This is just one conversation we had with a client recently that reflects the messy reality of B2B buying. 

You may have plenty of leads engaging with your content and marketing assets right now, but if they get stuck in your marketing cycle and don’t move forward efficiently, you’re missing out on compounding revenue.

As a result, you’ll have limited resources to reinvest in customer acquisition and ultimately lose market share to your competitors. 

This means that your growth opportunity lies in increasing pipeline efficiency and moving more right fit prospects through the buyer journey in less time. 

In this post, we’ll discuss how chasing leads is costing you revenue and how to rebuild the buyer journey to increase pipeline efficiency. 

Why Chasing New Leads Isn’t Generating Pipeline

In the predictable revenue era of the 2010s, the solution to generating more pipeline was pure volume. 

B2B marketers created more content, sent more emails, and published more lead magnets to increase pipeline.

The rising noise meant the number of touchpoints per lead increased, though the number of closed won deals remained constant. 

This broke the formula of more touchpoints equals more pipeline.

So how do you fix this problem and predictably and efficiently generate pipeline?

Instead of striving to increase touchpoints, focus on improving speed and efficiency. 

In other words, move more leads to the next stage of the buyer journey as quickly and efficiently as possible, rather than simply increasing prospect touchpoints.

For example, instead of celebrating 1,000 webinar signups, focus on how many of those attendees moved to the next stage of the buyer journey and how much time it took them to take that step.

This mindset shift fundamentally increases efficiency because the cost of moving an existing lead to the next stage of the buyer journey is lower than the cost of acquiring a new lead. 

Additionally, it forces marketing to better align with sales and capture more qualified prospects rather than chasing cheaper prospects. 

By targeting more qualified prospects and removing bottlenecks to speed up the buyer journey, you’ll be able to scale more efficiently. 

To help our clients capture more pipeline more efficiently and predictably, we use the following 30/60/90 day playbook. 

The 30/60/90 Day Playbook to Improve Pipeline Predictability and Efficiency

There are three stages in the 30/60/90 day playbook to improve pipeline predictability and efficiency:

• Improve efficiency: Identify and remove bottlenecks to increase the number of leads flowing through the funnel.
• Strengthen your foundation: Realign on who your ICP and anti-ICP is and then readjust marketing efforts to better align with best fit prospects.  
• Scale: Instead of generically increasing content volume and CAC, tie branding efforts to revenue and increase CAC on the highest value prospects.

0-30 days: Generate Fast Wins By Identifying Inefficiencies and Unblocking Flows 

In the first thirty days, the goal is to identify where your prospects are getting stuck and unblock them.

Step 1: Measure Existing Buyer Journey Metrics

Start by defining two metrics:

• Stage to stage conversion percentages
• Average days between stages 

The goal is to increase the percentage of prospects who reach the next stage of the buyer journey and decrease the time spent between stages. 

For example, let’s say you’re currently getting 50 of your 1,000 webinar attendees to take the next step and book a demo in the seven days following the webinar.

In this case, you’re metrics are:

• 5%: Stage to stage conversion percentage
• 7 days: Average days between stages

To track these metrics, RevOps should set up stage-aging fields and SLA flags in your CRM. Then, create a dashboard that shows the movement (stage conversions, median days, and stall percentages) by segment and source. 

Step 2: Recover Near Customers

A core principle of building pipeline predictability and efficiency is retaining and nurturing existing leads rather than chasing new leads.

Tactically, here’s how we retain and convert a higher percentage of customers:

• Recapture demo no-shows: Send no-shows a follow-up email that provides a helpful recap of the demo, a link to reschedule the demo, and an objection-handling video. Here’s an excellent example of an ad designed to recapture no-shows: Source

• High-intent retargeting: Retarget leads that visited demo and pricing pages with conversion ads or Calendly-in-ad. Source

As you create lead reactivation campaigns, be sure to segment your retargeting campaigns and tailor the messaging to the last topic consumed, rather than using generic drips.

For example, if the prospect’s last touchpoint was a webinar on optimizing for LLM visibility, make sure that the retargeting messaging is related to LLM visibility rather than generic SEO tips.

Aim to increase no-show rebooks by 20% and convert at least 2% of the retargeted leads into meetings.

Step 3: Use Hyper Specific Offers and Messaging 

A key reason chasing lead volume over efficiency sets marketers up for failure is that it incentivizes broad, generic offers and messaging that generate a lot of engagement, but fail to attract the right attention. 

By attracting the wrong customers, you’ll see low conversion rates, regardless of how well you’ve optimized your retargeting. In fact, zero leads are better than low quality leads, because you’ll waste even more resources retargeting leads that won’t ever convert.

To ensure you only invest in the right-fit leads, eliminate vague offers and reframe webinars and lead magnets with outcome-based language. 

For example, instead of “How to get more leads on LinkedIn,” reframe it to something like “Do these 7 fixes to lift LinkedIn CVR this month.”   

Improving topic specificity will also allow you to keep lead forms short (which can lift conversion rates) while still ensuring prospects are high quality. 

Aim to improve landing page conversion rates by 20% on high-intent pages, and reduce webinar registration-to-MQL drop-off by 15%.

Step 4: Test and Refresh Ad Creative

If you aren’t constantly testing different ad creatives, you’re experiencing inefficiencies due to ad fatigue. 

Implement bi-weekly creative drops by testing new hooks, formats, and messaging angles. 

Keep a log of the highest and lowest performing creatives to double down on what works and avoid retesting messaging, creative, and formats that underperformed. 

Ideally, over 60% of your ad spend should be allocated to ads that are less than 30 days old, and build a creative backlog of over 20 assets to test.

Step 5: Align Executives on Key Metrics (CMO, CFO, and CRO) 

Before rolling out any changes, your entire executive team needs to align on what success looks like. 

Tactically, this means defining targets for win rates, payback guardrails by segment, and MCL (marketing cycle). 

While most teams track the sales cycle in detail, fewer people understand what the marketing cycle is or how to track it. 

Understanding the MCL is crucial for budget timing (e.g., how long it takes a prospect to mature into an opportunity from their first touchpoint) so that you can set realistic expectations with finance and sales. 

To calculate the MCL, define the first meaningful touchpoint. It is usually the first website visit, but it could also be ten ad impressions. Tools like Fibbler, Hockeystack, and Dreamdata can help you calculate impressions if you decide to use impression count as the first meaningful touchpoint.

You can then use historical data to measure your marketing cycle and set targets accordingly. 

For win rates, 25% to 30% is the most common benchmark, but it varies depending on the company’s maturity, budget, and GTM motion.

We also discussed payback periods at length in our article on determining CAC, but here are some general targets to aim for depending on funding:

• Bootstrapped: 6-9 months payback typical.
• PE-backed: ~9-16 months.
• VC-backed: ~12-24 months (market share land-grab tolerance)

This step should be more than just a verbal meeting, as verbal agreements are easily forgotten and impossible to track. 

Instead, create a signed document outlining these target metrics and a dashboard to match it. 

31-60 days: Rebuild Your Pipeline Foundation and Increase Momentum 

The old marketing playbook was increasing content output with the goal of increasing lead volume.

As we discussed earlier, increasing lead volume at the expense of lead quality decreases pipeline efficiency.

So during this step, rebuild your marketing foundation so that your messaging clearly defines who you do and do not help. Defining who you don’t help will significantly improve pipeline composition.

Clarifying messaging and positioning will also lay the foundation for branding investments, which will ultimately help you build pipeline consistency and improve performance marketing efficiency.

Step 1: Clarify Your ICP and Anti-ICP 

Create a list of your highest LTV customers and define:

1. Titles of decision makers involved in the buying cycle
2. Company size
3. Company industry
4. Specific pain points they came to solve

Next, analyze the leads that did not convert in the last 30 days (since improving the efficiency of your marketing cycle) as well as your worst customers (e.g., lowest LTV, longest sales cycle, and high maintenance).

Then, look for commonalities across those customers to make an anti-ICP list using the same metrics used to define your ICP.

Keep in mind that your ICP and anti-ICP lists shouldn’t just be purely demographic data. It should also include pain points that you solve significantly better than competitors, and pain points you do not solve for the anti-ICP list.  

Using this data, update your targeting, including account lists, titles, and exclusion lists. 

Embrace a narrow ICP. Ideally, over 70% of qualified pipeline should come from priority segments. 

Strive to improve the opportunity to closed won gap by 10% relative to past quarters. 

Step 2: Invest in Authority Assets to Build Brand

In an effort to hit quarterly targets, marketers often put all of their eggs in the performance marketing basket and neglect brand building. 

Over the next four to eight quarters, this tradeoff will catch up and you’ll find competitors who invested in brand building will experience higher compounding returns and lower CAC while yours remain flat.  

Allocate about 20-30% of your monthly budget to branding assets to build category presence. 

Ship one POV editorial and one proof asset (e.g., case study, teardown, benchmark, etc.) each week. 

Then, redistribute that content to your email list, across LinkedIn, and through partners. 

Target to increase branded search by 10-20%, direct traffic by 10%, and the “seen you everywhere” selection in your CRM notes by 10%.

Step 3: Channel Reallocation (CMO and RevOps)

Improving efficiency is as simple as doing less of what doesn’t work and more of what works.

Pull budget from any sources where the opportunity to win rate is less than 10% for two consecutive quarters and reallocate it to Google Ads for high purchase intent keywords.

Aim to capture 60-70% impression share for those critical keywords.  

Step 4: Improve Nurture Efficiency Through Topical Relevancy

Marketers often make the mistake of retargeting leads with generic nurture flows that aren’t congruent with the pain point the prospect engaged with. 

For example, if the prospect engaged with a post on improving content marketing efficiency, don’t retarget them with a resource on link building. Retarget them with a content efficiency checklist.  

Instead, create nurture sequences that are relevant to the topic of the ad or asset the prospect engaged with.

Step 5: Gives Sales The Resources Necessary to Close Leads Faster

Even if you send sales excellent leads, they won’t close if reps don’t have the right responses to encourage prospects to move forward.

To solve this problem, provide sales reps with a concise one-pager that addresses common objections, ROI calculators, and competitor comparison sheets.

Remember that everyone is on the same team, so if sales can’t close the leads, it’s your problem too.  

61–90 days: Scale What Works 

After building an efficient system, scale it by increasing opportunities in the pipeline, shortening the sales cycles, and establishing a repeatable cadence.  

Step 1: Build a Coverage Engine (CRO + CMO + RevOps)

Once you’ve built an effective system, ensure it continues to move forward effectively. 

Specifically, establish weekly checkpoints by prospect segment and sales rep to monitor:

1. Lead volume: There is a sufficient number of qualified opportunities.
2. Opportunity velocity: Deals are moving forward at the established acceptable cadence.
3. Deal size: Identify opportunities to expand the deal size. 

You should maintain a 3-4x pipeline coverage for the next quarter’s bookings based on your win rates and average deal size.  

Step 2: Invest Heavily in The Highest Value Prospects

Your highest value prospects may be worth 2x, 3x, or more than your average customer and therefore warrant more attention and a higher CAC.

As we discussed in our resource related to the benefits of investing in higher CAC, it’s essential to first acquire high quality prospects and then improve targeting and messaging to optimize CAC. 

Reversing the order (acquiring cheap customers first) doesn’t work as you’ll fill your pipeline with junk SQLs, and ultimately see higher CAC due to lower win rates.

That said, increase ad spend strategically by launching named account programs and target individual decision makers with multi-threading sequences. 

This will help you increase enterprise pipeline which will result in more market share and higher compounding revenue.

Step 3: Offer Portfolio and Experimentation

Delivering a hyper-specific solution tailored to a prospect’s problem is one of the best ways to increase closed won deals.

Create a living offers map that ties a specific problem to an offer that then directs the prospect to a relevant asset and CTA.

Not all of these offers will work, so run 2-3 monthly experiments with clear hypotheses and success metrics to determine whether to scale or shut them down.

The goal is to find 1-2 scalable offers that beat your control by about 20%. 

Step 4: Connect Branding Efforts to Revenue

Marketers often hesitate to commit budget to branding efforts because revenue attribution is notoriously difficult. 

To track the efficacy of branding efforts, look at the closed-won and closed-lost reasons in your sales data.

Here are some examples of phrases that highlight branding as the key reason for a closed-won deal:

• “You seemed more credible”
• “You were the most well known”
• “You looked like the market leader”

Add up all of the revenue generated from closed-won deals with phrasing like this and then you’ll know exactly how much revenue you can attribute to brand.

You can also use this method to measure how much revenue you’ve lost due to a lack of brand presence. 

Here are some examples of notes that indicate that you lost a deal due to a lack of brand awareness:

• “We went with the category leader”
• “They were more established”
• “We heard of them before”

Add the deal values of all of the closed lost prospects that use that phrasing to understand the cost you’ve paid for a lack of brand presence.

To illustrate the value of brand investment to executives, you can then provide the following three metrics: 

• Percentage of qualified opps lost due to brand perception
• Percentage of wins where brand strength is cited
• Percentage of conversion rates for known versus unknown buyers

If you are consistently losing two out of three qualified deals due to lack of awareness or credibility, you can show executives that you have a brand problem rather than a performance problem, which will justify increasing brand awareness spend.

Step 5: Strengthen Governance Among The Executive Team

Once your team has established goals, don’t keep moving the goalposts, as doing so will slow progress and erode trust. 

Instead, lock in red, yellow, and green thresholds and then wait for the next quarterly review to make any definition changes.

Eliminating mid-quarter metric roulette allows the systems in place to generate compounding revenue.

Realistic Outcomes From This Pipeline Efficiency Playbook

After implementing this system to improve pipeline efficiency, here’s an overview of the average lift we typically generate for clients.

Your results may vary depending on your existing pipeline efficiency, so consider these metrics industry benchmarks.

1. Deal Movement: The slowest stages in your sales process speed up by about 20-30%, and about 5-10% more leads make it from “sales accepted” to real opportunities.
2. Pipeline Quality: Around 70% of opportunities come from priority segments and you cut about 1-2 of the lowest yielding sources. 
3. Brand Momentum: You see a 10-20% increase in direct search and branded queries. Additionally, most of your ad budget is allocated toward new creative from the last 30 days.
4. Financials: You have 3-4 times more pipeline coverage for next quarter’s goals, your payback period is within the established limits, and you’re measuring CAC at the opportunity level rather than just the CPL.

Get More Help Increasing Pipeline Efficiency and Predictability

This is the step by step playbook we use to help B2B SaaS companies build predictable pipeline efficiently. 

While the process itself is fairly straightforward, there are plenty of nuances to each step that will impact your results. 

For example, identifying the largest revenue leaks, creating messaging that resonates, and investing in branding efforts that attract industry attention are all tasks that require experience to execute with maximum efficiency. 

If you want a partner who has worked with dozens of SaaS companies to build efficient, predictable pipeline, reach out to us today. 

Related Resources

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• Top Demand Generation Tools to Boost Leads, Engagement, and Business Growth
• Top 6 B2B SaaS Demand Generation Agencies in 2025

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While you’re spending resources chasing cheaper prospects, your competitors are winning qualified, in-market prospects.

This is a problem because B2B companies have a finite pool of buyers, and only about 5% of them are in-market at any given time. Once those prospects choose a provider, it’s unlikely they’ll come back in-market for several years due to contracts and switching costs.

Therefore, limiting CAC shrinks the pool of in-market prospects you can target and costs you several years of compounding revenue, because those prospects won’t return to the market for several years. 

Essentially, chasing a lower CAC allows your competitors to eat your lunch.

Instead of asking “How can we cut CAC?” a better question is “How can we efficiently maximize CAC to capture market share and generate more compounding revenue?”

In this post, we’ll discuss how to determine a realistic CAC for each prospect so that you can remain competitive, capture more market share, and ultimately generate more compounding growth.    

Why a Low CAC Is a Red Flag 

Not only does cutting CAC stall growth, but it is fundamentally a fruitless quest. Even if you create an amazing ad that dramatically outperforms your competitors, they will eventually notice and copy you. 

As a result, your ads will become less efficient over time, and CAC will increase again.

This is why a low CAC is often a red flag.

Assuming you’re in a competitive market where CAC stabilizes over time, a low CAC is usually the result of one of the following scenarios. 

First, you might have come across a growth hack. We have a more detailed explanation on why growth hacking isn’t a sustainable strategy, but the bottom line is that as soon as all of your competitors learn the hack (and they will), it won’t work anymore. 

Andrew Chen’s Law of Shitty Clickthroughs also supports this theory, claiming that any marketing strategy declines in efficiency over a long enough time period. 

Secondly, if you do have a significantly lower CAC than your competitors, you’re probably acquiring low quality leads and therefore have a leaky bucket. 

A leaky bucket essentially means that you might have some leads coming in, but you’re probably experiencing some of the following issues:

1. Your opportunity to conversion rate is poor
2. The sales cycles are long and resource intensive
3. Churn is high and LTV is low

In the rare scenario where you’re truly in a market with a low CAC (i.e., the cost to acquire a customer is dramatically lower than its LTV and it has a short payback period), you’re leaving money on the table by not increasing CAC to capture as much market share as possible. 

The only other reason you might have a significantly lower CAC than your competitors is if you have invested in organic marketing and brand building, and optimized your buyer journey more effectively than your competitors. 

If you’ve followed the core principles of our Predictable Growth Methodology and optimized the buyer journey to seamlessly lead the prospect to the point of sale, you’ll convert a higher percentage of qualified leads in less time.

Yet rather than leveraging your organic presence and seamless buyer journey to keep CAC low, use it to your advantage to capture more market share.

The Playbook to Establish a Realistic CAC Target and Leverage it For Growth

Once the conversation shifts from reducing CAC to leveraging it for growth, establish realistic CAC targets for prospect cohorts based on historical data.

Otherwise, you may overspend on unqualified leads or continue underspending on the most valuable prospects. 

Here’s the step by step playbook we use to establish a realistic CAC target and leverage it for growth.

Step 1. Cohorize Prospects and Assign CAC Target Accordingly

Not all prospects are equally valuable and therefore don’t deserve the same CAC.

Even categorizing prospects by generic SMB, mid-market, and enterprise cohorts does not provide a detailed enough representation of the value of that prospect. 

Instead, create cohorts by:

• Company size (51-200, 201-500, 501-1000, 1001-5000, 5001-10000, 10000+ employees)
• Vertical and complexity 
• Motion (SLG vs. PLG assist).

Step 2. Establish Baseline CAC Using Data

Finance teams often pressure marketers to reduce CAC, but there’s rarely any discussion as to how the finance teams arrived at a specific CAC target. 

Finance rarely bases CAC targets on the ACV of a customer or their payback period, which can set unrealistic expectations. 

To establish realistic CAC expectations, get real data to answer these questions:

1. What is our ACV?
2. What is our payback period?
3. What is our average LTV?

For example, if you have a 4:1 payback expectation on your LTV, it implies that your CAC should be equal to one year of contract value if the average lifetime value is four years. 

However, this usually isn’t the case. Often, the CAC target is only, say, one tenth of the first year of CAC.

By underfunding CAC, you’re limiting your ability to grow.

An Example of How To Set CAC Targets

Let’s say your baseline ACV is $25,000 and the average LTV is three years. In this case, the total value of that customer is $75,000.

Let’s say we’re aiming for a 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio. 

In this case, you can spend up to $25,000 to acquire a customer.

However, if you go upmarket and your ACV is $50,000, your LTV becomes $150,000. In that case, you can spend up to $50,000 to acquire a customer.

Finance might counter that not all of the LTV is pure profit, so you can also show them a model with gross profit at about 80% to set a stricter cap. 

In that case, the CAC for the first scenario with a baseline LTV of $75,000 would be $20,000 and the second scenario where the LTV is $150,000 would be $120,000.

What Should My Payback Period Be?

This question is also important to answer with your finance department, because a realistic payback period depends on a company’s funding.

For bootstrapped startups, profit is the only fuel available for growth, so they’re forced to become profitable quickly, meaning they tend to have a shorter payback period. 

In contrast, PE-backed and VC-backed startups can afford a longer payback period and focus on capturing more market share, because they have external funding. 

Here are some general targets you can aim for depending on your company’s funding:

• Bootstrapped: 6-9 months payback typical.
• PE-backed: ~9-16 months.
• VC-backed: ~12-24 months (market share land-grab tolerance).

To keep your team aligned, everyone should know these simple equations:

• CAC ≈ (ACV × PaybackMonths) / 12.
• Payback (months) ≈ (CAC / ACV) × 12 (assumes annual upfront).

To put these equations in practice, let’s say you’re a bootstrapped business aiming for a 6 month payback period and your ACV is $150,000. In this scenario, your CAC would be $75,000. 

In contrast, if you are a VC backed company with the same ACV, but a target payback period of 24 months, your CAC would be $300,000.

You can also change the CAC target to see how it impacts your payback period. For example, if your target CAC is $50,000 and your ACV is $100,000, you can expect a payback period of 6 months. 

In general, we recommend staying above a 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio as going below that tends to lead to unprofitability in the long run. 

Step 3. Account For The Prospect’s Stage in The Buyer Journey 

The baseline CAC gives you real data based on the potential deal size, but it doesn’t account for the full cost or time delay to attract, nurture, and convert a lead. 

It might be more profitable to pay $2,000 for a qualified lead that is ready to convert immediately rather than $300 for a lead that might convert until six months later. 

This is because the time delay to close the prospect equates to lost revenue, and there are also hard costs associated with nurturing prospects in the form of the sales team’s time and remarketing materials.

Step 4. Commit to The Established CAC Targets For Each Cohort

Now that you’ve determined an appropriate CAC for each cohort, taking into consideration the deal value and their current stage in the buyer journey, commit to spending that CAC target to acquire those customers. 

By focusing on maximizing new revenue, you’ll capture more market share faster and, in turn, see faster compounding growth. 

Step 5. Set Weekly Leading Indicators

Once you’ve set new CAC targets for each cohort, make sure you’re capturing the right leads and aren’t just overspending on junk leads. 

Here are a few red flags to watch to ensure you’re acquiring high quality, in-market prospects rather than cheap, unqualified prospects:

• Rising cost-per-opportunity
• Sharp drop-offs between stages (Lead > SAL > Opportunity > Closed Won).
• Qualitative feedback from sales regarding “junk intent”

We monitor the metrics above by looking at cohort cost per opportunity trends by source and segment, as well as stage-to-stage conversion and velocity each week. 

For each cohort, publish and track:

• Lead to SAL rate
• SAL to SQL/Opp rate
• Opportunity to Closed Won rate
• Cost/Opportunity value
• Median days in stage and total cycle length

These metrics can also show you if you can increase CAC to grow more aggressively. 

If the ladder is smooth and less than the threshold sales cycles, you can justify increasing CAC as your funnel is clearly working (assuming churn for that segment stays above the threshold).

Step 6. Run Paid Experiments to Increase Deals From Top Cohorts

The goal of this article is to shift the narrative from cutting CAC to strategically increasing CAC to acquire better prospects and generate more compounding revenue. 

So how do you effectively increase CAC without wasting ad spend?

If your weekly leading indicators are on track, we increase CAC by running paid experiments for the top cohorts. 

The answer lies in vigilantly tracking leading indicators. 

If your weekly leading indicators, like SALs, opportunity creation rates, and conversion velocity, are on track, you’ve earned the right to increase CAC. 

However, instead of increasing CAC across the board, target only your top cohorts, as these accounts have the strongest ICP fit, highest LTV potential, and the fastest sales velocity. As a result, you’ll capture more market share which will ultimately lead to higher compounding revenue. 

Here’s how to tactically increase CAC among your top cohorts:

1. Identify your top cohorts: Filter by ICP fit, deal size, win rate, and velocity.
2. Run paid experiments against these cohorts: Think LinkedIn ABM campaigns, competitive conquesting, or layering in higher-intent signals.
3. Monitor payback rigorously: Instead of exclusively looking at CAC, calculate the payback period as well. How long does it take to break even on your acquisition costs? 
4. Adjust with precision: If the payback aligns with your LTV:CAC model, continue scaling. Otherwise, pull back. 

This approach reframes CAC not as a static cost to minimize. You’ll finally view it as an investment lever, one that, when pointed at the right cohorts, accelerates pipeline, revenue, and long-term growth.

Step 7. Close The Loop With Sales

The final step in the process is aligning with sales to ensure you’re sending them qualified leads that both teams agree are worth pursuing. 

This means building a feedback loop where marketing doesn’t just measure volume, but actively validates whether the pipeline being created fits the ideal customer profile (ICP) and is in the right buying stage.

Specifically, ask these questions every time leads are passed to sales:

1. Do these leads align with the assigned cohort?

Specifically, do the leads align with the industries, revenue ranges, and employee bands we’ve defined in our ICP? Are we excluding companies that look like “good fit” SaaS at first glance, but don’t actually buy (e.g., martech or B2C-heavy businesses)?

2. What stage in the buyer journey are these leads?

Did they come in via high-intent actions (demo request, pricing inquiry) or are they earlier-stage leads who need nurturing? Sending low-intent leads to sales erodes trust and wastes time.

3. Does sales agree with lead quality?

Are AEs or SDRs reporting back that these are “garbage demos,” or are they advancing through to opportunities? Marketing must be accountable for not just filling the funnel, but filling it with leads sales can close.

Answering these questions upfront prevents overspending on low-quality leads, reduces friction between sales and marketing. As a result, your budget is weighted toward accounts with the highest lifetime value potential.

Next Steps To Leverage CAC For Growth

You can reduce CAC by minimal percentages or spend competitively to acquire customers and focus on growing compounding revenue. 

We realize that committing to a higher CAC can be tricky, as you need to know your numbers to first get the finance team on board and then ensure you aren’t overspending on junk leads.

This is where working with a partner like Powered By Search can help. 

Unlike marketing agencies that simply create, run, and optimize marketing campaigns, we take a data driven approach to growth and can help you understand your numbers and determine competitive CAC targets to maximize profitable growth. 

Contact us today to learn how we can help you use CAC as a growth lever.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• 10 Proven SaaS Growth Strategy Methods to Boost Revenue and Improve Customer Acquisition
• Mastering Your SaaS GTM Strategy: Key Steps to Market Leadership and Long-Term Success
• Master SaaS Inbound Marketing: Proven Strategies for Customer Acquisition & Retention

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• Stop Blaming Product-Market Fit for Your SaaS Growth Problems
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As soon as one marketer discovers a hack that works, they share it, and everyone else starts doing it. After a few weeks, that hack no longer works. 

As a result, marketers are constantly jumping from one hack to the next.

It’s exhausting, unsustainable, and eventually causes your growth to flatline. 

However, hacks aren’t necessary for genuine growth. 

In fact, consistently executing fundamentals on a world class level will lead to profitable, compounding growth, whereas jumping from growth hack to growth hack won’t drive compounding growth. 

In this post, we’ll discuss why growth hacking isn’t an effective long term strategy, how to build a compounding growth strategy, and an actionable strategy to break free from the growth hacking mindset for good.

Why Growth Hacks Rarely Survive Two Quarters

You probably remember some of these growth hacks:

• 2019: Hyper‑targeted Facebook Look‑Alike audiences let early adopters collect demos for less than the price of lunch. Twelve months later, CPMs doubled and iOS privacy updates kneecapped conversion tracking.
• 2020: LinkedIn InMail automation promised 40 % acceptance rates. By the time everyone installed the Chrome plug‑ins, LinkedIn throttled connection limits and black‑listed offending domains.

• 2022: Cold‑outreach gurus mined 50,000 email addresses a month until GDPR fines and Google’s spam update torched sender reputations.

• 2024: The “one‑click” AI personalisation craze briefly lifted reply rates before prospects started screenshotting synthetic intros and roasting them on Twitter.

As a result, you’re always searching for the next hack. 

If you’re too late, the hack won’t work due to:

• Channel Saturation: CPMs and CPCs spike as everyone learns about the hack.
• Platform Policy Shifts: APIs become restricted, platforms ban automated scraping, or cookie tracking sunsets.  
• Buyer Sophistication: Prospects recognize automated outreach patterns and skepticism rises. 

This pattern creates an exhausting cycle of searching for loopholes and  “hacks,” which pulls you away from executing fundamentals.

As a result, you never build fundamental marketing systems and therefore never achieve compounding ROI. 

This uncertainty isn’t just exhausting. 

It also makes budgeting and forecasting virtually impossible, and your own success is at the mercy of the latest loopholes.

Predictable Growth Defined

One of the key reasons many SaaS companies never achieve predictable growth is that they lack a clear understanding of the fundamentals that drive predictable growth. 

In fact, their “marketing strategy” is a collection of campaigns across a variety of channels that they see their competitors using.

However, this is not an effective SaaS marketing strategy. 

We’ve explained that an effective SaaS marketing strategy is more about understanding who your customers are and then meeting them where they are to guide them through the buyer journey.

Over time, you’ll build a flywheel where each marketing campaign works with the others to connect the buyer journey. Compounding growth is the natural result because each campaign improves the efficiency of all other campaigns.

Here’s a more in-depth overview of our Predictable Growth Flywheel:

Our Predictable Growth Methodology is much more sustainable than relying on growth hacks, because it leverages proven, “boring” channels that deliver predictable results. 

The results may be slower than growth hacks in the beginning, but unlike growth hacks that decline over time, the Predictable Growth Methodology compounds over time as the channels begin working together to pave a predictable buyer journey. 

The core difference between growth hacking and Predictable Growth lies in the fundamentals of understanding the core value of your product and its differentiators, as well as your customers (where they exist, how they currently solve the problem, and how they research solutions).

This leads us to the next question: How do you build this flywheel?

Five Foundational Questions Your Board Will Actually Care About

The basis of any great marketing flywheel is a deep understanding of your product and your customers. 

SaaS marketers often think they know the answers to very simple questions about their product, its key differentiators, and their best customers.

Yet when we ask leadership these five questions, many companies have very different responses. 

Here are these five questions all of your leaders must align on:

1. What painful job do we solve better or cheaper than the status quo? The status quo could be other competitors, DIY spreadsheets, or an in-house full-time employee. Don’t just answer this question with guesses. Ask your customers (or have your sales team ask customers) what they’re doing before buying your product.

2. Where does our buyer already go for trusted information? This could be analysts, peer Slack communities, specific newsletters, or trade shows. This is important because it will help you understand where you need to appear to get in front of your ideal customer, which will shape your buyer journey.

3. Which event triggers urgency to buy now? Again, ask sales to give you a data driven answer to this question. A trigger event could be new funding, an upcoming audit, a renewal date for the competitor’s contract, or the arrival of a new VP. Campaign calendars should orbit these triggers, not arbitrary quarters.

4. What proof erases the two objections we hear most? Ask sales for the two most common objections. Then, ask sales which proof points (case studies, benchmark graphs, ROI calculators, or security certifications) negate these objections.

5. How can we monitor progress every week, rather than just celebrating or panicking quarterly? A living scorecard tracks leading indicators (traffic quality, demo‑to‑SQL conversion, activation rate) alongside lagging metrics (new ARR, CAC, churn). Weekly visibility means you iterate while stakes are low.
   

Once you have the answers to these five fundamental questions, your messaging will better resonate with prospects across all campaigns.

Answering these five questions will also help you understand how users experience the buyer journey, informing you of which channels are the right fit for your company and how to structure CTAs to lead them to the next natural stage of the buying journey. 

Building a Flywheel To Maximize LTV and Shorten Payback Period 

Marketers often focus on generating more leads and reducing CAC, but at some point, they reach a ceiling where they can’t profitably scale spend because their competition outbids them. 

As a result, growth stalls and the company can’t scale. In a desperate attempt to break through this barrier, many marketers turn to growth hacking. 

Instead, we focus on attracting the right customers and then maximize LTV and shorten the payback period.

Maximizing LTV and shortening the payback period allows you to outspend competitors, because:

1. A single customer is worth more to your company than your competitors (thanks to increasing LTV) and 
2. You have more cash on hand to invest in advertising (thanks to a shorter payback period).

Most people will agree that increasing LTV and shortening the payback period is ideal, but very few have a systematic process to achieve this.

There are several ways to adjust the offer, but the most effective way to increase LTV and shorten the payback period is by implementing the product-first GTM flywheel.

A product-first GTM flywheel helps users immediately understand the product’s value, making them long-time customers and brand evangelists. 

Here’s an overview of the process: 

1. Product delivers the promised outcome: This could be faster data syncs, clearer dashboards, whatever your core value is.

2. Wow Moment is when users receive that first instant value. For an analytics software, it might be the first automated insight. For payroll software, it might be processing the inaugural pay‑run in minutes.

3. Marketing amplifies that Wow moment by making it known to more people. First, capture the Wow moment using our testimonial flywheel. This is our systematic approach to collect testimonials in the most impactful moment and then save, organize, and distribute them appropriately. For example, we’ll use these testimonials in blog content, social content, and retargeting ads.

4. Sales leverages the Wow proof to qualify customer fit, instantly communicate the value of the product, and remove objections around the perceived likelihood of success.

5. Customer Success helps users experience more Wow moments post‑sale. For example, customer success could help them resolve other related issues and ensure they always have a seamless experience. This deepens trust, allowing customer success to earn more testimonials. We actually have an entire process for building testimonial flywheels.

6. Customer success collects proof assets, such as video clips, charts, and quotes. These assets feed back into marketing and sales. Nothing is wasted; everything compounds.

Amplifying The Product-First GTM Flywheel 

Once you’ve built a product-first GTM flywheel that works, marketing amplifies its reach. 

But what is “marketing” from a tactical perspective?

Unlike the growth hacks, we focus on proven SaaS marketing channels:

• SEO (including content marketing and link building)
• Paid ads (Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads)
• Email marketing

From an execution perspective, we focus on world class execution of high impact fundamentals. 

For example, if you read our playbook on SEO for SaaS, we focus on high impact items like:

1. Building a website architecture that allows users and search engines/LLMs to easily find and understand each page on your website.
2. Targeting (and refreshing content for) high purchase intent keywords while also following optimization best practices.
3. Building links from relevant, high traffic/authority websites to high purchase intent pages.

Many SaaS marketers fail with fundamentals because they don’t execute them at a high enough level, consistently, for a long enough period of time.

If you have tried these channels and they haven’t worked for you, read our guide to SaaS marketing strategies, as we discuss pitfalls that can cause performance to flatline permanently (or at least, until you fix the issue).

Three “Boring” Plays That Can Accelerate Your Flywheel’s Success

We understand that pressure from the board or other executive leaders means that time is a luxury.

This pressure makes growth hacks an attractive alternative to steady growth. Though as we discussed earlier, chasing fast results will catch up with you eventually.

The good news is that, while compounding success doesn’t happen overnight, there are a few things you can do to accelerate success.

Here are three boring plays that work today and will continue to work in the future that we recommend every SaaS company implements.

Strategic Nurture Paths (Email Marketing)

Email is the only marketing channel you own outright, and it still is highly effective for SaaS if you use it thoughtfully.

If you’ve tried email marketing and haven’t found it effective, you might be making one of these mistakes:

1. Sending generic nurture sequences to all people rather than segmenting based on pain point and/or ICP.
2. Failing to revive dead leads.
3. Failing to deliver genuine value in the emails.

When segmented thoughtfully and tied to real user pains, a nurture sequence acts like a silent SDR working nights and weekends. Nurtured prospects also tend to close at a higher ACV because education precedes the pricing slide.

If you need help crafting an effective nurture sequence, you can use our email nurture templates. 

We also have a more detailed guide on how we approach building an effective email marketing strategy.  

Testimonial Flywheel

Testimonials are a critical part of the product-first GTM flywheel, but very few people put much thought into the testimonial collection process.

In fact, most SaaS companies don’t have a customer testimonial collection process. 

However, if you’re a little more intentional and use a defined process, you can optimize both the quality and quantity of testimonials. 

Specifically, this is the customer testimonial flywheel we use:

1. Capture: Ask for testimonials the moment a customer experiences a win.
2. Organize: Tag all testimonials by ICP and pain point so that they’re easy to find for marketing materials and sales calls.
3. Inject: Identify friction points within the buyer journey and inject proof points accordingly. 
4. Expand: You can also use testimonials to upsell existing customers. 
5. Reactivate: Use your testimonials in retargeting ads to win back churned or dormant accounts.

Weekly Scorecard Meeting

Marketers often become attracted to shiny objects because they don’t have clarity on what needs to be executed. 

The Weekly Scorecard solves that by filling the team’s time with fundamentals execution. 

The Weekly Scorecard is a single thirty‑minute meeting every Monday, and we’ve seen it save departments six figures in misallocated spend. 

The rule is ruthless. You have just five leading indicators and three lagging indicators on one slide. 

If a metric turns yellow, an owner drafts a fix by Tuesday. We don’t immediately implement the fix because the drop could be impacted by other factors, such as seasonality.

Therefore, we’ll establish a deadline of when the metric must turn green again. If the metric isn’t reversed by that deadline, we’ll lock in an action plan.

While not all metrics will be reversed within the week, the discipline to address each metric on a weekly basis is important to ensure growth stays on track.

How to Build a Long Term Mindset (And Avoid Falling For The Latest Growth Hack)

The attraction of growth hacks is rooted in a desire for fast results. 

However, the most successful businesses take decades to build. 

So reframing your growth timeframes from days and weeks to months and quarters is the best way to ensure your team never falls back into the growth hack mindset.

This mindset shift starts by changing the questions you ask yourself. 

Here are the questions a “growth hacker” might ask versus a marketer with a long-term mindset:

Here are a few of the biggest methods to create and sell online. 

Get More Help Developing and Executing a Long-Term Marketing Strategy

Consistently executing the fundamentals at a high level is the most sustainable path to success, but there are plenty of nuances to executing the fundamentals at a world class level.

That’s where Powered By Search comes in. 

We’ve developed systems and playbooks specifically for B2B SaaS and pride ourselves on being world class at the fundamentals.

If your marketing strategy isn’t as effective as it needs to be and you want more help identifying and solving inefficiencies so that you can finally escape the growth hacking tactics, reach out to us today.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• 10 Proven SaaS Growth Strategy Methods to Boost Revenue and Improve Customer Acquisition
• Mastering Your SaaS GTM Strategy: Key Steps to Market Leadership and Long-Term Success
• Master SaaS Inbound Marketing: Proven Strategies for Customer Acquisition & Retention

Related Articles

• Stop Blaming Product-Market Fit for Your SaaS Growth Problems
• Chasing Low CAC Stalls Growth: How to Use CAC as a Growth Lever
• Powered by Search Ranks 5th on Canada’s Top 10 Growth Companies

This is the typical startup marketing budget advice.

The only problem is that most early-stage companies lack solid data to create accurate revenue projections.

Additionally, without historical data, marketing spend is typically distributed across various channels randomly.

Some channels never gain enough data to identify insightful patterns, making it impossible to improve performance.

As a result, growth flatlines, and the marketing budget can’t grow, making scaling even more difficult.

In this post, we’ll explain why this marketing budget advice is flawed and how we recommend most Series A B2B SaaS companies establish and distribute a marketing budget. 

