At Foothold I honed an approach to B2B SaaS digital marketing strategy that can be customized and replicated to deliver impressive results for almost any B2B SaaS company. Since joining Foothold in late 2017, I led 8x growth in Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), met pipeline coverage targets of over 4x on average (solely from inbound leads), and improved metrics for other key stages of the sales funnel using this strategy.
Are you looking to develop an effective demand generation strategy for your B2B SaaS business? This case study serves as a comprehensive playbook, adaptable to nearly any industry. Explore the details below to learn about the impact of this strategy and how you can apply it to accelerate growth in your own business.
Strategic Overview
Put simply, this approach is designed to attract ‘in-market buyers’ by targeting transactional keywords through a potent combination of SEO and Paid Acquisition. These high-intent visitors convert to MQLs at a high rate, and are likely to move through the funnel relatively quickly as they actually want to hear from your sales team. This is a fundamental shift from ‘lead generation’ to ‘demand generation’ and ‘demand capture’ that results in a greater revenue impact and a more efficient marketing and sales function.
This is complemented with automated lead nurturing through email marketing and other direct methods which builds awareness and interest in prospects and organizations that are not yet looking for the solution you offer. Content marketing, ABM (Account-Based Marketing), and traditional sales campaigns are used in conjunction with the core strategy to start building mind-share with ‘out-of-market buyers’.
”"Ronan led Foothold's 'increase leads' effort and saw dramatic results - with lead volume increasing by 44% y/y during the latter 9 months of the year. This was one of our critical goals and we could not have done it without Ronan."
Christina MartinezCMO, Foothold Technology
Keyword Research
Keyword research and selection is at the core of B2B SaaS digital marketing. Starting with a thorough understanding of the business strategy is crucial as it will direct your keyword research. Ultimately you will want your ‘keyword universe’ to be as comprehensive as possible, even keeping track of keyword ideas which do not become part of the strategy either due to low relevancy, high difficulty, or other factors. A tool like Ahrefs is crucial to find and effectively track your keywords, and analyze their progress over time. Monthly volume, difficulty, and semantic variants are some of the key elements you should be aware of when prioritizing keywords. Use these metrics to guide your content strategy.
For brainstorming, you can use a simple spreadsheet to define your core/seed keywords and build lists of keyword modifiers from there. These lists of core keywords and modifiers can be used in near endless combinations to find long-tail opportunities. The key aim of this process is to find strong search / product fit – where ‘product’ can be defined as the product/service you’re selling, or a content product you’re offering (the lead magnets that you offer at no cost to engage and educate your target audience).
You should also have a keen sense of the market landscape and carry out competitive analysis for each of these areas as well as more generally. For example, which organizations show up in the SERP for your chosen keywords? What is your Search Impression Share on Google Ads? How many reviews do your competitors have on Capterra?
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Technical SEO
Once you have a clear sense of the relevant keywords it’s time to review your website. Your site should be fast, mobile-friendly, and user-friendly. The site architecture, which defines your subfolders and page paths, should be structured to reflect your target keywords and content clusters. Leverage Search Console to ensure that Google can crawl your site, and check site auditing tools to reduce and remove as many errors and issues as you can while maintaining the function of your site.
Review the site using Page Speed Insights and Search Console to understand how it performs against Google’s Core Web Vitals. It is also important to make sure you are using a hosting provider that can meet your needs (never GoDaddy), that you have an active SSL cert on the site, and that you implement other security measures such as malware scanning.
At Foothold, I lead the transition from the legacy site to a brand new, SEO-centric website. The site was restructured around ‘pillar pages’ as the primary subfolders, and which corresponded to our primary transactional keywords and content clusters. Use the slider to see the before and after comparison.
Content Marketing
If you are building site content from scratch you can use your chosen keyword groups and hierarchies to inform what the content structure and hierarchy should be for your site. If you are optimizing an existing site start by mapping each page of the site to your chosen keyword groups, and refine your site structure to match. Your aim here is to have one single page that addresses a keyword group comprehensively. From there you should implement a content marketing strategy that attracts buyers across the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages of the buyer journey. Your keywords, and now content, should map to the customer journey, and this can form the basis of your lead nurturing and email/direct marketing program.
