Learn B2B SaaS Marketing

8 High-Impact B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies for 2024

by 

Lauren O'Bryan

Last updated: October 11th, 2024

Are you frustrated with ineffective lead generation strategies that only lead to wasted spending? There’s no doubt that there are challenges surrounding lead generation, especially with changing buyer behaviors, technological advancements, and increased competition influencing the market. However, this also presents opportunities for marketers to tap into to capture high-quality leads and drive sustainable growth.

In this article, we’ll share 8 high-impact strategies that’ll help you improve your B2B SaaS lead generation, all tailored for 2024’s dynamic environment and beyond. But before we dive into the specific strategies, let’s revisit the core principles of B2B SaaS lead generation to ensure you build on a solid foundation.

Understanding B2B SaaS Lead Generation

Lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting qualified leads, that is, those with a high likelihood of converting. Effective lead generation requires a deep understanding of your buyer personas and target audience. This information can then be injected into effective lead nurturing that walks the prospect through the sales funnel, ultimately to the point of conversion.

Understanding lead generation is intrinsically linked to understanding the sales funnel because the two are closely interconnected.

Lead Types and the Sales Funnel

We can categorize leads into three main types:

• Cold leads: These are potential customers who have had no prior interaction with your product.
• Warm leads: These leads have shown some level of interest or engagement with your product. Engagement can be established by behaviors such as visiting your website, downloading content, or following you on social media. These leads can also be defined as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).
• Hot leads: These are highly interested prospects who have demonstrated a strong intent to purchase. They may have engaged directly with your sales team or requested a demo. These leads are classified as Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).

How are these leads connected to the sales funnel?

• Cold leads sit at the top of the funnel. Engaging and educating cold leads to move them further down the sales funnel requires substantial effort.
• Warm leads sit in the middle of the sales funnel and although they are already familiar with your brand, they still need nurturing.
• Hot leads are ready for a sales pitch and only one step away from making a buying decision, as they have reached the bottom of the sales funnel.

Understanding how your leads are interconnected with the sales funnel is important because it helps you create targeted content and personalized outreach strategies that resonate with leads at each stage of their journey.

The Importance of Lead Generation for B2B SaaS

Lead generation is crucial for B2B SaaS because it drives a steady stream of new customers. SaaS businesses typically rely on subscription-based payment models, which means attracting quality leads ensures that the flow of new customers outpaces any subscription cancellations.

Effective lead generation helps target the right audience, improves conversion rates, and shortens the sales cycle, which also leads to a reduction in CAC. Additionally, it provides valuable data and insights that can help refine marketing strategies and product offerings. This ensures that the SaaS company can meet the evolving needs of its market and maintain a competitive edge.

Now that we’ve got that covered, here are our recommended B2B SaaS lead generation strategies.

Effective Strategies for B2B SaaS Lead Generation

The strategies you choose to employ to improve lead generation will depend on your business type, market, and individual needs. However, these 8 strategies, used in conjunction or individually, will put your business on the right path to boost lead quantity and quality.

Enhance SEO and Content Marketing Efforts

One of the best and most cost-effective strategies for improving lead generation is through the use of SEO and content marketing. The principles for effective content marketing begin with understanding your customers’ pain points.

• Select keywords based on user intent, not search volume – long-tail keywords are very effective.
• Optimize on-page SEO by crafting clear title tags, meta descriptions, and including alt text with images.
• Promote the benefits of your product, not the specific features.
• Develop quality content that answers your customers’ questions.
• Frequently refresh content and remove what is redundant.
• Improve technical SEO aspects like page loading speed and ensure all pages are mobile-friendly.
• Acquire strong backlinks to your pages using only white hat techniques.

In addition, the topics and type of content should be aligned with your sales funnel. Prioritize the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) because that’s where you’ll get a better ROI for your content marketing efforts. Then, develop content for the middle and top of the funnel (MOFU).

The types of content that work best for the bottom of the funnel include comparison pages and case studies. This content feeds the need for additional information that helps the lead make a purchasing decision.

For warm leads in the middle of the funnel, the best type of content to produce includes interactive tools and product tour pages. This is because it gives them a taste of what your software can do for them, which can increase their interest and likelihood of converting.

Developing content for cold leads at the top of the funnel should revolve around expanded list posts and ultimate guides that introduce your product and educate users.

Use Email Outreach to Your Advantage

Email nurturing sequences are a fantastic way to systematically target segments of your audience and guide them through the sales funnel. Email outreach allows you to personalize content to specific customer segments, improving the results of email marketing campaigns.