Why Conventional Budget Advice Fails Pre‑Revenue SaaS

Creating a marketing budget equal to 5-10% of projected revenue works for established companies with predictable profit and loss statements (P&Ls).

The problem is that early-stage B2B SaaS companies have very little historical data to make accurate revenue predictions or predict which marketing channels will work.

To be more specific, here are four variables that make it unrealistic for startups to use the 5-10% of revenue rule:

1. Unknown CAC Baseline: Until you’ve tested a few marketing channels, you don’t know if landing a demo signup will cost $80 or $800.
2. Uncertain Sales Velocity: You don’t know how quickly a deal will close. Prospects may buy in a week, or it may take six months to complete the SOC-2 review.
3. Unstable Win Rates: You’re likely still improving your demo process, iterating your proof of concept, and altering pilot structures. All of these variables impact forecasts.
4. Product‑Market Fit Is a Spectrum: Without historical data, you may pivot your ICP several times before discovering a consistent close rate.

The reality is that your revenue is likely to be low as an early-stage startup.

If you use a revenue percentage based marketing budget, you won’t have enough budget to gather sufficient data to identify statistically significant patterns.

As a result, you won’t really know what worked and what failed. 

Months later, the board will ask why growth flatlined, and a reasonable explanation is that there simply wasn’t enough data collected to identify patterns and double down on what works.

In this post, we’ll outline how we approach setting marketing budgets for SaaS companies.

The “One‑Customer Revenue” Rule

The one-customer revenue rule assigns a marketing budget equivalent to the gross annual contract value (ACV) of one customer.

For example, if a single customer’s ACV is $36,000, your Q1 marketing budget is $36,000.

However, keep in mind that the one-customer rule is only applicable to pre-revenue startups, as they don’t yet have any data to understand what works on a specific channel.   

How To Efficiently Deploy a 90 Day Marketing Budget 

The next question that arises is, “How should we spend our marketing budget?”

Unlike a mature company, you don’t have substantial historical data to determine which channels deserve more budget. Virtually every marketing channel is a new test.

Here’s how we begin and adjust budget allocation:

60% of Budget ($21,600) = Primary Paid Channel(s)

As a startup, you likely don’t have any organic marketing traction, so paid media is often the most effective method to start acquiring customers.

Done correctly, paid media can drive immediate pipeline and build enough demand for the next quarter. 

For most businesses, Google ads (combined with bottom of the funnel content) is the best place to start. 

However, LinkedIn ads can also help you stay top of mind and build trust and demand for the next quarter. 

Therefore, about 60-70% of the $21,600 is dedicated to Google ads, and the remainder of the spend is usually allocated to LinkedIn. 

However, the exact percentage varies depending on industry maturity, competition, and your audience’s habits. 

The bottom line is that our goal is to fill 3-4 times the revenue goal for each month. 

Most SaaS companies have a three month sales cycle and a win rate of 30%, so you can assume the pipeline generated in the first month will deliver one customer by the end of the third month.

25% of Budget ($9,000) = Pain Point Focused Content 

“We need sales – not brand awareness. So why should we invest in thought leadership content at this stage?”

This is a common (and valid) objection we receive from early-stage startups.

However, paid traffic coming to your website won’t convert if there isn’t any content to build trust and capture leads. 

This is particularly true for B2B SaaS companies, as sales cycles are often lengthy and deals require extensive nurturing, education, and leadership buy-in.

That said, we keep an 80/20 approach to content creation at this stage.

Four deep-dive blog posts discussing key audience pain points and product differentiators, along with one downloadable guide, are sufficient to anchor ads and email nurtures.

15% of Budget ($5,400) = Contingency Pot

This fund exists to test two highly specific ideas, such as sponsoring a niche Substack or purchasing a half-page slot in an industry-specific Slack job board. 

If you’re unsure how to allocate this, consider the alternative channels your competitors are investing in.

If your test works, you can reallocate the Budget accordingly in the next quarter.

Additional Elements Required For a Successful GTM Plan

As you’re mapping out a go-to-market strategy, you also need conversion to infrastructure to capture the traffic you’re earning, as driving traffic to a generic landing page is a waste of money. 

To maximize conversions, we implement a landing page blueprint that targets your highest value ICPs.

We also implement a 14 day lead to MQL email nurture workflow that turns a click into a calendar booking without human chase notes.

Once you’re capturing traffic, you also need data that shows you what’s working and what needs to be cut.

A HubSpot starter plan, a Dreamdata or Attribution App subscription is usually sufficient data, though you’ll also need to dedicate time to enforce UTM discipline.

Tracking Weekly Efficiency (Weekly Budget Scorecard)

Marketing budget is often wasted due to inconsistent execution. 

To ensure poor performance blame isn’t incorrectly placed on the channel or strategy, we use the weekly budget scorecard to ensure execution is consistent. 

From a tactical perspective, this is a 30 minute Monday meeting that reviews the following scorecard:

Quarter‑End Assessment and Adjustments

After 90 days, assess your marketing strategy’s performance.

Did the spend produce at least one closed‑won match for your ideal customer profile? 

If the answer is no, you learned where friction exists in your marketing funnel at the expense of just one customer’s ARR.

If the answer is yes, you are neither a genius nor lucky; you simply paid the market’s tuition fee.

Regardless, this data should give you sufficient information to understand which channel produced the lowest cost per SQL or served as a critical touchpoint before the prospect became a qualified prospect (e.g., a BOFU piece of content that attracted a qualified lead, even if they didn’t immediately convert).

You should also better understand channel mechanics and messaging that resonated with your audience to improve performance in the next quarter. 

Common Marketing Budget Pitfalls (and How to Dodge Them)

The most common error we see SaaS companies make is prematurely hiring a senior executive. 

Spending $180,000 on a VP of Demand Gen before your channel economics are proven significantly increases burn, but doesn’t necessarily bring clarity. 

Outsource specialist execution until metrics stabilize and you’ve identified messaging that resonates before hiring an executive in-house.

Another pitfall is investing in too many channels simultaneously. 

If your competitors have a presence on Twitter Spaces, Quora threads, Reddit AMAs, and programmatic display, you’ll feel tempted to invest in those channels as well.

Resist the urge. 

Investing in too many marketing channels spreads your resources too thin and makes it impossible to thoroughly test any single channel. As a result, you won’t see any meaningful patterns and therefore won’t be able to improve performance. 

Limiting yourself to three channels until CAC stabilizes ensures you have a sufficient set of data to make better optimizations.

When to Pivot from Efficiency to Velocity

Staying frugal for too long hands first‑mover advantage to faster‑spending competitors, so when should you scale and how?

We recommend B2B SaaS companies increase spend when the following three checkpoints are true:

• LTV:CAC ≥ 4:1 for two consecutive quarters.
• Channel CAC variance ≤ 25 %. There aren’t wild swings from quarter to quarter.
• Sales forecast confidence ≥ 80 %. Your weighted pipeline (active sales opportunities multiplied by the probability of closing) reliably lands within 10% of actual closed won revenue.

Once you’re ready to scale, double spend for two quarters, focusing on the best‑performing channel and adding one new adjacent channel to diversify risk.

How To Allocate Budget to Scale From $1 Million to $10 Million ARR

After you cross roughly $1 million in ARR, you know which messages resonate and which channels your ICP uses to discover your solution.

Now, you just need to figure out how to profitably make the growth compound. 

Base Your Budget On New Revenue, Not Total Historical Revenue

As you’re growing rapidly, create incremental revenue targets for your marketing budget rather than basing it off total historical ARR. 

In practical terms, teams identify a meaningful but sustainable percentage of the ARR you plan to add over the next twelve months. 

The precise percentage varies by cash runway and gross‑margin profile.

So rather than cite a single number, use this rule:

Spend enough to consistently generate sufficient pipeline for the sales team without extending the CAC payback beyond the window your investors expect.

For example, let’s say your sales team needs $300,000 in new pipeline each quarter to reliably hit revenue targets. If your average deal size is $30,000, that means you need at least 10 opportunities in the pipeline every quarter.

If your current CAC is $7,500 per customer and your investors expect a 12-month payback, you might set a quarterly marketing budget of about $75,000. 

This ensures the sales team has enough opportunities to work while keeping CAC payback within the investor-approved window.

Introduce Maximum CAC Thresholds For Each Channel

Once you reach $1 million ARR, every channel now has a history. 

Calculate the CAC per channel over a three-month period and use that data to establish a maximum CAC threshold. 

For example, if LinkedIn acquisition creeps 25% above its long‑term average for two consecutive months, reallocate the LinkedIn budget to the next‑best performing channel until you diagnose the problem that causes the CAC to increase. 

These maximum CAC thresholds allow you to scale profitably.

Determine Your Sales Team’s Capacity and Don’t Overwhelm Them

Each sales rep can only work with about 8 to 10 opportunities per month without quality slipping. 

If you send sales more opportunities than they can handle, they’ll start losing deals. 

Unfortunately, if your close rate decreases, your CAC will increase significantly. 

To avoid this scenario, aim to keep the projected pipeline within 120% of your AE’s capacity.   

Sample Scaling Model From $1 Million to $10 Million

If your target is $250,000 in new ARR each month and your historical win‑rate is 20% at an $18,000 ACV, you require about 70 opportunities monthly.

(70 opps × $18,000 ACV × 20% win = ≈ $250,000 ARR)

With an average $3,000 CAC you will spend $210,000 per month, or 30% of the ARR goal, right on budget.

Get More Help Establishing and Scaling Your Marketing Budget

Setting a marketing budget is critical to profitably scaling a B2B SaaS company. 

If your budget isn’t large enough, you won’t scale fast enough to keep up with your competitors. 

On the other hand, if you spend too much too fast without data to understand what’s working and what isn’t, you’ll waste money.

If you want more help setting a marketing budget that allows you to scale profitably, reach out to the team at Powered By Search.

We’ve helped dozens of B2B SaaS companies scale from early stage startups to eight figures and beyond. 

You can claim your free marketing plan today to learn how to profitably scale with maximum efficiency.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• What Are The Best B2B SaaS Marketing Channels?
• Top SaaS Marketing Communities to Join in 2024
• Top Books Every B2B Marketer Should Read

Related Articles

• What Most SaaS Companies Get Wrong About Marketing Budgets⁠—and the Data-Based Method for Finding the Right One
• Top 28 SaaS Marketing Agencies in 2025 (Plus: How to Choose the Right One)
• The Key to Understanding Your B2B SaaS Marketing Metrics (Hint: It’s the Relationships between Them That Matter)

1. The teams’ personal experience and expertise in a particular marketing channel 
2. The marketing channels competitors are using

However, a marketing strategy is fundamentally a method to attract ideal prospects and convert them into customers.

Therefore, an effective marketing strategy is built around how the prospect experiences the buyer journey.

The marketing channels incorporated into the strategy are simply the touchpoints a prospect organically uses to research, evaluate, and select a solution.

In this post, we’ll discuss the most popular marketing channels (as that’s often the main topic of conversation when discussing a marketing strategy).

However, unlike most marketing strategy content, which simply provides best practice advice for executing each channel, we’ll answer the two most important questions:

1. When is the right time to invest in this channel?
2. If you’re already investing in the channel, what are the common mistakes that most SaaS companies make, resulting in average performance?  

At the end of this post, we’ll also discuss how we create a SaaS marketing foundation and build a flywheel that makes each channel progressively more effective.

The 9 Most Important SaaS Marketing Channels 

Here are the nine most important SaaS marketing channels that we frequently execute for clients.

1. SEO

Should SaaS companies invest in SEO in 2025? 

We frequently receive this question from SaaS companies, and given the rise of LLMs and the fact that Google’s AI overviews are reducing website traffic, it’s certainly a valid concern. 

First, LLMs like ChatGPT are indeed capturing a significant percentage of traffic, but Google still holds a substantially larger market share than any other LLM. 

Additionally, while Google’s AI overviews are significantly reducing website clicks, Google search still drives plenty of qualified leads for our clients.

Yes, top of funnel traffic is decreasing, but conversions remain strong.

The key is to shift your thinking from optimizing for traffic (which we’ve always believed is a flawed metric given that it doesn’t always correlate with conversions) and instead:

1. Use conversions and leads as the core KPI to measure content success.
2. Shift leading indicators from generic traffic to rankings for high purchase intent keywords.

We have a more detailed guide discussing our SaaS SEO playbook, but our core philosophy on SEO is to shift the focus from volume to impact. 

From a tactical perspective, here’s how we shift focus from chasing traffic to maximizing conversions:

If you want to learn more about how we tactically implement our SaaS SEO playbook, here’s a brief overview: 

1. Create: Prioritize high-intent, conversion-ready keywords. Refresh existing content rather than always writing new content.
2. Structure: Align site architecture, content, and CTAs to seamlessly connect each stage of the buyer journey.
3. Promote: Earn high-quality, contextual links to pages that drive conversions by building relationships with relevant industry leaders.
4. Integrate: Break down silos between content, SEO, and link-building teams. Focus all efforts on boosting pages that contribute to demos and revenue.

2. Content Marketing

You can have the best technical SEO in the world, but it won’t drive any traffic if you don’t have information addressing a prospect’s search questions. 

Therefore, content marketing is essential for every SaaS company.

A better question is:

How much should we be investing in content marketing, especially if our current strategy isn’t yielding results?

The answer to this question depends on two variables:

1. If you have content targeting all of your highest converting (BOFU) keywords
2. The quality and rankings of the content targeting those keywords.

For reference, the highest converting (BOFU) keywords we’re looking for follow these four frameworks:

• Comparison pages (e.g., “Your SaaS vs Competitor”)
• “Alternative to” pages
• “best” (industry/persona) software
• Pain points your most popular features solve

After identifying the keywords that fit those frameworks, we prioritize updating content that’s already within striking distance (e.g., positions 4-15 for the main keyword).

Why start with content within striking distance?

CTRs increase significantly as you move up even just a few spots on the first page, so targeting this low hanging fruit will give you the biggest immediate lift:

Once we’ve updated all those keywords, we’ll move down the list and refresh content that targets high-intent keywords but ranks below position 15 for the target keyword.

Finally, we’ll move on to creating new content for the remaining high-intent keywords on the list. 

To refresh the content, we interview thought leaders to craft unique insights that allow it to stand out from generic and AI content. (We’ll also build links to these pages, but more on that later.)

Additionally, we optimize the blog design to capture and retain a greater percentage of traffic. 

Specifically, most visitors aren’t ready to sign up for a demo the first time they land on your website. Therefore, instead of leaving just a generic CTA to book a demo, we create offers relevant to each stage of the buyer journey to retain maximum traffic.

3. Digital PR and Link Building

Your content marketing efforts won’t move the needle if nobody sees your content. Even if you refresh existing content, you might not have enough page authority to outrank your competitors. 

Digital PR and link building can solve this problem.

That said, if you’ve ever tried running a link building campaign, you know that most campaigns have very low response rates and don’t meaningfully move the needle.

The problem is that most of these link building campaigns lack targeted goals. They’re building links to the generic homepage from any website with a high domain authority. 

Instead, here are a few principles that make our digital PR and link building effective:

1. Build links to high converting pages in “striking distance” rather than the homepage
2. Select link partners based on page authority, traffic, and other metrics rather than generic domain authority.
3. Reach out to the right person with an offer that makes their life easier rather than a generic request.

Here’s a full overview of our methodical approach to link building and digital PR:

4. AEO

“How do we show up in ChatGPT?”

The answer to this question is AEO – Answer Engine Optimization.

AEO is a strategy to rank higher in modern AI search tools, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and dozens of niche AI agents.

First, having a strong SEO foundation (and a strong brand) certainly helps. However, there are important nuances that make AEO unique.

So, in addition to executing SEO, we also implement the RAISE framework. We outline this framework in more detail in our guide to ranking in LLMs.

5. Facebook Ads 

While it may not be the first platform that comes to mind for B2B SaaS, Facebook Ads can be a powerful platform if your audience is active on the platform and matches one of its specific target audiences.

For example, we worked with a B2B SaaS whose target audience was restaurant owners. While only some of these restaurant owners are active on LinkedIn, many of them have Facebook profiles. And, Facebook allowed us to target restaurant owners directly.

This ultra specific targeting made Facebook a highly effective channel for not only generating brand awareness, but also generating qualified leads.

Even if your audience is primarily on LinkedIn, Facebook is excellent for retargeting and general brand awareness campaigns.

If you’ve tried Facebook ads before and it hasn’t worked, it’s usually due to one of these three issues:

1. Imprecise targeting
2. Insufficient creative testing
3. Neglecting on platform lead generation

Beyond simply executing best practices for Facebook ads, here’s the 80/20 of successful Facebook advertising:

For more detailed information, we have a dedicated resource outlining our approach to running Facebook ads for B2B SaaS, and explain each step in more detail. 

6. ABM

ABM (account based marketing) is ideal for B2B SaaS companies that sell to enterprise or mid-market buyers with long sales cycles, as it allows you to target specific people within a target company.

While ABM is a powerful tool, many prospects tell us that it’s too expensive and doesn’t convert well enough. 

In these cases, we typically find that the company is making one of the following three mistakes.

• Exclusively using firmographic data for targeting: Just because a company fits your ICP doesn’t mean they’re actively looking for a solution. Only target in-market accounts that show real purchase intent. You can use intent platforms like 6sense, Bombora, or Demandbase to identify in-market prospects.

• Running ABM like a generic demand gen campaign: A key reason ABM ads can deliver outstanding results is that you know exactly who you’re targeting and can therefore deliver a hyper-personalized message that speaks to their specific pain points.
• Ignoring the prospect’s stage in the buyer journey: If your buyer journey lasts six, twelve, or eighteen months, a message that resonated in month one likely won’t resonate at month 12. Calibrate your messaging to match the prospect’s stage in the buyer journey.

ABM campaigns are more complex to set up, so here’s our five-step ABM process. However, once you have them set up and follow the blueprint, ABM is very powerful for B2B SaaS companies selling to enterprises.

7. LinkedIn

LinkedIn ads are a staple for many B2B SaaS companies because they allow you to target key decision makers by job title, industry, company size, and other filters that aren’t available on Google or Facebook.

Therefore, we typically use LinkedIn ads if:

• You sell to enterprise or mid-market companies.
• Your buying committee includes multiple decision-makers.
• Your sales cycle is long and complex.
• You already have strong positioning and messaging dialed in.

If you’ve tried LinkedIn and it hasn’t yielded a great ROI, it might be due to one of these three common mistakes:

1. Exclusively targeting bottom of funnel prospects: Most enterprise buying cycles last about 12 or more months. If a prospect learns about your product after they’ve already talked to several other brands, it’s unlikely they’ll consider your product. 
2. Inaccurate targeting: SaaS companies often misuse the “AND” and “OR” functionality in LinkedIn targeting. Similarly, only targeting one person involved in the buying committee won’t get you the buy-in you need to close a deal. 
3. Using the wrong content at the wrong time: Someone at the top of the funnel might not be interested in a case study whereas someone at the bottom of the funnel is probably too advanced for a basic checklist. 

We have a detailed LinkedIn ads playbook for B2B SaaS, but here’s a brief synopsis of our approach:

8. Google Ads

Google Ads are another staple of B2B SaaS marketing, and they’re unique from paid social channels because you’re bidding on keywords, not an individual’s title, company, or characteristics. 

By bidding on keywords, you can pinpoint people who are in-market by reverse engineering the intent behind a specific keyword.

To help you identify the right keywords and allocate budget appropriately, here are the keyword frameworks we recommend for B2B SaaS companies: 

To further improve the performance of your Google ads, here are some additional best practices we recommend in our SaaS Google Ads playbook:

• Use Three RSAs Per Ad Group: If you’re only rotating one or two ads per ad group, you simply don’t give the platform sufficient opportunities to improve conversion rates. 
• Sitelink and Callout Extensions: These give you more real estate in the search result and encourage prospects to take action while also reducing the visibility of your competitors. 
• Dedicated Landing Pages: We often see SaaS companies drive prospects to a generic homepage. Instead, send them to a dedicated landing page that matches their stage in the buyer journey and offers a calibrated call to action.
• Exclude Existing Customers: Create a list of existing customers and exclude these people from brand query campaigns. In most cases, it makes more sense to upsell existing customers through email and other cheaper methods.

9. Email Marketing

When used appropriately, email marketing can be a highly effective strategy to nurture prospects and increase the LTV of existing customers. 

However, simply sending emails doesn’t mean your email marketing is effective. 

Most companies are making one of the following mistakes:

1. Sending one off emails instead of sequences.
2. Emailing generic lists rather than segmenting the audience.
3. Copywriting that doesn’t speak to the customer’s pain points

To solve for these problems, we have a handful of specific email nurture sequences that we implement for three of our B2B SaaS clients:

• Nurture campaigns: The goal of these campaigns is to convert prospects into MQLs. Specifically, we have templates for lead to MQL sequences, trial welcome sequences, and pre-demo/pre-webinar welcome sequences. 
• Activate: These campaigns are sent to current customers and are designed to either upsell them or educate them on how to use your product more effectively. 
• Revive: Not all churned customers are a poor fit for your brand. Depending on the reason a customer churned, you can send them a revival email to win back their business.

We have a more detailed guide outlining our full SaaS email marketing strategy, along with execution tips.

Why a Collection of Marketing Channels Is NOT A SaaS Marketing Strategy 

Many of the underperforming SaaS marketing strategies we audit have great tactical execution. 

The root of the problem often lies in the team’s fundamental approach to building a marketing strategy.

Specifically, they’ll analyze the marketing channels their competitors are using and then execute similar campaigns.

The problem with this approach is twofold:

1. Pain point misalignment
2. Disconnected user experience

Pain Point Misalignment

You probably know the basic problems your customers face. If you’re a cybersecurity software provider, security is the obvious pain point. 

Yet there are three specific nuances to pain point alignment:

1. Committee member: An end user often cares about making their job easier, whereas a check signer cares about ROI and organizational impact. You must know which member of the buying committee you’re addressing.
2. Timing: At the beginning of the buyer journey, the pain point is more general – identifying a secure solution. At the end of the buyer journey, the pain point is more specific – how is Cybersecurity A better than Cybersecurity B? Does it offer Feature XYZ to prevent a specific type of attack?
3. Accuracy: You might think people are buying your cybersecurity solution for a specific feature, yet they might actually choose you because your customer support is superior. However, if you don’t use qualitative and quantitative data to identify these reasons, you’ll never know. As a result, messaging around your special feature won’t convert.

Disconnected user experience

Prospects don’t conform to the buyer journey you lay out. To effectively attract, convince, and convert prospects, you must construct a marketing channel that aligns with how they experience the journey.

Specifically, this means:

1. Your CTA must be calibrated to their stage of the buyer journey: We often see SaaS companies offer a CTA to schedule a demo, yet if the prospect is in the problem awareness stage, they aren’t ready for a demo. The CTA instead needs to offer a smaller ask, like a free calculator or template.
2. The messaging on the next channel must be congruent with the previous channel: We often see SaaS companies have messaging targeting a slightly different pain point from one touchpoint to the next. It may be very slight – as simple as incorrect timing of a correct pain point. However, even a slight disconnection in messaging can cause a prospect to exit the buyer journey.

In short, a collection of tactically flawless marketing campaigns is not an effective marketing strategy. 

The solution to building a profitable marketing strategy is taking a data-driven, holistic approach that meets prospects where they’re at and provides the knowledge they need to overcome objections and convert. 

This is the fundamental principle behind our Predictable Growth Methodology, which is the cornerstone of our marketing philosophy here at Powered by Search.

How To Build a Sustainable SaaS Marketing Strategy

The Predictable Growth Methodology is a systematic approach that creates a flywheel where each marketing initiative builds on the previous efforts, making the overall strategy progressively more efficient. 

Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Evaluate Your MRR Accelerators

Identify the seven types of “fit” beyond product-market fit that impact monthly recurring revenue growth. For example, Message-Market Fit, Customer-Channel Fit, and Customer-Content Fit are all “fits” that impact the efficacy of your marketing, and therefore, your revenue.

Audit your marketing strategy by combing through each of these “fits” and uncover the weakest points.

Note: As you’re auditing your marketing strategy, use real data – not assumptions.

You can also understand why website visitors aren’t converting by analyzing data from your customers’ perspective, rather than relying on internal assumptions.

Step 2: Understand Customer Intent and Pain Points

Assuming you know who your best customers are and their pain points is dangerous. 

Yes, you probably generally know who is buying your product, but do you know:

1. Every title involved in the buyer journey (Who brought it up first in the company? It isn’t just the check signer)
2. Which channel did they find you through? (You might see leads from LinkedIn ads, but it was actually a blog post the saw earlier that first made them interested in your company.)
3. Why they chose your product over the competition? (You might think it’s feature-related, but they might say it’s because your customer service is better.)

Answer these questions with data.

Specifically, we gather qualitative data from product, engineering, customer success, and analytics teams. 

We also gather data from the CRM and sales calls to better understand pain points and how they phrase them (this will impact your messaging). 

Step 3: Pinpoint Visitor Conversion Issues

Analyze why current website visitors aren’t converting into demos and trials. Look in your CRM to see which lead magnets perform the best and which ones have not been successful.

Look at Google Analytics to identify where users leave your website. These insights are essential for tying together the customer journey.

Step 4: Educate and Motivate Ideal Prospects

Publish content and messaging that addresses your prospects’ specific needs and pain points, and guides them towards a demo or trial.

If you’re only targeting bottom of the funnel visitors, you’ll see low conversion rates. Remember that enterprise purchases are considered purchases and don’t happen overnight. Therefore, you can’t expect to show up in a prospect’s feed at the last minute and win their business.

Step 5: Drive Right-Fit Traffic

Implement both paid and organic marketing campaigns to attract visitors who are most likely to convert into qualified prospects and eventually paying customers.

For this stage, you can use a tool like SparkToro to identify the channels your best customers use to research problems and discover solutions. Then, run campaigns on those channels. 

Step 6: Creating a Proof of Concept Pilot Project

Instead of questioning whether your strategy will scale, focus on proving that you can turn a click into a customer through a repeatable process. 

The Pilot Project is a simplified version of your demand generation program targeting your highest-value audience. 

It tests three critical fits: 

• Customer-Channel Fit (testing paid channels like Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram, and optionally LinkedIn for high-LTV products)
• Customer-Content Fit (converting visitors to leads through valuable content like guides or calculators with minimal form fields)
• Journey-Offer Fit (using thank-you pages and follow-up campaigns to convert leads into demos/trials). 

This approach generates quick wins and momentum while establishing benchmark metrics and reducing the cost per acquisition over time.

Step 7: Measure and Generate Insights

Many marketers use vanity metrics to measure the efficacy of their marketing campaigns. We tie actions to ROI.

Specifically, look at:

• MRR Velocity
• CAC Reduction
• LTV Growth 

Step 8: Create Your MRR Acceleration Roadmap

After you’ve had time to gather some data, prioritize initiatives using three criteria: 

1. Highest impact adjustments in the shortest timeframe, 
2. Simplest to deploy changes with minimal dependencies
3. Most proven ideas based on historical success. 

Once you’ve prioritized initiatives, assign them to relevant teams with detailed briefs explaining best and worst-case outcomes. 

Here’s exactly how we approach project management to ensure these initiatives are executed:

1. Assign each initiative to a Directly Responsible Individual.
2. Break down initiatives into actionable tasks that take less than a week to complete.
3. Ensure initiatives have a small project team (3-5 people) and everyone knows who does what and by when.

This process ensures that these “important, but not urgent” tasks are completed.

Level Up Your B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy

This is an overview of how we approach SaaS marketing, but if you want more tactical information, you can read our playbooks (linked in each of the paragraphs above) on each marketing channel. 

However, as we discussed, building an effective SaaS marketing strategy isn’t just about executing hacks and tactics to make a channel perform better. 

It’s really about creating a solid foundation and then building a flywheel where each marketing initiative becomes progressively more efficient. 

Of course, uncovering these opportunities and fixing them is the hard part. If you need help, reach out to our team today. We can help you find key opportunities to improve your strategy and support you in the execution process. Claim your Free Marketing Assessment today to improve the efficacy of your SaaS marketing strategy.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• Ultimate Guide to Craft a Powerful SaaS Email Marketing Strategy for 2025
• What Are The Best B2B SaaS Marketing Channels?
• Top SaaS Marketing Communities to Join in 2024

Related Articles

• B2B SaaS Marketing Re-Acceleration Strategies to Hit Your 2024 Goals
• A Proven Cybersecurity SaaS Marketing Strategy (And Mistakes To Avoid)
• Is your digital marketing strategy back-to-front?

Yet testimonials rarely give prospects a reason to choose your product over a competitor’s product because they don’t explain:

1. The specific pain points the product solves (and how it solves them)
2. How your product is different
3. Who is the right fit for your product

If you think about it, a great customer testimonial often reiterates your messaging, positioning, and tells your prospects why you’re better than other solutions in the market.

The best part? The message is also much more powerful and authentic coming from a customer.

The Problem With Most Testimonials – How They Leave Prospects With More Questions Than Answers

Most customer testimonials sound generic and leave prospects with more questions than answers.

Here are a few examples: 

Sample Testimonial: “Great product that I highly recommend to my friends.”

Prospect Reaction: Okay, but why do you recommend it, and to which friends?

Sample Testimonial: “It helped our team double efficiency.” 

Prospect Reaction: What specific problem did it solve that unlocked that efficiency? Because I have XYZ problem. I know solving that problem would double efficiency, but I don’t know if this product can do that.

Sample Testimonial: “Hands down the best solution for XYZ on the market!”

Prospect Reaction: Okay, but why? Is that true for my company, or is your company different from mine?

Instead of gathering generic testimonials that often gather dust in a hidden page on your website, we use a customer testimonial flywheel to collect effective customer testimonials that provide authentic proof for specific customer pain points and objections and place them in the most opportune moments throughout the buyer journey.

This level of specificity ensures each customer testimonial is proof to back specific claims your marketing or SDRs may make.

The Five-Stage Testimonial Flywheel Framework

Below we’ll discuss the five stage testimonial flywheel framework we’ve developed. 

We’ll also highlight how each step of the customer testimonial framework drives impact compared to the generic approach of collecting and distributing customer testimonials at random.

Stage 1: Capture – Harvest Wins in Real Time

Many customer testimonials are collected at random. 

You might look for the biggest customer or the one you have the most contact with and ask them for a customer testimonial as needed.

We’ve found that you’re more likely to get higher quality testimonials if you collect them in the moment the customer experiences the value.

Not only are customers more willing to give a testimonial in the moment they’re experiencing value, but they can also clearly (and effusively) articulate the pain relief your product has provided. 

This results in a customer testimonial that is much more specific and can be used as proof to support specific benefit claims.

Here are a few of the triggers we use to capture testimonials:

• Milestone Moment: 30/60/90‑day success metrics hit
• Usage Spike: Feature adoption jumps +25% week‑over‑week
• Support Delight: Ticket solved > 2 × faster than SLA
• NPS > 8: Promoter leaves glowing comment

Tactically, here’s how we actually capture these testimonials:

• Quick Zoom call (< 10 min) with a calibrated question bank:
  “What worried you before partnering with us?”
  “How is life different 90 days later?”
• Async Loom request, no fancy production, just authenticity
• Slack/Teams screenshot capture (use CloudApp or Droplr)
• Gong snippet of a renewal/upsell call

Stage 2: Tag – Structure Your Proof Library

If you have a lot of customer testimonials, your SDRs probably don’t know where they are or which pain points they have customer testimonials for.

Even if they do know where the customer testimonials are, they probably can’t quickly pull up a relevant testimonial in seconds on a sales call. 

To solve this problem, we make every quote searchable and deployment‑ready by creating an Airtable (or Notion DB) with these fields:

• ICP Segment (FinTech, Cybersecurity, Vertical SaaS)
• Role (VP Marketing, RevOps, Founders
• Pain Point (High CAC, Agency Burnout, Attribution Chaos)
• Format (Text, Video, Screenshot, Audio)

With tags in place, your Growth, SDR, and CS teams can filter “Video + VP Marketing + Cybersecurity” in seconds.

This level of organization may seem unimportant, but it can be the difference between getting a prospect to convert on a demo and dragging out the sales cycle. 

Stage 3: Inject – Put Proof Wherever Friction Happens

The objections a prospect experiences change as they progress throughout the buyer journey.

For example, at the beginning of the buyer journey, they might be asking questions like:

• How do I solve XYZ problem?
• What are the different products available for this pain point?

At the bottom of the funnel, the questions a prospect might ask include:

• How is this product different from XYZ competitor?
• What is your pricing model, and what’s included in each tier?

This is why the “one size fits all” testimonial doesn’t work. 

Instead, we map out the buyer journey and then place testimonials that support specific claims to each objection. 

Here’s an example of how we map this out:

In fact, we’re even implementing this in our marketing strategy. 

For example, several of our clients post testimonials on LinkedIn explaining how they use our service to grow and why they selected us as a partner. Once it gains enough traction organically, we then promote this as a thought leader ad to our prospects in our ABM list to build trust early in the buying journey and proactively address any potential objections.

Stage 4: Expand – Turn Praise into Upsell Fuel

Testimonials are often used to earn new revenue, but it’s uncommon for teams to use them to upsell existing customers. 

Yet it’s often more profitable to upsell an existing customer than convert a brand new customer.

For example, Clay launched a feature called “Custom Signals” and their CEO published a LinkedIn post illustrating how other brands like Cursor, Rippling, Density, and Amplitude used that particular feature. The feature launch post emphasized the success stories of large, well known brands that used the feature, talked specifically about how they used it, and the results they got from it.

As a customer who was on a lower tier plan, seeing multiple versions of this post on my feed piqued my curiosity and made me want to upgrade to give this feature a shot.

In addition to creating LinkedIn posts, here are a few other ways you can use testimonials to upsell existing customers:

• In‑app alerts: “Teams like yours increased retention 12% after upgrading to Predictive Insights.”
• QBR decks: Show how similar accounts scaled usage + revenue
• Customer newsletter: Feature a monthly “Win of the Month” story pointing to add‑on feature guides

Stage 5: Reactivate – Win Back Dormant or Churned Accounts

Most SaaS companies have a reactivation email sequence to win back churned customers, yet these emails are usually just reminders. 

However, reminder emails don’t really give users any reason to sign up for your product.

Instead, we first segment churned accounts by churn reason (e.g., Price, Champion Left, Feature Gap).

Then, we match a testimonial illustrating how other similar customers derived value from the product. 

Finally, we deliver the testimonial to these audiences via LinkedIn ads and monitor their performance. And for better impact we always recommend you layer these customer testimonial ads on top of your reactivation emails for dead leads.

Get More Help Building Your Testimonial Flywheel

This is the playbook we use to build the testimonial flywheel, but that isn’t to say that execution is easy. 

For example, figuring out where to inject testimonials in your marketing funnel and getting buy-in from your team can be challenging.If you want more assistance building your testimonial flywheel and improving your marketing, come talk to us. We’ll audit your current testimonials and map them to your buyer journey so you start closing more deals in 30 days.

Related Resources

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• The Ultimate SaaS Rebrand Checklist: Steps to a Successful Business Transformation
• 20 Examples of the Best SaaS Testimonials Pages

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Clicks from Google search are declining, and more people are using LLMs like ChatGPT for search.

You’ve also probably heard that some people use social media for product research.

These statistics make many SaaS marketers question the future of B2B SaaS SEO.

And even if SEO is still relevant, you may have noticed that traditional SEO strategies no longer work. 

In this post, we’ll share our outlook on the future of SEO and how we’re addressing changes for our B2B SaaS clients.

The Future of SEO (As Illustrated By New Data)

Marketer Rand Fishkin recently published original data regarding Google’s market share, and Google searches have grown significantly since 2023 despite the rise of AI tools and social media.

Google still owns the overwhelming majority (93.57%) of search. On the other hand, ChatGPT (which currently has the largest market share of LLM searches) only accounts for about 0.25% of total searches. 

This data shows that AI platforms will continue to grow in popularity, though Google will be the dominant player in the coming years.

However, this graph only accounts for searches.

It does not account for clicks.

This is an important distinction because recent data from Seer Interactive showed that organic CTR drops by about 70% when an AI overview is present in the search result.

This data raises the initial question again, but with a modification:

“If people aren’t clicking on my website in the search results, is SEO worth it?”

To answer this question, consider another:

“Is it valuable for your brand to appear as the recommended brand in the AI overview?”

For example, if you’re an influencer marketing platform, appearing in this AI overview is quite valuable:

In fact, appearing here in the AI overview is arguably even more impactful than earning clicks to your website because users will likely trust recommendations from an unbiased, third-party source (Google) over a brand’s own promotional content.

To help you prepare for the future of SEO, we’ll discuss specific strategies to ensure your website not only shows up in the traditional search results, but also dominates the AI overviews and receives visibility in LLMs.

How SaaS Companies Must Adapt For The Future of SEO

The traditional SaaS SEO strategy focused on targeting individual keywords.

Find a relevant keyword, write a quality article targeting it, and then build links to the published article.

The basis of this strategy is still relevant, but targeting keywords alone is no longer enough.

Today, there’s much more content due to the rise of AI writing tools and the general awareness and acceptance of content marketing as an effective SaaS marketing strategy. 

Instead of trying to determine the quality of each piece of content, search engines prioritize ranking content from websites with strong entities. 

An entity is a website that is frequently linked to, receives many mentions from other industry experts, and has content covering all of the topics related to that industry in various formats.

It makes sense – bigger brands, which are often trustworthy and provide more credible information, are usually discussed more frequently online. 

This concept of building a strong entity is important not only for ranking in the traditional search results but also for the AI overview and even LLMs.

The dated approach to SEO is “targeting one keyword.”

The modern approach to SEO is building an entity that’s respected and discussed throughout the industry. Your brand becomes the ultimate authority in that niche or industry.

Another benefit of building a strong entity is that the ROI compounds by leading to new partnerships and relationships.  

When search engines see a strong entity, they’re more confident recommending that brand to its users, resulting in greater visibility in the AI overviews and traditional search results:

“Products with strong entity authority appear more frequently and accurately in AI responses,

while others might be misrepresented or overlooked entirely.”

Below, we’ll lay out a tactical strategy to help you build a strong entity that’s competitive in the evolving SEO landscape.

How To Build Entity Strength 

There are three components to building entity strength:

1. Core (Website)
2. Secondary (Multimedia)
3. External (Third party recognition)

We’ll discuss these components in detail and provide actionable execution steps.

1. Core (Website) 

The basics of SEO – having a technically sound website with relevant content – are still important. 

In fact, they’re more important than ever before.

Search engines want to deliver an excellent experience to users, so any technical issues that negatively impact the user experience will be more detrimental than ever. 

We have a separate resource on our approach to technical optimization, but some basics include:

• Fast load speed
• Safe and secure
• Correct usage of structured data
• Proper indexing
• Accurate URL structures

Website architecture is also critical so crawlers can easily find your content. If crawlers can’t navigate your website, they won’t reach your content. Comprehensive content is a critical component of building a strong entity.

Clear website architecture is also essential for users to find your content easily. If users can’t find your content, they won’t complete the buyer journey and, therefore, won’t convert.

