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.
Foundation to Inbound Marketing
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.
Go From Brand to Demand
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.
Audience Personas
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:
- Who are your ideal customers?
- Where do they belong?
- What are some of their key challenges?
- What are their likes, interests, and preferences?
Going deeper into the behaviour and needs of your target customers helps you create campaign messages that resonate with them.
Map Your Digital Touchpoints
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.
Aligning Customer Journey
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.
Embrace a Strategic Approach to SaaS Pipeline Growth
Once you have laid the foundation for your SaaS demand generation strategy, working on the rest of the elements is ideal.
- Make sure you have a search-friendly website and many marketing tools to help you execute your strategy.
- Work on planning your campaigns and defining the messaging strategy.
- Allocate a budget for your marketing campaigns and define what you wish to achieve in that budget.
- Build a team of campaign and product managers.
The following image shows how you can grow revenue by aligning each element to a single business outcome.
Building The RIGHT Marketing Team
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.
SaaS Pipeline Generation Tactics for 2023
Your SaaS pipeline generation strategy depends on your budget and choice of gestation period. Let’s understand more about it in this section.
Heavy Investment, Short-Term Results
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.
- Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads: These are the top two paid marketing channels for B2B SaaS and can help you reach your audience quickly and effectively.
- Co-Marketing Initiatives: Collaborating with industry peers to create joint campaigns helps you access a ready-made audience. You can use their influence to connect with your ideal customers quickly.
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.
Low Investment, Short-Term Results
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.
Low Investment, Long-Term Results
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.
Use Unique Tactics for Different Buyer Segments: Successful B2B demand generation uses the best channels for your buyers. If you’re targeting low ACV customers, you’re looking at a broader customer base.
In such a scenario, you must focus on the following marketing tactics:
- Paid Ads: Google and Social
- SEO and organic content marketing
- Peer referrals and community building
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:
- Outbound and account-based marketing
- Events and collaborations
- Expert reviews and influencer collaborations
- Lifecycle marketing
- Digital PR
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.
Process for an All-Weather Pipeline Generation Engine
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.
Define the Funnel Efficiency and Unit Economics of Your Product
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.
Build a Buyer Journey Framework
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.
Create a 30-60-90-Day Plan
Creating an experimental SaaS demand generation plan requires a twin-pronged approach. Start by building a foundation:
- Create a process for tracking conversions and channel attribution
- Work on creating campaign collateral and content assets
- Set up your tech stack and align tool integrations
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.
Review After 90 Days
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.
Final Thoughts
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 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.