You can automate email sequences based on user actions or behaviors. For example, an automated email offering support to a customer a day or two after they sign up for a free trial can nesure they realize the benefits of the product.

We recommend following our 14-21 day lead to MQL email sequence. This sequence involves 6 types of emails being sent at various points after a customer downloads a lead magnet.

• The first email delivers the asset and thanks the customer for their interest.
• The following 3 “hot button” emails are sent several days apart and address common problems the user may face.
• The next email is sent after 14 days to avoid appearing spammy and give the customer ample time to consider your product.
• The final email is a deciding point to either move the user further along the sales funnel or relegate them to a lower-priority engagement list.

We find this approach and volume of outreach emails effective at generating further interest in your product.

Make Better Use of Lead Magnets and CTAs

Lead magnets provide multiple benefits to B2B SaaS companies. They educate users and bring them closer to understanding how to solve their problem. But they also allow you to collect contact details from leads to start engaging with them. So, what goes into creating effective lead magnets?

Firstly, understand your audience so that you can create valuable lead magnets that they actually want. Things like calculators, cheatsheets, templates, checklists, or ebooks are all very effective. Ensure your lead magnets are visually appealing and professionally designed, as good design can enhance perceived value and increase engagement. Also, make them as easy as possible to access to avoid deterring potential leads. This can be done by minimizing the number of fields in your sign-up form and only requesting essential information.

The use of an attention-grabbing call-to-action is often underrated in its value. In one test, the inclusion of a CTA at the bottom of a long-form blog increased conversion rates by 304%. A clear and compelling CTA will be direct, action-oriented, and show value. Always test CTAs thoroughly before release to optimize performance.

Improve Customer Targeting

Often, where companies go wrong with lead generation is in their audience targeting. Correct audience targeting will improve CAC and make marketing efforts more efficient. When campaigns target high-value users who are most likely to convert, lead generation efforts see an improvement in both quality and quantity. These leads often commit to longer contract terms and provide better revenue value per customer.

To improve customer targeting:

• Reassess buyer personas and audience segments for accuracy
• Analyze metrics like customer churn rate and lifetime value (LTV)
• Identify friction points in the customer journey using churn rate data
• Highlight high-value customers using LTV analysis
• Evaluate and optimize marketing channels for customer-channel fit

Improving your customer-channel fit will help to attract high-quality leads who are more likely to convert.

Optimize PPC Campaigns

PPC campaigns are a faster alternative to SEO for generating leads, and many B2B SaaS use PPC in conjunction with their SEO content marketing. But, there are plenty of pitfalls to PPC and, all too often, companies are not getting the maximum value out of their PPC campaigns.

Optimizing PPC campaigns involves:

• Conducting competitor analysis to find gaps and opportunities in keywords or topics
• Fine-tuning keyword targeting
• Revising ad copy
• Redesigning landing pages
• Adjusting keyword bidding
• Implementing ad retargeting

To optimize your PPC campaigns, we recommend the following PPC tactics:

• Lead scoring and conversion tracking
• Increasing the use of thought leadership content
• Utilizing non-skippable video ads
• Analyzing campaign performance with a hypothesis log

Optimizing PPC campaigns requires effort, but it’s crucial to avoid wasting marketing spend on ineffective paid media.

Include an ABM Approach

An Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy can significantly improve lead generation for B2B SaaS companies by focusing on high-value target accounts. This approach connects both the sales and marketing teams to provide smoother, more concentrated communication with high-value leads. It’s become a very popular marketing tactic because, if done correctly, it leads to higher engagement, stronger relationships, and increased conversion rates.

It involves carefully segmenting the target audience to identify the high-value accounts and delivering personalized, highly relevant content and campaigns tailored to their needs and pain points.

When developing an ABM strategy, we’ve seen companies make a few common mistakes, so here’s how to avoid them.

• Underfunding: Commit to a budget that accounts for higher-value users. It’s acceptable to spend more on customers who offer greater return.
• Static account lists: Reassess and optimize your account lists periodically. Customer preferences change, and successful ABM requires adaptability.
• Outdated data: Ensure customer data is accurate and up-to-date. Incorrect data can doom your entire approach from the start.
• Lack of personalization: Tailor content and messaging to each account’s specific needs and challenges.

Offer Free Trials and Demos

Free trials and demos are highly effective for improving lead generation because they provide potential customers with a hands-on experience of the product. For bottom of the funnel prospects, this allows them to directly assess the product’s value and fit for their needs. This firsthand interaction can build trust and reduce perceived risk, making prospects more likely to convert into paying customers.