We have a separate resource on our authority architecture framework, but essentially, we create a structure that’s easy to navigate and accommodates the buyer journey of each avatar.

As mentioned earlier, search engines want to show brands that are industry experts, and comprehensive content is a critical component of demonstrating industry expertise.

Instead of simply creating high-quality content targeting a specific keyword, we use the hub and spoke model to create content clusters that comprehensively cover broad industry topics. 

For example, if a relevant topic is “construction project management,” we’ll create a hub of information related to that topic. Linking to the main hub will be various “spoke” blog posts covering subtopics related to “construction project management,” like “construction project management tips” and “construction project management teams.”

By comprehensively covering popular topics in your industry, search engines will recognize your brand as an authority on that entire topic, and your website will receive more visibility for all related keywords. 

Of course, the content must also be high quality, and standards have changed in recent years. 

Instead of judging content by comprehensivity, search engines want to also ensure that it’s coming from qualified experts with genuine experience. 

This is why a core component of our content creation approach is interviewing internal team members and even third party industry experts to create each piece of content. This not only reassures readers that they’re consuming credible information, but it also boosts trust with search engines and allows us to meet EEAT requirements. 

2. Secondary (Multimedia)

Traditional SEO strategies focused primarily on blog content.

However, a legitimate brand has much more content than just blog posts. They have case studies, white papers, video content, active social media channels, and free tools.

Consider HubSpot. 

HubSpot is currently dominating the search results for many keywords related to marketing, and if you look at their website, the blog is just a fraction of their resources:

They also have a thriving YouTube channel and actively engaged social media platforms. 

Therefore, part of building a strong entity is expanding beyond blogging to build out content assets that fit each stage of the buyer journey.

We have a separate resource dedicated to our approach for developing B2B SaaS content for every step of the buyer journey, though the main takeaway is to implement an omnichannel strategy that meets customers where they are and delivers the content in a format that makes the most sense. 

3. External (Recognition) 

The true test of a brand’s credibility and legitimacy is its status within the broader industry.  

If many other industry experts are discussing your brand online, search engines view that as a positive signal that you’re a credible source of information.

For example, you’ll notice that in this blog post, we organically linked to the data study conducted by Rand Fishkin, as it helps outline the future of SEO. 

It’s no surprise that Rand Fishkin is considered a thought leader in the marketing industry because he regularly produces helpful data. As the data is helpful, it’s regularly linked to and discussed online by other marketers.

Search engines view these links and mentions as strong credibility signals. 

Therefore, earning recognition from other third parties is critical to building a strong entity. 

Some ways that we do that include:

• Creating original data (like the study discussed above)
• Building brand partnerships (e.g., integration partners, joint webinars, etc.)
• Traditional PR 

Community engagement is also critical. For example, speaking at events, participating in online forums, and even creating your own community platform are all excellent strategies to build your brand’s entity. 

Measuring SEO Success 

The traditional method of measuring SEO success was tracking traffic volume to a website.

We never liked using traffic volume as an SEO success metric, as more traffic doesn’t always correlate with more conversions. 

Today, traffic volume is even less relevant as it doesn’t account for brand visibility in the AI overviews, which is often a powerful touchpoint in the buyer journey.  

Instead, we have three primary methods of measuring SEO success that are all measured in the Entity Authority Metrics dashboard:

1. Technical Authority Metrics

To ensure the website is technically sound and operating as intended, we track the following metrics:

• API documentation engagement
• Developer portal usage
• Integration adoption rates
• Technical content performance

2. Commercial Impact Metrics 

The goal of any marketing strategy is revenue acceleration, and the best metrics to measure the commercial impact of SEO include:

• Organic traffic by intent
• Conversion rates by content type
• Pipeline influence
• Revenue attribution

3. Stakeholder Engagement

Unlike SMB software, enterprise B2B software requires buy-in from multiple stakeholders. The key to revenue acceleration is ensuring each buying committee member receives the information they need with the least friction possible. 

Therefore, here are a few of the metrics we use to measure stakeholder engagement:

• Content engagement by role
• Multi-touchpoint analysis
• Decision maker engagement
• Implementation team adoption

The Future of Search Engines and Next Steps

There’s plenty of speculation about the future of Google and search as more people are using LLMs to search for information.

However, the data referenced earlier shows that LLMs currently only have a 0.5% market share while Google still has a 93.57% market share. 

Google will continue to be a strong force in the coming years.

Additionally, Google’s primary business model (selling ads) relies on people using its search engine, so it will continue to adapt to retain searchers. 

So is investing in SEO still worth it?

Yes. In-market prospects will continue to use search engines to research and discover solutions. 

The key is to adapt your strategy to focus on building an entity rather than approaching SEO from the perspective of purely targeting specific keywords. 

This ensures you’ll not only show up in the traditional search results, but also dominate the AI Overviews and even LLM queries. 

If you want more guidance building your B2B SaaS SEO strategy, reach out to our team of experts. 

We can analyze your strategy, identify opportunities, and lay out a roadmap to improve your SEO success.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• The Best SaaS SEO Agencies in 2025: 7 Partners That Actually Drive Pipeline
• Must-Have Skills for a B2B SaaS SEO Consultant
• B2B SaaS SEO Statistics for 2025

Related Articles

• SaaS SEO Mistakes: 9 Areas Where B2B Companies Can Fumble Without Knowing It
• SEO Roadmap for B2B SaaS: How to Get Early Wins
• How to Budget for SEO: Our Thoughts on Budget Allocation for B2B SaaS Companies

This is a very real problem that many SaaS marketers experience and the problem usually isn’t solved by simply adding or changing the CTA.

To drive conversions, your content must:

1. Attract prospects who match your ICP
2. Show how your product solves their problem
3. Provide the next step in the buyer journey

In this post, we’ll explain how to create content that converts by fulfilling each of these points and specific mistakes we commonly see in SaaS content strategies that cost conversions.

Common Mistakes That Hurts Content Marketing Efforts

Most SaaS content marketers we talk to know the basics – you need to create high quality, helpful content that’s optimized for the target keyword.

The reason your content marketing program is ineffective is likely due to one of the three mistakes we’ll outline below.  

Mistake 1: Prioritizing Traffic Over Commercial Intent

Traffic is usually the main metric used to measure a content marketing program. 

The only problem is that high volume keywords (which tend to generate more traffic) typically drive lower quality traffic.

While not always true, high volume keywords tend to attract readers that either:  

1. Don’t fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and will never purchase your product. For example, your content may attract college students studying for an exam or regular consumers. 
2. Fit your ICP, but are at the top of the funnel and won’t convert for several months.

No matter how well you optimize the blog post to convert, it won’t drive conversions if it’s attracting the wrong audience or the right audience at the wrong buyer journey stage.

Instead of prioritizing traffic volume, we prioritize targeting keywords with high purchase intent. 

It’s also important to note that the keywords must align with pain points your product solves.

For example, your content may attract the right customer, but if you’re showing them how to solve a problem that your product doesn’t solve, it probably won’t convert very well.

Let’s say you offer influencer marketing software. If you have a blog post targeting the keyword “Instagram organic growth strategy,” some visitors might fit your ICP, but your product (which is designed for influencers) doesn’t solve their pain point. 

While you might be able to make the argument that readers should do paid influencer marketing, it probably won’t convert as well as ranking for the keyword “Instagram influencer growth strategy.”

Mistake 2: Creating New Content Rather Than Optimizing Existing Content

Most marketers know the obvious high value keywords they should rank for.

For example, if you’re marketing fundraising software, an obvious keyword you’re probably already targeting is “best fundraising software.”

However, just because you write a piece of content for that keyword doesn’t mean that it’s ranking for that keyword. 

We find that clients earn a higher ROI updating existing content targeting high value keywords (like “best fundraising content”) rather than creating new content for lower value keywords. It’s also easier to boost existing content in the SERPs than rank brand new content, as the existing content may already have some links. 

Instead, analyze the content that currently earns the most conversions and prioritize updating those posts rather than creating new content.

Mistake 3: Measuring Content Quality By Length Rather Than Value

AI writing tools have made it easy for anyone to create content. 

In fact, many of these AI writing tools are good enough that they can deliver content that’s decently optimized and produces factually accurate advice.

To make your content stand out (and rank), it must deliver unique insights and personal experience that’s unique from all of the other content in the SERPs.

Unfortunately, you can’t rely on a freelance writer to provide unique, expert-level advice on a topic. 

Additionally, freelance writers aren’t going to understand the intricacies of your product’s unique value or your customer’s pain points.

Real experts are often too busy doing the thing that they’re an expert in to write content, so we have freelance writers interview genuine experts and then organize the expert’s knowledge into an SEO-optimized blog post.

A Note On Prerequisites To Create Content That Converts

Before we get into the step-by-step process of creating content that converts, it’s important to acknowledge the fact that content is just one step in the buyer journey. 

Enterprise B2B SaaS companies in particular tend to have long buying cycles (at least six months, but often twelve or even eighteen months).

This buying cycle length means that it’s unrealistic for a visitor to convert into a customer immediately. Instead, the goal of your content is to ensure the prospect proceeds to the next step in the buyer journey. 

As content is just one touchpoint within the buyer journey, realize that friction elsewhere in the buyer journey can negatively impact conversions. 

Before optimizing a specific marketing channel or campaign, analyze your buyer journey holistically and identify where prospects are dropping out. 

Investigate why prospects are falling out of the buyer journey, solve those problems, and then come back and improve the content. 

How We Create SaaS Content That Converts

Below is the step by step process we use to create content that converts.

Stage 1: Customer Research and Product Value Analysis

The first stage of the content marketing process is research. This research will give us the data we need to understand what content to create and how to write the content so that it converts.

Step 1: Map Converting Keywords

If you rank for keywords that your ideal customers search when they’re actively looking to buy the type of product you offer, you’re much more likely to convert them.  

The challenge is identifying high converting keywords.

We have a few methods. 

First, look at your current organic keywords performance. Which keywords are driving the most conversions? 

We also look at PPC performance and create content targeting the highest converting PPC keywords. 

To uncover new keywords, look at your competitors’ paid keywords.

We also find that these keyword frameworks tend to convert very well:

• Competitor Comparisons: HubSpot vs Salesforce
• Competitor Alternatives: HubSpot Alternative
• Best (Feature) Tools: Best CRM Tools
• Best (Feature) Tools For (Avatar/Industry): Best CRM For Real Estate Agents
• How to (Solve Primary Pain Point): How to Send Automated Follow Up Emails
• Manual Searches For Tasks Your Tool Automates: How to Track Prospects in Excel 

Once we have a list of high converting keywords, we prioritize them by which ones will likely drive the most conversions.

To determine which ones will likely drive the most conversions, we consider these two factors:

1. The total traffic volume, and the percentage of that traffic that likely fits our ICP.
2. How realistic it is that we can rank for these keywords.

Step 2: Define Core Differentiators  

Once you have the right prospect on your blog post, you still need to educate them on why your product is the best solution for them.

Many B2B SaaS products are similar on the surface level, making it difficult for customers to understand how yours is different from anyone else. 

To solve this problem and communicate to prospects how our product is different from the competition (and therefore, why they should choose it), we go through the SaaS Positioning Canvas to define:

1. Who does the product help: This is the industry, company size, etc.
2. What problems does it solve: Analyze each of the major product features and ask what each product feature solves.
3. Why do prospects choose this product over the competitors’ (what does it offer that they lack?): This is the most important question to answer. You probably offer many of the same features as your competitors so why do customers choose your product over theirs? Sometimes it’s a unique feature, but sometimes it’s as simple as better customer support. Either way, we need to know the answer to this question to ensure it’s discussed in the content.

Take your time answering these questions. Instead of just guessing the answer to each question, listen to sales and talk to real customers. 

You may think that the main reason customers buy your product is a unique feature you offer, but if you talk to customers, you may discover that none of them even use that feature. Instead, they might all love your company because of your customer support. 

Step 3: Voice of Customer Analysis

Once you have the right prospects on your blog and you’ve defined your product’s USP, the copy must be framed in a way that resonates with your prospect.

We analyze customer language in support tickets and sales calls to understand how they talk about the problem and then use their verbiage in our copy. 

The content won’t be as compelling if there’s a disconnect between how the content describes a problem and how prospects describe that same problem.

It’s also important to understand specific objections people experience at each stage of the buyer journey. If you don’t address these objections, they likely won’t continue in the buyer journey. 

You can uncover objections by talking to the sales team and use their battle cards to address objections in the content. 

Step 4: Mapping The Buyer Journey

SaaS marketers spend a lot of effort and resources acquiring traffic, but a fraction of it focusing on retaining traffic.

A mistake we often see SaaS marketers make is offering a demo as the CTA on every blog post. If it’s a bottom of funnel blog post, a CTA to schedule a demo is appropriate, but if it’s a top of funnel blog post, that reader isn’t yet ready to schedule a demo.

Unfortunately, most people at the top of the funnel aren’t going to convert into demo signups. 

Even if they do get on a demo, they’ll waste the sales team’s time as that prospect will require extensive education before they’ll buy. 

Instead, we map out the buyer journey and use that data to identify an appropriate CTA that aligns with the buyer journey.

We have a separate resource that discusses how we use CRM data to map out the buyer journey in detail. 

Stage 2: Content Impact Optimization

As most SaaS companies already have some content on their website, our first action item after customer research isn’t creating new content – it’s improving the impact of existing content. Here’s how we do it.

Step 1: Quick Win Optimization

Once we have a list of the keywords most likely to drive the most conversions, we look at existing content targeting those keywords. 

Then, we prioritize updating the content that will likely give us the highest ROI boost. 

To create this list, we’re asking three questions: 

1. What will it take to rank higher in the SERPs from a link building and content quality standpoint?
2. What is the estimated increase in conversions that accomplishing that ranking position will deliver? 
3. Are there opportunities to improve the conversion rate of the content itself?

Once we’ve factored in the answers to all three questions, we’ll have a list of the most impactful content to update.

Step 2: Buyer Awareness Matrix Implementation

To retain a higher percentage of the traffic captured at each stage of the buyer journey, we use the buyer awareness matrix to bucket the content across the blog into unaware, problem aware, product aware, and solution aware.

Then, we create relevant resources for each of those four categories and offer those resources as CTAs to ensure readers continue down the buyer journey.

For example, if we have a Problem Aware blog post like “How to protect a healthcare organization from malware attacks,” an appropriate CTA is downloading a checklist to prevent malware attacks. 

Including relevant CTAs within each blog post can significantly improve traffic retention and increase the value of each piece of content.

Step 3: Content Measurement

Most SaaS companies we talk to don’t know what content is most effective because they don’t have any conversion tracking setup.

Without this data, you’re blindly guessing. So before updating or creating new content, we set up conversion tracking.

Stage 3: Expert Content Development

You don’t win a conversion just because you get the right prospect on your website at the right time.

Your content must convince prospects that your product will solve their problem more efficiently than your competitors.

Here’s the framework we use to craft content that converts.

Step 1: SME Interview Framework

To ensure the content converts, we want it to check all of these boxes:

1. It provides a unique perspective on a challenge from an expert.
2. It addresses common pain points and objections.
3. It accurately describes the key differentiators and USP of the product. 

Unfortunately, you can’t expect a freelance writer to create content that checks all those boxes. Instead, we conduct interviews with an internal expert from the company. Then, the freelance writer uses that information to distill their knowledge into an SEO-friendly blog post that’s also effective at converting readers.

Here’s an example of a content brief we give writers. The freelance writers then use this brief to interview the internal expert.

These interviews are recorded so the writer can refer back to the expert’s insights. 

Step 2: Content Structure Optimization

To rank in the SERPs and convert customers, your content needs to match the searcher’s intent. 

For example, someone searching “best CRM tools” wants a list of CRM tools. They don’t want a detailed guide on what a CRM tool is. 

The most common content structures are those we discussed during the first step of the process when mapping high converting keywords like:

• Guides (how to do X)
• Listicles (best software for X)
• Competitor Comparisons (HubSpot vs Salesforce)
• Competitor Alternatives (HubSpot Alternatives)

For guide and listicle outlines, we ask the freelance writer to bullet point specific nuggets of information the searcher wants to know. 

For example, someone searching “best CRM tools” already knows that all CRMs can send automated follow-up emails. However, not all CRMs are ideal for all use cases (e.g., real estate). Similarly, one CRM might have a unique feature that makes it more effective at a specific task. 

Those are the key differences that a reader wants to know. 

During the outline process, the freelancer identifies those unique nuggets of information readers want.    

For competitive comparison keywords, we have specific outlines that we’ve tested and optimized over time and give them to freelancers to use as frameworks.

Step 3: Defining Commercial Narratives

Creating the right content structure will get people to your content and defining those unique nuggets of information that answer the searcher’s question will keep them reading.

But unless you can craft an argument that outlines what makes your product more effective for your ICP than any other products, it won’t convert. 

Instead, you’ll just have a helpful article.

The expert interview allows the freelance writer to understand the key value propositions and product benefits, and then they use the problem-solution framework to present the information in a compelling manner.

For example, the main benefit of a fundraising company we work with is that they have a proprietary database of donors.

Instead of just stating this feature in the content, the freelancer presents it in a problem-solution framework as shown below: 

By presenting the product as a solution to the reader’s problems rather than a collection of features, you’re much more likely to convert visitors because they’ll understand the value it can deliver.

Stage 4: Continuous Improvement

Once we’ve created content, we constantly measure its effectiveness to understand what works and what doesn’t.

Specifically, we’re analyzing the conversion rates of:

1. Keywords
2. Lead magnets
3. Product positioning/messaging

We also continue to update content. For example, if we notice that specific messaging resonates particularly well with the audience, we’ll update the highest converting content to include that messaging.

Additionally, content decays over time, so we also refresh content as it begins to drop in the rankings.

It’s also important to note that content quality isn’t the only factor that impacts the success of your content marketing program.

Links significantly impact ranking. 

Large brands with high website authority often dominate the SERPs for high converting keywords, and the only way to get past them is building high quality links directly to the page you’re trying to boost.

We have a more detailed resource on our step-by-step guide to building high quality links, but essentially, we believe that while great content can attract links, you first have to build some links to it manually to give it the boost to rank in the first place. 

Only after the content begins ranking will it earn links organically.  

Get More Help Creating Content That Converts

This is the basic structure to build content that converts, but there are plenty of nuanced factors that impact the conversion rate of your content. 

If your content isn’t converting as well as you’d like, reach out to our team of SaaS experts. 

We can audit your content and identify opportunities to increase the conversion rate of your content. 

Over the last two quarters, we’ve started working with enterprise B2B SaaS brands on a specific mandate. Growth marketers at these organizations have asked us, “How do we get ranked on ChatGPT?”. Others have been impacted by Google’s recent core updates where they’ve seen as much as 20-50% drops in traffic. 

You’re in the right place if you’re wondering some of the questions about your B2B SaaS company right now.

This question is popping up in our DM’s and marketing Slack channels everywhere.

The buzz is undeniable. But while everyone’s discussing Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) in theory, almost no one has a concrete, proven playbook for implementation. Marketers are scrambling for answers as their traditional SEO playbooks become increasingly outdated.

We’ve Been in the Trenches Since Day One

Since Perplexity’s launch in 2022, we’ve refined our Answer Engine Optimization methodology. When ChatGPT added browsing in March 2023, we immediately scaled operations, treating these platforms as primary acquisition channels.

Our AEO approach isn’t theoretical. Through testing with dozens of our B2B SaaS clients, the evidence is clear: strategic Answer Engine Optimization captures high-intent traffic that traditional SEO can’t reach.

AEO Rankings: The New Competitive Battlefield

Our research reveals a fascinating pattern. Let’s take a popular enterprise software category like FP&A software (financial planning & analysis). Suppose we’re working with Prophix and want to find out how well they are positioning in AEO (Answer Engine Optimzation).

Here’s how different FP&A solutions rank across AI platforms:

Notice something crucial? Prophix appears consistently but ranks lower than it should for its capabilities. This is the exact opportunity LLM SEO addresses.

What is AEO?

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the strategic discipline of getting your brand, product, and key differentiators featured inside AI search tools like:

• ChatGPT
• Perplexity
• Claude
• Gemini
• And dozens of niche AI agents

While traditional SEO focuses on ranking in search results, AEO ensures you appear directly in the answers these LLM-powered tools provide users.

The RAISE Framework: Your Complete AEO System

Our battle-tested RAISE methodology consistently improves Answer Engine visibility:

R – Relevance Signals: Speak the Language of Answers

Last month, a mid-sized FP&A B2B SaaS company approached us with a problem: “We’re all over Google, but invisible in ChatGPT.” Their website was filled with beautiful marketing language that humans loved but AI completely ignored.

The issue became apparent when we ran a simple test. We asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to recommend FP&A solutions for a mid-market manufacturing company. Their product never appeared—not even once.

Why? Because answer engines think in solutions, not superlatives.

When we rewrote their core pages to directly address specific scenarios rather than making vague claims about “transformation” and “innovation,” their visibility skyrocketed within three weeks.

Ineffective: “Our platform empowers finance leaders with next-generation insights.”

Effective: “Prophix is an FP&A platform that automates budget consolidation for mid-market companies, with native ERP integrations and AI-powered forecasting capabilities.”

This pattern repeats across every client we’ve worked with. Answer engines don’t care about your clever taglines—they care if you’re answering their users’ questions.

Key insight: Structure content like an expert directly answering questions. When you write like an answer, you become the answer.

A – Access Verification: Unlock Your Digital Doors

One enterprise client came to us baffled: “We’ve implemented our last SEO agency’s recommendations, but our visibility hasn’t improved at all.” After digging into their system, we discovered their security team had blocked all AI crawlers at the firewall level—the equivalent of locking your store and wondering why no customers came inside.

This happens more than you’d think. In our audit of 50 enterprise SaaS websites, 68% were inadvertently blocking at least one major AI crawler.

Step 1: Check server logs for these crawler signatures:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GPTBot/1.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0)

Step 2: Fix these common AEO barriers immediately:

• Overly restrictive robots.txt (add explicit Allow directives)
• Security measures (whitelist AI crawlers in WAF configs)
• Progressive rendering issues (minimize JavaScript dependencies)

After implementing proper access protocols, our client saw their first-ever mentions in AI answers within days. Two weeks later, they appeared in 40% of targeted bottom-of-funnel queries.

Key insight: The most compelling content means nothing if AI can’t access it. Open your digital doors before worrying about what’s inside.

I – Information Density: Build Your AI Vocabulary

This principle became strikingly clear when working with competing products in the same category. One client consistently ranked in AI responses while their competitor, with more backlinks, domain authority, and SEO visibility, remained absent.

The difference? Information density.

The successful client systematically embedded a rich ecosystem of related terms, concepts, and specific use cases throughout their content. Their pages weren’t just longer—they were contextually richer.

For Prophix and similar FP&A tools, this means deliberately weaving in:

• “Financial planning & analysis software”
• “Cash flow forecasting and budget variance analysis”
• “Integrations with Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, and NetSuite”
• “Use cases for manufacturing financial modeling”
• “Alternatives to Oracle Planning and Anaplan”
• “SOC2 compliance and enterprise security features”
• “KPIs like working capital ratio, DSO, and cash conversion cycle”

Key insight: Answer engines build associative networks. The richer your contextual signals, the more likely you’ll be pulled into relevant conversations.

S – Source Authority: Cultivate Your Digital Reputation

The most significant AEO success we’ve witnessed came from a cybersecurity company where we invested heavily in third-party validation and Digital PR while our team concurrently worked on their website’s product page, blog, and comparison page content.

They secured coverage in Gartner reports, industry publications, and professional forums. They methodically built profiles on review platforms, contributed to open discussions, and established a presence in every corner of their digital ecosystem.

When they finally launched their product pages, the answer engines already “knew” them as legitimate players because they had encountered the brand through trusted sources.

In the specific example for Prophix for prompts associated with finding FP&A tools, the authority checklist includes:

• Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Wave reports
• G2 and Capterra with verified customer reviews
• Finance community forums on Reddit and Quora
• Publications like CFO.com and Financial Management
• Industry analyst reports and case studies
• Partner ecosystem marketplaces

Our data shows that brands appearing in at least 5 authority sources see 2.7x higher mention rates in AI answers compared to those relying primarily on their own websites.

Key insight: Answer engines trust established sources more than your claims about yourself. Build your reputation network before expecting AI recognition.

E – Engagement Feedback: Create Your Own Virtuous Cycle

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of AEO is how user behavior influences future results—a dimension traditional SEO simply doesn’t have.

We discovered this accidentally when a client’s sales team began regularly using ChatGPT to compare their product with competitors during calls. Within weeks, their specific comparison points began appearing in general AI responses about their category.

We’ve since formalized this into a deliberate strategy, creating “engagement campaigns” where employees, customers, and partners systematically prompt AI systems with questions where your brand deserves to be featured:

• “What’s the best financial planning tool for manufacturing companies?”
• “Compare Prophix vs Planful vs Workday Adaptive”
• “Which FP&A tools integrate best with NetSuite?”

When combined with ensuring your content is accessible and relevant, these engagement loops create a compounding effect. One enterprise client saw their AEO visibility increase 4x after implementing a structured engagement program with just 30 participants.

Key insight: Answer engines learn from human feedback loops. Strategic prompting creates visibility momentum over time.

AEO Intelligence: Reverse Engineer Success

Perplexity reveals its sources, providing a window into effective Answer Engine Optimization. Search “best financial forecasting tools for mid-market” and analyze which sources appear. Is it a Gartner report? A specialist blog? A comparison site? Mirror what works.

The AEO Mandate: Act Now or Become Invisible

Let’s be clear: if your team views Answer Engine Optimization as experimental, you’re already losing deals you don’t know exist.

Anyone doing “comprehensive SEO” without AEO strategies is missing the boat. Internal teams waiting for “more data” before implementing Answer Engine Optimization are surrendering market position daily.

By Q1 2026, answer engines will influence 10-20% of all B2B software purchase decisions. The AEO visibility battle isn’t approaching—it’s already determining winners and losers.

The RAISE framework delivers measurable Answer Engine Optimization results today. Implement it now or explain to your board why competitors are capturing your market through channels you ignored.

The question isn’t whether AEO matters—it’s whether you’ll capitalize on it before your window closes.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• The Best SaaS SEO Agencies in 2025: 7 Partners That Actually Drive Pipeline
• Must-Have Skills for a B2B SaaS SEO Consultant
• B2B SaaS SEO Statistics for 2025

Related Articles

• Mobile SEO Best Practices & SMS Mobile Marketing
• SEO Starter Guide: 10 Blogging Best Practices
• The B2B SaaS SEO Playbook (That Still Works in 2025)

However, increasing lead volume is an expensive solution to increase sales. 

Many SaaS teams can hit their sales goals with their current lead volume if they improve their conversion rate. 

So how do you increase conversions?

Improve your marketing operations. Marketing operations is essentially the roadmap that takes prospects from one step in the buyer journey to the next, and any friction along that road costs conversions.

In this post, we’ll share how we optimize your marketing operations to increase traffic to lead conversions, lead to SQL conversions, and opportunity to pipeline reactivation.

How Traditional SaaS Marketing Operations Create Lead Leakage

You probably already have a marketing operations plan in place.

But that doesn’t mean your marketing operations are effective.

Most agencies view marketing operations as a service to implement the technical plumbing required to connect the buyer journey.

For example, the deliverables might include implementing marketing automation workflows in HubSpot, or setting up campaign attribution and configuration.

Yet as your marketing strategy evolves, your marketing operations must also evolve accordingly to deliver accurate data. 

For example, if you add a new campaign, your marketing operations need to be updated accordingly. Otherwise:

1. Your team won’t have visibility into campaign performance, making it impossible to take a data driven approach to future campaign optimization. 
2. Prospects who interact with that campaign might not have the next step in the buyer journey, so they’ll simply leave the funnel.
3. Sales won’t have that touchpoint as data, limiting their insight into the prospect’s pain points and thus making their pitch less compelling.

Additionally inaccurate or limited CRM data will cause confusion for your internal team. Has this lead already been contacted? Are they qualified? 

This can lead to inconsistent communication and a negative overall impression of your brand, which ultimately deters prospects from converting.

Signs You’re Losing Leads Due to Marketing Operation Issues 

Before explaining how we solve marketing operations challenges, it’s worthwhile to address if marketing operations are the culprit of your low sales volume. 

Understanding the effectiveness of your current marketing operations is tricky as data inaccuracies aren’t always immediately apparent.

Instead, here are a few signs that your marketing operations are currently costing you leads and require work.

1. Lead Nurturing Gaps or Irregular Follow-Ups

After prospects demonstrate interest in your product (e.g., they downloaded a lead magnet, booked a demo, etc.), they should receive an immediate follow-up to keep them engaged. 

If too much time passes between prospect touchpoints, leads will go cold, decreasing conversions and increasing customer acquisition costs.

2. Inconsistent or Fragmented Data

If your CRM shows double entries, outdated contact information, or fragmented touchpoint history, there’s a problem with your marketing operations. 

Without accurate lead information, you won’t have insight into which campaigns are most/least effective, making it difficult to improve marketing performance. 

Additionally, if the data in the CRM is incomplete, the sales team won’t have sufficient context to deliver an impactful pitch. For example, they won’t know the topic of the content or ads prospects interacted with to understand their pain points, so their pitch will likely be generic and unpersuasive, costing conversions.

3. Lack of Lead Scoring or Qualification Process Sign

Not all leads are equally valuable and should not be treated equally. 

Yet you won’t know which leads are most valuable and require immediate attention if your marketing operations aren’t dialed in.

As a result, your sales team will waste time with unqualified prospects, and your highest quality leads may drop out of the funnel.

4. Poor Attribution and ROI Tracking

Can you open your CRM right now and say, with confidence, exactly how much revenue each channel drives?

If the answer is “no” your marketing operations needs work.

This question is critical, because without it, you can’t make data driven decisions to optimize future campaigns. Specifically, you won’t know which campaigns to cut and which ones to double down on, or which messaging resonates best with your audience.   

5. Siloed Teams and Communication Breakdowns

A telltale sign that your marketing operations system isn’t working is that marketing, sales, and customer success teams are misaligned on lead status, follow-up actions, and lead expectations. 

This miscommunication is frustrating for teams and sends mixed signals to prospects, creating a negative first impression of your brand. 

Our Approach To Marketing Operations 

We view marketing operations as an opportunity to improve revenue acceleration and use it to maximize existing investments rather than just adding new channels.

So instead of just telling you the technical plumbing we use to implement marketing operations, we’ll share how we use it as a tool to improve these three components: 

• Traffic to lead conversions 
• Lead to SQL conversions
• Opportunity to pipeline reactivation 

Traffic To Lead Conversions

Once you get the right traffic to your website, here are a few specific action items we implement to increase traffic to lead conversion rates:

• Implementing CRO strategies: This includes optimizing CTAs, implementing chatbots, implementing exit pop-ups, and reducing form fills.
• Optimizing messaging and copy: Specifically, we use the positioning canvas to ensure all the copy and messaging addresses the right pain points.
• Implementing proven page templates: We’ve tested various page layouts and now have templates for blog posts, product pages, landing pages, and general website design. 

Lead to SQL Conversions

If a lead fails to convert into an SQL, it’s usually due to one of three reasons:

1. Poor lead scoring system: The prospect wasn’t a great fit for the product.
2. Delayed assistance: Qualified prospects want to solve the problem sooner rather than later, so if sales takes too long to communicate with qualified leads directly, those leads will look elsewhere. 
3. Competitive offers: We’re in an open market and many SaaS products are similar. If the sales rep lacked sufficient pain point data to understand the prospect’s problem and tailor the pitch accordingly, there’s a good chance they will choose a competitor’s product instead.

To prevent these problems that cause lead leakage, here’s how we optimize the lead to SQL conversion path: 

• Lead scoring: Score based on the channel they came in from, the prospect’s job title, and the type of lead magnet (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU) they downloaded.
• Immediate notifications: We create notification triggers to alert account executives when a sales qualified comes in so that prospect receives immediate attention.
• Nurture sequence: Set up email nurture sequences that provide useful info about both the pain point and how the product solves their pain point. 

Opportunity to Pipeline Reactivation

Closed lost leads are often overlooked opportunities for two reasons. 

First, they can help you understand the leaks in your pipeline (why didn’t those prospects convert?).

Secondly, you can win back right fit prospects if they didn’t convert simply due to poor timing.

The first step is to ensure you’re always marking the reason why leads were closed lost.

For closed lost leads who didn’t align with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), understand how they reached the end of the buyer journey. Then, make adjustments accordingly to prevent unqualified leads from reaching the sales team.

For instance, let’s say you’re selling a cybersecurity platform. A lead may seem like a good fit based on factors like company size and job title, but if their primary pain point revolves around a different issue—such as data storage rather than threat detection—then your product might not be the right solution. In this case, you need to refine your lead qualification process to ensure that only those with a genuine need for your cybersecurity platform move forward to the Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) stage. 

Alternatively, if the closed lost deal does match your ICP, there’s a good chance you could still convert them at a later date. 

For example, if the timing wasn’t right due to budget constraints, that user might convert at a later date. Even if they decide to buy a competitor’s product, you can learn why they chose them over you, which is excellent market research. You can also follow up in a few months to see if that prospect is still happy with that product or if they’d prefer to switch. 

To communicate with closed lost prospects, we use the dead lead reviver. 

The dead lead reviver is a simple one-line email asking if they still have the pain point your product solves. 

We usually send the dead lead reviver at least 30 days after the deal was marked closed lost, as over communicating with prospects can create a negative impression of your brand and cause them to mark your emails as spam.  

Also, it’s important to allow time for circumstances to change. Otherwise, they still probably won’t convert.

Our Marketing Operations Execution Strategy

Now that you understand our approach to marketing operations, here’s the tactical execution strategy we use to achieve revenue acceleration goals. 

Marketing Automation Workflow Optimization

There are essentially three parts to our optimization strategy:

• Implementing effective nurture sequences
• Maintaining data hygiene
• Reporting

Implementing Effective Nurture Sequences 

Prospects who have expressed interest in your product at some point in time are often easier to convert than cold prospects, so we set up nurture sequences based on where they are in their customer journey, and dead lead reviver campaigns for those who were marked as closed lost.

Data Hygiene

For the automations to work smoothly and ensure we’re sending relevant messages at the right time, maintaining good data hygiene is essential. 

First, ensure each prospect is always tagged correctly.

For example, if a prospect is no longer an opportunity, it’s important to tag them as closed lost. 

For each closed lost lead, include the reason why they are closed lost for two reasons:

1. Only send the dead lead reviver sequence to right-fit prospects.
2. Use copy and messaging relevant to why the prospect did not buy. For example, if they didn’t buy because of budget constraints, we might reach out and ask if their budget has changed.

We also set up internal automations that remind the sales team which leads to work on and which opportunities are at risk of becoming dead leads. 

These internal automations are a great way to ensure each prospect still receives a human touch at the most opportune moment.

Reporting

Setting up reporting is essential so that you can understand where and why you’re losing prospects.

Here’s an example of a report we set up in HubSpot for a client that shows where we’re losing leads. Using this data, we then test different messaging, copy, offers, and channels.

Lead Scoring and Routing Improvements

SaaS companies often lose prospects because the sales team’s response time is too slow and/or the pitch isn’t sufficiently tailored to the prospect.

The root cause of this problem is that all leads are treated equally. Yet not all leads are equally valuable and/or qualified, and each one has different pain points.

Properly scoring and routing leads solves this problem by ensuring the right salesperson delivers a pitch tailored to the prospect’s pain points. It also ensures VIP leads receive immediate attention. 

When scoring leads, here are a few factors we consider:

• Job title: Is this a decision maker or a user?
• Company industry/size: Does it fit our ICP? For example, larger companies may score higher.
• Form Fill: Did they book a demo or just download a lead magnet?

Using this criteria ensures that, for example, a CISO at an enterprise company who booked a demo receives immediate attention rather than giving them the same attention as, say, a junior champion at a company of 25 people who downloaded a lead magnet.

System Integration and Data Flow Cleanup

We integrate HubSpot with third party tools to easily generate reports that give a full overview of the entire marketing strategy.

This birdseye view makes it easier for us to compare all campaigns objectively and identify the most effective platforms, campaigns, and messaging. 

Conversion Tracking Setup and Enhancement

The best marketing strategy is to double down on what already worked, but in order to know what worked, you must have accurate conversion tracking set up.

So we set up conversion tracking data and then upload it to Google Ads to ensure our future ads convert more effectively.  

Get More Help Setting Up SaaS Marketing Operations

There’s more to SaaS marketing operations than implementing the right technical plumbing. 

It’s an opportunity to improve the buyer journey and accelerate revenue by helping prospects move through the buyer journey with minimal friction.

If you’re losing leads, reach out to our B2B SaaS experts. We can analyze your current SaaS marketing operations to identify the leaks in your marketing operations and lay out a roadmap to solve them.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• Top 65 B2B SaaS Sales and Marketing Acronyms Explained
• B2B SaaS Trial Conversion Rate Benchmarks
• B2B SaaS Landing Page Statistics & Benchmarks
• B2B SaaS Landing Page Checklist
• 20 Examples of The Best SaaS Pricing Pages
• 10 Best Examples of Competitor Comparison Landing Pages in SaaS

Related Articles

• How We 3X’d TouchBistro’s Conversions Without 3Xing the Ad Spend
• How to diagnose a drop in paid media conversions
• Does Your Landing Page Match the Scent of Your Ad?

1. The B2B SaaS company was rebranding and needed the website refreshed to reflect the new brand image.
2. The B2B SaaS company was sold to a larger platform brand and the website assets needed to be consolidated and refreshed to reflect the platform brand’s image.
3. The B2B SaaS company recently acquired a new add-on company, triggering a website refresh to match the rebrand. 

Matching the website’s aesthetics to match the new brand image is typically our clients’ primary concern.

However, a website rebrand has a significant impact on performance.  

A poorly executed website rebrand can wipe out a brand’s SEO equity. It can also break the marketing funnel by making it difficult for prospects to find what they need to convert.

However, a website rebrand is also a great opportunity to improve performance by removing friction and providing the right resources prospects need at the right time.  

We’ve handled the rebranding process for several B2B SaaS companies, and in this post, we’ll discuss our step-by-step process, including checklists, specific people involved in the process, and key mistakes to avoid.

Opportunities and Risks of SaaS Rebranding

If you’re merging a newly acquired brand into a platform company website, migrating the website can strengthen the platform website by transferring its links and authority to that platform website.

Rebranding an existing website also allows the brand to project a more modern image and creates an opportunity to redefine its mission and purpose. 

Yet despite the long-term benefits of rebranding, some degree of negative impact on the website’s authority is inevitable.

The question is the degree of negative impact.

If the website rebrand process is correctly executed, you’ll likely experience a temporary drop in rankings for a few weeks as search engines recognize the change.

In the worst case scenario, a poorly executed migration could result in a brand disappearing from Google entirely for an extended period of time, or even permanently.

