How To Improve The Efficiency of Your B2B SaaS Marketing Funnel
Last updated: May 27th, 2024
If your B2B SaaS marketing funnel isn’t generating the ROI that you forecasted, most marketers approach the issue by making minor optimizations to various campaigns.
While auditing each campaign and running A/B tests can improve your marketing strategy’s efficiency by a small percentage, it’s rarely the best solution to significantly improve your ROI.
This is because the most common problems we find with most of our SaaS clients aren’t occurring on a campaign level.
The real problem is that they often have a disjointed marketing funnel and they’re losing prospects between each step of the buyer journey. Once you fix this problem and have a seamless marketing funnel that mirrors the buyer journey and accurately addresses the right pain points at the right moments, you’ll have more prospects reach each step in your funnel and any optimizations you make at a campaign level will have a much bigger impact.
In a previous article, we discussed how to create a marketing funnel forecast, but if your marketing program isn’t performing as well as you forecasted, this post will help you fix your funnel so that it moves prospects through the buyer journey more efficiently, which will ultimately allow you to hit your projected numbers.
Reach out to us for a Free Marketing Plan today, and we can diagnose and help you improve the end-to-end performance of your marketing funnel.
The Essential Prerequisite For An Effective B2B SaaS Marketing Funnel
Before you can begin auditing your marketing funnel, you have to have a detailed understanding of who your audience is, their pain points, and how your product solves them.
This is particularly challenging for enterprise SaaS companies, where the purchase decision is made by a buying committee rather than a single individual.
Therefore, you need to have a detailed understanding of the title, demographic, and specific pain points of each person on the buying committee, as each of them have different agendas and are likely interested in the product for slightly different reasons.
The level of specificity in which you understand each person’s pain points also has a significant impact on your overall campaign performance. In today’s competitive marketing landscape, your brand will stand out if your messaging uses the exact phrasing prospects use to articulate their pain points.
Therefore, the first thing we do before making any changes to a marketing funnel is building out a detailed buyer persona.
To build a buyer persona, we talk to your current customers to understand who was part of the buying committee, what pain points they were trying to solve, the role they played in the purchase process (influencer, check signer, etc.) and how the product has benefitted them.
With this information, we can confidently optimize the messaging and content at each step of the funnel as guesswork can lead to vague and irrelevant content that bottlenecks conversions.
During this research process, we also learn how prospects navigated the buyer process, the objections they had at each step of the process, and the channels they used to ultimately arrive at the purchase decision.
This is critical because buyers don’t conform to the marketing funnel you create. They will experience the journey as they see fit.
Therefore, the first principle of building a B2B SaaS marketing funnel is understanding how they experience the customer journey so that you can build a funnel that aligns with their needs.
Only after doing detailed customer research and mapping out the buyer funnel do we begin to audit and optimize the funnel.
How To Optimize Your Marketing Funnel (Step By Step)
Once you know exactly who you’re targeting and their pain points, the optimizations you make to your funnel will be much more effective.
Then, we look at each stage a prospect must reach as they travel through the buyer journey and optimize the funnel to increase conversions at each step.
As a result, we can help more prospects turn into SQLs in less time.
Step 1: Converting Impressions To Website Visitors
The two main opportunities to earn more impressions and generate more website visitors are ads and content.
Ads
When we audit client ad accounts, the biggest opportunities usually lie in improving the ad targeting and copy.
Therefore, we reference the buyer personas we created in the first step of the client engagement and then use that information to ensure the ad copy discusses the right customer pain points and that the targeting gets the ads in front of the right people.
We also analyze the buyer journey to ensure we’re showing the right ads to each stakeholder at the right time.
Additional Resources:
- How To Improve Your SaaS LinkedIn Ad Performance
- How to Scale Your Google Ads Performance
- The B2B SaaS Google Ads Search Campaigns Blueprint
Content
Content marketing and SEO are also key channels we leverage throughout the buyer journey to build touchpoints with the customer and provide value.
