When it comes to generating quality leads for your SaaS business, finding the right strategy can be a challenge, especially when marketing isn’t your strength. The fact that prospects are becoming increasingly more knowledgeable makes it even more difficult.
Spamming prospects with one pitch after another is no longer effective. What’s required is more sophisticated prospecting and engagement methods.
The good news is that there are many effective ways to increase the number of leads and subsequent conversions. According to lead generation statistics, 86% of B2B firms use their website as a primary source of lead generation, but that’s not the only way forward for your SaaS business.
In this post, you’ll find a selection of the top SaaS lead generation and conversion tips to choose from.
Benjamin Waugh
Digital Marketing Manager at Vevox
Twitter: @BenWaugh4
LinkedIn: Benjamin Waugh
Sometimes… Less Is More!
If you are running a digital campaign now or have a landing page to entice leads to download or submit form… think about how many steps you are asking them to go through? Is your messaging clear? Think about using no navigation landing pages that only give the user one decision to make, download the content or leave. If you make it enticing and easy enough, they will be tempted to submit… give way too many CTA options, ways to navigate your site or content… then ultimately, you can let them get distracted in the most crucial time.
Sawaram Suthar
Founder at TheNextScoop
Twitter: @sawarams
Focus on SEO and Build a Go-To Community
I would like to suggest two major methods to help you generate more leads and increase conversion.
- Focus on SEO: you can optimize on-page for your all web pages with focused keywords and real-user context. If you’re building something for DevOps, you need to choose keywords accordingly and add some of the known terminologies so people can easily find your product. Creating long-form content with keeping in TOFU, MOFU and BOFU would be helpful.
- Build a go-to community: this is not new, but people are still struggling with it because they either didn’t take it seriously or are unable to achieve it. You can create a community by focusing on your industry or solutions niche rather than common. Then, you can invite and onboard real-time users in the community and listen to their problems. You can create a great user list by understanding their problem and providing them with optimum solutions.
Suraj Kr. Prakash
Founder & Author at Dhandho Karo
Using Case Studies to Generate Leads
Using case studies to generate leads can be very powerful. It works a little like social proof and enables the prospect to visualize themselves using the solution. It can also make it easier to envision the product or service in action, in real life, which can be a powerful motivator.
Case studies work particularly well for more complex products or services. Where descriptions and marketing material may fail to effectively communicate, being able to show and tell with a case study can overcome that.
It’s one reason why case studies have been around for so long. They have the unique ability to show the prospect how a solution works rather than just telling. This can be all that’s needed to turn a prospect into a qualified lead. That’s a very effective marketing technique!
Ilija Sekulov
Marketing & SEO at Mailbutler.io
LinkedIn: Ilija Sekulov
Clear Understanding of Your Target Market
In order to generate leads for your SaaS company, you need to have a clear understanding of your target market and what they are looking for.
Once you have this information, you can create content that resonates with their needs and pain points. Additionally, it is important to make sure that your website is optimized for lead capture.
This means having forms that are easily accessible and visible, as well as providing valuable content in exchange for contact information.
Once you have captured a lead, it is then essential to convert them into a paying customer. To do this, you need to provide them with a great user experience and continue to deliver value at every stage of the customer journey.
By following these tips, you can ensure that your SaaS company is generating and converting leads effectively.
Omar Nasif
Chief Marketing Officer at Groupboss
Twitter: @OmarNasif14
LinkedIn: Omar Nasif
Generate Leads from Your Community
It’s now easy to generate leads from communities like Facebook groups.
If you have a SaaS product or planning to start one, do not forget to create a community based on your audiences. Facebook groups can be the best option to create a community for free. To screen the new members, set membership qualifying questions. Review the answers and approve the members. Do not forget to save the answers and generate leads. If you are asking for an email address in any of their membership questions, that will give you extra benefit for lead generation.
This is one way to generate leads from Facebook. There are many other options to generate leads from social media. Just remember, social media exposure of your SaaS will help you to get leads and grow faster.
Johannes Karjula
Co-Founder and CEO of Trustmary
LinkedIn: Johannes Karjula
Showcase Your Previous Happy Customers
People are more likely to convert when they see that you are trusted by other people like them. Direct referrals are of course the most effective, but often spontaneous. Two people come together, discuss a problem, find out that they have had the same problem, and exchange solution ideas.
In order to grow and build trust faster, we need to replicate this situation digitally. When a visitor lands on your website, showcase your happy customers through testimonials and reviews. This way the new potential customers can immediately see that you can help them, too. There are many software tools that help you to automate this process.
Aaron Gray
Managing Partner at NO-BS
LinkedIn: Aaron Gray
Call to Action More Persistently
To generate and convert a qualified lead, you should have a compelling call-to-action strategy for your ads as well as landing pages. While encouraging people to buy your product or service, don’t be afraid to insist on a purchase in your calls-to-action (CTAs) and make them sound highly persuasive.
