SAAS lead generation

Background

Rankhammer was approached by a growing SaaS company. Their product was well received by those that had implemented it, but they needed to generate more interest in the product. Early efforts had been tried with paid search, facebook and linkedin with very inconsistent results. When we were engaged, our mission was to grow the marketing qualified leads without increasing the budget.

Engagement Goal

The goal of the client was to consistently develop leads. The sales process is a customized one, with an emphasis on adapting the product to the needs of the end consumer, so sales involvement is high and purchase cycles can be long. However, once adopted the product has very high retention. Lead volume is very important, and was not meeting their growth needs before we began.

We wanted to not only improve their current situation, but make sure that we were laying the groundwork for future growth in channels or budget.

Strategy

We began the engagement with an audit of the current marketing channels. There was a very strong emphasis on direct engagement and bottom of the funnel activity. For channels like search, this was consistent with the buyer journey and expectation. However for less involved channels like social media and youtube, the messaging was too aggressive. In addition we found some targeting issues which likely was leading to higher than expected costs in these channels. As with most audits, often the intent was right but some of the details needed modification.

Our approach was to separate the marketing into middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel groups. The middle of the funnel groups used a revised targeting derived by us, which allowed for a lower cost per engagement. The bottom of the funnel group was an expanded audience of those that engaged with middle of the funnel content. We also added the opportunity for direct form fills on the platforms for bottom of the funnel advertising.

Results

The first month after beginning the new strategy showed little difference. The middle of the funnel was filling, but these would not yet be considered true leads. However, after the pipeline began to fill, lead activity began to climb in the second and subsequent months. By the fourth month, lead activity was consistently growing and showed signs of even more opportunities for improvement. During the period of this study, we did not increase budget at all.

One of the major attributable factors for this success, in our opinion, was methodical work on audience targeting. The out of target audiences we were able to remove as we gained knowledge allowed us to waste less money. With a fixed budget, this removed waste was converted into value which demonstrated itself strongly in the final part of the case study.

The consistent growth has continued past the period of this study, and more channels and tactics have been added as well. The client is willing to experiment and this has opened up the pipeline further. Their budget has increased, and further lead growth has been at a similar cost per lead.