If you aren’t earning as many impressions as you want from your content and SEO efforts, it’s usually because your content isn’t ranking for the right keywords. To solve this, we leverage link building to boost the page’s authority and help it earn more organic traffic.
However, our link building strategy is unique as we don’t build links simply for the sake of building links. Instead, we identify pages that the target audience might already be visiting so that we also earn relevant organic search traffic.
For example, if you have a cybersecurity software we’ll reach out to non-competitive websites currently ranking for a keyword like “best cybersecurity software” and ask to be included on their list.
As a result, you not only get a link from a high quality page, which boosts your SEO, but you’ll also earn qualified organic traffic to your website (people actively searching for a solution you offer).
Another overlooked opportunity to increase website visitors from your content marketing efforts is A/B testing your title tag and meta description. The title tag and meta description are the only elements people have to decide which result to click on in the SERPs, so we look at blog posts ranking somewhere on the first page and test different title tags and meta descriptions to increase clicks.
Additional Resources
- B2B SaaS Content Marketing Strategy: How to Map Your Content to Each Phase of the Funnel
- Content Refresh: The Powerful Yet Simple Solution for Improving Your Search Traffic
- The Buyer Awareness Matrix: A Content Strategy Tool for B2B SaaS
Step 2: Converting Website Visitors To Leads
Many marketing agencies measure results based on traffic, yet getting a visitor to your website is just the beginning of the funnel.
Once they’re on your website, you need to turn them into a lead.
If your website visitors aren’t converting into leads, it may be because you aren’t attracting the right audience.
Again, we’ll reassess the buyer persona and then see if your top of funnel strategies are attracting the right people. Specifically, we’ll look at your content marketing efforts and make sure you’re targeting keywords that your ideal audience would search.
For example, if you sell fundraising software for large non-profit organizations, a keyword like “how to run a bake sale” might drive a lot of traffic to your website, but it wouldn’t be the right traffic and therefore won’t convert into leads.
People searching that term are likely DIY fundraisers, like moms raising money for a field trip, but it won’t attract your target audience, who are professional fundraisers targeting multi-million dollar donations from wealthy individuals.
Therefore, we analyze the relevancy of the keywords you’re targeting.
We also look at the content quality itself. If readers don’t find the content helpful and it doesn’t effectively solve their pain points, they won’t continue down the buyer journey. Instead, they will return to the search results and look for a different, more helpful blog post on the subject.
Once we know that the content is attracting the right audience, the next opportunity to increase website traffic to lead conversions is on-page conversion rate optimization.
We documented our SaaS blog design in a separate resource, but a few of the key things you can do to boost your conversion rate include:
- Optimizing the header menu with a clear call to action
- Include the lead magnet CTA in the sidebar
- Internally link to product use case pages within the content
- Including an email opt-in offer contextually
- Analyze the buyer journey, assess the appropriate next step, and then include a CTA for that step in the conclusion.
- In the footer, include a high intent CTA (a trial/demo signup), a mid-funnel CTA (a resource opt-in), and a top of funnel CTA with the least intent required (a social share).
In addition to optimizing the blog design for conversions, we also optimize the website design to increase conversions.
We have another resource on SaaS website best practices to increase conversions, but here are a few of the main things we consider when optimizing a website to increase conversions:
- Crafting a headline that clearly communicates what the product does, the main pain point it solves, and how it’s different from competitors.
- Include testimonials and social proof that highlight the benefits of the product.
- Explaining the value of the product with “pros without cons” statements.
However, the biggest mistake we find most SaaS companies make is that the only CTA they offer is to schedule a demo.
However, if a website visitor is interacting with your brand for the first time, they probably aren’t ready to make a purchase. Instead, they’re likely still researching other products and solutions. Therefore, rather than scheduling a demo, the prospect is more likely to simply leave your website altogether.