Tactic-driven CTAs can help you make your targeted customers click the button and that can translate to revenue growth.
Importantly, you should mind the color for your CTA buttons. Colors influence site visitors’ behavior and can improve your conversion rates dramatically. For example, a red CTA button may turn more page viewers into customers than a green one.
Use the most effective words and convincing call-to-action phrases to maximize conversions:
- Join free
- Get x% off
- Buy now
- New __
- Never miss __
- Get started, etc.
Sam Pelton
Content Director at Mobile Text Alerts
Twitter: @MobileTextAlert
LinkedIn: Sam Pelton
Be a Conversion Copywriter
Copy is crucial.
This is true for emails, landing pages, ads, or whatever other medium you use to convert and generate leads.
You can’t just throw some copy together and hope it sticks.
Think of your copy as an online salesperson. You need it to be convincing and persuasive. But not salesy and pushy.
So you need to know your audience’s problems, desires, and needs. And you need to speak to that in every piece of sales copy you write.
You need to be immersed in the voice of your audience by poring over survey results, support conversations, sales demo recordings, and personal interviews.
Then you’ll be able to use that data to really speak your audience’s language and write copy that truly converts.
So be intentional about every single page, email, and ad. Test different types of copy and see what connects with your audience.
Be a conversion copywriter.
Bhujal Patel
Founder and Operator at MyDigitalKube.com
Twitter: @bhujal_patel
LinkedIn: Bhujal Patel
Create More SAGE Lead Magnets
Start with 4 key pain points that your customers are experiencing then going to be potentially searching for a solution or introduced to your industry.
1. Short: Even though you have high perceived value in your lead magnet, do not create long videos and ebooks because people coming to your website don’t even know who you are. Create
something that is short, focused, and easy to consume.
2. Actionable: When your leads consume this information, it needs to be actionable so that they get a quick result. If you can make that promise in the headline, you’ll get a lot of options.
3. Goal Oriented: Make your lead magnets focused on specific outcomes that your customers have a desire to achieve.
4. Easy: If you can help a person identify a pain, get them to exchange their contact information for your document, and get them a result at the end, you’ll be the winner. They will subscribe to you.
James Angel
CO-CEO at dyl.com
Twitter: @DYL
LinkedIn: James Angel
Create Short Forms
Forms are key to B2B companies. Whether or not you’re at the beginning stages or you’ve been in business for years, almost every B2B company uses forms as their main bread and butter.
However, what a lot of managers and directors don’t understand is that asking professionals for too much information can turn them off from filling out a form.
Your data capture should be a quick and simple process. We’ve tested forms on over 1600 websites, and we’ve noticed that adding 1 form field equates to losing 15% of your leads.
So when a new lead fills out a form, you should capture basic information.
Your sales team can then continue the qualification process and find out any other information that’s important to the sale.
Jason Parms
Customer Service Manager at SSL2BUY
LinkedIn: Jason Parms
Create a Conversion-Optimized Homepage
Your website homepage is the face of your vision and your dedication to your business. It is the primary thing a customer sees when he/she lands on your website. Here, you can impress your customers and drive them ahead on your website. Therefore, what could be required stuff you can add to your homepage?
- Make a tagline for the product’s advantage.
- Customers should know about your product when they land on your website. How your product will be beneficial to customers?
- Also, place Buy Now, and Free Trial buttons to attract customers. It will clear their doubts about your products.
- Add the number of satisfied customers, total countries you served, and different brands on the homepage.
- A web page should have customer testimonials and a few case studies.
- A short duration product video will also do a good job.
- If a customer wants to know about the company then, place the About US page, contact details, and pricing link.
Patrick Herbert
Founder of Singularity Digital Marketing
Twitter: PatrickHerbert0
LinkedIn: Patrick Herbert
Iterate to Better Converting Blogs with Ads
If you’re creating pages that you want to convert but you’re unsure how they’ll do then try testing them using Google Ads. Spending hours crafting and designing the perfect page and assets for a blog post or landing page and then just waiting weeks/months for it to get enough traffic to convert doesn’t make sense. As a SaaS you need to cut the curve to growth.
Instead of the publish and wait method choose 3-5 relevant keywords for that page and set up a new campaign in your Google Ads account. Commit to a 1-2 week test and bid as high as you can on those keywords. If the page converts, you have positive feedback and can stop the campaign. If it doesn’t convert, assess why you think that is, make some changes and then try again.
Paul-Louis Valat
Traffic Manager at Plezi
Twitter: @PaulLouis_Valat
LinkedIn: Paul-Louis Valat
Sponsoring Targeted Newsletters to Generate Leads
Whether it’s to promote a product, an offer or a lead magnet, newsletter sponsorship is a great way to reach an engaged audience. Because of their format, newsletter creators must rely on their community to spread word of mouth. This constraint allows them to build a loyal reader base, who will pay attention to the author’s recommendations, sponsored or not. Newsletters are also a good lever to enter a new market, since you are validated by someone already established on this market.
