Rev Up Your B2B SaaS Lead Generation With These 7 Tips

B2B SaaS companies face a unique challenge when it comes to lead generation. A typical lead generation process at a B2C company focuses on a single decision-maker, whereas a B2B lead generation process often must woo multiple key stakeholders to win a single client business. 

To make matters even more complicated, the B2B SaaS industry is known for having a much longer sales cycle than many other industries. With the right strategies, however, you can vitalize your lead generation efforts and breathe new life into your customer base. In this article, we'll share seven of our best tips for generating more leads for your B2B SaaS business.

1. Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a detailed description of your business's perfect customer — for B2B SaaS businesses, ICPs mainly describe an ideal business, not an ideal person, but it's also very important to take the characteristics of the key decision makers at your ideal client business into account.

An ideal B2B SaaS customer profile should include information about the client company's industry, size, location, budget, and other characteristics that are relevant to the product you're selling. Creating an ICP can help you focus your SaaS lead generation strategies on the businesses that are most likely to be interested in your product and ready to buy.

In addition to the considerations above, make sure you pay close attention to the following elements when creating your ICP:

• Demographics - This primarily includes the age, gender, location, job title, and income levels of your ideal client organization's key decision makers.
• Psychographics - This includes interests, values, attitudes, and lifestyle choices that may influence a stakeholder’s decision-making process when purchasing a product or service.
• Pain Points - What problems does your ideal customer have? What solutions do they need?
• Buying Habits - How do buyers in your target market make purchasing decisions? For B2B SaaS, it's important to consider which individuals influence purchase decisions and how their internal decision-making process works.
• Buyer Journey Stage - Is your ideal customer still at the beginning of the buyer journey or further along in the process? 

2. Publish Gated Content

Gated content is a powerful tool for improving your lead generation strategy. By requiring users to provide their contact information in exchange for access to valuable content, your content marketing efforts can capture leads and build relationships with potential customers at the same time.

What Type of Gated Content Should You Publish?

The first step in leveraging gated content effectively is to identify the types of content that will be most valuable to your target audience. Since you're asking for contact information in return for the content, it needs to be high-quality and relevant enough that your ideal customers will consider it worth the exchange. 

This type of content could include whitepapers, webinars, case studies, e-books, or any other type of educational material. Once you've identified the type of content you want to offer, create a landing page with a form where users can enter their contact information in order to access it.

How to Promote Your Gated Content

Next, promote your gated content across every channel you can, such as email campaigns and social media posts. Make sure that your messaging clearly explains what value readers will get from accessing the gated content and why they should take the time to fill out the form. You may also want to consider running paid advertising campaigns on platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads in order to reach a wider audience and increase your gated content's visibility. 

Finally, make sure you're tracking how your audience engages with your gated content so you can measure its effectiveness as a lead-generation strategy. Analyzing metrics like click-through rate and conversion rate can help you determine which pieces of gated content are performing best. 

3. Run Webinars and Events

Hosting webinars and other live events can be another very effective strategy for generating leads. Webinars and events enable you to showcase your products or services in real time, allowing potential customers to see the value in action, ask questions, and gain a better understanding of how the product or service works. 

By sharing helpful information during live events like webinars, you can also establish your organization as an authority in your niche, helping you nurture leads and build trust with potential customers. You could also consider offering incentives during your events like discounts on products. Always end each event with a clear call to action to ensure attendees understand what steps they need to take if they're interested in your products or services.

4. Offer Free Trials

Free trials are another great tactic to help you boost your B2B SaaS lead generation. Many leads are more likely to show interest if they don't have to make any kind of commitment up front. By offering potential customers the chance to try out your product or service for free, you can demonstrate its value and generate further interest in what your company has to offer.

If you want to offer a free trial, the first step is to create an effective lead magnet that will attract potential customers to your trial and encourage them to sign up for it. This typically involves creating a landing page where prospects can sign up for the free trial and circulating marketing materials like an ebook or webinar to draw their attention to the landing page. You can also promote your free trial through channels like social media or email campaigns.

Offering a free trial gives leads the opportunity to try out your product's features, learn how it works, and decide if they want to commit to a longer-term subscription. Free trials also allow leads to get familiar with your product’s interface and ask questions before making a final purchase decision. By not requiring the lead to make an expensive commitment right away, you enable a more buyer-friendly decision process, helping to generate leads and improve your conversion rate all at once.

5. Use Lead Generation Tools

Lead generation tools are software solutions that help businesses optimize lead generation, often with the use of automation. Lead generation tools can automate the process of collecting contact information from potential customers, such as their name, email address, or phone number. This makes it possible to generate qualified leads much more quickly and accurately while also freeing up your team’s time to focus on nurturing high-value leads.

You can use the information you collect with tools from lead generation companies to create targeted campaigns and nurture relationships with prospective customers. For example, some lead generation tools can automatically track the interactions each lead has with your business and score their likelihood to convert, enabling your sales team to focus on the most valuable leads or intervene if a lead looks likely to drop out of the funnel.

6. Prioritize SEO

Today, SEO is one of the most important tools for improving lead generation at any kind of business — B2B SaaS included. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it involves streamlining your website's content to increase its visibility in organic search engine results pages (SERPs). Improving your webpages' search engine rankings is one of the best ways to get more traffic to your website, and therefore increase your pool of potential leads.

Keywords

When it comes to stepping up your SEO best practices, one of your highest priorities should be to identify the most relevant keywords related to your product or service and your target audience. This will help you fill your website with content that's optimized for those keywords, making it more likely to appear higher in your target audience's search engine results. 

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to research which keywords are most valuable for your business. Once you've identified the most relevant keywords, you can use them throughout your website content as well as in blog posts, articles, press releases, social media posts, and any other type of content you publish.

Link Building 

Another critical aspect of SEO for B2B lead generation is link building. Link building involves creating links from other websites back to yours, which helps demonstrate trustworthiness and authority to search engines and results in higher rankings. Any links back to your website that you can establish through methods like guest blogging on other websites will help drive more traffic to your site from other sources. This is a great way to reach a wider audience and potentially generate leads who would not have otherwise seen your content.

7. Implement Referral Marketing

Referral marketing is another highly effective lead generation strategy because it leverages existing relationships to build credibility with future customers. A lead is more likely to be willing to try a product or service if they hear of it through a referral from a trusted source. 

Additionally, referral marketing is extremely cost-effective since it doesn't require a large investment in advertising or other marketing materials. However, you should set up some kind of incentive to encourage your current customers to participate in the referral program (otherwise it's not really a program — you'd just be asking your customers for referrals). 

For example, some businesses offer a discounted month of service or access to exclusive content in return for referrals. These incentives also help you build relationships with your current customers at the same time you're generating leads.

How Mentors Can Help SaaS Companies Generate Leads

Lead generation at a B2B SaaS company is no easy task. If you’re building a B2B SaaS startup for the first time, attracting customers is likely one of the first major obstacles you’ll encounter. Having an experienced mentor by your side can make the process much easier. Even if you have a bit more experience under your belt, mentorship is an invaluable tool for helping you get unstuck or maintaining your forward momentum. You can find a mentor with exactly the type of expertise you need and easily set up a meeting with them using Mentorcam.