyword planner, SEMRush or Moz to get this metric. 

However, Moz and SEMRush give you a numerical value for the monthly search volume, which people consider to be more insightful when compared to Google keyword planner, which racks it low, High or medium.

6. Domain Authority

This metric, a Moz software add-on, tells you how you rank the search engine results page (SERP).

Use the selected keywords on questions websites: 

Although many others will stop here, for efficient SaaS lead generation, you will have to use the selected keywords on Answer the public and Quora. This action allows you to get a gist of the particular question that people ask and what to be answered.

It gives you an excellent insight into the common problems and questions that your target users might have. You can then use the answers or solutions to create contents that easily draw leads to you.

7. Do On-Page SEO

There is a misconception that SEO is no longer important band effective, and all you need is to give quality content, and leads will eventually come. 

While we agree that quality content is important, you must know that SEO is very important, and you need it in your blogs or website to generate high-quality leads for your SaaS company.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is simply some set of guidelines that makes it effortless for search engine bots to locate your webs so they can easily be set up on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The need for SEO comes from the fact that no matter how much high-quality content you provide if the search bots can’t find it, your target users and prospects won’t be able to read, see or access the content.

A major way to do on-page SEO yo your blogs or website is by using meta tags. Also, there are two main meta tags you should focus on

Meta tags 

One way you can do the best on-page SEO on your website is to use meta tags. There are two very important meta tags to take note of when doing on-page SEO.

1. Title Tags: The title tag lets the search engines display your article’s title or page in SERPs. You must ensure that your title isn’t more than 160 characters.

2. Meta Description tags: the success of Meta description tags are literally what decisions of many websites are featured in the SERPs – both yours and the search engines. Ensure to make the meta description tags sweet and short as search engine accepts only meta description tags of 160 characters.

8. Partner with Non-Competing SaaS Vendors

Try to build a partnership with non-competing SaaS vendors, especially those selling a complementary product or service. You must tell the vendor how your SaaS solutions combined can be much more valuable, and it would be rational if they would bring deals to you just as you would for them.

For example, if you are selling accounting software that helps that finance department, you can partner with a tax management software provider that is already a vendor for the client. Whenever the client expresses a pain point in account s management, thru will make an introduction.

The partnership goes ways and would help established high-quality leads for both companies.

9. Offer a Free Trial to Entice and Generate Leads for Your SaaS Company

A well-verified SaaS lead generation strategy gives customers or prospects complete access to use your SaaS software or application. The free trial or freemium is usually for a limited time, and in exchange for using the free trial, users will have to give their contact information. Startups in the SaaS space can use this to generate leads and gather customers. 

The use of freemium and free trials effectively generates leads because it allows prospects and customers to test run your SaaS software or application.

A typical example of this strategy is when SAP SE in 2016 set its lead generation target at 300. It offered prospects 30 days free trial to try out the strategy. The result was 3700 new leads, plus an 88.5% reduction in the lead generation cost.

10. Describe the Values and Benefits of the SaaS Product or Service

You must let people know why they need to buy from you. Is there a specific reason why they would buy from you? Do your product or service save time, or save money? Do you offer advanced performance?

If you can offer a permanent solution to users’ problems, they will likely buy from you.

11. Create a Video for Your SaaS Product or Service

While it is good to have a standard FAQ section that answers most questions concerning your SaaS product, consider creating a video that will also show the product in action and answer most of the common questions prospects, leads, and customers may have about it.

Videos and audio are becoming the top ways to share content, mainly be because of their effectiveness.

Also, about 65% percent of people are visual learners. This high percentage means that they understand things faster in the video-audio format than when they have read it. Creating a video for this percentage of people works wonders than even a well-written copy on your landing page can.

Videos on your website can also build trust and credibility for your business with prospects. They will be more comfortable when they see and hear someone talk about your products, features, and answers to common questions. This media filled with questions and answers of actual people will make them develop the trust and be at ease to buy from you. This psychological hack is why product explainer videos have generated up to 33% more leads for SaaS startups.