To find a newsletter that fits your niche, you can either do a search on Google or social media, or use a marketplace like Swapstack. Newsletter ads typically consist of a visual, a headline, a short description and a CTA. Use this short space wisely, as you want to quickly gain the reader’s interest and redirect them to a more detailed landing page.
Since 2022, I’ve worked with 24 different newsletters and learned that :
- It’s affordable: about $250 for a newsletter with less than 10,000 subscribers
- It’s effective: I generated 162 new users for my freemium SaaS with a cost per lead of $52.
It’s also very quick to set up and newsletter creators are often transparent about their audience and numbers. So if you want to try it for yourself, there is very little risk!
Trevor Hatfield
Founder at Inturact
Twitter: @trevorhatfield
LinkedIn: Trevor Hatfield
Create Free Tools
You can create and rank other types of content in addition to written content to generate leads — free tools. If your business offers software as a service (SaaS), this is particularly effective. Reduce the features of your paid tool and make it available for free. You can be certain that if someone is using it, they are the best leads.
If you don’t want to offer a sneak peak of your tool for free, you can create savings calculators. Your free tool should be good enough to do one or two promised jobs and help the user but remember to add a call-to-action (CTA) to motivate those who want more to sign up.
Jamie Cheung
Marketing Associate at SleekFlow
LinkedIn: Jamie Cheung
Comment Auto Reply on Facebook and Instagram
What’s your strategy in capturing your customers’ attention and getting noticed? Is it possible to build a following and engage them without spending a lot of money on sponsored or paid marketing campaigns?
We can confidently tell you that it’s possible by using the comment auto reply tool that helps you interact and extend your target audience consistently. Comment responses are intimately associated with the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram, which are designed to bring greater organic impressions and reach when a post has active engagement. They not only make your followers feel heard, but they also boost the reliability and prominence of your brand.
Surya Biswas
Founder of Bloggingrico
Twitter: @SamratSuryabr
Turn Product Into Valuable Leads
Your software product is your most important lead generation asset as a SaaS company. People are constantly seeking their benefits. You have made a converting product; they will buy; otherwise, it’s your big mistake if you are not working on your product.
Offering a valuable tool for free to grab the leads and then using cross-selling campaigns to promote paid products: we already know this. But have you checked your copy?
Because page copy is the most important element for a lead generation page, starting from the top (first line), you have to convey your message in a way that inspires action.
Probably, you are selecting pricing points as per your wish. Most probably, you will use less pricing than your competitors. Do you think it’s all? Shortly, no.
List your premium features in the free list and charge for usage instead. Think twice about this hack.
Armando Hysenaj
SEO Manager at Windsor.ai
Twitter: @hysenaj_armando
LinkedIn: Armando Hysenaj
Implement Cold Email Outreach to Generate More Leads
Email outreach is one of the best marketing channels if it’s done right.
With more than 4.26 billion email users worldwide you can almost reach out to all your potential prospects.
Some tips to get the best results from your cold outreach:
- Focus on understanding your audience.
- Warm up your email to avoid spam.
- Personalize as much as you can your email templates.
- Keep it short and use simple language.
- Send 1-2 follow-ups.
- Use catch subject lines with emojis.
- Provide value.
- Clearly state the purpose of reaching out.
- Add an email signature.
Asif Khan
SEO Executive at Second Phone Number App
LinkedIn: Asif Khan
Use VoIP System to Increase Conversions Rate
Waiting for the client to reach out to the businesses is a 50-50 chance of conversion and to increase the conversion rates Big SaaS companies who are doing business worldwide with their customers use VoIP technology. With Virtual Phone Numbers, these companies contact their customers who have filled the signup forms with all the details like phone numbers.
Through VoIP numbers, anyone can reach out to their customers sitting anywhere around the world and can discuss their products, and can know the customer’s requirements vocally. It is a much more cost-effective method and drives positive impact on the customers.
Hunter Branch
SEO at Writesonic
Twitter: @ranktree
LinkedIn: Hunter Branch
Utilize AI to Produce More Content Faster
Just about everything in marketing comes down to content–having great content on multiple platforms where your target customers are. But creating all that content takes tons of time.
Nowadays, people are utilizing AI writers to drastically reduce the time it takes to create everything from social media to blog content. And learning how to use one to research, outline, and even write first drafts of your content can help you truly achieve the goal of being “everywhere all the time.”
Conclusion
When it comes to generating leads and conversions for software companies, a priority should always be generating high-quality leads. These are more likely to become and remain your customers.
Now you’ve got some ideas it’s possible for your lead generation strategy to become the game-changer it’s meant to be.