Additionally, free trials and demos offer valuable insights into user behavior and preferences, enabling more personalized follow-up and nurturing by the sales and marketing teams. This approach not only attracts qualified leads, but also accelerates the decision-making process by demonstrating the product’s benefits in a practical, engaging way.

Of course, if your lead has not yet reached the bottom of the funnel, you can also make use of templates that are cheap to create and considered risk-free. Templates can be a very effective tool for moving a lead through the sales funnel.

Use Additional Customer Engagement Solutions

There are plenty of new tools coming onto the market these days and AI chatbots are showing great promise as a customer engagement solution. AI-powered chatbots can intuitively engage with customers around the clock and even ask lead scoring questions to establish if a user qualifies as an MQL or SQL. This not only takes a load off your marketing and sales teams, but it’s also very efficient at walking users towards conversion.

The same technology can be used to trigger exit intent popups when a visitor is about to leave the site and present a targeted message from a chatbot or an offer. The specific offer could be a discount, free trial, or downloadable resource, but the intention is to capture their attention and encourage them to stay or provide their contact information. Exit intent popups are often very good at reducing bounce rates by re-engaging visitors. They also provide a final chance to help users find answers to their questions, ensuring they leave satisfied and likely to return.

How to Build a Budget and Extra Considerations to Take into Account

Certain factors impact how much you spend on lead generation efforts, like market competitiveness and your specific growth targets. That said, not allocating enough budget to any marketing strategy is a sure way to fail. So, how do you determine an adequate lead generation budget and what factors should you consider?

To start with, you need to understand the value of each customer. Spending more than the customer value wastes money, while spending too little likely leads to lackluster results.

1. Set a growth target: You need a quantifiable figure to work towards.
2. Establish your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): Calculate the amount of revenue you can expect from each customer.
3. Identify the number of new customers you need to reach the growth target: When you know the value of each customer, you can calculate how many customers you need to reach your growth target.
4. Calculate the number of leads you need: Not every lead converts to a customer, so determine how many leads you need to achieve the desired number of conversions. To do this, you need to understand your conversion rate. Typically, B2B SaaS companies can expect to convert between 2% to 5% of leads. Analyze your historical data to refine this estimate for your specific business.

From this point, it’s a process of working backward to establish the total budget amount that will enable you to acquire the number of leads and conversions you need. Ultimately, we like to use the 3:1 Golden Ratio as a budget guideline. This stipulates that your customer LTV should be three times your customer acquisition cost (CAC) to ensure profitability.

How to Allocate Budget to Different Marketing Channels

Crunching the numbers and deciding on an effective total marketing budget is one thing—the next is how to distribute that among various marketing channels. We recommend the 70-20-10 rule, which works for all B2B SaaS companies regardless of how many channels are used for marketing.

It works like this:

• 70% of the budget is allocated towards channels that are proven to be effective.
• 20% of the budget can be distributed to new tactics that are showing promise.
• 10% of the remaining budget can be invested in experimental tactics and channels.

This method allows experimentation with new, untested channels or tactics without risking big losses. This budget format is generally easier to promote to leadership because investing more heavily in tried and tested channels is considered safer. At the same time, it enables marketers to be agile and able to adapt strategies quickly to a rapidly changing market.

Essential Lead Generation Metrics and KPIs to Track

To optimize your lead generation efforts, it’s crucial to track and analyze the right performance indicators. Here are five key metrics that provide valuable insights into your strategy’s effectiveness:

Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate: This metric shows the percentage of leads that become paying customers. It helps you assess the quality of your leads and the effectiveness of your nurturing process. A higher rate indicates that you’re attracting the right prospects and successfully guiding them through the sales funnel.

Average Cost Per Lead (CPL): CPL measures the financial efficiency of your lead generation efforts. Calculate it by dividing your total marketing spend by the number of leads acquired. This metric helps you allocate your budget more effectively across different channels and campaigns.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): CLV estimates the total revenue a customer will generate throughout their relationship with your company. It’s crucial for understanding the long-term impact of your lead generation efforts and determining how much you can afford to spend on acquiring new customers.

Lead Response Time: This metric tracks how quickly your team follows up with new leads. Fast response times can significantly improve conversion rates, as it shows prospects that you value their interest and are ready to assist them promptly.

MQL to SQL Conversion Rate: This ratio measures how many Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) progress to become Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). It helps evaluate the alignment between your marketing and sales teams, as well as the overall quality of leads generated by your marketing efforts.

By consistently monitoring these KPIs, you can identify areas for improvement in your lead generation strategy and make data-driven decisions to enhance your results.

