SaaS Demand Generation 101: How to Build Reliable Pipeline
An effective SaaS demand generation pipeline creates high quality demand for your SaaS product among your target audience.
This might sound similar to the process of capturing and converting leads to pass to your sales team. It’s a useful comparison – the step by step processes for each map onto each other quite nicely – but ultimately demand generation and lead generation are separate things.
Whilst lead generation focuses exclusively on capturing ready-to-buy sales leads, demand generation aims to create an awareness of need that will result in sales in the long term.
Here’s why that’s such a powerful tool, and how you can build a SaaS demand generation pipeline that sets you up for long-term, sustainable growth.
Why is demand generation so important?
Did you know that, according to Gartner, 60% of software buyers eventually choose the brand they had in mind at the start of their search?
In other words, having your name out there is half the battle. If you build a strong brand which your target audience thinks of positively, you give yourself a huge headstart when it comes to generating strong, ready-to-buy leads for your sales team.
A great demand generation pipeline helps you create a predictable and scalable revenue stream that fills the sales pipeline with new opportunities.
The SaaS demand generation pipeline: 4 key steps
Demand generation is a long-term process – timelines may stretch out further than more direct sales campaigns. Because of this, it might be useful to think of it in four distinct phases:
1. Attraction
You make your potential customers aware of your product, mainly using online marketing strategies (SEO, social media, targeted content marketing) – though look for offline opportunities too, such as expos and conferences.
2. Nurture
The nurture stage is all about building your audience’s awareness of your brand after that initial discovery via targeted content that is tailored to their needs. Content should build trust in your solution and expand their knowledge of it, so that they are guided closer to a purchase decision.
3. Conversion
This is when you make your move. Having nurtured your prospects’ interest in your product via targeted content, you encourage them to take the leap and purchase your product. You might offer a free trial as a bottom-of-funnel lead nurture tool to transform prospects into paying customers.
4. Ongoing engagement
The demand generation pipeline doesn’t end once your prospects convert. Engage your existing customer base with new features, beta testing opportunities, and referral rewards to turn them into your biggest brand cheerleaders.
Building and optimizing each stage of the demand gen pipeline
Attraction
Attracting attention from potential customers requires visibility. But it’s not about just any visibility – to make an impact, you’ll need to communicate your unique value proposition effectively.
So, start by making sure you’re crystal clear on the customer needs your product is designed to address, and what your key points of differentiation are from your competitors. The clearer you can express this, the more compelling your top-level messaging will be.
Once you’re clear on the fundamental headlines of your product, you can build out online marketing campaigns that build awareness of your brand among your target audiences. Some of the most effective strategies include:
- SEO content marketing
- Email marketing
- Paid ads (search and social)
- Webinars and video content
To optimize your chances of attracting audience attention, diversify the channels you use. Not only does this increase visibility – it also safeguards your marketing strategy against sudden external changes.
For example, if the bulk of your brand awareness comes from organic SEO and a Google algorithm change causes your content to slip down the rankings, you need other sources of visibility in place to avoid taking a serious visibility hit.
And – because it’s increasingly easy to forget that a world exists outside of the internet – don’t limit yourself to online measures. Conferences, expos, and sponsorship opportunities all help build visibility and awareness outside of an online landscape saturated with SaaS solutions.
Nurture
The nurturing is all about encouraging potential leads through the marketing funnel to the point where they’re ready to engage with your product directly – either via a free trial or via a paid-for signup.
New to the concept of the marketing funnel? Think of it as a multi-stage process that guides customers towards your product by providing them with the most relevant content for their needs.
- Top of funnel (TOFU – solid acronym) content focuses on building awareness of the problem your product can solve.
- Middle of funnel (MOFU) content centers around educating audiences about your product and building interest.
- Bottom of funnel (BOFU) content encourages your prospects to take the leap and become customers.
This handy infographic from Shopify is a great way to visualize the marketing funnel:
(Source: Shopify)
Note that ‘content’ at each funnel stage doesn’t have to mean long-form, written content. Sure, blogs are great – but the best marketing funnel strategies use a range of content types to engage prospects at each stage. Podcasts, quizzes, pricing information, free trials, events and videos all count as ‘content’. Use a range of formats to keep your prospects engaged.
Conversion
After attracting interest for your product and encouraging your prospects through the marketing funnel, how do you take the leap and get them to convert into paying customers?
Tracking customer behaviour will give some key indicators that it’s time to make a move. Look for the following signs:
- A prospect has strong engagement with bottom of funnel content, such as pricing comparisons, webinars, and product demos
- A prospect signs up for your online events of their own accord, without any prompting from your side
- A prospect visits your website repeatedly, keeps downloading gated content, or interacts with the same product education content multiple times
If the signals are strong, it might be time to tempt them in with every SaaS business’s best friend, the free product trial.
Free trials: the do’s and don’ts
Free trial sign-ups are a promising sign – but they are not a done deal. You still need to convert free trial users to paid users if you want to see real revenue.
According to OpenView’s product benchmark research, just under 1 in 5 (17%) of free trial subscribers convert into paying customers. That decreases to 1 in 20 (5%) for freemium subscription models.
Good news: with a bit of effort, you can do much better. To optimize your free trial – paid conversion rate, do not:
- Assume your prospects will experience the best of your product on their own
- Stop engaging with your prospects once they have signed up for a free trial
- Keep things the way they are if things aren’t working for you. Full access for 14 days isn’t the only way to do things
Instead, make sure you:
- Continue to share webinars, instructional content, and video demos to show prospects the full extent of your product’s capabilities
- Check in for feedback – this is your chance to address any concerns and show how your product addresses their needs directly
- Constantly test and optimize your free trial’s parameters. Would a longer trial give you more time to demonstrate the value of your product? Would limited access to features focus attention on your product’s standout functionality?
Finally – make sure your customer support and onboarding processes are primed and ready to go. If you can’t resolve issues or onboard users smoothly during the free trial, you won’t gain the trust needed to fully convert them into paying customers.
Ongoing engagement
The demand generation pipeline doesn’t stop once you have successfully onboarded a prospect as a paying customer. This is because:
- As a SaaS business, you need to constantly demonstrate value to existing customers to reduce churn and grow your MRR
- Satisfied customers can be powerful demand generation tools. Positive online reviews, word-of-mouth referrals, and testimonials build strong brand visibility.
Keep your customers engaged with your product by investing in customer success, and fine-tuning your support options to offer the best level of service possible. But don’t wait for your customers to start recommending you of their own accord.
Only 19% of customers report always leaving a review of a business’s products or services. However, that figure rises to 69% when you prompt them. Reach out to your customers to ask them to share their thoughts in online reviews, quotes for your website, or in-depth case studies.
Go one step further by inviting your biggest cheerleaders to take part in beta tests for new features, increasing engagement by involving them in the development of your product. You could also set up a referral reward scheme to encourage word-of-mouth referrals across industry networks.
Land the right messages with Velocity’s SaaS marketing services
Hitting the right audiences with the right messaging is fundamental to starting your SaaS customer journey map on the right foot.
With years of experience and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of successful campaign spend behind us, our team at Velocity are hyper-focused on optimizing your paid search campaigns for quality leads, maximum conversions, and minimal acquisition costs.