Even if the website rebrand is successful from an SEO perspective, there’s also a risk of hurting conversions if the new website design adds friction to the buyer journey.

Our goal is to mitigate the negative impact as much as possible. Fortunately, we’ve done plenty of website rebrands for B2B SaaS clients and have a proven step by step process.

In this post, we’ll share our step by step process along with critical checklists to ensure your SEO authority is protected and even improved. We also identify and remove friction in the buyer journey so that conversion rates remain stable or even outperform the previous website.

Assembling The Right Team For A SaaS Rebrand

A website that effectively drives conversions is aesthetically pleasing, technically accurate, and aligns with the user journey by delivering the right message at the right time.

Each of those three elements requires a specialized skill set, making the hiring process tricky. A team that specializes exclusively in one area (e.g., aesthetics, technical accuracy, buyer journey optimization) could deliver a website that’s excellent in one area but lacks in the other two, rendering the website ineffective.  

For example, a web design agency can deliver an aesthetically pleasing website, though it might overlook critical SEO elements, like internal linking, costing the brand rankings in the search results. 

Similarly, an SEO agency might deliver a technically accurate website that ranks for important keywords but lacks a compelling narrative and polished brand image. 

This is why hiring multiple specialized agencies to collaborate on a website migration can often lead to mistakes, as each has its own priorities, systems, and processes.

To avoid these problems, we designed Powered By Search as a full service agency that employs experts in each respective task (e.g., SEO, website design, website development, etc.). 

Each individual on our team is an expert in his/her respective field, though all of our team members work from the same playbook and understand how their role fits within the larger project. Working from the same playbook ensures everyone is moving towards the same goal and no step is overlooked.  

It’s also important that all internal stakeholders are on the same page before beginning the website rebrand, so our first step is assembling all stakeholders from the client’s team to set expectations. All parties must realize the potential risks of a rebrand and understand that a temporary dip in performance is inevitable.

These are the specific stakeholders we bring together from both the client’s team as well as team members from Powered By Search for the initial website rebrand discussion:

• SEO leaders: Provide technical SEO advice to mitigate ranking drops.
• Web design/development leaders: Deliver an aesthetic design and ensure the website is functional.
• Marketing team: Ensure the website aligns with the user journey and that users see the right message at the right time.
• Executives: Ensure the website projects the desired brand vision and narrative.

Step by Step Playbook For SaaS Rebranding 

We have used the step by step process outlined below to help several SaaS companies execute website rebrands. 

Migration Process (Benchmark and Baseline)

Before making any changes, assess the current website performance as this baseline will be essential to monitoring performance during and following the migration, and it can also be helpful for identifying issues and troubleshooting.

Here are the specific baseline metrics we assess:

• Branded keywords and corresponding search volume
• Rankings for critical search terms (the highest converting, most relevant search terms)
• Traffic for each page
• User engagement (time on site, pages visited, etc.)

For example, here’s an example of the spreadsheet we used to monitor the weekly traffic for all pages on a recent website migration we executed for a client.

Risk Assessment and Mitigation Planning

Every rebrand has some risk, and there will be a degree of performance decline in the immediate weeks following the migration.

Clearly communicate this fact to each stakeholder involved in the rebrand to avoid any surprises in the aftermath of the migration and ensure that performance goals are adjusted accordingly.

Otherwise, some team members may take drastic actions to combat the initial performance decline, which could ultimately result in more harm than help.

In fact, we do a three month organic search traffic forecast to solidify expectations and ensure each stakeholder understands the degree of impact.  

Technical Migration

From a tactical standpoint, here are the main tasks we’re executing before and during the migration.

Identify Pages to Deindex

The first step to executing a technical migration is auditing the blog posts on the existing site and identifying which pages should not be migrated to the new website.

For example, pages with few links and unhelpful content create bloat and negatively impact SEO performance. Instead of migrating these pages, make a list and deindex them.

Consolidate Duplicate/Repetitive Content

When migrating content, consolidate multiple pages covering the same topic into a single, comprehensive page. 

This step is particularly important if you’re rolling multiple websites into a single website, as each website may have its own blog post on the same topic, For example, Website A, B, and C may each have a blog post on Cybersecurity 101. Before consolidating Website A, B, and C into Platform Company’s Website, each of the three unique blog posts on Cybersecurity 101 must be consolidated into a single guide that will be placed on Platform Company’s Website. 

Even within individual websites, there may be repetitive or duplicate content. For example, Website A may have several posts about Cybersecurity 101 that must be consolidated before the migration.

To consolidate content, create 301 redirects from all original URLs to the new consolidated page. For example, if you have three blog posts about link building, combine their unique insights into one definitive guide, and then implement 301 redirects from the inidivdual link building blog posts to the new ultimate guide on link building. 

301 redirects preserve SEO value while cleaning up duplicate content. Be sure to maintain important backlinks and monitor traffic to the consolidated page after migration.

Content Relevancy Audit

Some content on the old website may reflect dated vision, ideas, and even service offerings. 

For example, if an SEO agency acquires a PPC agency, its content regarding service scope (and potentially service ideas and vision) should also be updated accordingly. 

Make a list of all of these blog posts that will need to be updated following the migration and create notes on specific aspects of them that need to be updated.

Update Internal Links

Internal links help users navigate your website, but perhaps more importantly, they’re critical to SEO performance as they allow search engine crawlers to identify and index your pages in search results. 

Check that each internal link will point users to a page on the new website rather than the old one.

Updating branded anchor text with the new brand name is also important. For example, if the old brand name was “Brand A” and the new one is “Brand B,” all mentions of “Brand A” should be changed to “Brand B.”

Update External Links

Update as many external links as possible to direct users to the new website rather than the old one.  

Start with third-party websites you can easily change yourself, like G2 and Capterra. Ensure that any brand mentions are also updated to the new brand name. This also applies to brands you have an integration or partnership with.

• Start with profiles you control (G2, Capterra)
• Contact integration partners and close collaborators
• Focus on updating anchor text that uses your old brand name
• Prioritize backlinks from high-authority domains

Regarding organic external links (e.g., links placed in a blog post pointing to your website), it’s best to update each of them to the new website brand name (if it uses the brand name as anchor text) and URL to avoid confusing search engines.

Of course, most larger websites have thousands of external links, and updating every single one is unrealistic. Instead, create a list of the 100 highest authority links and concentrate your team’s efforts on updating those links. 

Here’s exactly how we approached this challenge for one particular client:

Updating Google Search Console

Add both your old and new domains to Google Search Console for comprehensive migration tracking. The tool lets you verify domain ownership, monitor indexing status, and track search performance during the transition. 

Running separate crawls with and without blog content helps identify technical issues specific to different content types and ensures proper redirection across your site architecture.

Post Migration Checks

Some website functions will inevitably break, or errors will arise. The best approach to mitigating negative impact is to catch and solve issues immediately.  

Frequently recrawl the website using Google Search Console, checking for 404, 403, and 500 errors. We also check that critical technical aspects of the website (e.g., buttons on the demo sign-up page) are functioning properly and users can navigate the website as intended.

Additionally, here are three spreadsheets we create before the migration and use to monitor the migration progress: 

• Target keywords for migrated blog posts: Create a list of all the blog posts you’re migrating and notate the current ranking of that target keyword then track its ranking position on the new website. 
• Index and coverage state of blog posts on the new website: Create a list of all the blog posts migrating to the new website and then track their index (whether or not they appear in Google’s search results) and coverage state (whether the Google Bot can find them) on the new website.
• Index and coverage state of blog posts on the old website: You can duplicate the spreadsheet above, though this one should track the index (whether or not they appear in Google’s search results) and coverage state (whether the Google Bot can find them) of each migrated blog post on the old website.

User Experience and Journey Mapping

The key to a high converting website is showing prospects the right messaging and providing the right resources at the right time.

Our SaaS website best practices  guide discusses our SaaS Website Authority Architecture framework, which is how we design and develop a website to align with how prospects experience the buyer journey.

Get the SaaS Authority Architecture Framework

Optimize Your SaaS Website for Maximum Conversions.

Mapping out the user journey is critical to ensure you maintain (or improve) the conversion rate on the new website.

For existing websites that have already completed this exercise, this step primarily reassesses and updates the user journey before transferring it to the new website.

However, we’ve also helped clients roll multiple websites (e.g., acquired brands) into a single platform company’s website, and the user journey for each product is often slightly different.

This presents a more challenging scenario as you’ll have to construct the platform company’s website to accommodate the buyer journeys of multiple personas seeking different solutions. 

If you overlook this step, existing customers of the acquired brands may be confused and frustrated if they can’t find what they’re looking for, and you’ll lose new potential prospects in the buyer journey. 

Post-Migration Growth Opportunities

Following the migration, there will be plenty of new content opportunities as you’ll need to communicate new service offerings (particularly if the rebrand involves an acquisition) and brand positioning.

Therefore, create a list of new potential content topics before the migration and then tackle these content topics following the migration. Now is also a great time to refer back to the list of blog posts created during the Content Branding Audit step and update those blog posts to reflect your new positioning and service offerings. 

Your new content topics will also provide new link building opportunities, so create a list of potential backlinks to pursue for the new domain. 

Following the content migration, you may need to adjust your paid media strategy to ensure campaigns reflect the updated brand messaging and product/service offerings. This includes the ad copy messaging, the lead magnets, and potentially the ad creative.

Therefore, audit all of the following ad accounts and ensure they reflect the new branding:

• Google Ads
• Microsoft Ads
• Bing Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Meta Ads

You’ll also likely have to reconfigure HubSpot and any other tracking you may have set up. 

SaaS Rebranding Case Study

We’ve helped several B2B SaaS companies navigate the rebranding process using the system outlined above, and here’s a brief overview of how the collaboration worked and the results.

Consolidating Multiple Acquired Brands Into A Single Website

This client recently acquired three brands and rolled them into the platform company’s website.

We spearheaded the website rebrand and migration and here were the main goals:

1. Retain the authority and traffic of each of the acquired brands and strengthen the platform company’s website.
2. Rearchitect the platform company’s website to accommodate the buyer journeys of each of the acquired brands to maintain (and improve) conversion rates.
3. Ensure existing users have an excellent first experience (both technically and aesthetically) with the rebranded version of the company to prevent churn.

Before the website migration, this client was collaborating with a web development agency as well as a branding agency, and each contributor was operating with a different playbook. 

Operating in silos created confusion and could have led to a disjointed, ineffective website.

Our first step was aligning contributors on the vision to ensure the final website delivered a cohesive user experience. As a full service agency with experts in each respective role of the migration process, our team could speak the language of each collaborator and essentially play traffic controller to more effectively leverage the talents of each contributor.

Another challenge was ensuring the website architecture aligned with the user journey. 

As this project involved rolling multiple acquired brands into a single website, we used the Authority Architecture framework to map out the user journey for each acquired brand. Then, we arranged the structure of the new website to ensure every prospect received the right message and resources at the right time to maintain conversions.

It was also particularly important to cross-check the content across the new websites (and the platform company’s website) and consolidate similar blog posts to ensure we weren’t sending similar or duplicate content to the new website. 

Then, we deployed the step by step process above and saw a 20% increase in traffic for the next six months relative to the previous year’s metrics. 

This client also experienced a 25% increase in new users relative to the same time period from the previous year. 

B2B SaaS Rebranding Best Practices and Tips

Most B2B SaaS companies executing a rebrand know they need extensive technical checklists, but checklists are just one element.

To recap the key takeaways from this piece, here are a few of the most critical factors required for a successful rebrand.

Ensure The Right People Are Aligned

The SEO, branding, web development, marketing, and executive team all need to be aligned to ensure the website delivers a cohesive user experience that is not only functional but also effectively leads users to the point of sale. 

Set Expectations

Stakeholders must understand that performance will decline to some degree in the weeks following the migration. Document the existing website’s performance and then create a forecast to solidify expectations. This will ensure that each key stakeholder is prepared and will adjust goals accordingly.   

Use Checklists For Each Step

Most brands have checklists, though make sure each team understands which checklists they are responsible for and that they’re tracking the right metrics. 

Steps are often overlooked when one team is under the impression another is responsible for a specific task.  

Explore Growth Opportunities Following The Migration 

Following the migration, there are likely plenty of expansion opportunities, including content updating and new backlink opportunities. 

Make a list of these opportunities and promptly attack them to ensure customers understand what you now offer. This content also indicates your domain expertise to search engines, which will help you rank for new keywords.

Partner With A B2B SaaS Rebranding Specialist

To avoid missing a step or overlooking key factors, like rearchitecting the website to consider the buyer journey, consider reaching out to the team at Powered By Search. 

Our team consists of specialists in each of the roles involved in a rebranding project, including SEO, content marketing, and web development, and they’ve all worked together to execute multiple SaaS rebranding projects. 

This means they know their role in the rebranding process and how it fits in with the rest of the project, ensuring the final product delivers a cohesive branded experience.

Reach out to us today to discuss your rebranding goals, and we can help you assemble a roadmap for a rebrand and how to get started.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• The Ultimate SaaS Rebrand Checklist: Steps to a Successful Business Transformation
• 20 Examples of the Best SaaS Testimonials Pages

Related Articles

• Your Product Is the Marketing: How to Build a Testimonial Flywheel That Sells for You
• The Dodo Brand: How We Must Adapt to Survive the Future of Marketing – InboundCon
• InboundTO 31 Recap: An Introduction to UX/UI Design

Yet, we often find new opportunities to improve campaign efficiency by analyzing why prospects are dropping out. 

We begin exploring new demand generation channels only after correcting bottlenecks revealed by this analysis.

There isn’t a single “best” channel for B2B SaaS demand generation as it depends on your target audience and how they experience the buyer journey.

To help you improve the efficiency of your demand generation program, we’ll discuss:

1. When it’s time to add new channels to your demand generation program and the specific analysis we conduct to assess the efficiency of your current process.  
2. How to decide which marketing channels to add to your demand generation program. 
3. How to test and implement a new channel, and then measure its success.

When Should You Add New Marketing Channels?

Most B2B SaaS marketers add new marketing channels to their demand generation program when they can no longer improve campaign performance through iterative testing.

However, the root cause of low conversions probably isn’t in the campaign itself.

You’re really losing conversions between each campaign. There might be disjointed messaging, or the CTA and offer are irrelevant to the prospect’s current stage in the buyer journey.

The key to improving conversions is taking a holistic view of the buyer journey and removing bottlenecks.

We encourage marketers to reframe how they think about demand generation. An effective demand generation program isn’t run by a single demand generation team. An effective demand generation program requires the marketing, sales, and RevOps teams to work together, because prospects experience touchpoints from each of those teams throughout the buyer journey.

Before adding new channels to a demand generation program, our first order of business is removing bottlenecks from the buyer journey where prospects are dropping out of the funnel. 

To remove bottlenecks, we first identify each buying committee member and use our buyer persona template in conjunction with the positioning canvas to identify key pain points each buying committee member feels and why they buy your product over the competition.

Then, we use HubSpot to trace how they currently experience the buyer journey (e.g., which channels they use and when). 

This data informs how to improve the messaging and copywriting of each channel and recalibrate the call to action to provide the appropriate next step in the buyer journey (rather than asking for a demo signup when they aren’t yet ready) to ensure prospects move to the next stage of the buyer journey.  

This approach to demand generation doesn’t just increase lead volume – it also elevates lead quality and accelerates revenue by helping prospects move through the buyer journey faster. 

Once you plug leaks in your funnel and increase the efficiency of each channel, you can profitably spend more money on each channel. Therefore, doubling down on existing channels may be more profitable than expanding to new channels.

Adding New Channels And Scaling Your Demand Generation Program

Only after we’ve optimized each stage of the demand generation program do we consider adding more channels to the demand generation program. Once we have optimized each step of the buyer journey, here’s how we add identify, implement, and measure new channels.

Step 1: Channel Selection and Strategy

As every market is slightly different, the best way to compile a list of the best potential channels is by looking at your competitors.

Which channels are they investing in, and how much and for how long have they invested in each?

If your competitors have invested a lot of money in a specific channel for a long time, it’s probably working. Some platforms, like Meta and LinkedIn, offer ad libraries where you can see your competitors’ ads and history. 

Google also has an ads library that you can use to look up keywords your competitors are bidding on and their historical ads.

We have a separate resource that provides a detailed analysis of each marketing channel we use for demand generation if you want to learn more about the pros and cons of each. 

As we take a holistic approach to accelerating revenue, another piece of information to consider is how and where your competitors position that channel in their marketing funnel.

For example, are they using Google Ads primarily for top or bottom of funnel traffic? How is it connected with the rest of their marketing strategy? 

While your competitors likely don’t have the perfect marketing strategy, reviewing and analyzing common strategies across most competitors is a good starting point to identify channels and strategies worth testing.

Step 2: Implementation 

After you have a list of the most common channels across your competitors and approximate data on how much and how long they’ve invested in that channel, the next step is to set up campaigns and run split tests on the top few channels. 

In addition to testing different channels, you can also test different offers and lead magnets.  

Start small and use Google Analytics and HubSpot to see which campaign generates the best results. Specifically, we look at metrics like CPC and CPL.

Once you’ve identified a winning channel and implemented a full rollout, it’s time to go back to the first step and fully integrate it with the rest of the buyer journey. 

As you’re monitoring channel performance, focus on identifying and correcting revenue bottlenecks that are causing prospects to drop out of the funnel when they reach that channel.

For example, we set up pathways in HubSpot to monitor where people drop out of the funnel and then correct critical touchpoints the data reveals.

You can also use these HubSpot pathways to ensure proper cross channel coordination because it will show how that channel fits into the entire buyer journey. 

For example, how are people arriving at that channel? Are they arriving on a BOFU page from a TOFU blog post? Is the call to action the offer they want at that point in the journey? 

Step 3: Measuring Success 

Channel-specific metrics like CPL and CAC are helpful, but they don’t accurately reflect revenue. 

Even the closed won rate isn’t a perfect measurement of success because lead values differ. 

For example, a channel generating ten leads per month with an LTV of $10,000 is less valuable than a channel generating two leads each month with an LTV of $100,000.  

This is why we use revenue impact metrics to measure success.

Specifically, we look at which channels and regions have driven the most pipeline revenue, as well as which solutions have led to the highest closed won revenue.

We also look at pipeline velocity to understand how quickly prospects move through the buyer journey from first click to closed won deal. If pipeline velocity is low, we use HubSpot to understand where prospects are stalling and remove friction.

Once we know which channels drive the most revenue and have removed friction across channels to expedite the process, we look at the conversion rates of each individual marketing channel and test messaging, copy, and offers to ensure prospects receive the right message at the right time.

The Next Step To Improving Demand Generation

If you’re considering adding more marketing channels to your demand generation program, first take the steps outlined in this post to ensure you’ve maximized the opportunity in your existing marketing channels.

If your marketing channels are still underperforming, reach out to our team of experts for additional help. We’ve helped dozens of B2B SaaS companies improve the efficacy of their demand generation programs and can help you identify revenue leakage and opportunities to improve performance. 

Reach out to our team today to identify bottlenecks and improve performance now.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• Top 6 B2B SaaS Demand Generation Agencies in 2025
• Must-Have Skills for a B2B SaaS Demand Generation Manager
• Top Demand Generation Tools to Boost Leads, Engagement, and Business Growth
• 8 High-Impact B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies for 2025
• Stages of the B2B SaaS Sales & Marketing Funnel
• B2B SaaS Funnel Conversion Benchmarks

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• How Demand Generation Boosts Customer Acquisition and Profitability for B2B SaaS
• The SaaS Demand Generation Campaign Blueprint (And Mistakes)
• The Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation

The only problem is that you need to know why your landing page isn’t converting before you test it.

Is the problem the traffic quality? The CTA? The value proposition/pain point? 

If you’re blindly guessing why it isn’t converting and testing different elements randomly, you’ll probably waste a lot of ad budget.

To help you accurately identify why your landing page isn’t performing and solve the problem, here’s the step by step process we use to audit SaaS landing pages. 

SaaS Landing Page Optimization Best Practices

Below is the checklist we use to audit SaaS landing pages. 

Align Pre-Click Messaging

Have you ever clicked on an ad only to land on a page that doesn’t deliver the resource or asset you anticipated? 

Most SaaS companies aren’t making obvious mistakes, like using click-bait messaging to attract leads to an irrelevant landing page.

Instead, pre-click messaging mistakes are often subtle. Here are a few examples: 

• Benefit/pain point messaging is misaligned. For example, the landing page may promote a different benefit than the landing page (as seen in the example below). Or, the landing page messaging may simply be too vague.

• The pre-click messaging implies education in the form of a free resource whereas the landing page only offers a demo. 

Changing the design (colors, fonts, etc.) from the pre-click ad/content to the landing page can also be jarring to prospects and cost conversions.

Instead, maintain consistent messaging, offers, and branding across the pre-click messaging and the landing page. 

Align Messaging With ICP

The landing page messaging should target your ideal customer profile, but this simple concept becomes complicated for SaaS companies with multiple ICPs for two reasons:

1. The product(s) are ideal for multiple use cases, and/or 
2. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the buyer journey at different points (e.g., a CTO, individual engineers, etc.).

As a result, the landing pages target the wrong persona.

For example, we recently audited a landing page attracting small business owners, though the testimonials were from enterprise customers. 

Another mistake we see is marketers leaving the messaging intentionally vague as they know that multiple stakeholders or ICPs arrive land on the page.  

However, vague messaging won’t convert any of your prospects. 

For example, if you have project management software and serve both agencies and SaaS companies, vague messaging like “get more done in less time” isn’t nearly as compelling as “improve team collaboration to deliver a seamless client experience.”

The solution is to identify your ICP and the stakeholders involved at each stage of the process. Then, create landing pages for each specific ICP. 

Optimize Copy To Address Pain Points And Benefits

SaaS landing pages that explain features tend to have low conversion rates because they don’t communicate how the product will solve the visitor’s problem.

For example, this payment processing platform has an estimates feature. It’s tempting to talk about how the estimates feature works, how its dashboards work, and other capabilities it offers. 

Yet prospects only care about how it will benefit them, so the messaging discusses what prospects care about – profit-driven, repeatable estimates. 

As you scroll down, we talk about the feature in more detail, but always from a benefit perspective. Instead of discussing how the estimates to budget linking feature works, we discuss how it will make the prospect’s business more efficient. 

So, instead of discussing features on your landing pages, discuss the main pain points your product solves for existing customers and the benefits it gives them. 

It’s also important to refer back to the ICP each landing page is targeting, as each will have slightly different pain points.

For example, a CTO may value team efficiency benefits, whereas an individual engineer may value ease of use benefits. 

Similarly, different industries (e.g., restaurants, clinics, etc.) may have different pain points and value different benefits. 

Simplify Forms By Taking A Progressive Profiling Approach

Sales wants as much information as possible on any prospect so they can tailor their pitch accordingly and close prospects more efficiently. 

However, if you ask for too much information at once, right fit prospects may abandon the form altogether, resulting in fewer total conversions.

Instead, we recommend a progressive profiling approach where you collect more information over time.

First, ask for their name and email. 

Once a prospect provides that information, enroll them into a nurture sequence or use a third-party data enrichment to build out their profile progressively so you can learn more about their company, role, team size, and industry.

A Clear Call To Action Placed Above The Fold

There are common mistakes we see with CTAs that lower conversions:

• Obscure Placement: The CTA button is too small or placed below the fold. 
• Unclear Messaging: It’s easy to over-optimize the CTA text, yet doing so can make the CTA unclear. For example, “start streamlining sales” doesn’t clearly communicate what will happen next. Are they scheduling a demo? Starting a free trial? Downloading a lead magnet?     

Instead, clearly place the CTA above the fold and ensure it takes up a significant amount of real estate on the page (at least 30% or more). 

The text surrounding the CTA button should also communicate what happens after a prospect takes the next step. For example, if it’s “schedule a demo,” state the demo length or what they’ll learn. 

Here’s an example of a well-optimized CTA:

Optimize Visual Design For Clarity

Many SaaS landing pages are littered with unnecessary distractions that create friction in the user experience. 

For example, in the SaaS landing page below, users have to close the cookie bars and chatbots before they can see your value proposition.

The mobile experience is even worse: 

Another challenge is poorly organized copy. 

While longer landing pages aren’t bad, the text should be organized in a way that is easy to skim and clearly communicates the value.

Here’s a great example of a clean, clear landing page: 

Deliver An Equally Seamless Mobile Experience

Many prospects are probably viewing your page on their mobile devices, so apply all of the best practices mentioned above to the mobile version as well.

The form fill should also be easy to fill out on a mobile device. Prospects will likely abandon it if it’s too small or difficult to type.

You can also compare mobile and desktop conversion rates. If the mobile conversion rate is significantly lower than the desktop conversion rate, revisit the design best practices above.   

Optimize Post Click Experience

Prospects need to attend a demo or use the product during the free trial before they’ll convert, and the post-click experience heavily impacts whether or not they’ll proceed in the customer journey.

If the thank you page is confusing and doesn’t deliver what prospects want, they’ll likely abandon it and drop out of the buyer journey. 

For example, if someone clicks to schedule a demo but doesn’t immediately see a calendar to schedule a time (e.g., they have to scroll for it) on the thank you page, they’re less likely to schedule a demo.  

Another mistake is sending prospects to a landing page that says they will be emailed a calendar link. If prospects have to search for the email in their inbox, you’ll likely lose them as they become distracted by other emails.  

Instead, the thank you page should give prospects what they signed up for and the next steps to take to proceed in the buyer journey.

Here’s an example of a well optimized thank you page following an asset download.

After receiving the asset or scheduling the demo, keep prospects engaged through email marketing. 

For demo signups, we use a 14 day nurture sequence of five emails, three of which illustrate how the product solves three relevant pain points. 

When prospects see how the product can solve their problems, they’re more likely to show up to the demo as they realize it’s the solution they need. The demo will also be more productive as prospects will be familiar with how the product works and can ask more advanced questions, requiring less follow-up after the demo. 

If a prospect signed up for a free trial, the nurture sequence can educate them on using the product to achieve specific outcomes. Assuming your product delivers meaningful value, it’s a no-brainer for right-fit prospects to convert when they use it correctly. 

Another often overlooked opportunity to improve conversions is sending a no-show sequence that immediately offers another opportunity to book the meeting if they didn’t attend. 

For free trials, we offer an extension so they can continue using it if they need more time and provide links to resources to help them use it effectively.

SaaS Landing Page Examples

We’ve discussed specific best practices for creating a high-converting SaaS landing page, and while there isn’t a single perfect landing page template, here’s a checklist of components every landing page should include:

• Headline with a clear value proposition
• Testimonials/proof points from your target audience
• Pain points/benefits
• Clear CTA

If you want some inspiration as you create your own landing page, here are a few examples of landing pages we’ve improved.

Use Case Examples

• Globalization Partners: Highlighting mistakes in current landing pages and proposing optimized versions. https://www.globalization-partners.com/meridian-contractor-lp/ 
• Full Fabric: Before and after mock-ups to showcase improvements in messaging and form simplicity. https://www.fullfabric.com/book-demo 
• Albi: Addressing issues like visual clutter, form complexity, and messaging alignment. https://go.albiware.com/book-a-demo 

Get More Help Improving Landing Page Conversion Rates

Above is the step by step process we use to improve SaaS landing page conversion rates, but there isn’t a single template perfect for every landing page. 

Your product, demo structure, the prospect’s familiarity with your product, and a variety of other factors impact the nuanced differences in the copy and structure of your landing page.

Therefore, if you want more personalized help improving your landing page conversion rates, reach out to our team today. We’ve run hundreds of tests across dozens of SaaS landing pages and can help you dial in yours. 

Reach out for a free marketing plan today. 

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• B2B SaaS Landing Page Statistics & Benchmarks
• B2B SaaS Landing Page Checklist
• 10 Examples of The Best SaaS Landing Pages

Related Articles

• The Ultimate Landing Page Checklist
• Boring, unsexy, incredibly effective: How to improve your SaaS landing page conversion rate
• Does Your Landing Page Match the Scent of Your Ad?

This is a common issue we hear from prospects, and it’s a tricky situation to solve because there are plenty of reasons why a person might visit your website or become a lead and never pull the trigger to become a customer.

Are you attracting unqualified prospects?

Is sales dropping the ball on demo calls?

Is the landing page offer misaligned with the ad driving the traffic?

Running A/B tests is a common best practice to increase conversions, though without understanding why prospects aren’t converting, most of these tests fail to produce meaningful improvements.

In this post, we’ll show you how to audit the entire conversion funnel to understand:

1. Where prospects drop off within your funnel
2. The friction that’s causing them to drop off 
3. How to rework campaigns to deliver the right messaging at the right time.

This methodical approach will help you understand which elements of your funnel to test and potential tests that would meaningfully increase conversion rates. 

1. Pre-Click Targeting

Some funnels we audit are well constructed, but the messaging in the ads and content driving traffic to the funnel attracts the wrong audience. 

Unfortunately, regardless of how well-optimized your funnel is, you won’t be able to convert wrong-fit prospects (or, if you do manage to convert wrong-fit prospects, you’ll end up with customer support headaches and negative reviews).

Most companies know more or less who their best customers are, but a common mistake is that the ICP is too loosely defined, leading to vague pre-click messaging. 

Vague messaging creates two problems:

1. The messaging isn’t compelling enough to maximize clicks from right-fit prospects and
2. Some poor-fit prospects click onto your landing page out of curiosity only to realize it’s irrelevant, leading to lower conversions and wasted ad spend.

We have a detailed process for identifying right-fit prospects, including identifying the specific decision-maker and stakeholder titles, when and how they become involved in the buyer journey, and their unique pain points and benefits that would resonate with them.

We have a separate resource detailing the customer research process we execute for clients at the beginning of each engagement, and it’s key information we use to direct our pre-click messaging to attract the right prospects to enter the funnel.

2. The Landing Page

If a prospect clicks on an ad, the pre-click messaging and promise clearly resonate with prospects.

Therefore, here are the main reasons a prospect wouldn’t convert after arriving on your landing page are:

1. The pre-click and landing page messaging are misaligned. The copy should mention the same pain points and benefits as the pre-click messaging. If that messaging won the click, it clearly resonated with the prospects who clicked on it, so don’t change it. 
2. The landing page is cluttered or vague. Prospects won’t understand the value of proceeding in the buyer journey. Here’s an example of a landing page where there are simply too many different benefits and value propositions, leaving the prospect feeling confused:  
3. It’s unclear how prospects should take action and/or what happens next. Ensure the CTA is positioned above the fold and it’s clear exactly how prospects can access what they clicked on the landing page to access. The value prospects will receive by proceeding should also be clear. For example, this landing page doesn’t indicate what happens next. Are they getting on a 30 minute demo? Are they receiving a free trial? A free resource?
4. There’s too much friction for prospects to move forward. If your form is too long, people won’t convert. Instead, take a progressive profiling approach by asking for just their name and email and then earn more information about them through nurture. For example, this landing page has too many different fields for prospects to fill out, which could cause right-fit prospects to abandon the landing page:

The most common overarching problem is that marketers simply over-optimize their landing pages. 

Instead, keep it simple. Echo the exact pre-click messaging, make it clear what will happen if prospects proceed, and make the process of proceeding (e.g., form fill) frictionless.

3. MQL Stage 

Many conversions are lost between the time a prospect fills out a lead form and attends a demo. 

A confusing thank you page is the first mistake that can prevent prospects from reaching the next stage of the buyer journey.

For example, this thank you page doesn’t give prospects any indication of what will happen next or how they can move forward in the buyer journey.

Best practices vary depending on the type of thank-you page.

For demo sign-up thank you pages, place a calendar booking link front and center above the fold. Avoid having a sales team member reach out to arrange a call, as that adds unnecessary friction to the process.

Once prospects schedule a call, the second thank you page can direct them to other resources to prepare for the call, like links to content answering commonly asked questions. This will help prospects show up for the demo prepared with more advanced questions to expedite the buyer journey. 

For thank you pages following a resource download, tell them how they can access the resource (e.g., it arrives in their email in 15 minutes) and introduce them to your solution. 

For example, if prospects signed up for a free template, and you have software that automates the task the template solves, you can include a three minute demo of your software by illustrating how it makes the process even easier than the template.  

In addition to the thank you page, ongoing communication before the scheduled demo or following the resource download is essential to keeping prospects engaged so that they show up. 

Our solution to keep prospects engaged is the 14 day nurture sequence. 

This is a series of five emails sent over a two-week period that educates the prospect on how the product solves three of their biggest pain points. 

We have a separate resource discussing how we develop these email sequences, but the most important thing is ensuring your emails highlight your prospect’s most relevant pain points.

If your emails have low engagement, it’s often because the copywriting with the emails discusses pain points that are either irrelevant or too vague. 

To ensure you’re discussing the right pain points in language that resonates with your prospects, revisit the audience research process in step one to better understand the problems customers purchase your product to solve. 

If you have multiple ICPs, you may need to segment your nurture sequences to ensure the pain points are specific and directly relevant to the prospect receiving the emails.

4. SQL Stage

Following the demo, prospects that didn’t convert should receive a follow-up to continue moving them through the buyer journey. 

A sales team member often manually sends this follow-up, though even the most diligent people occasionally forget to do so. Or, sales may send a follow-up at a similar time as marketing, overwhelming prospects with too much communication.

The solution to ensure every prospect receives a well timed follow-up with effective messaging is to work together with sales to set up automated follow-up sequences through a CRM like HubSpot and Salesforce.

In the automated follow-up emails, provide answers to FAQs, case studies, white papers, and other resources dedicated to specific objections and questions that arise following a demo.

5. Opportunity Stage Optimizations

After prospects attend a demo and you provide them with sales enablement materials addressing common objections and questions, the next step is for sales to have a more personal touch with these prospects and identify and answer specific questions or objections holding prospects back from taking the final step in the buyer journey. 

If the prospect says “no” because the timing isn’t right or they don’t have the budget, most teams part ways with these opportunities. 

However, if circumstances change (e.g., budgets increase, priorities shift, etc.), there’s still an opportunity to convert right-fit prospects at a later date. To re-engage these prospects, we enter them into the dead lead reviver reactivation sequence. 

Then, they receive an automated single-line email such as:

“Are you still looking for a solution to (problem)?”

The cadence of the dead lead reviver depends on the end-to-end buying cycle for your product. 

For example, if it’s a 30 day buying cycle, send a reactivation campaign around the 30 day mark. For longer buying cycles, you can send a reactivation campaign about once per quarter. 

6. Post-Acquisition Optimization

One of the easiest ways to increase the ROI of your marketing efforts is increasing customer retention. Many customers churn because the product experience isn’t congruent with expectations set during the marketing and sales process or they never figured out how to use the product. 

The first step to preventing churn is delivering a seamless onboarding process that helps prospects understand how to use the product effectively for their specific use case. 

Prospects just spent at least three to six months in the sales cycle communicating one-on-one with a salesperson, so they’ll expect to receive a similarly personalized onboarding experience. 

Leveraging data from recently closed deals to understand how prospects experience the buyer journey is another often overlooked opportunity to improve your future marketing efforts.

For example, most people think this is how prospects experience the buyer journey.

Yet there are multiple ways a prospect navigates the buyer journey. 

And keep in mind that prospects don’t conform to your version of the buyer journey. 

Therefore, understanding how prospects experience the buyer journey will help you provide them with the resources and messaging at the right time so that they move through the journey more efficiently.  

The problem is that accurately tracking each step of a buyer’s journey can be tricky, especially if you have a six to twelve month buying cycle, multiple lead magnets, and multiple customer segments. 

Some SaaS companies track first touches with the brand through Google Analytics, and then they may track a first call with the sales team in a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce.

Yet few companies have a complete overview of how customers experience the buyer journey. For example, the sales team might forget to log some of the calls, or some lead magnets may not be accounted for in the journey. 

To solve these problems, we work with our clients to automate as much tracking as possible and then we can also identify any tracking that can’t be attributed and provide support to help the team stay disciplined in tracking these aspects. 

How To Further Improve Your SaaS Conversion Funnel 

The customer journey for enterprise SaaS companies can last anywhere from six to eighteen months, making it challenging to pinpoint exactly where you lost prospects and why.

While you can spend time experimenting on your own to identify weak links in your buyer journey, you can also reach out to our team of SaaS marketing experts for more personalized assistance. 

Our team works with dozens of enterprise B2B SaaS companies and our experience can expedite the process of identifying bottlenecks and solving them.

Reach out today to improve your SaaS conversion rates.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• What is a MQL in B2B SaaS Marketing?
• Top Demand Generation Tools to Boost Leads, Engagement, and Business Growth
• Top 6 B2B SaaS Demand Generation Agencies in 2025
• 8 High-Impact B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies for 2025
• Must-Have Skills for a B2B SaaS Demand Generation Manager
• Stages of the B2B SaaS Sales & Marketing Funnel

Related Articles

• Webinar – Optimizing Emails for Lead Generation Success
• The Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation
• The SaaS Demand Generation Campaign Blueprint (And Mistakes)

Yet these two teams have different agendas. Specifically, the PR team’s primary objective is boosting brand awareness, whereas the SEO team’s primary objective is earning a link.

If these two teams worked together to ensure each campaign earned both a link and maximum brand awareness from the right target audience, you could potentially double the ROI of each campaign.

In this post, we’ll share our step by step process for educating the traditional PR team on link building, including which types of publications are most beneficial from an SEO standpoint, creating link-worthy content, and the types of links to acquire.     

The Difference Between Digital PR and Traditional PR

Traditional PR is a marketing strategy designed to generate maximum brand awareness.

Digital PR is a marketing strategy designed to generate targeted brand awareness and boost SEO strength through link building. 

To illustrate this concept, the goal of a traditional PR campaign may be landing a quote in a large lifestyle magazine that reaches hundreds of thousands or millions of readers.

In contrast, a digital PR campaign’s goal may be earning a handful of link placements across several respected cybersecurity blogs. 

Yes, the lifestyle magazine might earn more total reach, but those readers likely won’t visit your website if there isn’t a link to it. Additionally, they might not be relevant prospects – especially if you’re selling enterprise SaaS products. 

In contrast, a brand mention and link placement on several cybersecurity blogs might earn less total reach, though it will likely send more relevant prospects to your website. The link itself will also boost SEO efforts.   

To further illustrate the difference between traditional PR and digital PR campaigns, here are some metrics used to measure each.

Traditional PR Metrics:

• Total views
• Engagement
• Third party mentions

Digital PR Metrics:

• Domain/Page Authority
• Traffic 
• Link type
• Leads/signups 

Should Every Traditional PR Campaign Align With SEO Efforts?

The answer to this question depends on the company’s goals. 

If the company is purely interested in brand awareness among the masses, aligning traditional PR efforts with SEO efforts may not make sense. However, most enterprise SaaS companies are not selling to the masses.

If the company’s primary goal is to drive more signups, trials, and revenue, aligning traditional PR teams with SEO is in everyone’s best interest, as traditional PR teams can tailor campaigns to send links to high-converting pages. 

In many cases, the only adjustment a PR professional must make is simply asking the publisher to include a link in the publication – a simple request that can deliver significant value to the SEO team and increase the total ROI of each PR campaign.  

