SaaS lead generation overview
Running and growing a SaaS business is extremely difficult and competition is becoming fiercer every day.
When it comes to trying to stay afloat, SaaS owners will need to try all the marketing strategies available to them to generate leads and clients.
Lead generation is vital for every business including SaaS. Businesses will need to constantly find qualified prospects and leads to fill their sales pipeline.
Lead generation for SaaS businesses is usually different from other traditional sectors that require more in-person interaction with potential clients.
Let’s continue reading further below to learn more about the most popular lead generation strategies for SaaS businesses.
Lead generation for SaaS vs lead generation for other types of businesses
SaaS lead generation often requires greater focus on digital strategies. SaaS businesses are often found relying heavily on paid ads, emailing marketing and automation.
Whereas, traditional businesses focus more on in-person sales pitches and interaction. These businesses usually employ a team of sales professionals to find and build relationships with leads & clients. These are often businesses that sell high-value physical products such as machinery, equipment, etc.
Businesses of all kinds are transitioning to doing more digital marketing, however, certain types of products would sell easier in person.
SaaS lead generation’s most popular strategies
SaaS businesses have an expert-level understanding of software and how it works. Therefore, SaaS businesses often run lead generation campaigns at a very high level.
However, quite many SaaS businesses missed out on lead generation opportunities that they don’t even know exist.
1. Paid ads
Most SaaS businesses have done a lot of paid ads to get their name around and clients.
Big SaaS companies spent millions of dollars on ads every year to stay competitive. Small SaaS businesses often find paid ads expensive, however, they will have to run ads because advertisements have them reach and acquire users faster.
Popular platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc are evolving every day to provide their clients with more ads options to improve ads’ effectiveness.
Therefore, if businesses don’t stay up to date with the updates, they will leave behind a lot of growth potential for lower costs.
If you have a good budget for paid ads, it’s recommended to run 2 or 3 types of ads at the same time to get the maximum result. If your budget is limited for lead generation, we recommend using ads that are specifically designed for it such as Linkedin & Facebook lead gen ads.
This specific type of ads makes it easy for your business to generate leads. Instead of showing ads to direct the traffic to your website, it will show a form where people can put their contact information in quickly after a few clicks.
If you are running ads to find leads and haven’t known about this type of ads, try it now.
Also, paid ads should go hand in hand with other strategies to reach maximum performance. For example, you should keep working and optimizing your SEO and Email Marketing campaigns to coordinate with paid ads.
Once every campaign is implemented properly and in harmony, you will see your traffic and other goals multiplied.
2. Email marketing.
A majority of lead generation for SaaS businesses is often done by the mean of email marketing. Email marketing comprises many digital marketing tactics that use emails.
Cold emailing
Cold emailing is most used for lead generation. Cold emailing refers to a practice by which you send emails to highly targeted prospects that are likely to become interested in buying or using your products.
Cold emailing has many advantages compared to other methods such as cold calling. Some of those pros are
- Reaching a lot of prospects fast
- Much less annoying compared to cold calling
- Affordable
- Can be automated
To run a successful cold calling campaign, you first will need to generate high-quality prospects. The goal for this is to get your emails landed in the prospects’ inbox, opened and replied.
There are several ways to generate high-quality prospects for your cold emailing campaigns. However, buying targeted prospects from a reputable B2B leads database is the fastest and most affordable way to generate excellent prospects.
There are many data providers on the Internet you should avoid so that you won’t waste time and money on bad data.
If a lead database offers the following, you should give them a try:
- Free trials
- No credit card is required
- Excellent support
- Refund policies
- Generous discounts for first-time users
At Limeleads – a leading B2B leads database, we offer all the above-mentioned and many more.
You can simply complete few-click signup and get your free trials with us. No credit card is required.
Email automation
Email automation keeps your leads engaged with your business. For example, if a lead signed up for an account, there should be a couple of automated messages sent to their inbox on two separate days.
These are usually welcome and follow-up emails. Many businesses downplaythe importance of these automated emails, however, these emails are necessary to keep your leads warm so that your next promotion emails will have a better chance of being opened and replied.
Email automation has become increasingly sophisticated, it allows you to schedule a sequence of emails to be sent out at a specific time or based on certain actions that your leads have taken such as open, link click, etc.
Email automation also means you can schedule to send newsletters and follow-up emails to slowly drive your leads further down your sales funnel.
SEO and lead magnets for SaaS lead gen
SEO usually doesn’t do well for SaaS businesses. However, you’re running a business and it’s very tough to survive and grow. Everything that works, even a little, should not be overlooked.
For SaaS startups, SEO is one of, if not the most challenging digital marketing aspect to take on. However, there are some big SaaS names that are doing very well with SEO such as Hubspot, Zendesk, etc.
If you decide to go all in for lead generation, SEO should never be ignored. It will probably be a long battle for your site to get substantial organic traffic but once you get it done, organic traffic will bring you the most leads and sales.
A good lead magnet is a must for an optimum lead generation campaign. A lead magnet can be anything from a useful checklist to an Ebook.
Visitors will download your lead magnet for free in exchange for their contact information, usually, email addresses. More than often, lead generation will see a much-improved performance with a good lead magnet compared to not having it at all.
Lead magnets also can help your paid ads perform better and lower the ads cost. At the end of the day, people always like getting useful things for free, so take advantage of that!
Conclusion
The lead generation strategies mentioned above for SaaS businesses are only a few popular tactics. There are a few other strategies that can work out for your SaaS business such as social media for lead gen, chat automation, etc.
Lead generation for SaaS businesses is a challenge and you probably won’t see good results overnight. All you need to do is being persistent and constantly improving your campaigns based on your performance stats.