The most scalable channel for large, highly qualified SaaS leads (hint: it’s NOT Facebook)
When I speak with SaaS companies about paid ads strategy they are usually experiencing at least one of these three problems:
1) There is a low-level of market awareness about what they do… people are not actively searching for what they do. In Eugene Schwartz’s “Five Levels of Market Awareness” most of their prospects are at the “Problem-aware” stage.
SaaS companies who sell to large enterprise customers are often at this stage and experience this problem.
SaaS companies who use a software and service hybrid business model to add extra value to their customers with the power of tech + a done-for-you service often also operate at this “Problem-aware” stage. People will also often confuse what they do with just being a pure-play SaaS.
Successful SaaS companies I’ve talked to like Bounce Exchange, Price Intelligently, PressCable and LeadChat all fall into this category.
2) Leads that are generated from paid ads are often low quality. This is due to the leads not meeting very unique “ideal client profile” criteria that each of these companies need to have met before they will take on a client.
3) Leads are often too small. Only companies above a certain revenue level will get the most amount of value from their SaaS (or service/software package) due to the higher price point compared to an SMB SaaS product.
How To Use The World’s Largest Paid Media Channel To Drive Highly Qualified, Enterprise SaaS Leads
In this article I’m going to demonstrate how I would use 2 paid media channel strategies to drive highly qualified, enterprise leads into the top of SaaS companies sales funnels and convert them into demos.
Most successful SaaS companies often already work with a small number of enterprise-level companies, so the goal of these strategies will be to:
- Find a large volume of “Problem-aware” prospects and nudge them towards a software demo
- Generate high quality leads
- Generate more enterprise-level leads
For this article I’m going to use LeadChat as an example.
LeadChat are an Australian company that sell outsourced live chat in Australia and USA. They already work with big Australian enterprise companies like Health.com.au, Seek, Mazda and Jim’s Franchises.
They have a great value proposition: real humans that work 24/7 to answer your live chats and capture 4x-8x more leads from your website (while being 50x cheaper than hiring a full-time employee).
Their ideal client is any business who has 1,000+ unique monthly website visitors, with no target customer in any specific market vertical.
Here are the channels I would use to generate leads for their business.
1. Google AdWords Paid Search
For a lot of enterprise SaaS and software/service hybrid companies Google AdWords paid search won’t work, however there is a very small segment of the market that are “Solution-aware” and are actively searching for the solution LeadChat offer.
Here are average monthly search volumes on Google in Australia.
As you can see, there is not a lot of search volume on Google for people searching for high buy intent keywords that relate to “outsourced live chat”.
However there is enough for a small campaign.
If I was LeadChat and I only had a small $2-3k/mo media budget, I would start by running a small AdWords paid search campaign to a landing page that offers a demo of their software/service using some of these keywords.
That would be a great start to bring in a small amount of high quality leads.
But due to limited search volume on AdWords, their monthly lead generation volume would eventually max out on this channel. So to really scale their lead generation I would need to find a more scalable channel.
PS - If your SaaS is in a well-established market targeting SMBs with something like “accounting software” or “plumbing software” you can use AdWords paid search to scale your lead generation.
2. Google Display Network
Google Display Network gives you access to 90% of worldwide Internet users, through more than 2 million publishers.
It is where the top 1% of media buyers play.
It’s a place where driving 100,000 clicks per day is no problem.
While FB ad budgets will often max out at $10k/day, GDN ad budgets will scale up to $100k/day.
To target LeadChat’s ideal client profile, I would identify 5 unique characteristics of their ideal client profile before ever running the ads:
- software they invest in
- celebrities they follow
- blogs they read
- competitors they use
- keywords they use
To target their enterprise persona, I would identify the enterprise software, enterprise blogs, enterprise competitors, etc.
I would then create a Custom Affinity Audience for each one (ie: 5 audiences Google will create that is themed around those 5 ideal client profile characteristics) to target ads to.
