1. Content Promotion

Content marketing is being used by businesses all over the world to promote their brand, attract visitors to their websites, and generate leads. One significant advantage of content marketing is that it has a compounding power of return, which means that it grows in value over time, much like a wise investment.

Importantly, content continues to generate leads, but other forms of marketing, such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, can only do so for as long as you continue to spend. As a result, we consider content to be a company asset, whereas online advertising is rented. This distinction is critical for SaaS marketers to understand.

Looking for content marketing ideas? Here are three SaaS companies that rely on content to generate leads:

• Dropbox

Dropbox has several different sorts of potential clients, which it targets via focused material on Dropbox, Dropbox Business, Dropbox Tech, and Dropbox Developer blogs. In addition, they hold several webinars to promote their qualifications to potential clients.

• Intercom

The content marketing approach of Intercom is focused on product management, design, startups, and marketing. The customer communication platform is quickly becoming known for the high quality of the Inside Intercom blog, podcast, and books, which all contribute to the company’s brand and drive qualified leads.

Inside Intercom is a blog dedicated to sales, marketing, and customer conversion. 

2. Product Evaluations

Product trials are quickly becoming a significant source of leads for the SaaS business. Nothing beats “test driving” a product, and if you don’t already, your company should consider offering a trial on your website.

Trials are a very successful lead-generation technique if you’re selling to a tech-savvy audience that prefers to try the product before speaking with a sales rep. Because product trials are often self-serve, you can continue to create leads while investing little in the continuous promotion.

However, there are a few red flags to be aware of. You must guarantee that users have a great experience when testing your product. Therefore, depending on the complexity of your product and your unit economics, you should consider providing some onboarding or help. This could be done via one-on-one calls, group webinars, automated emails, or a combination of the three.

Product trials are valuable because they are a good predictor of buyer intent. A prospect is devoting time to learning about your product. At HubSpot, we know that people who participate in a trial have a higher proclivity to buy; we refer to these people as product-qualified leads (PQLs), and we carefully track them.

The challenge is to find a happy medium between providing value without overpowering the prospect and doing it in a light-touch and cost-effective manner. This requires some trial and error, but with continual optimization, product trials can turn into a steady stream of highly qualified leads.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO and content marketing go hand in hand by making your material discoverable on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. Consider SEO in two distinct but complementary categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page Search Engine Optimization

The good news about on-page SEO is that you have complete control over it. You must generate content that people want to read, link to, and share, but there are other considerations.

These include keyword strategy, internal linking, title, and description use, website load time, and user interface. Check out our on-page SEO tutorial for a deep look at what makes a well-optimized website.

SEO Off-Page

People frequently believe that off-page SEO only refers to link building, but there’s more to it than that. While links are vital, the quality of those links is more significant. High-quality links from reputable and authoritative websites always outweigh low-quality connections. As for social media, it has a role as well, as shares and links from significant social accounts are another quality indicator.

Creating a distribution strategy is the best approach to earning links and shares. Matthew Barby, HubSpot’s Director of Acquisition, presented a talk at SearchLeeds titled “There’s more to life than “excellent content” that delves deeper into this.

4. Marketing by Referral

Referrals are one of the most effective sorts of leads, according to a growing body of research. Although recommendations are often low-cost and close rapidly, there is a referral mismatch between sales and marketing, with 56 percent of salespeople considering referrals “extremely important” but just one-third of organizations having a referral program in place.

There’s a lot of disagreement about whether or not businesses should reward referrals. One school of thought holds that without an incentive, you will not create many referrals, whereas the opposing position holds that if you incentivize too excessively, you may receive low-quality referrals. The greatest advice is to test and optimize for what works best for your SaaS business.

The most critical step before focusing on optimization is to create your referral program. There is software available that can power your referral program from start to finish, but at the very least, we recommend that you develop a landing page on your website where visitors may make referrals.

Explain what constitutes a good referral to ensure you receive great referrals. This could be the individual’s job title, industry, or the size of the organization they work for. You should also specify whether, how, and when people will be rewarded.

By creating templates that sales, customer success, and support teams can utilize, marketing teams may make it easier for them to ask for referrals. The most essential component here is making it simple and empowering sales professionals to make the ask.

5. Google AdWords

While inbound marketing might help you save money on AdWords, millions of consumers still click on search engine advertising every day. If you don’t want to miss out on a chunk of prospective leads, you should keep investing in PPC, especially now that advertising is getting more prominent in Google search results.

PPC is still popular for a variety of reasons. It drives targeted traffic to your website and is extremely scalable, which means you can adjust your spending based on the needs of your business on any given day. It also provides a high degree of intrinsic predictability, both in terms of cost and outcome, which appeals to CFOs or those who have historically overseen marketing budgets.

The greatest recommendation is to undertake a series of tests to determine which activity delivers the highest ROI for your company. The level of competition varies greatly between businesses, but the truth remains that if you’re prepared to pay for it, you can create big amounts of traffic and leads via PPC.

HubSpot has released the Ads Add-On, allowing our clients to execute inbound and paid campaigns directly from the software.

6. Collaborative marketing

Many SaaS companies decide to collaborate by launching a co-marketing campaign with other companies that either complement their product offering or have a similar point of view or business model.

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to co-marketing, but often the organizations involved develop the material, such as an ebook, organize a webinar, or publish research. The companies involved share the leads generated as well as the costs incurred.

Both companies can benefit from one another’s followings and maybe reach a new audience. Co-marketing can be quite effective if both teams are on the same page. However, it is critical to ensure that all teams are on the same page and understand the expectations from the outset.

You can generate leads by collaborating with other renowned companies to develop a highly sought-after piece of content. When done correctly, co-marketing is a low-cost way to create leads, expand the reach of your brand, and establish thought leadership. HubSpot routinely collaborates with other businesses in co-marketing efforts, such as this one between HubSpot and LinkedIn:

HubSpot and LinkedIn have teamed up to provide a social media and sales co-marketing proposition.

7. Retargeting 

Whether your primary conversion measure is an ebook download, an online purchase, or a free trial, the fact remains that the majority of website visitors never take the action you desire. Retargeting (also known as remarketing) can help you significantly increase conversions by re-engaging people who have left your website.

Retargeting tracks your website visitors and then displays online advertisements to them as they visit other websites on the internet. Many eCommerce businesses set the standard for retargeting by providing contextual offers to entice returning website users. Consider the last time you looked at a piece of clothing online, left the site, and then saw advertisements (typically with a discount) advertising that same pair of jeans on your favorite websites or social media. That’s retargeting at work.

Retargeting may (and should) be used to convert hard-earned website visits into customers, regardless of industry. Furthermore, most retargeting software now allows advertisers to target users who have not visited a website. You can, for example, begin a campaign based on activities such as opening an email or attending a webinar, while some solutions allow marketers to target people who share similar qualities but haven’t visited your website yet.

Retargeting is a powerful marketing technique since it provides your business with another opportunity to create trust, credibility, and familiarity with website visitors.

These are tried-and-true SaaS marketing methods to help software companies grow, but as always, we urge you to test, analyze, and optimize them to see which ones produce the best results for your company.