While traditional PR teams are often weary of technical link building metrics, there are a few simple ways PR teams can align with SEO teams to maximize the benefit. Similarly, SEO teams can learn outreach strategies from the traditional PR team, as PR professionals are often more skilled at building genuine relationships with publishers.  

How To Align Traditional PR With SEO Teams 

Simply scheduling a monthly or quarterly meeting to discuss goals might sound like a good start, but without actionable tasks, it won’t lead to effective change.     

Instead, we align PR and SEO teams by providing a four part checklist for both SEO and PR teams. 

If both teams are using the same metrics to measure campaign success, you’re much more likely to successfully align both teams and ultimately achieve the company’s overarching growth goals. 

Step 1: Link Prospect Evaluation

The first step to aligning PR and SEO teams is using the same criteria to evaluate and choose partnership opportunities. 

As PR teams traditionally measure campaign success based on brand awareness and reach, they often prioritize high traffic websites. However, not all high traffic websites are credible or drive relevant traffic. 

Earning a link from a high traffic website with low credibility (like a foreign news website) likely won’t provide as much of an SEO boost as a link from a smaller yet more trusted and authoritative website (like an industry-relevant blog). 

Similarly, the traffic from a foreign news site likely won’t drive relevant prospects to your website – especially if you sell enterprise SaaS software. 

To ensure PR and SEO teams are aligned and targeting opportunities that are credible and generate relevant, substantial traffic, this is the four part checklist we use to qualify link partnership opportunities.

This checklist is separated into two categories: domain and page-level metrics.

Domain-level metrics evaluate the entire website, whereas page-level metrics evaluate the specific page you’re aiming to earn a link from.

Domain Level Metrics:

• Domain Rating (DR) (measures a website’s credibility): This is a third-party metric from Ahrefs based on the quality and quantity of links pointing to that website, which provides a snapshot of the domain’s overall credibility. A link from a high DR website will boost your website’s authority (and therefore, SEO rankings) more than a low DR website. 
• Domain Traffic (measures a website’s traffic): This metric measures the entire website’s total traffic. 

Page Level Metrics:

• URL Rating (UR) (measures a specific page’s credibility): Similar to domain rating, this measures the strength and authority of the specific page you’re aiming to get a link from. Pages with a high UR have a high quantity of quality links and, therefore, pass more authority to your website.  
• Page Traffic (measures a specific page’s traffic): This metric measures the total traffic the specific page you’re targeting receives. Obviously, a page with more traffic is more likely to send you more referral traffic than a page with less traffic.

After creating a list of potential link opportunities that match this criteria, manually evaluate each for thematic relevance. For example, if you sell a cybersecurity enterprise SaaS product, eliminate general lifestyle publications and instead prioritize trusted cybersecurity blogs.

Evaluating websites for thematic relevance is important for earning relevant referral traffic. Links from relevant websites also help search engines understand that your website is an authority on that topic, which can help it rank higher for industry-related keywords. 

For example, if search engines see many cybersecurity websites linking to you, they’ll realize your website is an authority in the cybersecurity industry and boost rankings for cybersecurity related keywords.

Once you have a list of thematically relevant websites that meet the domain and page level criteria, prioritize them first by domain level metrics and then by page level metrics. 

Step 2: Targeting and Content Strategy

Bloggers and journalists only link to other resources if they add value to their existing content. For example, if a piece of data allows them to prove a point or a unique opinion from an expert adds additional insight to their content, they often mention the source and link to it. 

The first step to earning links is therefore creating content or data that provides new insights that would improve the quality of a blogger or journalist’s work.

What Is Linkworthy Content?

Many PR teams create broadly appealing graphics that appeal to the general masses. 

For example, a PR team for a sales software company might create a visual and dynamic infographic of the most famous salespeople in history. This broad visual might be published in a general lifestyle magazine or another generic publication, and it likely will earn a high quantity of links. 

However, it likely won’t be published on a page that’s topically relevant (e.g., a blog post about the top sales software on a sales blog). Unfortunately, links from websites that aren’t topically relevant won’t meaningfully boost rankings for sales related keywords. 

Instead of creating broadly appealing content, look at your list of link prospects and create content that would meaningfully increase the value of those specific pieces of content. 

For example, we recently acquired a link from a page on WordStream discussing PPC for B2B SaaS companies. We had recently published a webinar on LinkedIn where our founder, Dev, discussed his unique point of view on a subtopic of this subject. 

We reached out to WordStream and asked if they wanted to include an extra paragraph, including Dev’s unique perspective on the topic. 

They agreed because they thought it was an original idea and would elevate the quality of their content. Within the pitch, we also mentioned that, if we helped them refresh their content, it might help their page rank higher because Google typically prioritizes fresh content.

Some specific types of link-worthy content include:

• Unique opinions from experts
• Unique data on popular industry topics
• Case studies and examples to support the writer’s points

In addition to creating new content, we also identify pages that are already effective at converting prospects and build links to these pages. 

For example, we may build links to bottom of the funnel blog posts that have proven particularly effective at driving demo signups. 

The tricky part is crafting a pitch that makes it valuable for link prospects to link to those pages. 

Step 3: Outreach Principles

Many PR professionals are excellent at building genuine relationships with journalists and bloggers, though they don’t always leverage these relationships to earn links. 

As building new relationships takes time, start with low-hanging fruit – identify journalists/bloggers your team has worked with to earn mentions yet hasn’t included a link to your website. 

Reach out to them and ask if they can also add a link to the brand mention. 

Another opportunity is to identify no follow links. No follow links don’t pass any SEO authority to your website, so simply reach out to the blogger/journalist/publisher you already have a relationship with and ask them if they can swap it for a follow link.

You can also reach out to publishers who organically mentioned or included a no follow link to your content and ask them if they’d consider adding a follow link.

For example, we found an unlinked mention on Forbes for our client, Elastic, and the publisher ultimately agreed to give them a follow link.

To improve your response rate, include something helpful to further incentivize them to swap the link for you. This could be updating a passage of the post or providing a quote with new insights. 

 Finally, if you notice a website has links to other content that is dated yet covers a similar topic as your fresh content, reach out (with a refreshed paragraph) and ask if they’d consider swapping it. In the pitch, mention that refreshing the content can help it rank higher in search results.  

After tackling these low-hanging fruit opportunities, reach out to new link prospects you identified in the previous steps. 

PR professionals are excellent at building genuine relationships, so simply ask them to request a followed link from the publisher. They don’t necessarily need to ask for a link on the initial outreach message, though they should request the link before the brand mention is placed on the website.  

It’s also important to provide an anchor text recommendation during the link placement negotiation. Anchor text is the word or phrase that contains the link to your page, and including keywords within the anchor text can help search engines better understand that your content is related to that keyword. 

Finally, be sure to specify the specific page you want the link to lead users to. While a link to your homepage can help boost the overall authority of your website’s domain, a link directly to a specific high value page on your website will help that specific page rank higher and is therefore more impactful.

This is why one step within our content promotion process is dedicated to carefully selecting the most impactful pages (e.g., those that produce the most conversions/rank for critical keywords) to send links to.

Step 4: Link Placement Score

Rather than using brand awareness and traffic as the primary metrics to measure the success of PR campaigns, we use the following link placement scoring system to align PR and SEO teams.

Here’s how it works:

• Mentions = 1 point: A mention is great for brand awareness, but won’t send people to the website. 
• Backlink (no-follow) = 2 points: A no-follow link doesn’t provide any direct SEO value, but it can send people to the website.
• Backlink (follow) = 3 points: This is excellent for SEO and sends traffic to the website.
• Relevant anchor text = 4 points: This is perfect. It’s a do-follow link to a relevant anchor text, so it passes SEO value to a targeted page and gives search engines context for what that page is about.

This scoring system makes it easier to align the PR and SEO teams and ensure they’re both working towards the same goal. 

Get More Help Aligning PR and SEO Teams

The process mentioned above is the step-by-step process we use to help our clients align the PR team with SEO goals and maximize the value of each PR campaign. 

However, execution can be challenging as it requires not only getting the PR team on board, but also educating them on the importance of this process and guiding them through the first several campaigns. 

If you want more personalized assistance aligning the PR team with SEO incentives, reach out to Powered By Search today and we can help you execute this strategy. Our team members can also help you discover low hanging fruit opportunities and lay out a full SEO roadmap for the coming year.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• The Best SaaS SEO Agencies in 2025: 7 Partners That Actually Drive Pipeline
• SaaS Digital Marketing in 2025: SEO, AI & Growth Strategies
• Must-Have Skills for a B2B SaaS SEO Consultant

Related Articles

• SaaS SEO Mistakes: 9 Areas Where B2B Companies Can Fumble Without Knowing It
• SEO Strategy for B2B SaaS: Tying KPIs to Revenue and Prioritizing Actions That Drive Results
• SEO Roadmap for B2B SaaS: How to Get Early Wins

Most marketers have leads and data everywhere in their CRM, but it usually doesn’t make sense and leads to questions like: 

• Is this an SQL? Or just a lead? 
• How much was this deal worth, and are we acquiring customers profitably?
• Do we know which of these marketing channels is performing the best? 
• HubSpot says we have X closed deals, but our revenue reflects that we only closed Y.  

Even if you hired a competent HubSpot consultant, these issues will still likely arise because there’s substantial groundwork the marketing team needs to execute before setting up the CRM to ensure it shows accurate and meaningful data.  

This groundwork includes aligning the team on critical definitions, mapping out the buyer journey, and defining essential KPIs. Yet these tasks are well beyond the scope of a traditional HubSpot consultant.

In this post, we’ll discuss specific challenges with hiring a HubSpot consultant to implement a basic setup, the problems that arise from this strategy, and a better solution to ensure your CRM provides accurate, meaningful data. 

The Problem With Hiring a HubSpot Consultant to Execute Basic Setup 

HubSpot must be personalized to your goals, KPIs, and buyer journey. Otherwise, the data won’t help you improve performance.

Unfortunately, most companies need help getting clarity on prerequisites before they can set up HubSpot. 

For example, have you defined the difference between a lead, MQL, and SQL, and are the sales and marketing teams aligned on those definitions?

If there’s any confusion on these definitions, it’s impossible for the HubSpot consultant to set up the CRM in a way that shows accurate lead to MQL to SQL conversion rates.

Additionally, for HubSpot to show you meaningful campaign performance data, it must show each step of the buyer journey. Specifically:

• How does each visitor first become a lead?
• What other digital touchpoints did they interact with during the buyer journey?

Without answers to these questions, you can’t determine where prospects are dropping off, making it difficult to quickly identify underperforming campaigns and leaks in the buyer journey.  

Yet mapping out the buyer journey is well beyond the scope of a technical HubSpot consultant.  

Finally, the buyer journey and your marketing strategy evolve, so hiring someone to set up HubSpot once means the data you see a year from now likely won’t be accurate as it won’t account for new marketing campaigns. For example, if you added LinkedIn ads to your marketing funnel, that must be updated in HubSpot. 

The Most Common (And Costly) HubSpot Mistakes 

We audit dozens of HubSpot setups for prospects and clients, and these are a few of the most common challenges we see that lead to confusing and/or inaccurate CRM data. 

Inaccurate/Inconsistent Labeling

Mislabeling a prospect’s lifecycle stage (subscriber, lead, MQL, SQL, etc.) is a common problem that makes CRM data confusing.

For example, if a website visitor downloads a gated piece of content that’s considered top of funnel (like a demo video), it’s better to label them as a lead. But we’ve seen cases where those prospects are tagged as MQLs.  As a result, that prospect may receive messaging and resources designed for a more advanced prospect. This is a problem because prospects will drop out of the funnel if your messaging and resources are irrelevant to them.

Inaccurate labeling is also a problem for your team, because it misleads you to believe where bottlenecks occur in the buyer journey, making it difficult to diagnose and improve inefficiencies.

For example, a prospect who subscribed to the email list may be inaccurately labeled as an MQL rather than a lead. 

This mislabeling error will reflect a lower MQL to SQL conversion rate than the real conversion rate (as leads are less likely to convert directly to SQLs). As a result, the inaccurate data will mislead you to believe there are issues with content (e.g., white papers, case studies, etc.) used to capture MQLs, when the real issue likely occurs elsewhere in the funnel. 

No Deal Value Tracking

Many of the HubSpot accounts we audit lack precise deal value information. Imprecise tracking is problematic for two reasons.

First, you need to know the average deal value to know how much you can spend to profitably acquire that customer.

For example, if the average LTV of a deal is $40,000, spending $4,000 to acquire them is a no-brainer as that’s a 4x ROI.

Secondly, prospects with a higher deal value should be monitored more closely. For example, we often set up additional automation in HubSpot for VIP prospects, like carefully optimized follow-ups and more specific dashboards and reports to see how they’re progressing down the funnel.

Labeling high-value deals also makes it easy to collect data and identify patterns of high-value prospects. For example, you might notice that 70% of high-value deals come from LinkedIn, making it clear that LinkedIn deserves more investment.

As you can see, it’s critical to label deal value in HubSpot, though calculating it is beyond the responsibility of a technical HubSpot consultant, and it’s a metric that needs to be consistently updated by your team.

Overlooking Follow-Up Opportunities

Many right-fit prospects don’t buy due to budget constraints or because the timing wasn’t right, though they may be interested in buying at a future date. 

Therefore, closed lost deals can be valuable opportunities as these prospects are already qualified and familiar with your brand, requiring significantly less nurturing than new prospects.

Yet many marketers never follow up with prospects after the deal is marked as closed-lost. To solve this, we set up a simple automation in HubSpot that sends our dead lead reviver sequence.

As you’re setting up this automation, only include closed lost deals that are right fit prospects. 

Forgetting To Update Data

Your marketing strategy will continuously evolve as you identify inefficiencies and remove and add marketing campaigns accordingly, and it’s important to update your HubSpot automations accordingly.

Here are a few specific things you must update continuously to ensure your data is accurate:

• New/removed marketing campaigns
• Deal values
• Properly labeling new digital touchpoints (e.g., webinar registrants are a lead, webinar attendees are an MQL)

How To Set Up HubSpot To Provide Accurate, Actionable Data

This is the step by step process we use to help clients set up accurate data that allows them to easily identify and solve inefficiencies in the buyer journey to reduce marketing costs and shorten the buyer journey. 

Step 1: Identify How Prospects Enter The Funnel

The first action item is identifying and labeling how a prospect enters your marketing funnel.  

We do this by looking at each contact in your HubSpot account and identifying how those contacts became leads (e.g., what form they filled out when you captured their first piece of information, such as an email address).

This helps us better understand how you’re acquiring contacts so that we can double down on driving more traffic to the forms driving the most high quality leads. 

Step 2: Create Nurture Campaigns 

Once a contact enters the CRM, track their touchpoints to understand how they move through the funnel.

Using these touchpoints, you can identify and fix bottlenecks through nurture campaigns. 

For example, if the data shows that a small percentage of demo registrants actually show up for the demo, there’s clearly a bottleneck at that point in the buyer journey. 

We remove that bottleneck by sending nurture emails as soon as someone registers for a demo that shows how and why other prospects found the demo. For registrants who still don’t show up for the demo, we can send a no-show sequence that allows them to reschedule the demo.

Step 2: Identifying And Creating a Buyer Journey

Next, make sure all of your campaigns (e.g., paid ads, organic blog posts, lead magnets like case studies, etc.) are tracked in HubSpot, as this will be essential to understanding how marketers experience the buyer journey. 

However, a mistake many marketers make is tracking user actions and creating reports based on assumptions of how prospects experience the buyer journey.

For example, you might assume that people move through the buyer journey like this:

Sees a LinkedIn Ad > Downloads a case study > Experiences your email nurture sequence > Signs up for a demo

Yet buyers don’t necessarily conform to the funnel you create. Instead, prospects might actually experience the buyer journey as follows:

Sees a LinkedIn Ad > Reads a blog post > Signs up for the newsletter > Signs up for a demo

If the buyer journey your tracking isn’t the path prospects actually use to convert into customers, the data won’t show you where customers are dropping out of the funnel, making it impossible to fix inefficiencies (e.g., optimize and/or cut underperforming campaigns).

To identify how prospects experience the buyer journey, we look at each step closed won deals took after they entered the buyer journey.

If you have a lot of leads, prioritize analyzing the buyer journey of your highest value closed won deals.

For example, you can see here that after this person (downloaded a case study), they then (several actions they took later)

We then look for patterns of prospects’ most commonly used paths to become customers and set up effective tracking of these buyer journeys, and create any automation needed to make the process more efficient – such as by sending notifications to the marketing or sales teams. 

For example, we analyzed the deals for one of our clients and noticed that deals which eventually became closed lost were spending a much longer period of time in each deal stage. We set up an automation to send out internal email notifications to the sales team if a deal spent more than a specific period of time in the deal stages, allowing them to flag potential closed lost deals before its too late.

Step 3: Labeling Prospect Status Throughout The Buyer Journey

Once we have data on how prospects move through the funnel, it’s essential to label them accurately so that you have visibility into:

• Pipeline: How many prospects are in the pipeline and how far are they from converting into a customer?
• Inefficiencies: At what stage do most prospects leave the buyer journey?

We recommend that the marketing and sales team collaborate to create a document defining what makes a prospect a lead, MQL, and SQL and then use those definitions to determine how to label a prospect at each touchpoint within the buyer journey. 

Accurate labeling ensures the marketing and sales teams are aligned on pipeline metrics, and it’s also important for the next step, where you’ll be able to see how each prospect engages with each campaign (e.g., how many leads vs. SQL vs. customers interact with a specific campaign).

Step 4: Track Critical KPIs 

HubSpot allows you to track KPIs critical to everyone on the marketing and sales teams and stakeholders.

Specifically, here are a few of the KPIs we track in HubSpot for stakeholders:

• Number of deals
• Avg deal value
• Total deal value
• Closed-won revenue
• Total marketing investment (Marketing Budget)
• CPL 
• CAC

It also allows you to granularly track how many prospects interacted with each campaign based on their status (e.g., lead, SQL, opportunity, customer, etc.).

Step 5: Update HubSpot As Necessary To Align With Documentation 

Update HubSpot as you make optimizations and add and remove campaigns. Specifically, it’s important to regularly update:

• Lifecycle stages
• Deal values
• Reasons for closed lost deals

Another easy opportunity to speed up the buyer journey and increase conversions is creating automations to engage prospects.

For example, set up re-engagement automations for closed lost deals. Specifically, we regularly send a dead lead reviver campaign at a pre-determined cadence to specific closed-lost deals that were good fit prospects. 

How To Get More Help With HubSpot

HubSpot is a powerful tool to improve marketing performance by providing clear insights and data, but it won’t help you if the data is inaccurate. 

If your current data doesn’t align with real revenue and it isn’t providing the actionable insights you need to move forward, reach out to our team today. 

We can audit your current HubSpot setup and help you customize it to provide accurate data and actionable insights that improves performance. 

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• 11 Examples of the Best SaaS Demo Pages

Related Articles

• Salesforce & HubSpot: How Using Both Tools Together Makes Marketing and Rev Ops More Effective
• The Nine Laws Of Inbound Sales Success
• How to Transform Your eCommerce Store Into a Personable Sales Machine

1. Recipients never respond to the outreach email.
2. The outreach email was successful and the link was placed, but the SaaS company’s SEO never improved (e.g., rankings, authority, and traffic, etc., didn’t increase).

However, if you do a quick Google search for any competitive keyword, you’ll see that the top ranking posts probably have plenty of links. Links are still essential to rank in search results.

So, how do you consistently earn links that meaningfully impact your SEO?

In this post, we’ll explain the most common mistakes that cause blogger outreach campaigns to fail for B2B SaaS companies and the step-by-step process we use to earn meaningful links consistently. 

Do I Need To Do Blogger Outreach (Can’t I Earn Links Organically)?

This is a valid question to address before we discuss our blogger outreach strategy. 

There’s a school of thought that you don’t need to build links because you can earn them organically as long as you produce high quality content. And there’s certainly some truth to this. Writers often naturally link to pages to support their claims. 

The problem is that most writers find content to support their claims (and therefore link to) by Googling the topic. Then, they select a blog post on the first page of Google that supports their claim and link to it.

Unfortunately, if you aren’t already on the first page of Google, it’s unlikely that journalists and bloggers will find your page to link to it. 

This means you need to build a few high quality links manually to propel the page to the first page of Google so that it can start earning links organically. 

Why Most Blogger Outreach Campaigns Fail

You already know that sending thousands of cold emails isn’t an effective method to earn meaningful links. Instead, these are the four most common (and less obvious) reasons blogger outreach campaigns often fail.

Reaching Out To Irrelevant Websites

Domain authority is often the primary metric used to evaluate potential link partners, though we’ve found SaaS companies receive a much better long-term ROI by prioritizing topical relevance (e.g., target smaller yet authoritative websites directly related to your niche).

First, editors for large websites with high domain authority, like news websites, typically receive hundreds of pitches daily, making it difficult to cut through the noise and receive a response. 

Unless you have data or a story that’s truly groundbreaking and newsworthy, there isn’t really an incentive for them to respond to you.

Instead, reach out to a smaller website directly related to your niche. These journalists and bloggers are much more likely to respond because they receive fewer pitches, and your new data, statistics, and opinions on relevant, trending industry topics are likely more helpful to them.

Backlinks from these websites are often more meaningful than links from large new websites because links from niche websites show search engines you’re an authority in that niche. 

Contacting The Wrong Person

If you contact anyone other than the person who has the power to change the link, you’re less likely to earn the link. Chances are, the recipient isn’t going to forward your email to a colleague. 

The best person to contact is usually either the editor or writer. 

Outreach Messages That Provide Little Value To Recipients

Another reason your blogger outreach campaign may fail is that the value you’re offering isn’t compelling. 

For example, most pitches sound like this:

“You should swap the existing link to our blog post, because we have a more up-to-date guide.”

Your blog post might be better, but the work involved for an editor to change the link far outweighs the benefit of offering readers a link to a slightly better article. 

For most editors, the work created by changing the link is often greater than the value it would add to their content. This is particularly true for larger blogs that receive hundreds of link requests per week. In fact, it would likely take them several hours each week to execute every link request. 

Instead, think about your recipient’s calendar. Does the value of swapping the link warrant 15 minutes of their time that could be dedicated to other high value tasks?

Earning an Insufficient Number of Links

Finally, if you’re among the rare percentage of SaaS marketers who have earned a handful of links from high-quality, niche websites but have still not seen an ROI, the problem may be link volume. 

It’s important to prioritize link quality over volume, but a page with equal quality content and more high quality links will likely still outrank you. Sometimes the problem is that you haven’t built enough high quality links.

Step By Step Blogger Outreach Process That Generates Meaningful Results

This is our proven, step-by-step blogger outreach process to help you increase outreach response rates and build relationships (and links) that meaningfully impact SEO.

Step 1: Strategy

Most blogger outreach strategies fail because the effort of swapping the link outweighs the value doing so delivers for the recipient. 

To increase response rates, you need to both:

1. Reduce the work for the recipient
2. Increase the value for the recipient

The solution is to identify specific pages where it makes sense to link to our post (rather than asking them to find a page on their website to link to us) and explain the value of linking to our post. 

Therefore, we first ask these questions to identify specific blog posts where a link partnership might make sense: 

• What kind of page would link to my page? What topic?
• Why would they link to my page? (more in-depth, up-to-date, unique perspective).

Step 2: Prospecting

If you’ve tried blogger outreach in the past and earned links but didn’t see a strong ROI from those links, the problem is likely that the linking websites weren’t relevant to your niche or they lacked credibility.

Search engines use links to understand a website’s area of expertise and general credibility.

The more links your website has from other credible websites in your niche, the better you’ll likely rank for industry-related keywords.

While most link builders use domain authority as the primary metric to evaluate potential link partners, this metric isn’t a complete analysis of a website’s credibility (and domain authority is a third party metric created by SEO tools, which some website owners have figured out how to fake).

Instead, these are additional factors that impact the degree of authority a link will pass to your website:

• The topical relevance of the website/page: A link from a cybersecurity blog indicates to Google that you’re an authority on cybersecurity, whereas a link from a generic news website doesn’t clearly indicate the topic you’re an authority)
• The authority of the linking page: A page with 10 other high quality domains linking to it will be more valuable than another page on the same website that doesn’t have any links.
• The page and domain traffic: Ideally, it’s best to earn links from pages that already have traffic from your target audience as you’ll not only earn the benefit of the link, but also potentially earn new prospects to your website through that link.   
• Keywords and rankings for the page: If the page is ranking for some valuable keywords our target audience might search, a link from that page will be far more valuable.

Here are the specific metrics we filter for to ensure each link we earn for clients checks all of the boxes mentioned above:

• DR20+
• Domain traffic of 5000+
• Page traffic 1+
• Specific keywords the page is ranking for 

Step 3: Inspection

Metrics are excellent for creating an initial list of link prospects, but you’ll find that some of the prospects on that list aren’t necessarily good candidates.

For example, there aren’t really tools to filter out inactive websites, and it’s best to personally check the quality of the content.

Therefore, we manually review each potential prospect using this checklist:

• Is it a legit website/company? Some websites exist solely for link building, and their links offer little to no value to your website. We only want to build partnerships with credible websites with industry authority. 
• Is it active? We don’t need links from inactive blogs.
• Is the content high quality? If it looks like the content is written by AI and doesn’t provide any insightful ideas, it might not be a blog we want our client’s brand associated with.
• Can we get a link above the fold? A link at the bottom of the page is less powerful than one at the top, so we aim to position all of our links above the fold. 

Step 4: Personalization

If the person you contact doesn’t have access or authority to change the link, your request will likely be ignored as they won’t want to take the time and effort to involve other team members to review your request and accept or deny it. 

This is why we invest a lot of time and effort into finding the best possible point of contact. 

We look for these people (in this order) when crafting outreach campaigns:

• Writer
• Editor
• Marketing
• Owner (for solo blogs)

Once we find the right person to contact, we also consider the best medium to use to contact them. We typically use email, but if they have a substantial social media presence, we may also contact them on social media.

Step 5: Email Outreach

A mistake many people make is only personalizing the email with the recipient’s name. However, this is table stakes. A personalized message shows that you’ve actually read their work and explains the value your link can add to that specific post. 

This level of detailed personalization is difficult to scale, so we create custom templates for each segment/sub-topic.

For example, here’s an example of a custom template we created targeting link prospects that have a blog post on vehicle maintenance and driving safety.

This message works because it provides value by offering to refresh their content for free. 

When it makes sense, we also like to inject humor. Most recipients receive hundreds of generic email pitches, and this can make yours feel like it’s coming from a real human.

You’ll also notice that we avoid using fake flattery. For example, many bloggers receive emails that say “we loved your blog post on X!” However, this flattery can feel hollow if you don’t explain what you liked about it or how it has impacted you.

Finally, we also always follow up at least twice. Many of these people are quite busy, and they may have simply missed your email or have forgotten to respond, so following up can significantly increase your response rates.

Does Blogger Outreach Still Work?

Yes, blogger outreach still works, but the dated tactics used several years ago do not. Review your own blogger outreach strategy.

Does it check all the boxes outlined in our step by step process above? If your strategy isn’t producing sufficient results, you probably need to tweak some of the steps in your strategy. 

We’ve found that many link building services use a similar approach, but they miss some of the finer points within each step of the strategy. 

For example, they may exclusively use domain authority and topical relevancy to determine potential link partners rather than the full criteria we use that also considers traffic, page authority, keyword rankings and involves a manual review of content quality and consistency. 

Get More Help With Your Blogger Outreach Strategy

This step by step strategy is exactly how we get results for clients, but the real key to success is accurately executing the finer details of the strategy. 

If you’re still struggling with blogger outreach, reach out to our team today, and we will audit your strategy.

We can identify why it isn’t working, how to fix it, and map out a long-term plan to improve your link building ROI. 

Related Resources

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• 11 Examples of the Best SaaS Demo Pages

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• The Nine Laws Of Inbound Sales Success
• Salesforce & HubSpot: How Using Both Tools Together Makes Marketing and Rev Ops More Effective
• HubSpot Technical Consulting For SaaS: Beyond Basic Setup

Enterprise cybersecurity products have a monumental impact on the company’s data security and often require a commitment of five, six, or seven figures.

This complexity means the buying cycle often lasts six, twelve, or eighteen months and involves a large committee of executives.

Unsurprisingly, a typical B2B SaaS marketing strategy optimized for a 1-2 month buying cycle with a buying committee of just one or two people won’t effectively convert cybersecurity prospects.

This misalignment is often the root problem that causes B2B SaaS cybersecurity marketing programs to underperform.

The real question is – how can you optimize a cybersecurity marketing strategy to cater to the unique needs of a cybersecurity prospect and ensure the marketing strategy performs?

In this post, we’ll answer that question by discussing the common mistakes we see impeding growth in cybersecurity marketing strategies and share the blueprint we implement for our cybersecurity clients.  

Why Generic SaaS Marketing Strategies Don’t Work For Cybersecurity

Here are four main reasons why a cookie-cutter SaaS marketing strategy usually doesn’t work for cybersecurity companies. 

Long Buying Cycles with Complex Buying Committees

Many B2B SaaS products fit the following description:

1. A buying cycle of 1-3 months.
2. A buying committee of 1-3 people.
3. An investment of $100-$10,000.

On the other hand, most enterprise cybersecurity B2B SaaS companies fit this description:

1. A buying cycle of 6-18 months.
2. A buying committee of 5+ executives/stakeholders.
3. An investment of 5, 6, or 7+ figures and a long term contract.

A marketing strategy optimized for the average B2B SaaS company won’t work for the enterprise cybersecurity company for a few reasons.

First, if the product is just a few thousand dollars, it’s not unreasonable for prospects to sign up for a demo after just two or three interactions with a company.

The same is not true for an enterprise prospect.

Enterprise prospects need more resources and nurturing before committing to a demo. If the only CTA is to schedule a demo, they’re more likely to simply exit the buyer journey altogether.

This means it’s critical to map out the buyer journey and understand prospects’ pain points at each step so that you offer the resources at the right time.

Also, each member of the buying committee has different pain points. To convert these prospects efficiently, it’s important to create unique content and product pages with messaging designed specifically for that individual.

Small Pool of Qualified Prospects

The pool of right-fit prospects for an enterprise cybersecurity product is often a fraction of that of a typical B2B SaaS product.

This means that while the average B2B SaaS marketing strategy can drive conversions with broad keywords and audiences, the same strategy will likely fail for an enterprise cybersecurity company. 

An enterprise cybersecurity company that uses broad keywords and targeting will likely run into two problems:

1. Low ROI on Paid Media: You’ll waste money unnecessarily on ads targeting the wrong prospects.
2. Unqualified Demo Attendees: If the wrong-fit customers sign up for a demo, your sales team wastes time on unqualified prospects.  

Instead, we’ve found that more targeted marketing strategies, like account-based marketing, are much more effective for enterprise cybersecurity companies. 

Requires Deep Trust

The average B2B SaaS product requires minimal trust to drive conversions. Simply adding some review badges and client logos is often sufficient. 

For example, if you’re purchasing a $20 per month to-do list tool, you might look at some reviews, but you probably won’t do much research into the trustworthiness of the company offering that tool. 

Yet cybersecurity is unique because prospects are selecting a partner to safeguard valuable data, and most cybersecurity contracts are six-figure investments and multi-year partnerships. 

Additionally, risk is the pain point prospects are experiencing when shopping for cybersecurity solutions, so they’re already in a vulnerable mindset when approaching cybersecurity vendors. 

Therefore, adding some reviews to your homepage isn’t sufficient for establishing trust with prospects. Instead, you need to prove your trustworthiness through resources like webinars, white papers, and case studies.  

Similar Competition

Prospects are clearly looking for a secure solution, so it makes sense to create messaging that communicates your product provides safety and security.

The only problem is that your competitors realize this and also have similar messaging. 

As a result, prospects don’t understand how your company is different from your competitors and therefore won’t know why they should choose it.

This is why it’s important to implement customer research to understand why prospects choose your product over your competitors and then showcase those key differentiators. 

Prerequisites For An Effective Cybersecurity Marketing Strategy

Before you start making changes to your existing marketing strategy, you must execute a few prerequisites first.

CRM Setup: Establishing Accurate Attribution

Many cybersecurity companies fall into one of two camps:

1. They don’t have tracking set up.
2. The data in their CRM is inaccurate and therefore doesn’t match revenue data. 

Without accurate data, you can’t understand:

1. Your current marketing strategy’s efficacy from a revenue perspective.
2. The specific stages in the buyer journey where prospects leave.

If you’re making changes to your marketing strategy without data, you’re just guessing, which is an inefficient method to improve your marketing strategy.

Therefore, the first step in every client engagement is setting up the CRM to accurately capture critical data.

We have a separate resource on how we set up tracking and attribution in a CRM, but this is always the first step before making any adjustments to the marketing strategy.  

Defining The ICP And Executing Customer Research

Moderate to poor performance across your general marketing strategy is a key symptom that the campaigns are too generic and aren’t accurately addressing the specific pain points your ideal customer feels at that moment in time.

The solution to this problem is defining your ICP and executing customer research, as this will help you improve campaign performance by allowing you to:

1. Understand who you’re targeting: This informs paid media targeting strategies, landing page optimizations (e.g., featuring reviews from similar titles), and where they exist online (and offline).
2. Understanding their pain points: This informs specific keywords to target as well as how to create messaging and ad copy that addresses those pain points and answers common objections. 
3. Understand how they experience the buyer journey: This informs which CTAs to place where and which resources prospects need to move forward at each step of the buyer journey. 

If you don’t execute customer research or define your ICP, you’ll probably find that prospects don’t complete the buyer journey (low lead to SQL conversions).

We have a detailed customer research process, and here are some of the checkpoints we fill out:

• Demographic details, like age, gender, and location
• Role and responsibilities within the company
• Publications or blogs they follow
• Preferred contact methods, marketing channels, and social media platforms
• Pain points with current systems and processes
• The solutions they’re researching

One important mistake to avoid is filling this information out based on random guesses. Instead, talk to your customers, download sales call transcripts, and leverage CRM data to ensure you answer each question accurately.

Components of A Cybersecurity Marketing Strategy

Most cybersecurity companies are already using the following strategies in their marketing plan:

• Content marketing
• SEO
• Paid Media
• Webinars/Events

Below, we’ll discuss the slight nuances to ensure these strategies work for cybersecurity, and common mistakes to avoid.

Content Marketing

We have a content marketing playbook that addresses our approach to content marketing, though we also add a few additional considerations when working with cybersecurity clients. 

First, we already addressed the importance of trust when selling cybersecurity products. 

Thought leadership content and case studies that demonstrate how you’ve helped other companies prevent data breaches are also highly effective at building trust with prospects and proving your product’s efficacy.

It’s also important to consider how you create content.

Today, many companies use ChatGPT or AI writing tools to write blog posts for them. While AI can help expedite certain steps of the content creation process, your content must provide unique perspectives and authoritative expertise on each topic. 

Originality is critical for earning trust with prospects and ranking in Google, as credibility is an increasingly important ranking factor. 

SEO

The two most common SEO challenges we hear from cybersecurity clients are:

1. They’re struggling to rank in the SERPs and can’t earn traffic. 
2. They’re earning traffic, but it isn’t converting into demos.

Here’s how we address each of these problems.

#1: Struggling to Earn Traffic

A few years ago, writing a high-quality blog post was a sufficient strategy to rank for critical keywords that would attract right-fit prospects.

This strategy no longer works because there’s more competition in the cybersecurity industry, and AI writing tools are making content production easier and cheaper, increasing competition in the SERPs. 

To rank in the SERPs, you also need to promote it.

This is why we offer content promotion strategies for cybersecurity. We identify the pages that drive the most revenue, assess the competition in the SERPs, and then use link building to boost the pages that would likely deliver the highest ROI.

We’ll discuss our link building approach (and common mistakes we see cybersecurity companies make) in more detail below.

#2: Earning Traffic, But No Demo Sign-ups

If the traffic you’re driving to the website isn’t converting, it’s likely due to one of two issues.

The first issue is that the keywords driving traffic are too generic and attracting people who don’t match your ideal customer profile.

For example, keywords like “what is encryption” or “cybersecurity basics” tend to attract students and general researchers rather than B2B buyers. Similarly, keywords like “best antivirus software” are more consumer-oriented and probably won’t attract B2B buyers.

Instead, target keywords related to specific threat types or attack vectors that prospects actively search. We also include compliance terms like HIPAA and SOC 2.

We also target competitor comparison keywords (e.g., “Cybersecurity company X vs Cybersecurity company Y”), as people searching these terms are interested in purchasing software similar to yours and tend to convert quickly. 

Alternatively, if the keywords are driving right-fit traffic to the website, prospects may not be converting because the buyer journey across your website is broken. For example, if the call to action at the end of a blog post that targets new prospects is to sign up for a demo, the conversion rate will likely be quite low as first-time visitors probably aren’t ready to schedule a demo just yet. 

Instead, they need more resources to learn about your product before they’ll be ready to sign up for a demo. 

We use the authority architecture framework to ensure each page on the website is designed with a calibrated call to action, and the prospect is always presented with the next resource they need to proceed in the buyer journey. 

The authority architecture framework also ensures the website is catered to the specific needs of each person involved in the buying committee. For example, the CISO, IT Manager, and Risk Officer may all need to sign off to close the deal, but each individual has different needs. The website therefore needs to be structured to address their specific pain points. 

It’s also important for cybersecurity companies to create different pages for different geographies, as some regions/countries/states have different compliance requirements.

Finally, the title tags, meta descriptions, and on page copy should use vocabulary that prospects understand. Using advanced technical language can make it unclear what your company offers and they may become frustrated and leave your website altogether.

Link Building

If you’re creating excellent content and it isn’t ranking, the problem is likely that your website doesn’t have the authority of the other websites in the search results. 

Link building is the solution to build your website’s authority, though not all links are equally valuable.   

If you’ve tried building links and it hasn’t worked, here are two common mistakes cybersecurity companies often make.

• Pursuing links from the wrong websites: Many companies make the mistake of relying heavily on cybersecurity new sites for backlinks, yet this creates an echo chamber and doesn’t necessarily reach your target audience. 

Instead, we pursue links from industry-specific publications where your target buyers actually spend time. For example, if you serve healthcare organizations, getting backlinks from healthcare industry publications often provides more value than general security blogs.

• Focusing on the quantity of links: Not all links are equally valuable and we’ve found that focusing on earning fewer, high-quality backlinks from respected industry sources is more effective than earning numerous links from low-authority websites. 

Paid Media

Cybersecurity companies struggling to make paid media effective typically struggle with one of these three mistakes:

• Broad Targeting
• Generic Messaging
• Poorly Optimized Landing Pages

Broad Targeting

Unlike most SaaS products with a wide range of customers, cybersecurity companies usually only have a small pool of high-value prospects. 

Therefore, targeting a broad audience, or failing to sufficiently refine your targeting to your ICP can cause paid media efforts to fail.