At Foothold, I worked with internal content marketers and outsourced content writers to scale up content production and take advantage of the identified keyword opportunities. If you have conducted comprehensive research it is not uncommon to have 1,000+ keyword opportunities – this requires a content production engine to match. Content can take many forms including standard blogs and topic pages, but also multi-media lead magnets such as video, checklists, infographics and even a podcast.
Link-Building
Finally, it is crucial that you spend time building the authority of your site. This may be through organic backlinks, but you can also use paid link-building and strategies like linking-building agencies, media syndication and PR, guest blogging, and HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to increase the visibility of your site.
The organic backlink opportunities at Foothold constituted vendor partners, industry associations, clients, and media partners. However for most companies this will only get you so far – working with a reputable link-building company will allow you to consistently build links over time and in different ways, which is incredibly important to maximize your success. Over 8 months, Foothold’s Domain Authority (a key ranking indicator) jumped from 38 to 53. Below you can see the growth in Referring Domains over that period, and the exact point at which we started working with external link-builders.
Paid Acquisition
SEM – Search Engine Marketing
Using your transactional keywords as the base, your aim is to create campaigns on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads that narrowly target searches that show buying intent. Depending on the industry the Cost Per Click can be high, but if you understand your buyer and target the right searches this should still provide a positive ROI.
Detailed reviews of the Keywords and Search Terms report is crucial to ensure your spend is focused on high-intent search terms. Following this, optimizing each keyword for Quality Score will help you to keep your Bids low while remaining competitive. When your campaigns start showing a positive ROI the competitive metrics (such as Search Impression Share) become all-important.
Software Review Sites
Publishing a profile for your software on third-party review sites such as Capterra, Software Advice, G2, Sourceforge, and others is a great way to round out your marketing efforts. Because these are third-party sites with verified reviews buyers are going to have a higher level of trust in what they read here.
While you can lose some control (it is extremely difficult to have a bad review removed for example), if you approach it correctly you can minimize the risk while achieving a good return from this spend. At Foothold I have tightly managed our review profile on Capterra to ensure a high rating and positive sentiment, while optimizing bids in their CPC program to generate leads with a reasonable CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads is notoriously poor at finding and converting ‘in-market’ buyers – after all most people on LinkedIn are looking to sell, hire, be hired, or kill some time at work. However LinkedIn has extensive data on each of its users which makes the targeting possibilities very exciting. As part of a top-of-funnel content marketing strategy, LinkedIn can be a great way to promote your content offers and lead magnets, and build your brand with your exact ICP and buyer persona.
Retargeting
With an effective sales strategy, retargeting in Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads can offer great air support to outreach efforts and help to reel in prospects who have slipped through the net. Retargeting is a method of advertizing that shows display ads to prospects who have previously shown interest in your product, or from a pre-defined list of accounts you wish to target. It can be effective at redirecting visitors who have bounced away from your conversion point back to your site, and it’s also a great complement to direct email, phone outreach, or as part of an ABM (Account-Based Marketing) campaign.
Content Marketing & Lead Nurturing
Email marketing and marketing automation are great tools to nurture ‘out-of-market’ leads into sales ready prospects. While SEO and paid acquisition are the ideal tactics for finding ‘in-market’ buyers, only a small amount of your TAM (Total Addressable Market) will be in-market at any given time. This is why it is important to build awareness and interest in parallel with attracting sales-ready buyers.
Data & CRM
The first step to effective lead nurturing is building a clean database of contacts and accounts in your target market. A good database will consist of fresh, accurate contact data and can be segmented based on relevant criteria such as buyer persona, location, service type, topics of interest. This can then be used for direct marketing efforts such as email, SMS, and direct mail. It is estimated that 22.5% of your contact data decays annually, so it is important to build processes that automatically removes long-term unengaged prospects. This has many benefits; for example it means your Open and Click Rates are based on your content performance (and not diluted by contacts who no longer exist), and improved deliverability rates, signalling good email marketing practices to your ESP and client servers.
Think about how you can build your dataset into a marketing asset that helps you communicate with your target market. Organic methods of list-building are always more effective, and will help ensure you don’t fall foul of data protection laws such as CPRA and GDPR. This in effect means building a content marketing engine that generates hundreds or thousands of fresh new contacts every month. Data enrichment tools like Apollo can also be used to quickly build targeted lists of contacts, though this can come with its own pitfalls, so be thoughtful about how you approach it.
