Today’s digital market is not about getting web traffic but about getting the “targeted” and “relevant” web traffic that could fetch qualified leads.
Optimized websites help to generate qualified sales leads that guarantee true revenue for the companies. A well-optimized website constitutes 63% of the total sales and the rapidly growing internet adoption makes every business to develop an optimized website.
Here is a five-step S.M.A.R.T. strategy for SaaS companies that help you to get qualified leads.
- Specific: What is it that you want to achieve?
- Measurable: What is the benchmark to say that you’ve reached your goal?
- Agreed: Do all your stakeholders agree?
- Realistic: Do you have the financial, human, and technology resources to reach this goal?
- Time-bound: When should you achieve this goal?
Once you answer these 5 steps, you can use SEO and online marketing to generate qualified leads for your company.
How to Target Hot, Warm and Cold Leads?
Customers visit a website based on advertisements, press releases or referrals. Such customers directly type in the name of the company in search engines and the company’s website appears at the top. These types of customers are known as hot website leads where they show an interest in purchase.
However hot website leads constitute only 5 to 10 percent of the total sales. The rest can be categorized as warm or cold leads. So SaaS companies should create awareness and nurture the leads using the following methods.
#1. Content Marketing and Social Network Linking
Almost 85% of SaaS companies accepted the fact that content marketing is a strong lead generating tool. Today’s information-seeking generation has adopted to learn before you go and try before you buy culture. Every company is forced to give information on how their products are useful for their customers; how it is designed; the statistics; and anecdotes from experts – all in form of an article, blog, white paper, and case studies. Your website customers would take time to go through everything and process their buying decision. Adding links to social media account will help them share the articles and also build a community. For example, lead generation from LinkedIn was successful for 65% of B2B companies.
#2. Creating an Attractive Landing Page
Landing pages are known as “lead capture page” is the single page on the company’s website that appears when a customer clicks while searching in the search engine or marketing email or an online advertisement. The message on this page is very crucial to website lead conversion as it is considered as call-for-action. Research says customers like to see the benefits they get from the company or product or service in just a line or two on the landing pages. Strategically optimized landing pages are used by 68% of B2B businesses to acquire leads. Use an attractive headline, imagery and include white spaces to give a clutter-free experience.
#3. Registration Forms and Micro-Conversion
As soon as customers spend some time navigating through the website, a pop window for registration or signup should be optimized to appear. These registration forms help to get information about the customer for the sales team to follow. 70% of customers don’t like to fill in long registration forms and it is better to keep it short with basic details. Some customers tend to close the registration forms as they might find it disturbing, for such customer we can do micro-conversion wherein if they try to download an eBook or wants to read a blog or webinar or get the quotes, they ought to sign up. This way we retain a few website leads.
#4. Customer Photos, Videos, and Testimonials
As every marketing experts say, “Customers should be the real advocates for the company.” They build the base. Adding case studies, customer feedback and testimonials along with their photograph will develop trust among new visitors. This enhances the website appeal and authenticity. Product video, Demo video, a video about the history of the company, an introduction video from the CEO, awards, and achievements – all help in generating value to the company. As today’s generation consumes more images and videos, this technique will help the sales team to enhance the retention of website leads.
#5. A/B Testing
There is no absolute method to know what works and what doesn’t. For instance, if a website lead gets a dialogue box to sign up – the color, the format, the words can give both positive and negative impacts. The only way to do is A/B testing.
Simple headlines like —
“You seem to be interested in our product, please sign in to get contacted by our staff.”
or
“We are glad that we were able to get your interest in our products, it would be a pleasure to help you more. Please fill this quick registration form. It just takes 10 seconds.”
– can make a whole lot of difference. Hence test each headline, copy and call for action pages.
#6. CaaS for Lead Nurturing and Scoring:
Live Chat has been around for a long time, but it’s only recently when marketers are starting to see the true potential of this software, especially when it comes to generating leads and sales conversion.
However, in-house live chat face problems with set up cost and maintenance and thus CaaS came into existence.
CaaS (Conversation as a Service) or Managed Live Chat is a new trend in generating websites leads where service providers like Chat Metrics guarantee 25% more leads in just 30 days.
CaaS drives up your sales by engaging your online customers instantly. They reduce the customer churn rate with a pro-active communication strategy. And finally, provide data and analytics to improve your product and marketing campaigns thus generating Sales Qualified Leads that convert quicker than ever before.
As you have different methods to apply for your SaaS startup, try to combine some of these strategies. Keep testing to find which inbound lead generation strategy best works for you.