Instead, we refer back to the buyer persona document created earlier in the process and use that to create more targeted ad campaigns. 

Generic Messaging

Most cybersecurity companies have messaging that indicates they offer a secure, safe solution. Using this messaging makes logical sense because the main pain point prospects want to solve is reducing risk and improving security. 

Yet all cybersecurity companies offer secure solutions, and using this messaging doesn’t tell prospects how your company is different from competitors they’re researching. 

To help our clients stand out, we identify the key differentiators that set them apart from the competitors and then weave that into the messaging.

This way, prospects recognize that you’re a secure solution to their problem and understand how you’re unique from competitors.   

Poorly Optimized Landing Pages

After aligning the marketing funnel to ensure it aligns with the buyer journey and ensuring right-fit prospects are arriving on the landing page, the next step is optimizing the landing page itself. 

We have a separate resource that outlines how we create landing pages for SaaS companies, as well as a few examples and a checklist, though here are a few of the most common mistakes that cause low conversion rates:

• Failing to align pre and post click messaging: The landing page should deliver on the promise made in the ad. 
• Placing the CTA below the fold: It should always be clearly visible at the top of the page. Only include one clear CTA on the page to avoid confusion.
• Adding too many fields to the initial landing page form: We take a progressive profiling approach and collect more prospect information over time rather than overwhelming them with large forms on the first interaction.
• Poorly optimized post-click experience: Prospects should be led swiftly to the next step in the buyer journey. For example, if they filled out the form for a demo, they should immediately see a calendar on the next page to schedule a time. 

In addition to following these basic best practices, here are a few additional optimization tips specifically for cybersecurity companies:

• Include reviews and company logos from your existing clients: This further increases trust, and clients will immediately understand that your product is relevant to them if they see other similar companies (potentially even competitors) using it. 
• Include plenty of relevant trust badges: Trust badges are helpful for any SaaS landing page, but they’re critical for cybersecurity companies as trust is a top priority for prospects. If you have trust badges from Gartner or other third parties, display them prominently. 

Another important consideration is that each member of the buying committee will likely have different pain points, so we often create different landing pages with messaging tailored to their specific pain points.

Finally, because cybersecurity regulations differ across countries, creating different landing pages for different demographics is important to ensure the messaging resonates with prospects. 

Live Events/Webinars

Live events and webinars are also a great opportunity to build trust with prospects as they allow you to demonstrate thought leadership.

Webinars providing information on emerging threats and security solutions tend to perform well for our clients. Additionally, targeting general security trends tends to attract a wider audience, and unlike paid ads and content marketing efforts that are hyper targeted to your ICP, webinars can target a slightly broader audience as there isn’t an additional cost to allowing more people to join the webinar. 

In fact, if your ideal prospects see that many people are attending your webinar, that further builds credibility. It’s also helpful from a branding standpoint if your webinars attract interest from the general cybersecurity industry.

Take Your Cybersecurity Marketing To The Next Level

Cybersecurity marketing is uniquely challenging given the complexity of the buyer journey. 

This means that any mistakes during the six, twelve, or eighteen month process can cause your marketing efforts to fail. For example, mixed messaging at any point could erode trust and cause prospects to seek out your competition. To add to the challenge, it’s not always apparent where mistakes occur. 

If you want more help from a team of experts with extensive experience with cybersecurity companies, reach out to Powered By Search today and we can identify opportunities to improve performance. 

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• Low conversion rates: You have plenty of leads at the top of the funnel, but an underwhelming percentage of leads make it to the end of the buying cycle and convert into closed deals.
• High marketing costs: Customer acquisition costs are high across most of your marketing channels (PPC, LinkedIn, Meta, etc.).
• Poor lead quality: The prospects attending demos don’t fit your ideal customer profile. Or, right fit prospects may be booking demos before they’re ready to convert, requiring the sales team to nurture them excessively and lengthening the buying journey. 

Once you recognize that your demand gen strategy is ineffective, the real challenges are:

1. Identifying where inefficiencies occur in your funnel.
2. Fixing those inefficiencies.  

Identifying and fixing inefficiencies is particularly challenging if you’re already following best practices, as the issue may not be obvious.

Additionally, stakeholders are often misaligned on the definition of demand generation.

We’ve helped dozens of SaaS marketing teams improve demand gen performance, so we’ll share how we define demand generation, the most common reasons demand gen programs fail, and most importantly, how to diagnose and fix inefficiencies hurting demand gen performance. 

What is Demand Generation?

Each marketer we talk to has a slightly different definition of demand gen, so here’s how we define it:

Demand generation is a strategy to improve marketing performance by analyzing the buyer’s journey across all of your marketing campaigns (from when they become a lead to when they become a closed deal) and then identifying and solving bottlenecks where prospects leave your funnel.  

You can think of demand generation as the roadmap that ties all of your marketing efforts (PPC, SEO, content marketing, etc.) together to efficiently move prospects from new leads to closed customers. 

From a tactical standpoint, a demand generation program involves: 

• Attracting right-fit prospects: Aligning messaging with the right ICP and their pain points.
• Connecting marketing campaigns: Creating email nurture sequences and relevant CTAs at the end of each campaign to efficiently move prospects to the next step of the buyer journey.   
• Optimizing individual campaign performance within the context of the buyer journey: Aligning messaging across each marketing campaign to deliver a seamless experience and address relevant pain points to the right stakeholders at the right time depending on their stage of the buyer journey.

Why Demand Gen Campaigns Fail 

Identifying why your demand gen strategy isn’t working is the first step to fixing it, but this can be challenging if you’re already following all of the best practices.

Additionally, throwing more budget at the problem might increase the number of closed deals, but it won’t actually improve the ROI of your marketing efforts.

So if you’re already doing all of the best practices and still aren’t seeing great results, here are a few reasons why your demand gen campaign may be underperforming.

Buying Committee Ambiguity (and Each Member’s Specific Pain Points)

Most SaaS marketers have a customer avatar and know more or less the size and industries of the companies they’re targeting, as well as the title of the decision maker who signs on the deal and that person’s general pain point. 

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Most enterprise B2B SaaS sales require a committee of buyers, and each member of the buying committee has a unique pain point and enters the buyer journey at a different time. 

For example, let’s say you sell enterprise cybersecurity software. 

The check signer might be the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) or Chief Security Officer (CSO), but the person researching different cybersecurity companies to bring to the VP’s attention might be the Information Security Analyst. Therefore, you need top of funnel content targeting that director’s pain points to ensure your brand’s name reaches the VP’s attention.  

Additionally, most marketers know their prospects’ general pain points, but it’s important to understand their specific pain points and when they experience them in the buyer journey.

For example, if the Information Security Analyst researching cybersecurity companies recently experienced a data breach, the obvious pain point is that they want to prevent future data breaches. 

However, as they go further down the buyer journey, their pain point may shift from “I need to secure against future data breaches” to “okay, all of these cybersecurity products offer protection against data breaches, but I need something that is compliant with regulations in my country and industry (e.g., healthcare).”

If your marketing messaging doesn’t address that pain point as that question in the moment it arises in your prospect’s mind, that Information Security Analyst likely won’t continue researching your company, meaning your brand will never reach the CISO/CSO desk.

Therefore, any ambiguity in who the stakeholders involved in the buyer journey are, when they enter the journey, and the specific pain points they experience at every stage of the journey can negatively impact the ROI of your demand generation efforts. 

We’ll discuss how we solve this problem with our framework for creating SaaS buyer personas.

Disjointed Marketing Campaigns

Marketers conceptually understand that each marketing campaign should seamlessly lead the prospects from one step of the buyer journey to the next. 

Yet many of the under performing marketing funnels we audit have mixed messaging at some point within the buyer journey.

This is sometimes due to legacy issues where teams have older ads and creatives running as these ads have valuable historical data (which Google uses to predict ad performance). Yet that ad messaging doesn’t always align with new landing page’s messaging. As a result, these ads aren’t always very effective at driving conversions.

Another common issue is if the messaging was updated on some campaigns, but not across the entire marketing funnel. For example, you may have updated the ads and key landing pages, but not important blog posts that prospects often visit during the journey. 

We find it’s rare that an organization will update and refresh all of its communications seamlessly, leading to disjointed messaging across marketing channels.

As a result, there’s often a drop in conversions at some point within the funnel.

Overlooking Churned Customers and Dead Leads 

Customers who churned and leads that never closed due to poor timing are excellent opportunities to retarget as they have already expressed interest in your company and its solution.

Therefore, converting these customers is often easier than converting cold leads. Retargeting is also often much more cost effective as you can use email nurture sequences, like our dead lead reviver sequence, to execute the retargeting campaign. 

Setting Unrealistic Expectations

Goals are often arbitrary numbers based on broad or visionary goals expressed by senior executives.

However, there’s a certain amount of time and resources required to achieve any goal. Without adequate time and resources, no amount of sheer effort or talent will allow you to meet your goals.

Instead of setting arbitrary goals based on your executive’s desires, start by looking at your historical performance and calculate the time and resources required to hit those numbers. 

You can of course improve your marketing strategy to outperform historical data, but to accurately calculate how much you can improve inefficiencies, you first need to identify them and then calculate the impact that solving them could have on future performance. 

While it may be uncomfortable, it’s important to present historical data to stakeholders and set expectations for what is and is not possible rather than setting unrealistic goals and setting the team up for failure. 

This is a key reason why we always begin client relationships with a marketing funnel forecast that lays out good, better and best scenarios based on historical performance data and optimization opportunities identified in the audit. 

Our Demand Gen Process

This is the step by step demand generation blueprint that helps SaaS companies attract and convert prospects more efficiently. 

Step 1: Auditing Current Processes and Data Accuracy 

The process of improving the efficiency of your demand generation strategy is removing friction throughout the buyer journey. Therefore, the first step to understanding the buyer journey and improving it is identifying how leads enter your CRM. 

Specifically, we identify each digital touchpoint where a lead can enter the CRM (e.g., lead magnets, downloadable resources, etc).

Without this information, you won’t be able to track how they navigate the buyer journey and you also won’t be able to track the efficacy of your demand generation strategy. 

Next, we want to understand how you’re categorizing each lead.

For example, if someone subscribes to your email list, label them a subscriber. If someone books a demo, label them as an MQL. 

After identifying the touchpoints where a prospect enters the CRM and how they’re labeled throughout the buyer journey, the next step is ensuring your CRM data is clean and accurate. 

Otherwise, your CRM data may not align with real revenue numbers, making it very difficult to optimize your demand generation strategy. 

We have a more detailed resource discussing how to audit and clean CRM data, though here are a few of the most common mistakes we encounter that cause data inaccuracies:

• No tracking setup: Some prospects simply don’t have any tracking set up in their CRM, in which case we start by looking at specific points where visitors become leads.
• Incorrect tracking: Sometimes the UTMs are not set up correctly and a prospect who already exists in your CRM is counted as a new lead. This is a common problem if you have many leads but few conversions.
• Tracking existing customers: Most marketers know that they shouldn’t be tracking existing customers, but it’s not uncommon that some aren’t filtered correctly. As a result, you might be counting existing customers as leads.

Step 2: Assess Current Marketing Performance

Once you have accurate data and you’re tracking each step of the buyer journey, the next step is to identify the breakdown where you’re losing leads and gather more information on the types of leads you’re attracting. 

Here are a few specific questions we ask:

• Who are the leads we’re attracting through each campaign? (company, position, etc.)
• What percentage of top of funnel leads are making it all the way through to the bottom of the funnel?
• Where do most leads disengage from the funnel?
• What are the closed-lost reasons for these deals?

Step 3: Identify Opportunities

Most marketers approach improving demand gen efficiency by identifying underperforming marketing campaigns and then optimize them, often by tweaking the creative or messaging. 

However, if you aren’t attracting the right prospects, or the resource you’re offering is irrelevant to that prospect at their current step in the buyer journey, no amount of campaign level optimization will improve your conversion rate. 

Instead, zoom out and look at the entire buyer journey and how each step flows from one to the next. 

Are prospects receiving the information they need at the right time?

From a tactical perspective, we look at the buyer journey and ask questions like:

• Do we have the right messaging that truly addresses customer pain points?
• Do we have CTAs that lead prospects to a relevant resource that will answer their next questions?
• Do we have everything optimized for lead capture and nurture across all our digital touchpoints?

Of course, we also assess individual campaign performance and ask questions like:

• Are basic best practices in order? 
• Are we targeting the right ICP and the right specific stakeholders with the right messaging?

Another often overlooked opportunity is reducing churn. While this might not seem like a marketing opportunity, reducing churn can improve LTV, which therefore increases the ROI per closed deal. As a result, you can invest more in acquiring leads. 

Therefore, we also set up email campaigns to ensure a seamless onboarding process and help customers use the product correctly to receive value from it. Upselling is another opportunity to increase LTV, so we often send email campaigns that promote additional upgrades that might be relevant to users.   

Step 4: Setting Realistic Goals and a Roadmap

Before setting a goal, use historical performance data to calculate whether or not it’s feasible based on the effort and resources required to achieve it.

Then, use that number as a baseline to calculate realistic outcomes for future performance. 

Use insights from step three, where you identified quick win opportunities to improve performance. By identifying specific opportunities, you have a better idea of approximately how much you can realistically boost performance rather than randomly guessing. Another opportunity to improve performance is identifying what isn’t working and cutting those campaigns.  

It’s also important to consider the current market climate and other external factors that can impact performance. 

Using this data, you can use our marketing funnel forecast template to create a good, better, and best scenario based on available resources.  

This allows you to arrive at a reasonable goal based on available resources, which helps marketing align with stakeholders.

Once the budget is set, create a tactical roadmap. To do this, identify the ICP (ideal customer profile) and fill out a buyer persona checklist to understand who you’re targeting and each stakeholder’s specific pain points. Then, look at historical data to understand which channels have brought the best customers. 

A common mistake is targeting channels that have generated a lot of leads. Yet not all leads convert. Similarly, not all closed deals are equally valuable. For example, an enterprise client is likely worth ten times more than a small startup.

This is why the fundamental building block of our roadmap creation process is understanding which channels bring the highest value customers.  

We also look at the messaging, ad creative, and offers that resonated with the best customers. 

Step 5: Execution and Optimization

A common mistake many marketers make is rolling out a new marketing strategy all at once. 

This is particularly common in marketing teams that feel pressure from stakeholders to dramatically improve performance and are therefore anxious to take action. 

However, every audience is slightly different and it takes time (and testing) to identify the most effective messaging and marketing channels. Therefore, rolling out an entirely new marketing strategy would set your team back to ground zero and is often more costly than helpful. 

Instead, prioritize quick win opportunities – tasks that require minimal time and effort to execute but have the potential to deliver substantial results.

It’s also important to cut the lowest performing campaigns across your existing marketing strategy.

Only after tackling this low hanging fruit do we begin a full roadmap roll out. To ensure each change we make is efficient, we use a hypothesis log to track all previous tests we’ve run.

Specifically, we look at messaging, channels, and audience segments we’ve tested and then use that data to create more effective A/B tests. This ensures we’re never making the same mistake twice and each test is more effective. 

While the quick wins will give you an initial boost, our full roadmap roll out often takes months and we’re constantly improving campaigns as we learn more about each client and their audience.

Therefore, most of our clients see an initial increase in growth at the beginning of the engagement as we tackle quick win opportunities, but the most meaningful ROI often comes six, twelve, or eighteen months into the engagement.

Even if you plan to execute a demand generation program in-house, it’s crucial to communicate this to your stakeholders and ensure everyone is on the same page. 

Get More Help Executing Your Demand Generation Program 

This is the step by step process we use to execute demand generation programs for clients, though there are plenty of nuances at each step of the process, from identifying quick wins opportunities to ensuring your CRM data is set up correctly. 

If you want an experienced team to review your current demand generation program, reach out to our team today. Our team of SaaS experts can help you identify opportunities and work with you to build a more effective demand generation program.

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The problem is that most B2B SaaS companies either don’t know how to get started with email marketing, or they have email campaigns that receive poor engagement and are therefore ineffective.

Email marketing still works – most SaaS companies simply haven’t identified the right messaging, structure, and funnel placement for each email campaign.  

In this post, we’ll discuss common B2B SaaS email marketing campaign mistakes and then present the process we use to build email nurture sequences that retain and convert prospects.

Why Do Email Marketing Campaigns For B2B SaaS Fail?

Here are a few of the common email marketing mistakes we see companies make that cause their email marketing campaigns to generate low engagement or fail to convert customers.

Mistake #1: Sending One-Off Emails Instead of Sequences

Nurturing a prospect requires time to educate them on the benefits of your solution and build a relationship with your company.

Building that knowledge and relationship takes time and often requires more than just one email. 

Therefore, sporadically sending emails won’t effectively engage and convert prospects. Similarly, consistently sending random, unstructured emails that fail to build on each other to lead the prospect to the point of sale will hurt your conversion rate.

Later in this post, we’ll explain exactly how we build nurture sequences that seamlessly answer objections and build customer relationships.

Mistake #2: Failing To Use Exclusion Lists (Correctly)

Most marketers know they should segment audiences and send targeted nurture sequences based on prospects’ interests and pain points. 

However, a prospect may download multiple lead magnets and thereby enter multiple email nurture sequences.

As a result, they may receive too many, conflicting emails, which can cause prospects to disengage and even mark your emails as spam.

Exclusion lists can solve this problem and ensure prospects never receive too many emails, though it’s also important to set up exclusion lists correctly. 

We’ve seen scenarios where B2B SaaS companies utilize exclusion lists incorrectly and unintentionally exclude right-fit prospects.

Mistake #3: Copywriting 

A perfectly constructed nurture sequence won’t convert if the copywriting doesn’t resonate with the audience.

Copywriting issues are common because they aren’t always immediately apparent. 

Specific copywriting issues we frequently see arise include:

• Uncompelling/Unclear subject lines: Many subject lines are generic or simply state the topic of the email without any suggestion as to the benefit the recipient will gain from reading the email. As a result, readers don’t click.However, some copywriters go too far to the other extreme and write a subject line designed to intrigue the reader, but ultimately make the value of the email unclear. If you have a low CTR, consider testing different email subject lines.
• Incorrect/generic pain points: Most copywriters understand the generic pain point a product solves (e.g., “drive traffic”). Though buyers want specific solutions for very particular problems (e.g., “increase qualified traffic from Google organic search for B2B SaaS.”) The more specific the copywriting addresses that problem and the buyer’s current pain point, the more effectively it will capture a reader’s attention and ultimately convert them into a customer.
• Speaking above/below the audience’s knowledge level: Beginner level content won’t appeal to a more advanced customer because they already know the information. For example, explaining the benefits of content marketing won’t capture the attention of a content marketing manager. Alternatively, speaking above an audience’s knowledge level, such as explaining tactical link building strategies to someone who has never heard of SEO, won’t work either. Instead, learn the prospect’s knowledge level and then explain the solution to them using vocabulary they understand. 

The sender of the email is also important. If the recipient doesn’t recognize the sender, they’ll likely immediately delete the email or mark it as spam. Instead, use a real person on your team that the recipient can connect with on a personal level.

Email Marketing Campaign Formats For B2B SaaS

A B2B SaaS company’s target audience can be bucketed into three main segments:

• Nurture: Nurture campaigns are designed to convert leads into MQLs.
• Activate: These campaigns address current paying customers, and you’re either upselling them to other products or educating them on how to use your products so that they continue to remain engaged customers.
• Revive: These are leads that demonstrated interest and then turned cold or customers who canceled.

Nurture Campaigns

Nurture campaigns target prospects learning about potential solutions for a particular pain point  and introduce them to your brand and its solutions.

Therefore, an effective nurture campaign takes a problem aware prospect through the buyer journey and ultimately converts them into a paying customer. 

The main benefit of an email nurture campaign is that it improves your marketing funnel’s efficiency by allowing you to retain and convert a higher percentage of prospects who engage with your content. It also expedites the buyer journey and allows the sales team to close prospects faster. 

Here are three common nurture campaigns we implement for our B2B SaaS clients:

• Lead to MQL sequences
• Trial welcome sequences
• Pre-demo/pre-webinar welcome sequences

Lead to MQL Sequences

Lead magnets like calculators, templates, and reports are excellent for earning a prospect’s email and we use a 14-day email sequence to re-engage, educate, and ultimately convert them into an MQL.

This is the structure of the 14 day email nurture sequence:

• Asset Delivery: This email delivers their requested asset (the template, checklist, report, etc.) and it also includes an introduction to the brand.  
• 2-4 Hot Button Emails: Over the next several days, we send a handful of emails that address common customer pain points and introduce how the product solves them. 
• The Probing Question: We typically wait about five days after the final hot button email to send the probing question email. If you immediately send this email following the hot button emails, it can feel pushy and may turn prospects away. The email itself is just one line: “Would you like our help creating (solution)?”.
• The Breakup Email: This email acknowledges that right now might not be the best time for the prospect to convert, but they’re always welcome to reach out at a more convenient time in the future.   

Pre-Demo/Pre-Webinar Welcome Sequences

Pre-demo and pre-webinar emails typically just provide a link to the upcoming event. Yet this touchpoint is a great opportunity to educate the prospect about your solution and build that relationship before they get on the demo/webinar.

Providing resources and engaging with prospects beforehand through an email sequence also keeps your event top of mind and improves attendance rates.

The pre-demo/pre-webinar welcome sequence can also set expectations for the event and give prospects an overview of how to prepare so that you can immediately jump into the pain points and solutions on the call without wasting time giving context and discussing what will be covered in the webinar/demo.

If the event is in 24 hours, you can send just one email beforehand, or if it’s several days or weeks later, you can send a multi-email sequence. 

Trial Nurture Campaigns

If there is any friction after a prospect signs up for a trial that prevents them from using the product and realizing its value it’s unlikely they’ll convert into a paying customer. 

Assuming you’re attracting the right customers, an easy way to improve your conversion rate is by delivering a trial welcome and activation sequence. 

The first few emails of this nurture sequence shows prospects how to log in and navigate the dashboard. Once prospects feel comfortable navigating the dashboard, the second part of this nurture sequence shows them how to use the product to solve common pain points. 

We have a separate resource that provides specific email templates for the trial welcome and activation sequence, but here’s a brief overview of the structure:

• Personalized Welcome Email: This is a personalized note from the founder welcoming them to your community with tactical instructions for the next steps to get started with the product. 
• Proactive Email Support: This email nudges users to take action by proactively providing resources to get started and asking them if they need help. If they have already taken action, it also gives them next steps to solve other pain points. 
• New Lead Sequence (emails 3-5): Identify the three most important pain points your product solves, and then use each email to explain how to solve that problem with your product.     
• Unconverted/Unconverted Trial: If the prospect didn’t convert, this email offers to extend the trial and provides concise directions on how to use the product. Alternatively, if they did convert, you can let them know about additional features they can access.  

Within the trial welcome sequence, you can also incentivize customers to convert immediately by offering a discount with an expiration if they sign up before the end of the trial.

This offer creates some urgency that encourages users to take action immediately. 

Post-Conversion Campaigns

Increasing LTV of each customer is one of the easiest ways to improve the ROI of your marketing efforts and allow you to spend more to acquire new customers. 

The two best strategies to increase customer LTV is by reducing churn and increasing the profit of each customer by upselling them (when it’s the right fit).

Here are two email nurture sequences we use to increase the LTV of each customer.

Product Activation

After a prospect completes the trial and converts into a customer, they already understand the product’s basic value and how to use it, but they may have unlocked new features.

This email sequence shows them how to use those new features to solve common pain points. Additionally, while the trial activation emails show prospects how to tackle low-hanging fruit, the product activation emails provide an opportunity to show prospects how to incorporate the product into their workflow and tackle long-term strategies. 

Additionally, if paying customers have access to additional support, make this known to prospects in the product activation email sequence.

Upgrade 

Customer retention is often considered customer success’s responsibility, though if the marketing team can increase the LTV of a customer, it will reduce customer acquisition costs and justify more marketing budget. 

The upgrade email is a perfect opportunity to not only continue educating customers how to use the base features of the product, but also introduce premium features and their benefits. 

Revive

Cold leads and churned prospects are another often overlooked opportunity to win new leads. These people already demonstrated interest in your solution, and they may not have converted because the timing wasn’t right or other circumstances unrelated to your product or brand.   

The revival email sequences re-engage cold prospects and churned customers.

Re-engaging cold prospects and churned customers is often more profitable than attracting and nurturing new leads because these people already know your brand and the value of your solution.  

Note: Only send revival emails to prospects/customers that are a good fit for your product. Instead, place customers/prospects who weren’t a good fit for your product on an exclusion list to ensure you don’t contact them. If you do reach out to these customers again, they may mark your emails as spam. Similarly, if the customer had a negative experience with your team, it’s best to avoid contacting them again.

No Show

If a lead scheduled a demo or signed up for a webinar and didn’t show, they may have had other more pressing matters arise. Rather than immediately writing them off, use the no show revival email to remind them of your solution and offer another time to reschedule. 

You can also send them a resource to add value and offer to communicate via email, as some people simply prefer avoiding calls.

Dead Lead Reviver

If a person attends a demo or trial, they’ve already invested time and effort into solving their problem and building a relationship with your brand.

These leads are therefore more valuable than cold prospects and often convert in less time, yet many B2B SaaS companies overlook this opportunity.

We have a separate resource that discusses how we set up dead lead revival sequences, beginning with capturing the right data in your CRM to ensure you’re targeting the right prospects. 

The email itself is a simple line: 

“Are you still aiming to (solve problem) without (negative impact)?“

Here’s an example:

“Are you still aiming to scale your outsourced support without increasing costs?“

Then, we schedule the dead lead revival email to send at a cadence that aligns with the buying cycle.

For example, if the buying cycle is about 60 days, we’ll send a reactivation email at the 60 day mark. 

Expired Trial Winback

Prospects who signed up for a trial and never converted are another opportunity to retarget with a revival email sequence. 

Send expired trial winback emails immediately after the trial ends while your product is still top of mind, and you can also send them periodically in the future to re-engage prospects as their circumstances may have changed.

Within the email, offer an incentive for them to convert into customers. This can be a discount or a value offer, like a case study or alternative resource that helps them solve their problem.  

Canceled/Churned Customer

When a customer initially cancels or churns, it’s customary that a customer success team member reaches out to learn why they churned. 

However, many customers churn simply because of budget constraints and other circumstances outside of that decision maker’s control. 

In these cases, sending them an email several months after the cancellation is a great way to win back right-fit customers as their circumstances may have changed.

How To Take Your Email Marketing Campaigns To The Next Level

Email marketing is a great way to capture traffic higher in the funnel at a lower cost and move them through the buyer journey.

If you want more personalized help identifying opportunities to improve your email marketing strategy, reach out to our team of B2B SaaS experts today.

We can analyze your current email marketing strategy, assess inefficiencies, and devise a plan to help you close more leads in less time. 

Reach out to our team today to improve your email marketing strategy and reduce customer acquisition costs.

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Yet fewer sales mean a smaller budget for all teams across the company, including marketing.

To increase sales volume, most marketing teams double down on optimizing campaigns to drive more traffic. Yet driving more traffic won’t increase sales volume if the current traffic isn’t converting.

Instead, long buying cycles, stalled pipelines, and low sales volume are often symptoms of a disjointed customer journey caused by a disconnect between the marketing and sales teams.

While each team may have separate responsibilities, both own different parts of the buyer journey, and friction during that journey can hurt conversions.

Therefore, the solution to increasing sales is creating a cohesive buyer journey that seamlessly moves the prospect to the point of sale.

As both marketing and sales own different aspects of the buyer journey, achieving a frictionless experience for prospects requires collaboration between marketing and sales. The real challenge is defining how the sales and marketing team can work together to support one another rather than operating in silos.  

In this post, we’ll lay out the step-by-step strategy we use to help marketing and sales align on the customer journey to deliver a seamless customer journey that allows your company to close more high quality prospects in less time. 

Why Is It Important For Sales And Marketing To Work Together?

Although the sales team is responsible for closing prospects, their ability to convert those leads into customers depends on the quality of the lead and that lead’s stage in the buyer journey.

The good news is that marketing can control these variables, ultimately giving marketing the power to influence sales volume.

The only problem is that marketing often believes they are sending high quality, prepared leads, but sales isn’t closing them.

On the other hand, the sales team often believes they can’t close the leads because they don’t match the ICP or aren’t educated enough yet to buy. 

As both sales and marketing own different parts of the customer journey, this misalignment causes friction for prospects. They may receive mixed messaging, poorly timed communication, and a generally negative experience that ultimately costs the sale.

In contrast, if marketing works with sales to understand the prospect’s pain points and objections, they can craft better messaging and serve the right resources at the right time.

The resulting marketing efforts will be far more effective and ultimately drive more revenue for the entire company. It’s also easier to justify increasing marketing budget if you can tie revenue to specific marketing efforts.  

Below, we’ll discuss exactly how marketing can work with the sales team to increase total revenue.

Step 1: Align On The Ideal Customer

Audience avatars are often vague and based on assumptions.

As a result, the marketing team’s campaigns tend to have vague, unconvincing language that fails to attract the right prospects.

For example, if you sell fundraising software and assume your audience purchases it to find more donors, you’ll tailor your marketing copy to address how it helps them close more donors. 

However, more detailed customer research may reveal customers actually purchase it to improve relationships with existing donors. In that case, your marketing copy will be much more effective if it addresses the pain point of improving relationships with existing donors.

Similarly, if you believe the VP of Finance initially discovers and purchases your software, you’ll tailor your marketing strategy to target that persona. However, if it’s actually the Director of Donor Relations who feels the pain point and initially discovers the product before pitching it to the check signer (the VP of Finance), the top of funnel marketing campaigns should target the Director of Donor Relations.

To ensure our clients target the right people at the right funnel stages with the right message, gather qualitative and quantitative data to identify your best customers. 

We have a detailed process to identify a SaaS company’s best customers, and here are four ways we gather data to craft an ideal customer profile:

• CRM: Look at data on your highest paying and highest LTV customers.
• Sales team: Ask them for the company names of the best customers.
• Customer support: Ask them for the company names of the happiest customers.
• Customer survey: You can send a survey or poll to existing customers that gave you a high net promoter score.

This quantitative data will allow you to define your target audience more precisely so you know who to target at each stage of the funnel. 

The next step is to ask the sales team for qualitative information on the ideal customer to better understand their pain points and what drives them to initiate a sales conversation.

Ask sales for specific scenarios that cause them to reach out and attend a demo or sales call to understand the prospect’s language.

In addition to gathering information on the prospect, it’s also important to understand the sales team’s processes. 

What happens when a lead comes in? What are the next steps after the initial call with a prospect? 

Understanding the sales team’s role in the buyer journey will help you tailor your marketing messaging to support the sales conversation rather than sending the prospect mixed messages. 

For example, you can ask about common FAQs and objections that arise at each step of the conversation and create supporting materials to move the prospect through the journey more efficiently. 

You can also ask for battle cards to understand your company’s key differentiators and highlight them in your marketing messaging.

Another benefit of talking to the sales team is that it will allow you to understand specific lead profiling data the sales team needs, which you can incorporate into lead forms. 

Step 2: Capture The Right Data

SaaS companies usually have plenty of data in their CRM, but it rarely provides meaningful insights and is often inaccurate.

With different data points and no clear success indicators, it’s difficult for sales and marketing to agree on important KPIs and use the data to improve prospect quality. 

To solve this problem, you need a single source of truth that provides accurate data on metrics that equate to revenue rather than vanity metrics. We have a separate resource that outlines how we set up marketing operations for clients, but these are the most critical metrics to identify:

• Win rates
• ACVs
• Time-to-close (by each prospect segment)

Once you have access to accurate data, you’ll better understand your pipeline’s efficiency and notice patterns between different industries, sources, and geographies.    

This data will help you better understand which prospect segments are strongest or weakest so that you can tailor your marketing strategy and budget accordingly.

For example, you’ll understand which segments require more nurturing further down the funnel before increasing spend to acquire those deals. 

It’s also important to track sales velocity (i.e., deals created, deal value, time to progress through stages, and deals won and closed won value) to better understand your overall marketing performance. 

You can also analyze sales velocity by various customer segments to understand where marketing performance is strongest and weakest and ensure you’re acquiring leads more likely to turn into revenue.

Once you have data on the buyer journey, the next step to solving the breakdown between sales and marketing is capturing the right data on new leads. 

This will help the sales team because they’ll know whether the lead is a good fit, where to route it, and how to personalize the sales process.

Ideally, capture as many of the following data points as possible:

• Company size
• Industry
• Pricing needs
• Number of employees or users
• Names and roles of important contacts
• Company goals
• Goals for using your product
• Tools they were using before to accomplish these goals
• Any hesitations or initial concerns about your product

However, take a progressive profiling approach and avoid asking for all of this information at once as it may turn away prospects. 

There are also plenty of different ways you can capture this information, including:

• Behavioral data: Website and marketing material activity
• Declared data: Data they submitted via a form field
• Enriched data: Records that were expanded by a 3rd party data provider

Once you have access to this data and align with the sales team, it’s easier to create a seamless customer journey and ensure the right prospects see the right marketing messaging at the right time.

Step 3: Optimize The Marketing-Sales Hand Off 

We established that sales and marketing own different parts of the customer journey, so the next step is to work with sales to define who owns what stage of the journey and how to optimize it to minimize friction.  

The first step of this process is aligning on the definition of a quality MQL and SQL. 

If there’s any misalignment on these definitions, sales won’t prioritize leads that marketing scored highly, and on the flip side, marketing won’t send the sales team prospects they consider high quality. The result is a low conversion rate that reflects poorly on both teams.

To solve this problem, talk to sales to understand the criteria of a quality SQL and then adjust your definition of a quality MQL accordingly to ensure the sales team receives quality leads they can convert as efficiently as possible.

Then, create a lead prioritization criteria to ensure sales addresses the highest intent leads first as not all leads are equally valuable. 

This criteria should cover both the profile and intent level of a quality SQL.

The profile was primarily covered in step one, and the intent level is where they are in the buying journey. If you send leads to the sales team too early in the customer journey, sales will waste time doing preliminary education that could have been accomplished through marketing.  

Here are some things to consider when scoring the intent level of a prospect:

• Lead Form: A lead that fills out a high-intent form such as Request a Demo/Start a Trial should be prioritized over a lower intent form like a lead magnet (case study, calculator, etc.) download.
• Outreach: If a prospect reaches out directly through a LinkedIn DM or raises their hand during a webinar, they’re likely a higher intent lead than someone who passively engages with your content.

Considering both intent and prospect profile fit, prioritize leads accordingly by sending the highest scoring leads to a sales rep to address immediately and lower scoring leads to a more passive sales cycle:

Finally, who you send the lead to within the sales team and the information provided to the sales rep will have a major impact on conversion rates. Here are some additional factors to consider:

• Lead routing: Send leads to reps within that lead’s territory to ensure the sales rep is familiar with that territory’s market conditions. Additionally, send the highest scoring leads to the highest performing reps.
• Notifications and to-dos: To help the sales team deliver a compelling pitch to each prospect, provide information on both the prospect’s demographics, as well as their pain points and why they’re interested in the solution. Too often, marketers send a contact to sales with no explanation of why that person is interested in the solution. As a result, sales wastes the prospect’s time uncovering information that was already provided, and the sales team doesn’t have an opportunity to tailor their pitch. 

Step 4: Optimize Pipeline Efficiency

High value B2B SaaS deals require extensive follow-up and are often lost because of over/under communication or mixed messaging from sales and marketing.

If the sales team is responsible for manually sending the follow-up, the timing of that message might be off, or they may forget to send it altogether. 

To solve this problem, marketing can set up automated nurture sequences to ensure every prospect receives the right message at the right time.

We create different automated nurture sequences for different prospect segments. For example, you can create playbooks for:

• New Deals: This sequence nurtures prospects from MQL to SQL and provides educational resources on their pain point and how your solution solves it.
• Lagging Deals: If a prospect is stuck as an SQL, this email sequence answers common objections and moves them further in the buyer journey. 
• Unresponsive Deals: This sequence is designed for leads that have gone cold and reopen the conversation to see if now is a better time.  
• Closed Lost Deals: These are for deals that were never a great fit, and you can use this data to better understand how to improve your marketing and qualification criteria.

After creating each nurture sequence, talk to the sales team to ensure they understand the send cadence and content of each email to ensure they never send conflicting or poorly timed messages. 

Take The Next Step To Improve Marketing And Sales Collaboration

The steps outlined in this article are the exact processes we use to help our clients improve sales and marketing collaboration, though there’s plenty of depth to each step.

For example, accurately setting up your CRM to capture the right data and defining a quality MQL/SQL can be tricky. If one of the four steps outlined above is executed incorrectly, your pipeline likely won’t improve.

If you want some additional help improving marketing and sales collaboration, we’ve executed this process for dozens of SaaS companies and can help you avoid common pitfalls.

To see if it’s the right step for your team, reach out today and we’ll assess your current operations. 

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• 11 Examples of the Best SaaS Demo Pages

Related Articles

• The Nine Laws Of Inbound Sales Success
• How to Transform Your eCommerce Store Into a Personable Sales Machine
• HubSpot Technical Consulting For SaaS: Beyond Basic Setup

Yet cold leads were once prospects that expressed interest in your business, indicating that they clearly have a problem your product solves. Additionally, you’ve already invested substantial time and resources into attracting and nurturing them.

Even if this isn’t the right time for that prospect to buy your product, you still have a good chance of closing them in the future as they already understand the value of your product and require significantly less nurturing than a brand new prospect.

In this post, we’ll discuss key mistakes SaaS marketers make when reviving cold leads and our strategy to help clients re-engage, convert, and close dead leads.

Do you need help reactivating and closing more leads? Reach out for your free marketing plan and we’ll show you how to improve your pipeline to close more deals.

Key Mistakes with Reactivation Emails

If you are actively re-engaging cold leads, but they still aren’t converting, here are a few mistakes that could hurt your conversion rates.

Manually Sending Reactivation Emails

If your team manually sends reactivation emails, there’s a good chance this task will be forgotten if other pressing matters arise, and you’ll end up with an inconsistent reactivation strategy.

Another danger of manually sending reactivation emails is that multiple team members may contact the same prospect multiple times, which creates a negative experience with your brand.

As a result, prospects may mark your messages as spam, or you could lose a prospect who would have otherwise naturally returned to your brand at a more opportune time.

Establishing an automated reactivation system streamlines this process and will make your revival efforts more effective and sustainable.

Targeting Wrong-Fit Leads

Some prospects realize partway through the sales process that the product isn’t a good fit for them, often because the product isn’t the solution to their problem or they don’t fit your ICP (e.g., an SMB researching a product designed for enterprise businesses).

These cold leads won’t (and shouldn’t) convert, so it’s best to remove them from your reactivation automation sequence.

Instead, the best cold leads to reactivate are prospects who are an excellent fit for your product but weren’t in the position to move forward when they last spoke with your team.

For example, perhaps their budget was pulled during the sales conversation, or they were in the middle of an RFP cycle.