Here is how it would look once it is setup:
The big challenge with GDN ads is that someone seeing a display ad isn’t necessarily interested in your product just yet, so you need to offer content that you think will be valuable and helpful to your prospects to build trust.
To overcome this challenge I would use the TOFU-MOFU-BOFU model.
TOFU = Acquire market specific leads
MOFU = Filter leads for topic interest
BOFU = Qualify leads as prospects
Here is a simple overview of how this would look:
For LeadChat, keeping in mind that their ideal client is any business with 1,000+ website visitors, this is what I would use for their TOFU, MOFU and BOFU.
TOFU (Top-Of-The-Funnel): Top 50 Website Traffic Sources [Spreadsheet]
A good TOFU offer should be something simple and light with utility that everyone in your market would love to have. For LeadChat, that could be a spreadsheet of traffic sources. Veterans and newbies alike will love it.
The purpose of the TOFU is not to filter or qualify. It’s sole purpose is acquisition. It should convert as high as possible and attract as many people as possible. For LeadChat that would be anyone with a website.
MOFU (Middle-Of-The-Funnel): How Jim’s Franchisees Generate 5x More Website Leads With 24/7 Live Chat [Webinar]
The MOFU and BOFU do the filtering and qualifying.
Webinars are great MOFU offers. People who attend LeadChat’s webinar will not just be any business with a website. They will be businesses with websites wanting to use live chat to generate more leads.
From the TOFU email series LeadChat may need to sell some of them on 24/7 live chat. Businesses use all sorts of website lead generation tactics. LeadChat need to explain why 24/7 live chat is cheaper and the most efficient method to monetise website traffic into leads.
BOFU (Bottom-Of-The-Funnel): Online Demo + $99 Calibration [Demo]
From the webinar you DO NOT pitch your SaaS. They are not ready yet.
There is a sequence you must follow.
Instead, just deliver great content. For LeadChat, they really need to show why 24/7 live chat is the best or only option people should use.
Then at the end push them to a demo.
To qualify leads LeadChat could have a “unique monthly website visitors” field people need to fill out when requesting the demo (eg: <1k, 1k-10k, 10k-100k, 100k+), so they only speak with qualified leads.
Now you’ve taken people from MOFU to BOFU. These are leads who want to see how YOU do it.
From there LeadChat can go through the infallible process they use to convert website visitors into leads with live chat and ask if people would like to invest in a $99 Calibration (ie: a 2 week trial period where LiveChat agent managers go on their website, measure the results and provide a tailored solution if successful).
Conclusion
There are paid media channels where you can drive people straight to a demo or trial of your software (eg: Google AdWords paid search, YouTube paid search, Bing paid search, etc).
This always works best with intent-based paid media channels (ie: channels where people are searching for what you do).
For contextual-based paid media channels (eg: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Display Network) you need to take a more strategic approach to acquire, filter and qualify leads.
You can try sending people straight to your BOFU offer (eg: software demo) and you might get lucky 3/100. Or you might end up with a whole bunch of unqualified (small, low quality) leads and all your ad spend wasted.
If you’re like most SaaS companies, you will send all of your leads to your trial/demo page as fast as you can. Like a 13 year old boy with his first girl, rushing to try and get to 3rd base before he’s even gotten on 1st.
And what you will end up with is a bunch of leads that are not yet ready for your offer aka low conversions.
If you want your sales team speaking with highly qualified leads from your paid ads, try the TOFU-MOFU-BOFU model.
Hubspot attracts 60,000+ new leads per month using this lead generation model to sell their enterprise SaaS product.
If you can make it work, you too can have a SaaS customer acquisition system to acquire, filter and qualify leads at scale.
For LeadChat, this would mean:
- acquiring leads who want more website traffic for their website
- filtering leads who want 24/7 live chat to increase website leads
- qualifying leads who have 1,000+ unique website visitors
What You Should Do Now
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