Common Lead Generation Mistakes

There are four lead generation mistakes that we see many B2B SaaS companies making.

1. Poor Quality Content that Doesn’t Address Customer Pain Points

Content that fails to resonate with your audience can significantly hinder lead generation efforts.

Poor quality content often lacks depth, relevance, or actionable insights, making it ineffective in attracting and engaging potential leads. Customers are looking for solutions to their specific problems and challenges, and if your content doesn’t address these pain points, it won’t capture their interest or demonstrate your understanding of their needs.

Indications that you have poor quality content include high bounce rates, low page authority score due to reduced credibility, and of course, low conversion rates. To improve content quality, focus on thorough research, incorporate data-driven insights, and prioritize solving specific customer problems.

2. Not Targeting Campaigns to Different Lead Segments

Because content creation is a highly time-consuming process, sometimes, companies will cut corners and replicate the exact content for each audience segment.

In reality, this will do more harm than good. A one-size-fits-all approach in lead generation campaigns is rarely effective. Different segments of your audience have distinct characteristics, needs, and behaviors, and failing to tailor your campaigns to these segments means you’re not addressing their specific requirements or interests.

Any lead growth you get will be lower than expected and generally very inefficient. Budget will ultimately be wasted by not targeting campaigns and content correctly. Therefore, implement persona-based marketing strategies and use dynamic content to personalize messaging for different segments.

3. An Overreliance on a Single Marketing Channel

Relying heavily on a single marketing channel limits your reach and exposes your lead generation strategy to higher risk. Changes in algorithms, market dynamics, or channel performance can suddenly impact your ability to generate leads. By putting all your eggs in one basket, you risk putting your lead generation efforts at risk.

Of your many audience segments, some marketing channels will be better than others. So, in order to get the attention of all your audience segments, you’ll have to use a combination of channels. By using a variety of marketing channels, you reduce your dependence on any single one and improve resilience to algorithm changes.

4. Not Analyzing and Adjusting Campaigns Periodically

Failing to regularly analyze and adjust your lead generation campaigns can lead to suboptimal performance. Market conditions, customer preferences, and competitive landscapes change, and without periodic reviews, your campaigns may become outdated or ineffective. Monitoring and evaluation are critical components of all marketing strategies.

Campaigns that haven’t been reviewed and updated are likely to show a slowdown in output and decreased performance. You may once have recorded an excellent ROI on a campaign that has since dropped, making the campaign no longer cost-effective. Therefore, implement a regular review schedule, use A/B testing to optimize campaigns, and stay informed about industry trends to maintain campaign effectiveness.

How We’ve Achieved Lead Generation Success for Our Clients

At our agency, we’ve helped numerous B2B SaaS companies overcome their lead generation challenges. Here are two examples that showcase our approach and the outcomes we achieved:

Example #1 TouchBistro

TouchBistro, a restaurant management software company, was experiencing high ad spending without proportionate results. They needed to gain more high-quality leads but were struggling to understand why their efforts weren’t producing better outcomes. Upon analysis, we discovered they were targeting the wrong audience throughout their funnel, which meant their messaging around pain points wasn’t resonating with potential customers.

What we did: We revamped their target audience strategy and messaging, focusing on highlighting the product’s key benefits. Additionally, we optimized their landing pages and CTAs to better align with the new targeting approach. These strategic adjustments resulted in a significant increase in ad engagement and a substantial boost in new qualified leads.

Example #2 Cybersecurity SaaS

Cybersecurity SaaS approached us with two interconnected problems: their organic traffic was lackluster, and their conversion rates were unsatisfactory. This combination was severely hampering their lead generation efforts and overall growth.

What we did: We improved their keyword targeting to match user intent, improved CTAs, updated and redesigned their website to streamline navigation and cut unnecessary pages, and improved content and topic quality to make sure it accurately matched target audience pain points. We generated an increase in leads within 3 months and reduced website bounce rate and technical SEO, which led to an increase in impressions.

Wrapping Up

In this article, we’ve explained the critical role of lead generation in driving business growth for B2B SaaS companies. We’ve highlighted effective lead generation strategies, including optimizing PPC campaigns, implementing Account-Based Marketing (ABM), leveraging free trials and demos, and enhancing content marketing efforts.

Before you go, why not take advantage of our SaaS scalability score self-assessment? This assessment considers how well your SaaS attracts, engages, and converts leads and will highlight your position against the competition. It’s an ideal starting point for implementing these high-impact lead generation strategies and boosting conversion rates.