To ensure you’re reactivating right-fit prospects, properly set up deal criteria in your CRM and frequently update the closed lost reasons category.

With detailed data on each prospect, you can exclude leads that aren’t a good fit for your product and segment your reactivation list with more targeted messaging in your follow-up emails.

Ineffective Messaging

Another reason your reactivation emails might not convert is that your messages are ineffective.

First, look at your open rates.

A low open rate may indicate that the subject line simply isn’t compelling.

However, it may also indicate that the topic mentioned within the subject line is irrelevant to the lead, which indicates that the content within the email may be irrelevant.

If your open rates are high but conversions are low, you probably have a great subject line, but the copy within your email is ineffective.

One of the biggest mistakes we see marketers make is writing emails that are too long. Prospects don’t have time to read paragraphs, so shorten your emails to just a line or two.

We’ll show you the exact templates we use below.

How To Create An Effective Dead Lead Reviver Sequence

Here’s the step by step process we use to create an automated sequence to revive dead leads.

Step 1: Capture The Right Data In Your CRM

When you send a reactivation email, who you send it to, and the content of that email are all critical to the success of your campaign.

Unfortunately, you won’t have this information if you aren’t capturing this data in your CRM during the sales process.

Specific information to capture in the CRM include:

• The date the deal was lost
• The deal value
• The deal owner
• Decision criteria
• Pain point/challenge

This information allows you to send a more targeted follow-up email. For example, let’s say the prospect’s pain point was that they lacked the resources to scale technical customer support.

In that case, you can tailor your follow-up email to address the specific problem of scaling technical customer support. As a result, your emails will be more relevant to the prospect and appear more personalized.

Step 2: Writing An Effective Reactivation Email

Often, key decision makers won’t read multiple-paragraph emails, so our entire reactivation emails are intentionally a single line – usually about nine words.

This single line should ask the prospect if they solved the primary pain point they were researching during the sales process. Here are a few examples you can use:

• “Are you still looking for a solution to [pain point]?”
• “Is finding a [solution/product/service] still a priority for you?”
• “Do you still need help with [pain point]?”
• “Are you still interested in [product/service?”
• “Do you still want to achieve [objective/goal]?”
• “What competitor did you end up going with?”

Here are a few more examples:

Here are a few other best practices to consider when creating reactivation emails:

• Always use plain text and keep it short – it should look like it’s coming from a real human.
• Add a big block of empty space so that the unsubscribe link is less prominent. We also change the text of the link itself to “Manage your email preferences.”

Step 3: Creating A Reactivation Cadence

Timing also plays a role in the success of your reactivation campaigns. If you send the reactivation email too soon, the prospect’s status likely won’t have changed, so they won’t convert. You also run the risk of annoying prospects if you’re overly persistent.

On the other hand, if you wait too long, the prospect may have forgotten about your product, or the point of contact may have left that company altogether.

To determine the perfect cadence for your reactivation sequences, consider the buying cycle length for your product or service and align the reactivation sequence to coincide with that cadence.

For example, if the end-to-end buying cycle is about 30 days, it might be a good idea to align the reactivation campaign around the 30-day mark.

If your buying cycle is longer than twelve weeks, consider sending reactivation sequences once per quarter. That timeline gives prospects sufficient time to try to solve the problem themselves, but they still remember who your brand is and likely still find the problem painful.

Step 4: Sending The Email

Finally, send the reactivation email from the account owner or whoever had the most contact with that person.

If the recipient doesn’t recognize the email address, they won’t open it. Even if the recipient does open it, they may not remember that it’s your company they spoke with before, as most people remember other people better than brand names.

Get Help Reviving Dead Leads

Reviving dead leads is one way we improve the efficiency of SaaS marketing programs, but there are plenty of other strategies we also use to generate more leads without resorting to traditional methods like increasing ad spend or publishing more content.

To learn more about other low hanging fruit opportunities to improve your content marketing program’s efficiency, reach out to us today.

Get your free marketing plan that covers all of the low hanging fruit you can tackle and other long-term opportunities to increase the efficiency of your SaaS marketing strategy.

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.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• Stages of the B2B SaaS Sales & Marketing Funnel
• B2B SaaS Funnel Conversion Benchmarks
• What is a MQL in B2B SaaS Marketing?
• Top 6 B2B SaaS Demand Generation Agencies in 2025
• 8 High-Impact B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies for 2025
• Must-Have Skills for a B2B SaaS Demand Generation Manager

Related Articles

• How B2B Marketers Can Increase Pipeline Efficiency and Predictability
• Webinar – Optimizing Emails for Lead Generation Success
• The Ultimate Guide to Lead Generation

As a result, you might get your message in front of the right audience, but capturing and moving them through your marketing funnel is much trickier.

So, how can you effectively remarket to prospects and nurture them through your marketing funnel to reduce customer acquisition costs without using cookies?

We’ve tested various alternative remarketing methods on dozens of SaaS companies, and below we’ll discuss the solutions we’ve found most effective, as well as the top mistakes that cause prospects to drop out of your marketing funnel.

Reach out to us for a Free Marketing Plan today, and we can address how your brand can remain competitive in a cookieless marketing landscape.

How To Approach A World Of Cookieless Marketing

Cookies helped marketers because they made it easy to follow customers anywhere online.

Therefore, marketers didn’t necessarily need to understand the full customer journey to remarket to prospects. Yet understanding the customer journey, including the stakeholders involved, the pain points they experience at each step, and the channels they frequently use is essential to maximizing your marketing funnel’s efficiency.

The good news is that if you fully understand your buyer and the customer journey, you’ll soon discover plenty of remarketing options that are often even more effective than cookies.

So how do you map out the customer journey?

At Powered By Search, we begin every client engagement by creating a detailed buyer persona that identifies not only the person who signs the check, but also all of the other stakeholders involved in the product discovery and purchase decision process.

Then, through detailed customer research, we identify how each of those people experience the buyer journey and each person’s pain points at each step of the journey.

With detailed information on the customer journey and their pain points at each step, you can create lead magnets and content to capture your prospect’s email address and nurture them through the funnel.

Your marketing program will also be more effective as you can create a holistic marketing strategy where each marketing campaign is a building block that feeds into your broader marketing funnel to answer objections and move the buyer to the point of sale.

This is the core philosophy behind our predictable growth methodology, and it’s a key reason we can help SaaS companies profitably acquire customers.

Rather than running a collection of random marketing campaigns and hoping some perform well, each campaign serves a specific purpose within the buyer journey.

How To Remarket Without Relying On Cookies

Remarketing is a critical component of a holistic marketing strategy, so here are a few ways you can still get your message in front of prospects at each stage of the customer journey without using cookies.

Using The Boomerang Method

If you can’t follow people with cookies, you can still ask for permission to remarket to them by collecting first-party data, like an email address. We create lead magnets, like calculators, templates, and checklists, and offer them to prospects in exchange for first-party data.

You can then upload your prospect list to an ad platform, like Google or LinkedIn, and run remarketing ads.

We also send prospects email nurture sequences relevant to the lead magnet.

For example, if prospects downloaded a lead magnet on content marketing ideas for enterprise SaaS, we might send them a nurture sequence on building a full content marketing program, including keyword research, content writing, content refreshing, and analytics.

Account Based Marketing

Cookies helped marketers by giving them information on their target audience. However, account based marketing is an effective replacement because you can still pinpoint who you target (i.e., the company and the specific titles within that company) and send them appropriate messages at each step of the buying journey.

Collaborate With Industry Partners

One of the first things we do when we begin a new engagement with a client is a full audit of their data tracking. During this audit, we first ensure the client is using the right tech and then use a scorecard to audit data accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Once you have accurate tracking in place, we can attribute closed won revenue to specific marketing activities, which helps us better understand which campaigns are most effective at each step of the buyer journey. This is arguably more valuable than data from cookies because it helps us understand what messaging resonates with particular prospects at each step of the buyer journey.

As a result, we can improve the efficiency of future marketing campaigns by improving messaging and targeting.

Key Remarketing Mistakes To Avoid

If you’re already investing in remarketing efforts and aren’t seeing a great ROI, you might be making one of these mistakes.

Focusing Exclusively on The Bottom of The Funnel

Bottom of the funnel marketing campaigns, such as targeting high purchase intent keywords with Google ads, are becoming more competitive and less profitable.

Therefore, the solution is to refocus your efforts higher in the marketing funnel and then use lead magnets and other permission based remarketing methods to nurture them through the buyer journey.

Assuming How Prospects Experience the Buyer Journey

Many SaaS companies map out a buyer journey, but it’s usually based on assumptions rather than real data. Unfortunately, if your assumptions are incorrect and the buyer journey you map out does not align with how prospects experience the buyer journey, you’ll likely lose prospects along the way.

This is because prospects won’t conform to the buyer journey you’ve laid out. If you don’t offer the next piece of information prospects need, they’ll simply go to a competitor for that information.

An example of this mistake that we frequently see is when SaaS companies include a call to action to schedule a demo in a blog post targeting a keyword that attracts a reader who is still at the very beginning of the buyer journey.

For example, someone researching “is cybersecurity important for my business,” isn’t ready to schedule a demo for an enterprise cybersecurity product.

A more appropriate CTA might be a lead magnet about implementing a cybersecurity strategy.

Therefore, the key to an effective remarketing strategy is to understand how your prospects choose to move through the buyer journey and then format your marketing strategy to meet them – not the other way around.

Therefore, talk to your customers and use data from Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Data Management Platforms (DMPs) to uncover these insights.

Inaccurate Data

While we established that having data from CDPs and DMPs is essential, many companies using this data still run into problems with remarketing for one of two reasons.

First, some companies capture a lot of data but lack a single source of truth. If you’re dealing with various disparate data points, extracting actionable insights to improve your marketing strategy is difficult. As a result, the data is essentially useless to your team.

The other problem we often find is that companies don’t realize that the data they’re collecting is inaccurate, which also makes the data useless (or even hurts their strategy).

That’s why we always begin each client engagement with a full audit of the SaaS company’s tracking to ensure the data is clean and accurate.

Get More Help Navigating A Cookieless Marketing Landscape

Even though a cookieless world makes data collection harder, consider it an opportunity to get to know your customers, their pain points, and the buyer journey on a deeper level.

Of course, the tricky part is learning how to understand your customers and the buyer journey better to ensure you send the right messaging at the right time.

This process has a lot of nuance, so that’s where we can help. At Powered By Search, we’ve helped dozens of enterprise SaaS companies navigate this challenge, and we can help you achieve the same success.

Reach out to us for a Free Marketing Plan today, and we can address how your brand can remain competitive in a cookieless marketing landscape.

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• Ultimate Guide to Craft a Powerful SaaS Email Marketing Strategy for 2025
• Top SaaS Marketing Communities to Join in 2024
• SaaS Marketing Courses to Level-Up Your Team
• Top Books Every B2B Marketer Should Read
• How to Build an Impactful B2B SaaS Marketing Budget

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• What Most SaaS Companies Get Wrong About Marketing Budgets⁠—and the Data-Based Method for Finding the Right One
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Generating a strong ROI with Google Ads is more challenging than ever, but it’s still a highly effective channel if your strategy is well-optimized.

In fact, here are some examples of results we’ve produced for clients in the past through the first 4 months of 2024:

• Increased SALs by 60% for a risk management SaaS
• 47% decrease in cost per conversion for an employee engagement SaaS
• Achieved 133% of quarterly SQL goal for a cybersecurity SaaS

In this post, we’ll give you the 80/20 of the Google ads strategy we have tested and refined across dozens of client accounts.

To discover the biggest opportunities to improve your Google ads campaigns, reach out to our team today for your Free Marketing Plan.

Challenges Most SaaS Marketers Face With Google Ads

It’s helpful to understand why your strategy isn’t working before implementing a new strategy, as poor performance is often linked to just a few common issues. If you address these issues first, the rest of your Google Ads strategy is much more likely to succeed. So here are a few of the most common problems we identify when auditing Google Ad accounts for B2B SaaS companies.

1. Saturated Market

The number of SaaS companies entering the market each year is increasing exponentially across most industries.

For example, if you look at G2, you’ll see that there are over 400 marketing automation tools listed:

This level of competition makes Google Ads much more expensive, especially when competing against large brands like HubSpot or Sprout Social, which have significantly higher ad budgets than the average SaaS company.

While you can’t alter the competitive landscape, you can stand out through strategic positioning. This is why we begin each client engagement with a detailed customer research process and then use that information to craft messaging that stands out and resonates with your target audience.

2. Wasted Ad Spend

Many SaaS marketers aren’t actively monitoring campaigns, so we often find a handful of campaigns running unchecked that aren’t contributing to a positive ROI.

On average, about 20-40% of ad spend doesn’t contribute to the desired outcome (e.g., generating leads or demo signups).

Therefore, you may be paying for clicks, but if they never convert, you’re just wasting ad dollars.

3. Lack of A Closed Loop Around Reporting

Google Ads uses machine learning to optimize and improve targeting to show your ads to the right prospects. Yet most marketers aren’t effectively teaching the system what type of conversion it should strive to achieve.

Given that your goal is driving trials and demo signups, teaching the machine learning algorithm to prioritize those conversion types and the value of different conversions is essential. Yet many ad accounts we audit, even brands spending as much as $400,000 or $500,000 per month, aren’t using primary or secondary conversion types.

Additionally, many brands aren’t implementing remarketing sequences and don’t use offline imports from Salesforce or HubSpot to send conversion data back to Google ads.

As a result, the data becomes siloed and Google’s machine learning algorithm won’t know which leads became MQLs. Without conversion data, Google’s algorithm can’t improve its targeting. Of course, it’s more difficult to set up accurate reporting if you have a longer buying cycle (e.g., 6, 12, or 18 months), so we often spend time fixing reporting challenges at the beginning of each client engagement before implementing any marketing campaigns.

The Solution: A Proven B2B SaaS Google Ads Blueprint

We run hundreds of tests each month, and this is the process we’ve developed and currently implement with all our clients.

You’ll notice that the diagram is divided into four main pillars of campaigns: prospecting, conquest, remarketing/win-back, and brand.

The traffic temperature symbolizes the prospects’ familiarity with your brand and rises as you move from left to right. Traffic in the prospecting stages may not have heard of your brand, whereas traffic on the right is already familiar with your brand and has had multiple interactions with your content.

Here’s an overview of the purpose of each of these pillars:

• Prospecting: This campaign targets people who may not know that your brand exists yet have declared intent. We can tell if they’ve declared intent primarily based on the types of pain points they’re searching for, though it could also be based on behaviors, customer uploads, etc. These prospects may or may not know your brand exists, so this campaign aims to build awareness and get prospects to enter your marketing funnel.
• Conquesting: These campaigns are also designed to build awareness, though they’re designed to steal prospects already using or heavily considering your competitors.
• Win Back: Most SaaS clients don’t convert on their first interaction with your brand (especially if your product has a longer buying cycle), so these campaigns are designed to remarket to prospects who have interacted with your brand yet didn’t make a purchase. We also test different CTAs and messaging to ensure we cater to each person, as every buying journey is slightly different.
• Brand: Finally, these campaigns are designed to serve people who are actively searching for your brand and resources related to your brand. If people can’t find what they’re looking for when searching your brand name, that poor first experience with your brand will hurt your conversions. Additionally, your competitors are probably bidding on your branded keywords, so owning your own branded searches is important.

How to Implement the Blueprint

Now that you can see how the playbook works, how do you use it and get started?

If we’re building a Google Ads strategy from scratch, we begin building campaigns on the right side (targeting brand aware prospects) and then move towards the left (targeting solution interested prospects who may not have heard of your brand).

Targeting traffic already familiar with your brand first gives you the quickest time to value, as a prospect familiar with your brand is more likely to convert faster and require less nurturing than a colder prospect unfamiliar with your brand.

Alternatively, some prospects who approach us already have a Google ads strategy in place and are struggling to profitably expand the ad budget.

In this case, assuming they’re already maximizing opportunities with warm traffic, we begin building the strategy on the left-hand side.

Regardless of which side you start with, here’s an overview of executing each step of the process.

Step 1: Prospecting

For most clients, we spend a total of about 60-70% of the total ad budget on the prospecting category, and we break down prospecting campaigns into three main buckets:

• Solution aware (high intent): 40% of total ad budget
• Problem aware (medium intent): 10-20% of total ad budget
• Symptom aware (low intent): 10% of total ad budget

We may break down each bucket into more subcategories by geography, conversion types, customer flow, and experiences. However, these are the primary categories we use to organize prospecting campaigns.

Solution Aware (High Intent)

This bucket targets keywords that imply the searcher has already decided to purchase a solution and is comparing different options.

For example, if you have data governance software, the solution-aware campaign we might set up would likely target keywords like “data governance tools” or “data governance software.”

Problem Aware (Medium Intent)

This category focuses on use cases, so we target pain point keywords that the product solves.

For example, if you have a social media scheduling tool, a problem aware keyword may be something like “how to post more consistently on social media,” as automating your posts with a scheduling tool solves that problem.

Symptom Aware (Low Intent)

These campaigns target keywords that indicate the searcher is still at the beginning of the buying journey. Keywords that fit the frameworks of “what is…” “trends,” and “reports” tend to fall into this category, as these readers aren’t actively looking to purchase a solution but are interested in your industry.

For example, someone searching “what is a social media scheduler” isn’t yet ready to purchase software as they’re just learning how it works.

However, running symptom aware campaigns is worthwhile because it’s easier to convert a customer who began their buyer journey with you rather than trying to introduce them to your brand, build trust, and convert them after they’ve already decided to make a purchase.

As a result, your bottom-of-funnel marketing efforts will be more effective.
Additionally, many of these top-of-funnel keywords are difficult to rank for in organic search (from an SEO perspective). Therefore, targeting these keywords with Google ads ensures your brand is present at the beginning of the buyer journey.

However, it’s critical to leverage Google’s targeting mechanisms and give it the data necessary to refine its targeting if you’re running top-of-funnel campaigns. This is because the broad nature of top-of-funnel keywords tends to attract a variety of visitors who may not fit in your ideal audience (e.g., students doing research).

Step 2: Conquesting

These campaigns target keywords that contain your competitor’s brand names, like brand name and “reviews,” “pricing,” and “alternatives.”

However, avoid targeting purely competitor brand names, as the intent is often unclear, leading to low quality scores.

We also target “versus” style keywords. For example, it could be your brand name versus another competitor’s brand name. However, we also target versus keywords that contain two of your competitors’ brand terms (“competitor A vs. competitor B”). In these scenarios, we’ll add your brand name at the end to make it a three-way comparison (“competitor A vs competitor B vs. your brand). This way, you’re stealing high-intent traffic researching your competitors, and inserting your brand into the conversation.

The key to making your campaigns for these comparison keywords convert is driving the traffic to custom landing pages. Each landing page is designed to be helpful to the reader in understanding how the products differ from one another and obviously highlight the key selling points of your product.

Step 3: Remarketing

Products priced anywhere from $5,000 to $500,000 generally have a buying cycle that lasts several weeks, months, or even years.

If you’re not remarketing to prospects you captured in the early stages of the buyer journey, you’re wasting ad budget as they won’t convert on the initial interaction with your brand. To prevent this, run remarketing campaigns at a cadence that matches the buyer journey.

We have three main buckets for remarketing campaigns: seven-day, 30-day, and 90-day remarketing campaigns (though we also have longer remarketing campaigns as well, depending on the buyer journey).

The seven-day bucket is targeted towards people in the market who are actively looking to make a purchase. Therefore, we show them a diverse range of offers frequently.

Offer diversity (the ads you show them and the landing page you send them to) is important because each prospect has slightly nuanced pain points and will respond differently to each offer. Additionally, a single offer designed to cater to a range of avatars will be generic and ultimately produce a much lower conversion rate than a more specific offer that speaks to a very specific avatar.

The 30-day bucket targets prospects beginning to research various solutions, and the 90-day bucket is designed to remind prospects of your brand and what you offer.

Step 4: Brand

It’s also important to own your branded terms. If you don’t, your competitors could launch their own conquesting campaigns to dominate the search results for your brand keywords. It’s obviously best for you to control your brand’s narrative, so we allocate about 10% to 15% of the budget towards any brand-related keywords.

If you’re not sure where to start, one of the most basic action items is creating a brand exact match campaign.

Global Best Practices

The most advanced marketers consistently execute the basics well, so here are a few of the most important global best practices.

Use Three RSAs Per Ad Group

A common mistake we see when auditing campaigns is that marketers rotate only one or two ads per ad group. This limits performance, as fewer ad choices mean fewer opportunities to improve conversion rates. Three RSAs per ad group is a best practice, though the more, the better.

Sitelink and Callout Extensions

Sitelinks and callout extensions enrich the ad, which allows it to take up more virtual real estate and offer a different entry point to your website. This gives you more brand awareness while simultaneously limiting your competitors’ brand awareness.

You can have a primary dedicated landing page with the callouts and site links going to parts of your site rather than a generic page.

Dedicated Landing Pages

If someone clicks on your ad to solve a specific problem and then you drive them to the homepage or a generic feature or pricing page, the prospect will simply leave because it didn’t answer their question or solve their problem. Additionally, sending them to a generic page on your website gives them too many options and menu items to click on, distracting them from the goal – taking the next step in the buyer journey.

So build out dedicated landing pages for your ads. Dedicated landing pages also make it easier to progress the buyer journey because you can give them a highly relevant call to action.

The only exception to building a dedicated landing page is targeting exact match brand terms. In this case, driving the user to the homepage makes sense because the intent is unclear.

Exclude Existing Customers

At the beginning of each engagement, we get a list of existing customers and exclude them from our brand query campaigns. The only caveat is if you have multiple products and you’re aiming to either upsell or cross sell them another product.

In those cases, we might put them into a brand consideration campaign.

Maximize Your B2B SaaS Google Ads Performance

This post outlines the 80/20 of the Google Ads blueprint we implement for clients, and you can use it to establish an excellent foundation. Yet, like any marketing channel, there’s plenty of nuance to maximizing the ROI of your Google ads campaigns.

This is because every target audience is slightly different, and everything from the ad copy you test to the insights you draw from various tests will impact performance. However, it requires years of experience to refine these skills.

That’s why Powered By Search exists. Each team member is a world-class expert in their specific marketing channel and has years of experience running campaigns specifically for B2B SaaS.

To discover the biggest opportunities to improve your Google ads campaigns, reach out to our team today for your Free Marketing Plan.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• B2B SaaS Google Ads Stats & Benchmarks for 2024
• Must-Have Skills for a B2B SaaS PPC Specialist
• 20 Must-Have B2B SaaS PPC Tools for Competitive Analysis & Spying

Related Articles

• Having Trouble Scaling Your SaaS Google Ads Campaigns? Here’s What You’re Likely Missing
• The B2B SaaS Guide to Google Ads Creative That Converts on Search and Display
• How To Maximize PPC Budgets on Google Adwords

As a result, it can feel like you’re treading water. You might be able to keep pace, but never quite surpass your competitors.

However, we audited dozens of B2B SaaS PPC tactics and strategies over the past several months, and most of them either make at least one mistake we’ll discuss below or overlook one of these key approaches.

If you want to keep pace or surpass your competitors without bumping up your ad spend, here are the top mistakes to avoid and the exact solutions we’re implementing with our SaaS clients to maximize their PPC strategies.

Do you need to accelerate your PPC performance this year? Reach out today for your Free Marketing Plan. We’ll identify low-hanging fruit and recommend a strategy to hit your goals.

How To Approach The Paid Media Landscape in 2024

In 2023, many SaaS marketers were operating with reduced budgets, but using a defensive approach to paid media won’t work in 2024. Demand is steadily ramping up, and your competitors will use this opportunity to capture more market share.

Therefore, our first approach to improving a client’s PPC strategy is identifying mistakes causing inefficiencies. Below we’ll discuss a few of the most common inefficiencies many clients don’t realize they’re making.

Once we’ve established a solid foundation for the marketing funnel, we implement strategies that are currently working.

Identifying the most effective current PPC strategies requires testing and experimentation, which can be expensive and time-consuming.

At Powered By Search, we work with dozens of SaaS clients and have the unique advantage of access to proprietary data from hundreds of campaigns. We also document each test in a hypothesis log to build our knowledge base. Therefore, we have a solid understanding of what’s currently working in PPC, and below we’ll share the exact PPC strategies that are currently working.

If you’re unsure how to improve your PPC strategy, begin by auditing your approach for these mistakes and then deploy these highly effective tactics.

7 Paid Media Mistakes To Avoid in 2024

Before increasing your ad spend, make your current paid media strategy more efficient by auditing your strategy for these inefficiencies that are wasting your ad budget.

1. Using Google Display for Performance Marketing

We’ve found that Google Display ads, unless used for remarketing, are ineffective. Most of the traffic is bots or very low quality, so it tends to produce very low conversion rates.

2. Keyword Stuffing/Single Keyword Ad Groups

Keyword stuffing just makes your ads less clickable to searchers and search engines are savvy enough to identify synonyms and understand what your ad is about. Therefore, you’ll see a better ROI creating an ad that attracts the right audience and repels the wrong audience.

3. Leveraging Manual Bidding

While manual bidding won’t necessarily hurt your strategy, it requires so much time and effort and rarely produces better results than automatic bidding.

4. Using Generic Non-Persona Content

People will only click on an ad if it’s tailored to their persona. For example, if a prospect is looking for call center as a service, they will click on an ad for call center as a service rather than a generic ad titled “call service.”

Even if someone happens to click on a generic ad, they may be the wrong audience. As a result, you’ll just waste valuable ad budget attracting a low quality lead.

5. Investing Exclusively In BOFU and In Market Segments

Bottom of the funnel keywords and marketing channels are more expensive than ever, so you’ll likely see high customer acquisition costs if that’s your primary strategy for attracting and converting customers.

Additionally, most enterprise SaaS buyer journeys last at least six months and involve a complex buying committee. Therefore, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to intercept and convert a prospect who has already invested a lot of time and resources into evaluating different providers.

Instead, we advocate for a more holistic marketing approach that addresses each step of the buyer journey so that you start the relationship with prospects earlier in the journey. This ultimately makes your bottom of the funnel efforts more effective.

6. Broad Keyword Targeting

Broad keyword targeting is often ineffective because these ads are usually shown to a generic audience that may not fit your ideal customer profile.

This is particularly true for enterprise SaaS companies, as these customers are often very specific individuals that require specific messaging.

While broad keyword targeting can work if you have an extremely seasoned account manager and negative match list structure, we’ve found that it’s rarely effective.

7. Utilizing tCPA/tROAS (Without Meaningful/Dynamic Value Tracking Updated By Offline Conversion Tracking)

Your leads are likely valued differently, so assigning a single metric to each of them is rarely accurate. As a result, you might be overspending to acquire a customer or miss out on an opportunity to acquire a higher-value customer.

7 Paid Media Approaches We’re Doubling Down On in 2024

Once you’ve optimized your strategy by cutting inefficient tactics, here are some more effective strategies to help you squeeze more out of your budget and ultimately surpass competitors with a similar budget.

1. Offline Conversion Tracking

Your leads aren’t all equally valuable, and without accurate tracking set up, it can be difficult to even begin to identify what is and isn’t working and where you should invest more or less.

That’s why we first set up lead scoring in HubSpot. This way, we know exactly how much a lead is worth and can adjust budget and strategy accordingly. In addition, the more (accurate) data you can feed to Google Ads, the more profitable your strategy will be as it can use that data to better optimize your ads.

2. Use Segmented ABM Lists

If you’re working primarily with just a TAM list, a large portion of the people on that list probably aren’t your ideal prospect. This is particularly true for enterprise SaaS companies that have a relatively small pool of high value prospects.

As a result, you’ll probably waste a lot of ad budget on people who aren’t a good fit for your products.

Instead, we’re using segmented ABM lists that target specific people at companies we know are a good fit for our clients’ products. Using a segmented ABM list also makes it easy for us to tailor the messaging on these ads to each stakeholder’s specific pain points. This can help you convince all members of the buying committee that your product is the best solution for their problem, which will help shorten the sales cycle.

3. Thought Leadership Ads

We’ve tested many thought leadership ads for our clients recently, and this ad format has proven to be highly effective. The key to making thought leadership ads effective is crafting authentic and genuine messaging.

4. Non Skippable Videos

It’s difficult to say anything meaningful and compelling in five seconds, so even though non skippable video ads are more expensive, we’ve found that they are more effective.

Again, we use segmented ABM lists to target key stakeholders with non-skippable video ads, and we tailor each message to that stakeholder’s specific pain point.

5. Brand Campaign Optimization

Even if your campaigns are performing well, there are always opportunities to improve the efficacy of your ads.

It’s also important to check that your ads are serving properly. For example, your ads should always appear first whenever you search for your brand name.

Additionally, we’re always running small tests on our clients’ campaigns, and we record the results of each test in a Hypothesis Log to ensure we never make the same mistake twice. It also helps us build a database of information on what works for each client’s target audience, which helps improve the outcome of each subsequent test.

6. Spot Checking How Ad Copy and Assets Are Served

Even if you properly optimize your campaigns, ad platforms don’t always serve them correctly.

If you notice that some of your campaigns aren’t performing well, search for that term in Google and see how the ad is served. For example, sometimes you’ll have headlines that are almost identical, but Google will still serve them with each other.

7. Continual Tracking Audits

Finally, even if you have everything set up to maximize conversions, it’s still important to regularly audit your campaigns and look for new opportunities to improve conversions.

We also spend time ensuring that tracking is functioning properly in HubSpot so that we can accurately attribute closed won revenue to specific campaigns.

How To Accelerate Your PPC Success

There are plenty of nuances to paid media, and finding the best strategy for your specific brand requires a lot of testing.

If you want to reduce the time spent testing campaigns and get results faster, you can accelerate your growth by working with a marketing agency that already has data from dozens of other SaaS companies running similar paid media campaigns. 

Here at Powered By Search, we work exclusively with B2B SaaS companies, and our team of experts can give your brand an unfair advantage as we have accumulated a database of proprietary knowledge from working with dozens of clients.   

To see if we can help your SaaS, reach out to us today for Free Marketing Plan. We’ll identify low-hanging fruit and recommend a strategy to to accelerate your growth. 

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• Must-Have Skills for a B2B SaaS PPC Specialist
• 11 Best SaaS PPC Agencies to Help You Drive Pipeline
• 20 Must-Have B2B SaaS PPC Tools for Competitive Analysis & Spying

Related Articles

• SaaS PPC Campaigns Falling Flat? Here’s Our Exact SaaS PPC Optimization Process
• How we run PPC for developer focused SaaS products
• The Starter Guide to PPC Optimization

When this happens, the lessons learned can focus too much on trying to improve what’s working well and ignoring the deeper issue.

For example, let’s say you’re investing tens of thousands of dollars per month into a paid media campaign to generate lead magnet downloads, like a checklist or template. You’re getting seemingly healthy clickthrough rates and lead magnet downloads but the sales team keeps asking why they aren’t seeing an increase in demos.

You start to wonder ‘what’s wrong with my paid media campaign?’ So you revamp your ad copy to boost clickthrough rates and update your lead magnet landing page to improve CRO believing that must be where the problem lies. While some updates do help improve CTR and downloads, the sales teams still isn’t seeing a meaningful increase in demos booked.

If this is happening in your B2B SaaS marketing campaigns and leads are stalling out from turning into MQLs despite consistently improving your lead generation, look closer into what happens after a visitor downloads that lead magnet.

• Is the lead passed to the sales team manually?
• Do you have workflows set up but rely on them to run unattended in the background?
• Does nothing happen and the lead is left on their own to take the next step in their buying journey to advance to MQL?

When partnering with B2B SaaS teams, we find that it’s a mix of all 3 cases. Solutions require internal marketing operations improvements,  close collaboration between marketing and sales stakeholders, and most importantly – nurturing the prospect’s journey from lead to MQL.

In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at what you can do to make it easier for leads to take the right next step to becoming a MQL.

How we’re going to do that is by showing you our process for an effective 14-21 day lead-to-MQL email nurture sequence.

We implemented this sequence for a B2B data governance SaaS and generated 56 sales conversations in 30 days from leads that otherwise would have likely gone cold.

Do you need help turning more leads into MQLs? Reach out for your Free Marketing Plan and we’ll show you how.

Common Mistakes Impacting Lead to MQL Nurture Emails

Email nurture sequences are still highly effective when executed correctly, yet there are a few key mistakes we see SaaS companies making that kill their lead to MQL conversion rate.

#1: You Don’t Have An Email Nurture Sequence

Many SaaS marketers feel overwhelmed at the effort of creating an email nurture sequence. What does an effective email nurture sequence look like? What kind of copy should it include? How many emails should it contain, and when should they be sent?

However, if you delay implementing an email nurture sequence to engage prospects and build a relationship, your current marketing efforts are wasted as leads won’t convert into customers. This is because prospects will forget they need your solution, or they’ll opt into your competitors’ email sequences and have built more trust with that brand instead.

If this is the category you currently fall under, we’ll solve it by showing you the proven email nurture sequence blueprint we use later in the post.

#2: The Email Sequencing Is Poorly Optimized

If you have an email sequence in place but engagement is low, many marketers counteract the problem by sending too many emails within a short period of time. However, if your send frequency is too high, people will likely begin to ignore your emails. A high percentage of unopened emails will also lower your deliverability rate, meaning emails to new prospects may go straight to spam.

On the other hand, if a prospect opts in for a lead magnet and then never hears from your brand for a month, they’ll probably simply delete any emails you send after that point because the prospect either won’t remember your brand, or the pain point they originally opted-in to solve is no longer top of mind.

Another problem we see is that the spacing between your send times doesn’t correlate well with the customer journey (i.e., you send two emails fairly immediately, and then there’s no communication until the sixth or seventh day). This issue also negatively impacts your nurture sequence’s engagement rate.

We’ve tested various send frequencies, and while there is slight nuance for each brand depending on the buyer journey, we’ve found that a staggered delivery of 6 emails over 14-21 days tends to be the sweet spot of send frequencies.

#3: The Messaging Fails To Resonate With Prospects

You can spend hours crafting the email copy for your nurture sequence but only seconds on the email subject line.

Yet the email subject line is essentially the gatekeeper to the email copy. If prospects aren’t first intrigued by the subject line to click on the email, the copy itself is useless. In addition, your subject line is competing with the subject lines of hundreds of other emails, while the body of your copy has essentially no competition.

This is why spending more time optimizing the subject line is critical.

To improve open rates, we analyze the top-performing subject lines from prior emails to understand the tone of voice and style that tend to be most successful for your brand. Then, A/B test various subject lines in that tone of voice and style to determine a winner.

Once a reader opens your email, the content needs to align with the buyer’s current pain point. If the content is irrelevant to the reader, they won’t take the time to read it, regardless of how compelling the copy is.

The key to creating relevant content is customer research and understanding how prospects move through the buyer journey. Prospects don’t conform to the buyer journey you create. Instead, you must craft a marketing funnel that meets them at each stage of their journey.

Yet the key to transforming a reader into a customer is leading them to the next step in the buyer journey. Therefore, it’s imperative to include a CTA to that next step in the buyer journey at the end of your email.

It’s also important to give readers only one CTA. If you provide more than one CTA, you’ll introduce confusion, and they likely won’t take any action.

#4: The Handoff To The Sales Team is Broken

Once a lead is ready to book a call with the sales team or engage with a real person at your company, they must receive a fast response.

Otherwise, you run the risk of any of these three scenarios that could cost you the lead to MQL conversion:

• Prospects have a negative impression of your brand. If the team isn’t responsive before they buy the product, prospects will assume the company won’t be responsive to support requests after they hand over their money.
• The prospect’s pain point subsides as other priorities replace it, and they become disinterested in your solution.
• The prospect turns to another competitor’s solution because they want an immediate solution to their problem.

While this step is technically in the sales team’s hands, you’re still likely held accountable for MQLs and revenue.

Therefore, audit the sales team handoff by going through the customer journey yourself. Then, collaborate with the sales team to better optimize response times.

The Solution: The 14-21 Day Lead-to-MQL Nurture Sequence

There’s a lot of nuance to creating an effective email nurture sequence, so we’ve taken the guesswork out of it for you by testing various sequences and have settled on the 14-21 day nurture sequence.

Using this blueprint, you can be confident that you’re sending the right emails with the right message at the right time to convert more leads into MQLs.

Here’s an overview of how it works, and then we’ll walk you through the step-by-step process to implement this nurture sequence into your marketing funnel.

• Day 0 – Asset Delivery: This email is sent immediately and delivers the asset that was downloaded.
• Day 1 – Hot Button 1: This email is sent the next day and addresses the top pain point your audience feels.
• Day 3 – Hot Button 2: This email addresses the second most pressing pain point your audience feels.
• Day 5 – Hot Button 3: This email addresses the third most pressing pain point your audience feels.
• Day 14 – Probing Question: The first three hot button emails nudge leads to become MQLs by addressing pain points. If they still haven’t converted, this email provides a stronger CTA by asking them directly to hop on a call or schedule a demo.
• Day 21 – Breakup: It’s important to avoid over-communicating and sending too many emails, as that can hurt your email deliverability and annoy the receiver, creating a negative impression of your brand. Therefore, if a prospect hasn’t responded by this point, this email will let them know that this will be your last communication with them. If you also have a reactivation campaign set up, your workflow needs to move the lead there for a future follow-up at a much later date.

To help you craft your own 14-21 day nurture sequence, let’s dive in a bit deeper below. We’ll include examples along the way.

Email 1: The Asset Delivery

The primary purpose of this email is delivering the asset the prospect requested, though it’s also a great opportunity to introduce what your brand does and how it helps solve their problems.

You also want to ensure you’re moving the prospect to the next step in the buyer journey. So, after they’ve read the asset they downloaded, what is the next piece of content they need to continue progressing through the buyer journey?

These pieces of content are usually middle and bottom-of-funnel pieces, like case studies, rather than top-of-funnel pieces. If you send them top-of-funnel content, it won’t be relevant to the prospect, as you’ll actually be regressing back up the funnel.

If you need help identifying the right content to include in your emails, refer to the buyer awareness matrix and prioritize sending product and solution-aware content relevant to where the prospect is currently in the buyer journey.

You should also include a ‘super signature’ at the end in case a prospect is already ready to jump ahead in the journey and get on a call with your team or download a more advanced bottom of funnel asset.

Let’s break this down.

The first thing you might notice is that the template short and simple in terms of overall copy. It’s plain text and takes a few seconds to read.

We find this to be very effective because it only needs to accomplish 2 things. 1) Give the reader their download, and 2) Offer options, but don’t demand their potential next steps.

The lead is just getting to know you, so make that easy for them. But don’t overwhelm them. The email should avoid being too long (it won’t be read), and avoid design elements so that it feels like its coming from a real person.

The next thing you might notice is that there’s a lot of placeholder text. This is because the email itself needs to uniquely speak to your SaaS’ ICP – who they are, what pain points they have, and how your solution helps them. We’ll work closely with our clients to understand exactly what that is using approaches like the B2B SaaS Positioning Canvas. Generic pain points and solutions won’t stick.

