By Kaci Antoine, Content Specialist
With the SaaS market growing by 18% each year, it's no secret that there is a lot of competition in the SaaS world.1 And as customers do more research and get input from more stakeholders, lead generation for B2B SaaS companies is increasingly difficult.
The SaaS Market is growing by 18% each year.
-BMC
SaaS marketing teams tend to focus on paid ads and other outbound strategies to generate leads. In contrast, marketers who use inbound marking tend to narrow their focus on landing page optimization or basic email automation, but impactful inbound marketing encompasses the entire customer experience lifetime.
Implementing inbound strategies can help you build confidence and trust with leads and push them towards making a purchase decision.
Generating leads through inbound marketing starts with defining and engaging your buyers by developing and researching buyer personas. Inbound marketers use buyer personas to market their product more effectively with messaging that appeals to their target market. Companies develop buyer personas using demographic data and information gathered from interviews with actual customers or qualified leads. Marketers can use buyer personas to:
Buyer personas are a critical component of inbound marketing, so before implementing additional inbound marketing strategies, ensure you have thoroughly researched and developed your personas.
Offer value and build trust by offering gated content. Gated content targeted to your buyer personas provides value and builds trust with potential leads while allowing you to learn more about them. When using gated content in lead generation for B2B SaaS companies specifically, content should educate readers on their pain points — the causes, market forces affecting their business, and a high-level overview of how leads can solve those pain points.
At the top of the sales funnel, leads aren't typically ready to hear about solutions to their problems, so content should be educational and establish you as a trusted resource in the client's industry. Consider using a free eBook, a white paper, original research reports, or a free trial of your product as gated content.
Ultimately, gated content:
In 2017, Forrester Research reported that 62% of B2B buyers use smartphones to research work purchases, and in 2019, the mobile app user base for SaaS products grew at two times the growth rate for web users.2 3 With more and more consumers using mobile devices to research products and solutions before making a purchase decision, they expect sites they're using for research to be easy to navigate (and will quickly bounce from sites that aren't).
To make your site easy to navigate for mobile users:
User experience is a significant issue for B2B companies. B2B sites have an average bounce rate as high as 75%, which means they're failing to engage users with their content and convert leads.4 Improving the user experience on your website will help you solve this problem. When it's easy for users to find the information they're looking for and see the benefit of engaging with a conversion point, they'll be more likely to do so.
Your website should also provide an experience specific to the user's pain points, goals, and what you know about them. Using smart forms, progressive profiling, and your understanding of your buyer personas will help you create a positive, tailored experience.
Improving the user experience requires thinking about how people currently interact with your website or app. What pages are people bouncing from? Where do they drop off when they're browsing? Are there landing or pillar pages generating a lot of traffic but with low conversion rates? The answers to these questions can tell you where your website's user experience needs improvement.
Many SaaS companies struggle to convert leads who haven't used their product and aren't sure it will be useful to them. SaaS solutions can be highly complex, so companies must make support products easy to find and read when designing their website to show potential leads that they'll be supported and guided through implementation and use.
Make user guides, demos, product documents, and other support resources available and easy to find on your website. You can even post them to social media or on your blog to boost SEO efforts and show leads doing preliminary research how your solution works. Case studies can also help you instill confidence in potential leads by showcasing customers' positive experiences with your product and the unique ways they've used it.
Switching to an inbound marketing strategy — or expanding your current inbound marketing focus — is an excellent option for B2B SaaS companies that want to boost their lead generation. Inbound marketing attracts targeted prospects and helps you set them up to convert to leads and progress down the funnel into paying customers. Get our guide for lead generation for your B2B SaaS company to learn more.
Sources
1BMC, The State of SaaS in 2022: Growth Trends & Statistics, September 17, 2021
2Digital Commerce 360, More Business Buyers Use Phones and Laptops to Order Online, Mar 29, 2017
3Mixpanel, 2019 Product Benchmarks Report, 2019
4 HubSpot, 6 Steps to Reduce Your Bounce Rate [+ Platform-Specific Tips], February 03 2022