The exhilarating world of SaaS demand generation is a rollercoaster ride. Demand generation for SaaS products continues to surge.
But, because of technological disruption, SaaS businesses face high competition and unpredictable revenue streams.
Whether you’re a budding startup or a seasoned SaaS business, having a reliable SaaS demand generation strategy is vital to staying ahead.
So, in this article, we decode the puzzle of SaaS demand generation and give actionable steps to create one for your SaaS business.
Are you ready? Let’s get started.
Inbound marketing isn’t just a buzzword—it’s your secret weapon for predictable growth. To lay the foundation of SaaS inbound marketing, you need to start by tracking the stage of your startup journey.
New GTM (Pre-revenue): You’re a startup taking your first steps. It’s that stage when you have minimal resources for marketing.
Outbound Led (Early Adopters): As your startup gains traction, outbound sales become the driving force. Marketing plays a supporting role, contributing less than 10% to total revenue.
Fundamental Marketing (Post-PMF): The company invests up to $300K in marketing. It’s like planting seeds—you nurture them, and they grow. At this stage, the influence of marketing is at an intermediate level.
Sophisticated Marketing (Rapid Scaling & Efficiency): Marketing contributes 40-60% to the pipeline, backed by a robust team. It’s like orchestrating a symphony—every note matters.
You know where you stand as a SaaS startup, so what’s next?
Remember, you’re a SaaS brand navigating the digital wilderness. That’s why you must create a clearly defined brand positioning.
Think of it as your digital DNA. Document your brand values to align them with your SaaS demand generation campaigns.
When you have a brand positioning document, it’s time to define your audience. It’s best to assemble your target personas by answering the following questions:
Going deeper into the behaviour and needs of your target customers helps you create campaign messages that resonate with them.
The next step is understanding where your ideal customers are most active. These are your touchpoints—interactions between your business and customers. Social media, Google ads, website—they’re all part of your potential target platforms.
Understanding major customer touch points helps you see which channels are critical to your SaaS demand generation campaigns.
Create a customer journey map. Think of it as a timeline. Start with awareness (low-intent), move to consideration (should I?), then purchase (high-intent), and retention (stay with us).
Plot touchpoints along the way.
This way, you’ll be able to meet users at the precise stages of their buyer journey. And in the process, you can match your campaign messages with audience needs.
Once you have laid the foundation for your SaaS demand generation strategy, working on the rest of the elements is ideal.
The following image shows how you can grow revenue by aligning each element to a single business outcome.
Effective B2B demand generation depends on the quality of marketing resources you hire.
At the same time, you need to work within your means and budget. So, how do you start hiring people who get you the results you’re looking for?
When you’re still an early-stage SaaS startup, it’s ideal to hire 2-3 resources who can handle a wide range of marketing activities around your product launch. The best way is to onboard two juniors and one experienced SaaS marketing professional.
The growth stage calls for a lot more budget and resources. It’s the phase when you must promote your product on multiple online channels and run many ongoing campaigns simultaneously.
It’s when you should consider hiring separate teams for brand communications, product positioning, and growth marketing.
Your SaaS lead generation strategy depends on your budget and choice of gestation period. Let’s understand more about it in this section.
Some SaaS marketers have a decent budget and are looking for faster results in terms of conversions. Here are channels that work best for such marketers.
Heavy Investment, Long-Term Results
Content Hub: You aim to build a brand through quality content for long-term results. Work on publishing valuable content that aligns with your brand.
Paid Social Campaigns: Again, paid campaigns on social media platforms help you build a solid brand on these channels. Such investments reap long-lasting dividends.
Cold Emails Outreach: To turn your marketing into quick sales, consider personalised email outreach to potential clients.
DMs Outreach: You can also slide into those LinkedIn or Twitter DMs with concise messages about your product USP.
Community Building: Try building a social media community around your business brand for low-cost and long-term results. Create a social group and foster meaningful conversations that add value to your target customers.
Personal Branding: Personal branding on platforms like LinkedIn is critical to SaaS demand generation success. It’s an essential way to build trust with your target customers. The strategy also helps you to build topical authority that promises a recurring revenue stream for your business.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing combines inbound and outbound tactics to help you create personalised experiences for high-intent and high-value customers. This is a cost-effective way to get long-term revenues for your business.
In such a scenario, you must focus on the following marketing tactics:
If your ideal customers have a high ACV, you need to use different tactics to build a deeper relationship with them. Here are some strategies that work better in case of high ACV customers:
The right way to consistently grow your SaaS sales pipeline is to align tactics with goals and customer segments. B2B SaaS marketers must understand that building an online brand is vital for breaking through the digital noise.
Also, you must keep working on building an audience and creating demand where it exists.
Building a SaaS demand generation engine is about getting to the core of what’s working for your business and then putting it into a process.
Defining funnel efficiency aims to squeeze the most out of every dollar you spend on your SaaS demand generation efforts. It helps you map out the number of leads and customers seeking to get from each marketing channel per period and marketing dollar spent.
Also, tracking funnel efficiency enables you to analyse where leads are dropping and why so you can take corrective action wherever necessary.
It lets you keep tabs on key metrics like CPL and CAC to minimise them over your campaign.
A buyer journey framework helps you create targeted campaign messages and reach your ideal customers through precise platforms.
It helps you thoroughly understand customer journey stages and create messages tailored to each stage of the customer lifecycle.
Creating an experimental SaaS demand generation plan requires a twin-pronged approach. Start by building a foundation:
Next, you need to work on deploying your marketing programs. Work on deciding how much you wish to invest in different channels. Learn from this experiment to understand which platforms work best for your SaaS.
After 90 days, you’ll know the channels that are getting you the highest return. It will also help you determine the efficacy of different campaigns and messages.
So, from here on, you can assemble a long-term marketing program that aligns with your business goals.
It’s evident that creating an evergreen and predictable SaaS demand generation engine requires a great deal of thought and strategic input.
However, the effort is all worth it because the results that follow aren’t just incredible but also consistent.
To create an accurate strategy, we recommend you hire an expert SAAS PPC Agency like TripleDart. As SaaS growth experts we have experience working with small, medium and large businesses. So, do book a call with us today.
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