Email Marketing Strategy
A winning email marketing strategy is a fine balance between highly personalized, targeted messaging, and operating automatically (as much as possible) at scale. This is going to vary widely depending on your own context and the resources you have to work with, but effective segmentation and top quality content will go a long way to becoming a preferred sender for your prospects. AI email personalization can give your nurturing program an edge in improving key metrics like Click and Conversion Rates.
The process of email marketing itself can also be used to clean your contact list and improve deliverability. Initially at Foothold the majority of our data was a mix of old conference and association member lists. Over a period of 8 months we increased the number of successfully delivered emails from 14.8k to 18.2k, in a dataset of 18.7k.
Lead Magnets & Lead Scoring
After putting in so much work to generate qualified traffic from your organic, paid, and email marketing channels, those visitors should be directed to web content where lead magnets (gated content offers) convert them into leads. Lead magnets work best when they are a useful content tool (e.g. checklist, template, comparison chart) that enables the visitor to action what they have learned on your educational web content. It is important to ‘productize’ the lead magnet for the prospect to increase its perceived value as something worth exchanging their contact info for.
Each lead magnet has an associated ‘lead score’ that varies depending on which stage of the buyer journey is mapped to the content. Your lead scoring model can be used to gauge which contacts are marketing-qualified / sales-ready. If 100 points is an MQL, and 0 points is completely unengaged, then points for lead magnets will fall somewhere in between, for example:
- Low intent – 25 points – e.g. a checklist
- Mid intent – 35 points – e.g. a webinar
- High intent – 60 points – e.g. an explainer video / video demo
You can also add small 5/10 point ‘bumps’ based on demographic or firmographic data that matches your buyer persona and ICP. This helps to make sure the most suitable leads are surfaced for the sales team.
Marketing Automation
You can then use visitors’ activity to enrol them in automated dynamic workflows that are more relevant to their interests and challenges, and that start to guide them to your solution. Good data can also be used in techniques such as automatically pre-populating forms and progressive profiling. A good marketing automation tool such as HubSpot is crucial to the success of these efforts.
At Foothold, our workflows were divided into 3 categories – content, internal processes, and audits. Here is a sample of the type of actions we have automated and I have included a snapshot below of how these algorithms look in practice.
Content Workflows
- New MQLs – Sending auto-response emails to contacts when they request contact from the sales team.
- Lead Magnet Conversions – Enrolling contacts into email series based off their content interactions on the website.
- Closed Lost Revival – Dripping content to contacts who have gone cold based on their Closed Lost Reason in order to get them re-engaged.
- Campaign-specific – Designing workflows that trigger different content depending on a contacts activity, and related to a specific marketing campaign.
Internal Process Workflows
- New MQL Notifications – Automatically notifying the relevant sales rep as soon as a contact becomes ‘sales-ready’.
- Sales Funnel Automation – Moving accounts through our funnel automatically based on their activity, and then ‘recycling’ them back to marketing content when they fall out of the sales funnel as ‘closed lost’.
- Data Population – Completing data points on the Contact and Account records to improve data fidelity in the CRM. E.g. using the IP address to auto-fill location, or using the UTM parameters in the URL to auto-fill tracking data and populate reports.
Audit Workflows
- Audits – Basic workflows to act as a check and balance that the more complicated workflows are working as expected.
Account Based Experiences & Sales Campaigns
Account Based Experiences (ABX) have become a cornerstone strategy for B2B SaaS companies, enabling them to tailor outreach for key accounts. By leveraging ABM tools like RollWorks, Terminus, and Clearbit, sales and marketing teams can identify high-value targets, understand their unique needs, and deliver relevant, timely content across multiple touchpoints. These tools facilitate seamless integration across revenue teams, ensuring that every interaction is aligned with the account’s journey, ultimately driving higher conversion rates and fostering long-term customer relationships.
Traditional outbound sales strategies such as direct selling and business development can also work in concert with, and use outputs of, an inbound strategy. For example, the list of MQLs that have since gone cold are accounts that are likely ripe for cold outreach. Or the membership of industry bodies can be re-targeted with display advertizing through Google Ads. The potential is limitless. Once you are clear on your value proposition and target accounts there is a lot of scope for creative demand generation strategies.
