In this digital generation, no one is exempt from the hype of content marketing - even B2B marketers have joined the trend. Gone are the days when B2B SaaS lead generation strategies focused on direct mailing, phone calls, and salespeople alone. Nowadays, B2B companies are using content marketing, social media, blogging, infographics, and ebooks to drive their lead generation efforts too.
B2B SaaS lead generation is evolving and becoming more web-centric. This is because people tend to search for product and service recommendations through online platforms like Google, Capterra, and G2. The competition is quite hard to deal with. As such, you must keep up with digital trends and updates to stay on top of your competition.
Still skeptical? Well, here’s how content marketing will help improve your B2B SaaS lead generation strategy.
Attract more potential customers
Content marketing helps people in all stages of the buyer’s journey, which includes the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. Content marketing helps prospects identify their needs before they may even realize they have a problem. This is what makes it different from traditional marketing, where the seller only caters to the buyer when they are going to buy.
Content marketing also guides prospects through every step of their buying journey. For instance, you can create content that provides education to your niche on a relevant topic, finds solutions related to their needs, compares products, and informs prospects why your product is the best choice.
Once you become part of every stage of the buyer’s journey, more people will come to you for information. You can grab this opportunity to step up your game.
Growth Channel customer decision journey framework
More website engagement
Content marketing is not only focused on blog posts or newsletters. It covers all types of information, from product materials, to website pages, to FAQs and return policies. Once you have all of this high-quality content, more customers will visit you as their go-to source for information.
However, when it comes to marketing your products, detailed and informative content is a must. Product description articles will help prospects compare products. In this way, they will be able to buy the best products for themselves or their company. Improving your product web pages is one of the best B2B SaaS lead generation techniques. By using keywords and following SEO best practices, you can increase your search engine rankings, driving more relevant organic traffic to your site and increasing brand awareness.
More frequent customers
Having a prospect buy your products should not stop you from creating content. Content marketing is all about driving more frequent customers through consistent communication.
Utilize content marketing to establish a strong relationship with your prospects and customers. You can target current customers by publishing informational tutorials, new ideas, product releases, and other relevant information about your products.
You will never run out of content. Think of all the ideas you can publish on your website to encourage customers to upgrade or make an additional purchase. It could be a social media post, new blog articles, podcasts, and other relevant information.
Analyze engagements
Besides brand awareness and online visibility, here’s another content marketing benefit - the metrics!
B2B marketers love analyzing their engagements because it helps them identify whether their marketing strategy is working or not. Analytics will help you determine if your campaign is effective and reveal what areas in your strategy should be improved.
There are a lot of B2B SaaS lead generation services that can help you with data analytics. You can have a marketing team, Google Analytics, Spring Metrics, Saas Metrics, and a lot more. For example, by connecting your Google Analytics account inside Growth Channel’s dashboard, you can take advantage of weekly smart notifications, which summarize all your key website metrics, successes, and areas for improvement.
The capabilities of metric services are incomparable with traditional marketing strategies. While you can have a general idea of your business engagements with traditional marketing, you can’t identify the specific audience or numbers with it. With content, you can track session duration, bounce rate, shares, likes, and conversions to see how your audience is engaging over time.
Higher credibility
To achieve high credibility, most B2B marketers follow the EAT guidelines in their content marketing. EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. The EAT guidelines will determine your success in your field. It could make or break your B2B lead generation strategy.
Once you assure your prospects that you are an expert in your field, you will drive authority to your content. Having a great level of authority means that your prospects are more likely to trust you. You can build authority by explaining your previous experience or education, including customer testimonials, success stories, references and links to any piece of data or research you include in your content.
Being credible and trustworthy is a must to achieve high-ranking results on the internet. Take note that the almighty Google will rank your content higher in search results once you follow the EAT guidelines.
Quality leads
Someone commenting on your content could mean that you have gained a quality lead... if they didn’t only visit your website, but also find your content informative and interesting.
Having leads on your website is a big deal. Hence, don’t frown when you are getting more leads than prospects. These leads mean that your hard work in creating quality content is paying off. More quality leads mean more potential customers.
Moreover, always remember that the foundation of content marketing is a healthy website. As such, you need to keep your website active to nurture your leads. Having a stock of content ready for posting will support the nurturing process. Hiring a bunch of content writers or finding guest bloggers will also help you in this journey.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Due to digital evolution, the sales and marketing department have a lot of things to adjust. This is not a bad thing though, as it has made the job of the sales and marketing team a lot easier. For instance, a sales team no longer needs to look for leads. Through content marketing, leads should come in without much effort from them.
The sales and marketing duties have evolved. Their main responsibility no longer focuses on brand awareness for your company. Nowadays, their job is focused on nurturing more leads by coming up with valuable content.
The effectiveness of your B2B SaaS lead generation depends on the content marketing strategy of both departments. If they are not aligned, you will be less likely to meet your business goals.
The sales team should know what content is pumping out and check that it is accurate. On the other hand, your marketing team should understand the type of leads they bring in through their content marketing and find ways to seamlessly pass off quality leads to sales representatives.
Bottom Line
If you haven’t tried content marketing before, it is normal to get overwhelmed. There’s no pressure here as content marketing requires careful thinking anyway. However, once you keep on providing valuable content, the sky is surely the limit.
The quality of your content marketing will either flounder or flourish your online visibility. Hence, you have to make sure you’re crafting informative, relevant, and quality content. In this way, you can encourage potential leads to move through the buyer’s journey and ultimately become your customer.
Lee Gladish is the former Co-Founder at Reply.io and the CEO at AirborneApp, which is the industry’s first sales engagement application purpose-built for Agencies. He has been in the software sales space for over 10 years. After working with countless (sales) agencies he understands the necessary tactics required to achieve massive results. He’s also helped many other businesses & entrepreneurs build a better sales engine.