12. Write High-Quality Blog Posts Relating to Your SaaS

Writing blog posts is an effective way to generate high-quality leads for your SaaS startup. It provides you with a platform to show your business as an authority in your SaaS niche and allows you to share expert advice and give solutions to most of your prospects and customers.

However, you must know that Consistency is the main key to making your blog powerful and effective in lead generation. You can post at least up to three quality blogs a week.

It is important that when you use your blog posts to generate leads that you strategically insert call-to-action links, words and phrases with your content. For example, your blog posts shouldn’t just have high-value content but also has up to three Call-to-action links strategically placed inside each blog post.

This blog content will build a bridge that will take your website’s visitors into your landing pages.

What’s more? You can also use guest blogging to generate leads for your SaaS startup by getting published on websites like Hubspot, Substack, among others. Let’s look at some of the effective ways to use guest blogging for SaaS lead generation.

>>More: How to Choose Between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS Based on Differences And Examples

Effective Ways to Use Guest Blogging for SaaS Lead Generation

1. Select the Right Website to Post Your Guest Blog

Ensure to review the website to see if its reader community matches your buyer persona or if they can have a pain point that your SaaS product can solve. This research will help you ensure that you got high-quality leads as you drive traffic to your website.

2. Go for Websites with High Domain Authority

These websites with a high domain authority are the search engine bots identify as being of high quality, making them easy to see by internet users. You must use this opportunity to make users see your blog content easier and faster.

This feature will also help move your site up the SERPs, especially if you put a backlink to redirect people from these websites to your site. Ensure to use Moz to identify these kinds of websites easily.

3. Write Quality Blog Content that Will also Benefit the Site

When using guest blogging, ensure that the art9 you write also provides value and is of high quality to the reader community in the guest website. The blog should be of value to them just as it is to you. Why? Doing this will make your guest blog have a high probability of being accepted and getting an invitation in the future to write another helpful post.

4. Optimize Your SaaS Company’s Website Speed

If loading a page on your website takes a long time, many customers won’t like to continue, and you would lose a lot of visitors and have a decline in your search engine ranking.

Hence, you have to optimize the load speed of your website. This optimization will not only impact your lead generation efforts positively but also improve sales.

5. Establish Trust Using Testimonials

While many new marketing and lead generation strategies and tactics continue to be developed and use in capturing the markets, nothing beats the old-fashioned word of mouth. 

Adding testimonies to your website’s landing pages with headshots of your customers can be a form of word of mouth. It will help develop and solidify a level of credibility and trust for your SaaS product and entice your website’s visitors to provide their contact information. Automatically, they become leads.

6. Ensure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly

A lot of Americans own a smartphone use it whenever they surf the internet. Therefore, to generate more leads, you must make your website mobile-friendly. 

You can use a site theme that automatically adjusts to suit the person’s device with the site. Being mobile-friendly entails that the theme will be responsive to your visitors’ devices and easier to navigate.

You should also make use of click-to-call in your website instead of the traditional call-to-action buttons. This will make it easier for visitors to contact you and have their questions answered.

>>More: SaaS Sales: Advice, Thoughts, and Best Practices

Final Takeaway

Your product is the most powerful SaaS lead generation asset, and it amplifies a strategy you might use in your lead generation campaigns.

Lead generation involves letting people know the benefits of buying your SaaS products and how they can solve their pain points and obtain their contact information to be one customer. However, with the saturation of the SaaS space, there is continuous competition, and you will have to use the best lead generation to be at the top of your SaaS marketing game. To make it easier for you, we have defined, delineated and described a lot concerning lead generation and gave you the top best thirteen lead generation strategies.

While these strategies work well, know that you also amplify their possibilities by joining some of them together to get the best results. Just keep texting to find the inbound lead generation strategy and process that works best for your SaaS products.

Read More