So one of the biggest opportunities to increase your website conversion rate is referring back to the customer journey you mapped out at the beginning of the process and then providing a lead magnet that answers the prospects questions at that stage in their buyer journey.
Step 3: Converting Leads To MQLs
Once a website visitor becomes a lead, it’s unlikely they’ll immediately get on a demo for an enterprise SaaS product as the buyer journey for these products is often over a year long.
Instead, they likely continue to educate themselves on the problem before raising their hand to become a MQL. To help leads turn into MQLs we primarily use email nurture sequences and other content automations.
Another opportunity to improve the efficiency of your marketing funnel at this stage is to improve your qualification criteria.
And, to also look at the data to identify what’s working. For example, if there’s a particular topic that consistently earns more demo signups than others, we’ll create more lead magnets around that topic or pain point.
Step 4: Converting MQLs To Opportunities
Many marketing agencies consider their job done when an MQL schedules a demo, yet because we measure our marketing performance based on closed won revenue, we rely heavily on the sales team to actually close the deal.
So instead of just dropping the lead in the sales team’s pipeline without any context, we specify where the lead came from, what pain points they’re interested in based on their engagement with various content pieces and lead magnets, and who the lead actually is.
This data makes it easier for the sales team to tailor the demo to show off how the product solves the specific pain points that prospect feels.
Otherwise, the sales team has to figure out prospect pain point information at the beginning of the demo, which wastes the prospect’s time. Additionally, the salesperson will have to tailor the demo to their specific pain points on the fly, which can cause the demo to be less polished and persuasive.
Step 5: Increasing Win Rates
Once the prospect is on the demo, improving the win rate is mostly out of our hands as the marketers. Nevertheless, because we measure our results based on revenue and can justify marketing spend based on the revenue we drive, we still rely heavily on our clients to have their demos to turn into trials and trials turn into customers with a high LTV.
Even after converting a demo into trial, we still need that trial to turn into a customer.
Perhaps the biggest reason why people lose conversions at this stage is because the product is too complicated and users don’t immediately receive the value they were anticipating because they can’t figure out how to set it up.
For example, you might allow new users to create an account and then they ultimately land on an empty dashboard with little context on how to use the product.
Even if you offer setup guides, most users don’t want to have to find the right guide and then read through several thousand words to figure out how to work the product. Alternatively, some companies use email drips that show users how to use the product over a period of several days. However, users want to receive value immediately and will probably simply quit using the product if they can’t immediately figure out how to use it.
Instead, have a step by step onboarding process that walks the new user through a seamless setup process inside the product so that they can land on a personalized dashboard populated with their information in seconds and instantly receive value from the product.
If you’re not sure if your onboarding is effective, you can use a tool like Mixpanel, Heap, or Amplitude to track your activation rate and understand where users are dropping off.
Start Improving Your Marketing Funnel Today
Above we outlined the blueprint we use to improve marketing funnel efficiency, though you’ll notice that there’s a lot of nuance to the process.
For example, there’s a lot of nuance to website copy, and it takes years to truly master the skill of copywriting. If you want to maximize your marketing funnel’s efficiency, it’s important to have experts in each individual area of marketing analyzing each step of your funnel.
Powered By Search exists to solve this problem. We have built a team of SaaS marketers who are specialists in various steps within the marketing funnel. When clients partner with us, they instantly have access to a team of world class experts, allowing them to maximize efficiency at each step of the marketing funnel.
If you want to quickly identify the biggest opportunities in your marketing funnel and map out a plan to optimize them, schedule a chat with our team today. We’ll analyze your current strategy and give you a Free Marketing Plan to maximize your marketing funnel’s efficiency.
What you should do now
Whenever you’re ready…here are 4 ways we can help you grow your B2B software or technology business:
- Claim your Free Marketing Plan. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best demo and trial acquisition platform, claim your FREE Marketing Plan. One of our growth experts will understand your current demand generation situation, and then suggest practical digital marketing strategies to hit your pipeline targets with certainty and predictability.
- If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.
- If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.
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