”"Ronan brings terrific ideas and thoughtful insights to the table that continue to move our digital footprint forward. Our digital results continue to trend in the right direction under his supervision, and his approach to planning helps to facilitate strategy for the whole team. Ronan does a great job of epitomizing our marketing mantra - nothing slips through the cracks!"
Nick ScharlattCo-Founder, Foothold Technology
Analysis & Reporting
Analysis and reporting for B2B SaaS has evolved beyond the traditional sales funnel to a ‘Bowtie’ funnel (fancy!) that models the entire revenue function of the organization. The left-hand side is the marketing and sales funnel we all know, but once a new sale is made there is the challenge of fully activating the client on the product and the opportunity of expanding use in the organization and maximizing revenue.
Build a real-time Bowtie dashboard in HubSpot, Salesforce, or your tool of choice, to get a full view of how your revenue teams are impacting the bottom line. If you don’t yet have the capability to build the full Bowtie, focus on the sales funnel first to make sure you have the system set up for accurate tracking.
Attribution Modelling
Attribution is a crucial piece of this entire puzzle – without it, you won’t be able to break down your spend and returns by your various marketing activities. To get started, break down your strategy into channels, campaigns, and content. Channels are the broad buckets that you can group activity by, and is largely how this article is structured – organic, paid search, email, social, outbound, paid social, referral, etc. You can augment this list for your needs (e.g. I typically combine paid social into paid, or break the paid channel into the actual source of the prospect – Google Ads, Microsoft Ads etc.).
Campaigns are distinct marketing initiatives you launch, with their own start/end dates, owners, OKRs, and reporting cadence. A campaign will likely make use of multiple channels. Finally content typically corresponds to the conversion points that turn unengaged visitors into engaged prospects. I take a wide view of this, so even a ‘Demo Request’ is a content point and is tracked in the same way. In this way you can see all of the conversion points a visitor has engaged with, the campaign that generated the conversion, and the channel through which they found you.
Equally as important is the model you use to assign attribution – first touch, last touch, U-shaped, time decay etc. Detailing each of these is beyond the scope of this article, but keep two things in mind when making this decision; does the model make sense for our business/sales cycle, and can set up reports to accurately report out on this model. More complex models can be very tricky to audit and fix.
Marketing Metrics
Shifting focus to channel-specific data, the starting point (however controversial) is Google Analytics 4. In combination with Looker Studio and Tag Manager this is a powerful trifecta to track almost everything you need from your channels and campaigns in one place.
When analyzing specific marketing work you will need to go deep on the relevant tools, whether that’s Search Console, Ahrefs, or Screaming Frog for SEO, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or LinkedIn Ads for Paid, HubSpot, MailChimp, or something else for email – you get the idea!
Experiments & Growth Hacking
Growth hacking can help to achieve results across the SaaS lifecycle – acquisition, activation, monetization, and retention. I suggest focusing your efforts on one of these areas to start and build the ‘growth hacking muscle’ in your organization slowly but surely.
Here, I’ll focus on aquisition. A/B testing your marketing (CRO and email marketing in particular) is crucial to maximizing the results from your efforts. This is a process I call Growth Experiments – a systematic process-driven approach to improving results by testing everything you create such as page layout, colors, copy, subject lines, timing, and much more. To manage this process set up a backlog of experiment ideas that details the hypothesis, KPI, expected results, owner, timeline, and that grades the experiment against the ICE framework (Impact, Confidence, Ease).
Keep testing your email subject lines until you consistently achieve a 18%+ Open Rate. Once you get there switch focus to the body content and aim for a Click Rate of 2%+ consistently. A good landing page conversion rate will vary depending on the context, but typically 5%+ is a good benchmark.
Pulling It All Together
This is just scratching the surface of the tasks involved in executing a comprehensive B2B SaaS digital marketing strategy. I could write a long article discussing keyword selection alone (and probably will!), but I hope this gives you enough of an outline to get started on implementing an effective demand generation strategy for your business. There is no simple answer to the question of how to grow your business. Please contact me if I can be helpful as you think about how growth marketing can help you achieve your goals.
