Being the person in charge of generating leads for a B2B SaaS business (Net-Results, a marketing automation platform along the lines of Pardot and Marketo), let me try and answer this question.
With varying success, here are some things that we’ve tried to generate leads:
- Paid ads. Even though it’s gotten pricey, Google Ads still has positive ROI for us (measure by a cost per lead and revenue per lead source). We’ve struggled with Facebook and LinkedIn ads, as in – we got leads, but they didn’t monetize. We’re continuing to try, however, as we know our ideal customers are on these platforms.
- Content marketing. The fact that I’m answering your question here on Quora is a part of our content marketing strategy. This Quora answer will be turned into a blog post, as well as an email for our subscriber list. We don’t have hard ROI numbers for these efforts, but we regularly get positive responses to our content. Our gut is telling us this is good for us.
- Cold LinkedIn outreach. We’d have a list of potential partners we’d want to work with. Reached out to appropriate people on LinkedIn after doing some homework. Dismal failure, no one really responded to these (we thought) pleasant messages.
- Cold emailing. Used BuiltWith to get ourselves a list of companies using Marketo currently. We then had a third-party research appropriate contacts in those companies. Sent out an email campaign. Got literally zero responses.
- Review websites. We leverage paid listings on sites like G2 Crowd and Capterra. They are generally worth the investment.
- “Mentions”. We try to show up in lists (“top 10 marketing automation tools”) and in other places where we know our buyers are: marketing blogs, influencer social media, etc. Not much of a tangible ROI here, but an ongoing strategy.
- Integrations. We try to integrate with other tools and get listed on their websites – that’s another way we get leads.
These are just some of the things we’ve tried at Net-Results. Take them as inspiration!