You also need to be very targeted in recommending the next steps the lead should take in their journey with you. If the lead magnet is targeting a ‘problem unaware’ audience, then the top articles can’t jump too far into ‘solution aware’ as the lead isn’t yet at that stage in their journey.

Then, for the ‘super signature’ this is an opportunity for a lead to effective jump ahead in their journey if they are ready to move faster. Only a few will take this shortcut. But by giving the option to engage with bottom-funnel assets (i.e. white papers, webinars) and effortlessly book a call or demo, you reduce friction for those that are ready to buy rather than requiring them to remain in the full 14-21 day sequence by default.

Emails 2-4: Hot Button Emails

The next few emails in this sequence a short series of 3 ‘hot button’ emails, at Day 1, Day 3, and Day 5.

The hot button emails are designed to address a common problem your audience faces and then introduce how your product solves that problem.

First, the subject line should catch their attention by foreshadowing that hot button.

Then, within the copy, introduce not only the problem, but also the impact of that problem.

For example, let’s say you offer email marketing software and the hot button is that prospects are struggling to increase their open rates.

In that case, you might open by discussing the implications of a poor open rate, including:

• You’re wasting marketing dollars earlier in the funnel as leads aren’t converting.
• Your emails are often marked as spam.
• You’re wasting time perfecting the email copy because nobody reads it anyway.

However, it’s important to approach these pain points from an empathetic perspective rather than from a fear-based perspective. Then, introduce your product as the solution.

The reason for 3 hot button emails instead of only 1 is that not every lead is going to have the exact same pain point. With 3 hot button emails, you can test different copywriting styles to ensure that at least one of your emails resonates with each prospect.

For example, you can test multiple motivators:

• A gain motivated email focus on what the lead gets or achieves by solving their pain point with your solution.
• A loss aversion motivated email focuses on the negative impacts that a lead avoids or de-risks with your solution.
• A logic motivated email focuses on tangible impacts such as time saved, money made, or costs saved.

Crafting the right copy for these emails requires a deep understanding of the lead’s needs, pain points, and what will trigger them to take action into becoming an MQL.

This requires more critical thinking than simply copy/pasting a universal template, but generally you should still write them in plain text and keep the length relatively short.

Here are two examples that we created for our B2B SaaS clients:

Data Governance SaaS

Employee Management SaaS

Email 5: Probing Question

After the 3rd Hot Button email is delivered, give the lead some time to consider their next step. By now you’ve given them their asset, educated them in multiple ways to encourage action, and provided them with several ways to learn more and get in touch with you.

The next email in our sequence isn’t triggered again until day 14 for 2 reasons:

1. A high volume of nudges after day 5 can start to appear spammy, and risks burning the lead.
2. A pause over several days gives this next email a bit more power behind it as it appears natural and unexpectedly urgent.

At this point, the buyer knows enough to take the next step in the buyer journey, so if they haven’t done so already, you can cut to the chase and ask them directly.

Keep this email short, to the point, and make your CTA very clear. The purpose is to encourage a lead that is ready to buy to take action rather than remaining neutral and undecided.

Here’s an example of this email:

That’s it.

It’s short, direct, and personable so that it triggers a clear ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response from the lead, rather than an ambiguous non-reply.

There are several variations of this email to test. Such as:

• Would you like to work with us on {{outcome}}?
• Are you still looking to solve {{painPoint}}?
• Did you get {{result}}?

The key here is to trigger action from the lead, whether that’s a direct email reply or opt-ing in your existing workflows.

Email 6: The Breakup

If a prospect hasn’t moved forward by this point, it probably isn’t the right time (assuming you’ve optimized your nurture sequence using the tips above).

In that case, continuing to send them emails is ineffective and will become annoying, which creates a negative impression of your brand and could cause them to mark it as spam.

Instead, we send a breakup email letting them know that if now is not the right time, that’s fine, and they’re welcome to reach out if their circumstances change in the future.

From there, we move them into a re-engagement list and periodically reach out to them in the future.

The key with this breakup email is that it’s ok if the lead is not ready to take the next step.

You can’t force anyone to sit through a demo or buy your solution if they’re not ready.

Give them a positive experience as they navigate their buying journey, and provide them with insight into how your SaaS solves their pain points. Then when they’re ready, you’ll stay in their consideration set.

Maximize your Lead-to-MQL Conversion

You can use these templates to get started with implementing your lead-to-MQL email nurture strategy, but success really depends on the pain points you select, how you craft the copy to address them, and the quality of the leads you’re driving.

At Powered by Search, we’ve advised and implemented marketing operations workflows and email nurture campaigns just like this one for dozens of B2B SaaS teams.

Reach out today and we’ll partner with you to diagnose your current strategy, identify the most promising opportunities for improvement, and help you implement a more effective nurture sequence.

Do you need help converting more leads into MQLs? Get your Free Marketing Plan here.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• What is a MQL in B2B SaaS Marketing?
• 8 High-Impact B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies for 2025
• Top Demand Generation Tools to Boost Leads, Engagement, and Business Growth
• Top 6 B2B SaaS Demand Generation Agencies in 2025
• Must-Have Skills for a B2B SaaS Demand Generation Manager
• Stages of the B2B SaaS Sales & Marketing Funnel

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We’ve noticed a similar pattern among marketers who consistently struggle to see predictable growth over time.

These marketing teams either aren’t testing, or they’ll test randomly selected variables and strategies that produce a lot of activity and data, but no useful outcomes..

And if a test doesn’t work out, there’s rarely any analysis to determine why it didn’t work, meaning the team didn’t learn any insights to apply to future tests.

While there will always be uncertainty in marketing, you can improve the success rate of your tests by using a documented hypothesis framework.

In this post, we’ll introduce you to the hypothesis framework we use here at Powered By Search to incrementally scale progress and performance for our B2B SaaS clients. We’ll show you how to create a hypothesis, document it, and analyze test results to draw helpful insights and apply them to future tests.

Do you need to apply a deeper testing and learning approach to your B2B SaaS marketing efforts? Reach out today to get your Free Marketing Plan.

What Is A Hypothesis Log?

You can use any medium or software you’d like to start working on your own hypothesis log. At Powered by Search, our hypothesis logs are usually managed in a simple spreadsheet where we write out exactly what we’re testing, the hypothesis itself, and other factors, such as:

• Impact: How much will this test move the needle for the business if it proves true?
• Confidence: How likely is it that the hypothesis of the test will be proven true?
• Ease: How easy is it for us to implement this test?
• ICE Score: This is the weighted average of the other three variables that helps us prioritize what to test first.
• Start Date: So we prioritize when to take action rather than it being just another idea.
• End Date: So the test doesn’t run in perpetuity and we intentionally stop, learn, and refine our hypothesis.

As you’re filling out your hypothesis log, we recommend that you prioritize first testing the variables with the highest ICE score.

How Can A Hypothesis Log Improve The Success Rate And Impact of Your Tests?

Using a hypothesis log to document each test ensures that:

1. No hypothesis is redundant or duplicated,, so you never repeat the same efforts for the exact same learnings time and again.
2. Your experiments are always in a controlled environment (e.g., people aren’t running overlapping tests at once, which could skew the test results).

Hypothesis logs also help you build a valuable database of information on marketing messaging, channels, and strategies that do and do not work with your audience so that the magnitude of success for future tests is higher. This way, every single hypothesis and test no matter the outcome provides valuable data and learnings.

For example, let’s say you want to improve the conversion rate of your LinkedIn ads.

If you already discovered in a previous test that messaging around Pain Point A was significantly more effective at driving clicks than Pain Point B, you can use that insight to test only variations of Pain Point A in your ads.

• Testing without a hypothesis log: The trigger for the test is a rough idea that’s guided by opinion. It sounds like “I wonder what I should test?” then time, effort, and money is spent to simply see what happens if the test is run. There may be a performance lift, but it’s often by default and not by design.
• Testing with a hypothesis log: The trigger for the test is defined based on prior learnings. It starts with. It sounds like “We learned that the pain point messaging in last month’s LinkedIn  ad copy refresh converted 1% better than the previous copy. Our hypothesis is that if we A/B test variations of this winning pain point ad copy for the next 2 weeks, we can gain another 0.5-1% lift in conversion.”

As you can see, these tests aren’t based on random guesswork – they’re high-conviction bets that can improve the likelihood and magnitude of success of your next test.

Additionally, because we’ve created hypothesis logs for all our clients, our team has unique proprietary insights into what works for most B2B SaaS companies when deploying similar strategies.

So, even when we begin an engagement with a new client who currently doesn’t have a hypothesis log, we can still draw from the insights gathered from our other hypothesis logs to increase the likelihood of the first test’s success.

When Should You Use A Hypothesis Log?

It’s important to find a balance between testing absolutely everything, and testing nothing at all.

One way to set boundaries is to avoid hypothesizing and testing something that is already empirically true.

For example, if your website is down, you don’t need to test if getting it back up and running will improve conversions from the website.

It’s more or less certain that getting your website back online will help you drive more sales.

We only add tests to the hypothesis log if we’re testing a question where there isn’t absolute certainty of the outcome.

On the other end of the spectrum, your marketing team will also have to be comfortable with hypotheses and tests that are not certainties. Otherwise no test will ever be given the green light to run. Some hypotheses will prove true, others will not and that’s ok. That’s the point to testing – to learn from the uncertainty.

The hypothesis log is also helpful for prioritizing tests.

There are often multiple tests we’d like to run at any given time, so the ICE score helps us prioritize which test to run first by identifying which ones would be most impactful if they proved to be true.

How To Create Effective Hypotheses

There are three core frameworks we use for creating a hypothesis. Below, we’ll walk you through each one and provide examples.

Each level of hypothesis adds more detail and fidelity to the statement, and you can use the one that best fits your situation and level of buy-in needed to get approval and validation on the test.

Level 1

The conditional statement hypothesis is the most common and is phrased as:

“If We [Action] Then [Outcome]”

In this case, the action is the variable you’re testing, and the outcome is the result you expect. The outcome is usually the growth of a specific metric you’re tracking.

An example of the conditional statement hypothesis might be:

“Our hypothesis is that if we reduce the number of form fields from 5 to 3 then the conversion rate will increase by 5%.”

This is a great framework to use when you need to explain the logical outcome of performing a specific action.

Level 2

If you must get buy-in from stakeholders to run a specific test, like increasing your Google ads budget, you’ll have to answer why you should run this test and the outcome you’ll likely achieve.

In these cases, use the suggestive hypothesis framework.

Here’s how to structure the suggestive hypothesis:

“We Think You Should [Do This] Because [Why] So That [Outcome]”

For example, let’s say you think you should add an additional $10,000 to your ad budget for the month.

In this case, you’ll obviously have to justify to stakeholders why you need that budget. So here’s the suggestive framework in action:

“Our hypothesis is that you should increase your Google Ads budget because of low (50%) impression share. This is so that you can drive at least ten more demos per month by winning more bids for converting keywords.”

Level 3

This type of hypothesis is similar to the Level 2 hypothesis, though there’s also an additional layer because you’ll know it is true when you achieve a certain metric.

Here’s the framework:

“We Believe That [Action] Will Achieve [Outcome]. We Will Know This Is True When [Evidence]”

This is a great framework to use when you need to prove the outcome of a hypothesis with evidence and data.

Here’s an example of this in action:

“Our hypothesis is we believe that by updating the content on your home page we will increase the engagement of high intent traffic. We will know this is true when the conversion rate on the home page demo form increases by at least 2%.”

Example Hypotheses Logs

Here are a few examples of hypothesis logs in action for our B2B SaaS clients.

Headless CMS SaaS

Cybersecurity SaaS

Audience Management SaaS

Fundraising SaaS

Creating A Marketing Strategy That Incorporates Continuous Testing And Learning

One of our core values is having a growth mindset, and testing is a key aspect of growth.

Creating and testing strong hypotheses throughout marketing programs is how we keep our clients on track toward achieving Predictable Growth.

If your current approach to testing needs a refresh, or just needs to get started, hopefully the framework that we’ve covered here is something you can start applying to your own marketing efforts today.

If you want to work with a marketing agency that will continue to systematically test and improve results, reach out to us today for your Free Marketing Plan.

Related Resources

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• What Are The Best B2B SaaS Marketing Channels?
• Top SaaS Marketing Communities to Join in 2024
• Top Books Every B2B Marketer Should Read
• SaaS Marketing Courses to Level-Up Your Team
• Ultimate Guide to Craft a Powerful SaaS Email Marketing Strategy for 2025
• How to Build an Impactful B2B SaaS Marketing Budget

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• What Most SaaS Companies Get Wrong About Marketing Budgets⁠—and the Data-Based Method for Finding the Right One
• Top 28 SaaS Marketing Agencies in 2025 (Plus: How to Choose the Right One)
• The Key to Understanding Your B2B SaaS Marketing Metrics (Hint: It’s the Relationships between Them That Matter)

However, when you dedicate a significant percentage of your budget to an agency to support your marketing efforts it would be irresponsible to pay for activity without a meaningful outcome.

To mitigate risk many marketing agencies measure success by reporting on marketing with vanity metrics, like keyword rankings or ad clicks.

It’s not necessarily wrong to measure vanity metrics, but we strongly believe it’s not the best bottom-line measure of an agency’s value. Vanity metrics can be useful indicators, but it’s not the full story.

Why? Because vanity metrics don’t always correlate with revenue.

So even if the reports from your marketing agency show that the marketing strategy is improving, it may not align with what really matters at the business level, which is the growth in real closed-won revenue trends reported by your finance team.

Unfortunately, this misalignment between your marketing agency’s reports and the finance team’s reports will make it difficult to win buy-in from stakeholders for future marketing campaigns.

To solve this problem, we use a system to tie the buyer journey together so that you can tie real closed revenue to your marketing strategy.

In this post, we’ll show you the exact process we use to align closed won revenue dollars to marketing efforts and how you can build the same reporting process to measure the success of your marketing strategy.

This reporting strategy can help you accurately calculate the ROI of your marketing agency and better align with stakeholders to get buy-in and win budget for future marketing campaigns.

Are you unsure if your marketing is delivering predictable ROI? We can help you diagnose what’s happening and turn your performance around. Reach out out today to get your Free Marketing Plan.

Why We Measure Beyond Marketing Metrics Alone

At the core of our Predictable Growth Methodology is the end goal that we have for all B2B SaaS teams we partner with – to make them unstoppable.

This isn’t only about making their marketing unstoppable. It’s designed to empower their entire organization by ensuring that marketing outcomes drive business outcomes.

We believe this makes us different from most marketing agencies that only measure their success at the marketing level alone.

Of course we still hold high importance on marketing performance, but we add more value by ensuring we also generate the right quality and volume of pipeline for the sales team, to ultimately help the business earn the right customers to hit business goals.

When we start working with our clients, one of the first things we aim to understand and accurately measure is – how much is a customer worth to you and how do you know when marketing contributes to won deals?

Not MQL value, not opportunity value (although both are important to know for measuring pipeline performance), but closed won revenue. Actual dollars in the bank earned from a customer.

Why? Because anything but closed won revenue is not yet tangible ROI. Growing opportunity pipeline is usually a good indicator that your marketing efforts are headed in the right direction, but if those opportunities never turn into paying customers then it means nothing at the business level.

You can’t predictably grow your business and justify investments on anticipated revenue alone.

How We Define The Value of A Closed Won Deal

Before we even begin building a reporting model, it’s important to define the value of a closed deal as this varies depending on the lifecycle of the customer.

For example, when a trail converts into a $29 monthly subscription, is that customer worth only $29? Unless they always churn in 30 days (which suggests there are bigger issues with your marketing and/or product), definitely not.

Here are a few questions we ask to define the value of a closed deal:

• Should we use Deal Size? This can be useful if the customer pays for their entire lifetime value when the deal is won. Yet if they’re on a monthly, or annual program then it’s only a fraction of their actual lifetime value.
• Should we use ACV? This can give you a good measure of the customer’s value of the term of their annual contract or your yearly financials. However, if customers must renew that contract every year and typically stay with you for 5 years, then you’re only measuring a portion (20% in this case) of the total customer value.

In both of these cases, the shared conclusion is in most cases to use lifetime value so that you have a truer measure of what that customer is worth as long as they continue paying you.

For even more accuracy, you can model in churn metrics too for a Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) or Net Revenue Retention (NRR) measure of ROI. However, we’ll focus on just LTV in this post for simplicity.

Why We Use LTV

Many companies use monthly and quarterly reports to measure the ROI of their marketing campaigns, but this is an inaccurate measurement for enterprise B2B SaaS companies for two key reasons.

First, the total revenue generated from that newly closed enterprise client is often much higher than the initial contract value.

For example, the initial contract you sign with a new client may be a 12-month contract for $100,000. However, if that client stays with you for 3 years during its lifetime (a total of three 12 month contracts for $100,000 each), the real value of that new client is actually $300,000.

Therefore, only attributing $100,000 to that closed deal isn’t an accurate representation of the real return earned from your marketing investment.

Secondly, enterprise B2B buying cycles often last multiple quarters, so tying one deal exclusively to that month’s or quarter’s marketing campaigns is inaccurate as the buyer journey actually began many months earlier.

As a result, it’s tempting to double down on the marketing strategies you used during that month or quarter when they may not have been the key drivers that generated the deal.

To solve these problems we use LTV to calculate the real return of your marketing dollars.

Using LTV as the main metric to measure success also holds the marketing agency accountable to long-term success.

In fact, our entire marketing approach is centered around the Predictable Growth Methodology, which is designed to provide cumulative long term value over a time horizon of several years.

By taking this long-term approach, we have the opportunity to lay a solid foundation for each client’s marketing strategy so that they see predictable ROI growth from a consistent investment in their marketing strategy.

Now that you know why we use ROI reports based on LTV, here’s how we actually create them for clients.

What The ROI Report Looks Like

We keep our report visually simple so that clients can see, at a glance, how the revenue from their marketing investment has trended over time.

We intentionally don’t provide a masterclass on SaaS finance because stakeholders need to be able to instantly see the directional ROI of the marketing strategy. We’ve also found that it’s easy for marketing agencies to hide their results (or lack thereof) behind a long list of metrics and numbers.

Yes, the marketing team should still know the specific metrics that contribute to marketing revenue, like CAC, payback period, churn. We still calculate these metrics for all of our clients, and you can see how we do it in your Marketing Funnel Forecasting template.

However, these metrics are all secondary to the bigger question, which is:

What’s the ROI of our marketing investment over the past X years?

To answer this question, we show a simple graph of closed won revenue.

Our goal is to make sure that this line shows compounding growth year over year. The other metrics are designed to help you better understand what strategies contributed to your results, but they aren’t designed to determine the efficacy of your overall marketing strategy.

How We Build ROI Reports

It’s essential that all parties are using the same data set for reporting, so the first step is to assess how you’re currently measuring marketing performance, revenue performance, and the pipeline metrics in between.

If we were to only ask for access to a client’s reports and draw our own conclusions, it would be a complicated, time consuming endeavor that could lead to misalignment. To avoid this risk, we co-create these reports with our clients.

We’ll have a series of conversations and workshops to understand how and why they measure these metrics so we can learn from their experience.

This ensures we’re always using the exact same source of truth so there’s never any confusion when reporting, and the easiest way to avoid that is to talk to each other and build the report together.

For example, when we start working with clients, we want to see that they can track marketing, sales, and revenue performance holistically. If there isn’t strong tracking in place, our first priority is to understand and diagnose that with our clients. We also always check that the data is clean and accurate.

Once you have the right reporting set up with clean, accurate data, you should be able to answer questions like:

• What’s the value of an average customer?
• What’s the LTV of your customer?

By starting with these questions, rather than just looking at vanity metrics like keyword rankings and cost per click, we can accurately attribute closed revenue from marketing efforts.

How We Calculate The ROI Of Our Marketing Efforts

Once you have the data and reporting set up, the calculation for the ROI is actually quite simple.

First, we always measure closed won revenue that came directly from our marketing efforts.

This number always aligns with the money that’s landing in the company’s bank account.

Then, we calculate investment based on the total dollar value of our engagement

So the formula looks like this:

To give you an example of this formula in action, let’s say that over a period of a year, the total revenue generated is $200,000, and the client’s investment with us is $150,000. In that case, the ROI is 133%, meaning the client made $1.33 in revenue for every $1 invested with Powered By Search.

As you can see, this formula always aligns with your finance team’s books, making it an objective, accurate assessment of your marketing strategy’s success.

We’re agnostic on what tool is used to visualize ROI over time, but the reports themselves are typically built out in a reporting tool like Databox, Tableau, or Looker Studio, or you can even do it in a spreadsheet.

What’s A Healthy ROI?

Once you have the data, the next question is usually; what is a good ROI?

There isn’t a simple answer to this question. A ‘good’ ROI is going to vary depending on:

• The trajectory of your marketing and business maturity – is your business primed to scale or still needs to build the foundation?
• The unit economics of your industry and product, such as buying cycles, demo-led vs. trial led, or pricing.
• The stage of your journey with your marketing agency. Expecting a ROI mere hours after signing on to start a program is never going to be realistic

Most agencies use industry benchmarks to determine whether or not the ROI is good, but that isn’t always a great method to measure the efficacy of your marketing strategy for two main reasons:

1. Each company has a different starting place.

Those with more established marketing programs are therefore much more likely to see a strong immediate ROI than those that are already a bit farther behind industry benchmarks. So measuring your ROI against industry benchmarks doesn’t actually reflect your marketing strategy’s growth.

2. Building a strategy that generates a high ROI over a long time horizon (12 plus months) rarely correlates with an immediate ROI (significant spike in one month).

Using industry benchmarks can incentivize marketing agencies to use short term growth hacks to keep up with competitors. Additionally, it can incentivize them to focus exclusively on bottom-of-the-funnel channels to boost short-term conversions. Yet in reality, those channels won’t immediately convert enterprise clients that have a 12 or 18-month buying journey.

As a result, you’ll just waste money.

Instead, we look at the full customer journey and focus on improving each stage of the journey. As a result, our efforts improving the top of the funnel may not produce an ROI until 12 or 18 months later when those leads are finally ready to convert.

Yet over a longer time horizon, you’ll see that this strategy is actually much more effective and sustainable than those focusing on short term growth strategies to keep up with industry benchmarks.

Here’s one example where you can see our client’s cumulative investment remained steady, yet over a longer time horizon, the cumulative LTV increased.

Instead of using generic industry benchmarks or just asking clients to blindly trust us that a negative ROI will turn positive, we use our marketing funnel forecasting template to provide an optimistic, realistic, and conservative estimate of the ROI clients will likely achieve if they work with us.

Therefore, we use this forecast to benchmark the marketing strategy’s success, and it’s a much more accurate measurement as it measures growth based on your current situation rather than comparing it to an arbitrary industry metric.

This approach also helps us set realistic expectations upfront, as it is possible that your ROI will be negative at the beginning of the engagement.

The fact is that our partnerships with our clients are collaborative journeys that ebb and flow over time. “Instant results” is a wonderful promise but that’s rarely the reality.

Typically our first year with clients has high periods, where we see quick results after tackling low hanging fruit, and low periods where there’s doubt as we’re testing to identify what works. This is normal and we’ve covered this topic of what it’s realistically like working with a marketing agency.

However, if the ROI is negative, we don’t make wild or crazy bets to turn it around.

Instead, we look at what aspects of the strategy are working and then double down on those and cut channels and campaigns that are ineffective.

This approach reduces risk as we’re just refocusing your efforts on what’s already working rather than randomly guessing and testing new approaches. In fact, we even create a hypothesis log for each client and record every significant test we run.

This data set provides more detailed insights on what works and why it’s working to better refine our approach. The hypothesis log also prevents us from making the same mistake twice, which is essential if you need to quickly turn around a negative ROI.

You can see that this cybersecurity client’s growth was very flat for a long time as we implemented this strategy, but by using the hypothesis log and focusing on compounding growth strategies, their growth eventually took off.

Examples of The ROI We’ve Achieved For Our B2B SaaS Clients

Data Governance SaaS

Email Marketing SaaS

Prospect Management SaaS

Start Accurately Measuring The Revenue Your Marketing Strategy Generates

If revenue trends aren’t adding up to your marketing strategy’s calculations, try using the LTV:ROI model to measure your marketing strategy’s success.

If you need more help implementing this reporting system and want to work with a partner that focuses exclusively on long-term growth, reach out to the Powered By Search team today.

When you’re ready, get your Free Marketing Plan here to identify growth opportunities and work with you to create a plan to improve long term growth.

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• Mastering Your SaaS GTM Strategy: Key Steps to Market Leadership and Long-Term Success
• 10 Proven SaaS Growth Strategy Methods to Boost Revenue and Improve Customer Acquisition
• B2B SaaS Fractional CMO Directory
• Top 6 B2B SaaS Demand Generation Agencies in 2025
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• How To Create a SaaS Buyer Persona That Improves Marketing ROI

For mission-critical enterprise B2B software serving the largest organizations in the world, the buying cycle can sometimes take years between the moment a stakeholder on a prospective customer’s team becomes aware that they need to make a change to when they sign up with you.

Yet the factors that cause longer buying cycles for B2B enterprise SaaS solutions are often out of the marketing team’s control. For example, some companies only issue RFPs on a three or five year basis, so you won’t be able to engage with buying committees until they’re ready to issue that RFP.

In addition, the key stakeholders on your prospective customer’s team are spread across functional areas and each have individual needs to be met and your marketing needs to speak to each of their unique pain points and desires. Some stakeholders will be solely focused on ROI or reducing expenses while others may be more concerned about ease of use and switching costs.

Marketing teams often receive undue scrutiny from finance and leadership stakeholders when it takes so long for pipeline to turn into realized revenue, making it almost too easy for the marketing budget to be frozen or reduced for short term savings.

Therefore, you need a strong argument to show the long term impact of short term thinking.

In this post, we’ll discuss how you can make your marketing strategy more effective to achieve better results, protect your marketing budget and give the finance team confidence in your investment decisions.

Do you need help with accelerating your B2B enterprise SaaS marketing strategy? Reach out today to get your Free Marketing Plan.

How To Make Your Marketing More Effective During Long Buying Cycles

Feeling pressure from executives to close more deals quickly, marketers often turn to bottom of the funnel marketing campaigns to capture and close prospects who are ready to buy.

However, there is a careful nuance with this approach especially for enterprise prospects.

Bottom of the funnel marketing channels tend to be the most expensive. As a result, focusing exclusively on the bottom of the funnel marketing campaigns can make your marketing less effective and less efficient. It must be dialed in to truly reach those prospects that are in fact ready to buy from you specifically.

If your bottom-funnel marketing is trying to reach a prospect that has never heard of your solution previously, it’s much harder to insert yourself into their consideration once they’ve already reached the later stages of their buying journey.

At this point, if they’re ready to buy then they have already convinced internal stakeholders of other competing solutions that everyone has had plenty of time to evaluate.

If they haven’t heard of you, at best you encourage them to reconsider their options and avoid buying any solution right now. However, they’re not going to immediately pivot and draw up a purchase order for your SaaS.

So instead of attempting to shortcut the buying journey by exclusively focusing on bottom-funnel campaigns, your marketing budget may be more effectively spent nurturing, and ultimately converting, prospects that already know, like, and trust you.

The real opportunity to improve the ROI of your marketing strategy is addressing the full buying cycle rather than just the bottom of the funnel.

Improving each step of the buying cycle will help you speed up the sales cycle as you’ll move prospects from one stage to the next in less time, and you’ll retain and ultimately convert more of the customers you capture at the beginning of the buyer journey.

As a result, you’ll see lower customer acquisition costs and ultimately improve the root challenge of lengthening buyer journeys.

Engaging Your Ideal Customer At Every Stage Of The Buying Journey

Following the Buyer Awareness Matrix, there are 4 key levels of awareness in the buying journey where your marketing needs to meet the exact needs and pain points of your target customer for them to successfully navigate down the funnel.

• Problem Unaware: Audiences who aren’t aware they even have the problem your product solves.
• Problem Aware: Audiences who know they have a problem but aren’t yet aware of solutions.
• Solution Aware: Audiences who are problem aware and also know there are solutions that exist (and may be actively looking for one).
• Product Aware: Audiences who are problem and solution aware, and who are also aware of your product as a solution (potentially wanting to evaluate it).

For an enterprise solution, each of these stages is almost a mini-journey in itself. It may take months or years for a stakeholder to understand that they have a real problem with their existing solution and then countless meetings to convince others that the problem is worth solving.

For your enterprise SaaS to have the highest probability of being the winning choice when it comes for your prospective customer to buy, your best bet is to design your marketing program to reach each stage of buyer awareness and effortlessly guide your prospect from one to the next.

Solution: Build An Effective Demand Generation Flywheel

Most marketing teams run individual marketing campaigns, yet they rarely work together to serve the prospect at each step of the buyer journey.

For example, you might have an SEO-driven blog post that addresses a specific pain point, but where do you send that reader next? If it’s just a CTA to schedule a demo, yet they aren’t ready for a demo just yet, you’ll simply lose that lead.

A more effective solution is to build a holistic demand generation program that addresses the entire buying cycle. With this approach, each marketing campaign is designed to serve a specific purpose within the broader customer journey.

As a result, you’ll close the gaps in the customer journey, which will help you move customers through the funnel in less time.

In addition, serving customers at each step of the buying cycle prevents them from turning to a competitor for an answer to a question. So you’ll see lower acquisition costs as you won’t have to remarket to those customers to bring them back to your brand, and you’ll have better lead retention rates.

Here’s an overview of how to build a demand generation program that attracts, retains, and converts leads at a lower cost.

This is the exact demand generation strategy we execute for clients, so if you’d rather have a team of seasoned experts implement this proven process for you, reach out to our team today.

Step 1: Align Buyer Personas

Many buyer personas only address one person or a few people involved in the purchase.

However, there are often many people involved in the purchase decision for enterprise products, and the critical people who first discover the product may not be part of the buying committee that ultimately signs the check.

Each of these people have slightly different pain points and objectives, so understanding who we’re talking to at each stage of the buying cycle is essential for crafting accurate messaging – from the person who initially discovers your brand to the final check signer.

Another key mistake many marketers make is assuming they know how buyers move through the journey and then constructing a funnel based on those assumptions. Yet if that assumption is inaccurate, buyers won’t conform to the funnel you’ve constructed. They’ll simply leave and go to a competitor for the information they want.

to protect against this, we’ll use our client’s customer insights to understand how they moved through the buying process, and why they chose your brand over other competitors.

This information is the foundation we use to begin mapping out the buyer journey, and it informs how we craft messaging for each step of the process. This data is also critical to setting up account based marketing campaigns, which are highly effective for enterprise sales.

And of course, competitive analysis is critical to understand what’s working for your competitors and use that data to inform the best marketing channels to reach our target audience.

Step 2: Attract The Right-Fit Visitors And Nurture MQLs

Now that you know who you’re targeting, how they experience the buying process, and their pain points, the next step is to build a holistic demand generation program to attract and nurture marketing qualified leads.

To attract MQLs, you can use a combination of SEO, PPC, and content. Below is a breakdown of how you can strategically position each channel within the buyer journey.

PPC

Google ads is primarily a bottom of funnel marketing campaign, so be strategic with your media spend to target prospective customers that already know, like, and trust you and are ready to buy.

It’s still important to show up in the search results, as there likely are still solution aware potential customers searching for your solution, and you don’t want to be surpassed by your competitors.

To reach every stage of the buying journey, allocate budget to paid social campaigns on channels where your ideal customer is most active. For example, it’s highly likely that the enterprise stakeholders you want to reach are on LinkedIn (but not a guarantee so validate first!). Social channels keep your brand top of mind and help you lead prospects from one stage in the buyer cycle to the next.

You can also use account based marketing campaigns to target specific members of the buying committee with appropriate messaging.

Another way to use your paid media more effectively is to remarket to prospects who have already visited your website or interacted with specific content.

Remarketing also makes your other marketing channels more effective because it helps you retain a larger percentage of the audience you attracted.

SEO & Content Marketing

SEO and content marketing are great opportunities to improve the robustness of your buying cycle, because your efforts will compound over time.

The first step is to map out the buyer journey and then create content to answer questions and objections at each stage of the buyer process.

Creating relevant content can strengthen the buyer journey and help you retain a larger percentage of marketing qualified leads as prospects can quickly get the answers they need to proceed.

We use the buyer awareness matrix to create a content strategy, as it outlines the different types of content that are relevant at different stages of the buyer journey.

At the first level of the buyer awareness matrix (problem unaware), the content is largely educational and consists of content like blog posts and quizzes. As you move further up the buyer awareness matrix, you can offer lead magnets like checklists and templates where you can ask for an email address in exchange for the content.

This is essential for retaining prospects with an effective nurture email campaign and remarketing to them later on.

After creating a content roadmap, we first tackle low hanging fruit by updating old content that is relevant to the buyer journey, yet has declined in the rankings. Then, we create new content to fill in the rest of the buyer journey.

Content marketing makes your brand omnipresent and it improves the efficacy of your other marketing channels by answering objections so that prospects move seamlessly through the buyer journey.

Another benefit of content marketing is that, unlike paid media, it will continue to generate an ROI months after publishing. Therefore, content marketing is also a great long term investment that can help you reduce future marketing costs and shorten your buyer cycle.

Nurture Emails

Your marketing costs will decrease if you convert a higher percentage of the audience you attract through PPC, SEO, and content marketing campaigns, and an easy way to convert a higher percentage of that audience at minimal additional cost is to engage them through email.

To improve the conversion rates of your nurture emails, segment your audience and only send content relevant to the subject the prospect was researching when they provided their email address.

For example, if one of our prospects provided their email address to download a checklist about reducing PPC costs, an appropriate nurture sequence to send them would be related to improving the ROI of PPC campaigns.

The most important part of this stage in the process is to focus on nurturing MQLs through the buyer journey so that it’s easier for them to become SQLs when the time is right.

Even if right now is not the right time for prospects to convert, it’s important to keep your brand top of mind so that you’re the first solution prospects consider when they’re ready to buy.

If you wait until the latter stages, such as when an RFP is issued to develop a relationship with prospects, your brand may not have enough time to earn their trust and show the value of your product. This will hurt your conversion rates and ultimately increase marketing costs.

Doubling down on bottom of the funnel channels to capture and convert prospects at the end of their buying journey seems like a logical solution to shorten the buying. Yet this plan usually increases marketing costs as prospects at the end of their journey are more likely to select a competitor that’s already built a relationship with them earlier in the funnel.

As a result, your marketing dollars will generate a lower return than if you put them towards developing meaningful relationships with prospects earlier in the buyer journey.

How To Take The Next Steps To Improve Your B2B Enterprise SaaS Marketing Strategy

Once your team and stakeholders are on the same page, create a marketing strategy that focuses on long-term growth.

Adjust your KPIs from closing more sales to moving prospects to the next stage of the buying journey.

For example, look at the buying cycle from the past several sales you’ve closed and analyze how long each of those prospects spent at each stage in the buying cycle.

Then, shift your goal to getting more visitors to turn into MQLs or more MQLs to turn into SQLs. The sales will come when the buyers are ready, but you can’t expect to transform the buyer journey from years into a matter of weeks or months.

To strengthen your case, ask the sales team for data on SQL to closed-won percentages and then calculate the total revenue generated.

Then you can work backward and put a dollar value to your MQLs, which can help you win buy-in.

For example, let’s say you get about 30 MQLs per month and about three of them turn into sales (10% of MQLs became closed deals).

If you want to turn those three SQLs into five SQLs, you’ll need to generate 50 MQLs per month.

Finally, zoom out and consider the long-term ROI of a closed deal.

For example, if you know that a closed deal is worth $1 million and the average client stays with your company for five years, then the real LTV of a closed deal could be $5 million. Therefore, it might make sense to spend a little more on marketing to earn even just one additional closed deal.

This is an important concept to communicate to your finance team and stakeholders.

Accelerate Your Demand Generation Strategy Now

The longer you wait to get started on your demand generation strategy, the harder it will be to achieve your goals.

If you want some help kickstarting your demand generation strategy, reach out to our team today for your Free Marketing Plan. We can analyze your current strategy, identify the low hanging fruit and help you craft a realistic marketing plan that will enable you to reach your goals.

Related Resources

Deep Dives

• What Are The Best B2B SaaS Marketing Channels?
• Top SaaS Marketing Communities to Join in 2024
• Top Books Every B2B Marketer Should Read

Related Articles

• What Most SaaS Companies Get Wrong About Marketing Budgets⁠—and the Data-Based Method for Finding the Right One
• Top 28 SaaS Marketing Agencies in 2025 (Plus: How to Choose the Right One)
• The Key to Understanding Your B2B SaaS Marketing Metrics (Hint: It’s the Relationships between Them That Matter)

However, content promotion does work – you probably just need a different approach and strategy.

To help your content earn more high-quality traffic, we’ll discuss how to successfully collaborate with a marketing agency and the key differences between an average content promotion strategy and the top performing content promotion strategies.

Do you need help with your content promotion strategy? Reach out today to get your Free Marketing Plan.

How AI Has Impacted The Content Marketing Landscape (And The Role of Content Promotion)

Several years ago, writing a helpful, comprehensive blog post on a subject was sufficient to rank for the intended keyword.

Yet you’ve probably noticed that simply improving the quality of a blog post is no longer a sufficient strategy to rise in the rankings.

This is largely because AI tools have made it relatively easy to generate comprehensive blog posts with minimal effort. As a result, the SERPs are flooded with extensive content for any given keyword, and improving the content’s quality beyond a specific threshold delivers diminishing returns from a rankings perspective.

In addition, plenty of AI tools make it easy for anyone to quickly optimize a piece of content for SEO, so most of your competitors probably have decent SEO.

With so many decent quality blog posts to choose from, search engines are becoming increasingly reliant on authority metrics (like backlinks) to determine which brands are reputable and provide genuine expertise on a subject.

Even if you have an outstanding piece of content on a subject, search engines will likely rank a decent piece of content produced by a higher authority website ahead of yours.

As a result, website authority is more important than ever before, and we’re prioritizing content promotion to help our clients remain relevant in the search results.

Is Content Promotion The Right Solution?

This is a valid question, as applying an effective solution to the wrong problem will not improve growth.

Here are the most common challenges that we typically use content promotion to solve:

1. You have high quality, SEO-optimized content on the website, but it isn’t ranking in the top three spots for the target keyword (or not even on page 1 of Google).
2. You have a low-authority website, and the primary pages aren’t ranking for core keywords.
3. You have a high authority website, but you’re competing with even stronger websites and for very competitive keywords.

However, your content promotion strategy won’t work if your content isn’t converting. Before implementing a content promotion strategy, there are some prerequisites we check to ensure the content itself is:

• High quality
• Well optimized for SEO
• Attracting the right prospects

If your content is low quality, it will be much more difficult to earn links from reputable websites. Even if you do manage to earn links to those pages, sending qualified traffic to low quality content will likely create a negative impression of your brand with prospects, and you’ll see low conversion rates from your content.

Content Promotion Partnership Mistakes To Avoid

While it’s your marketing agency’s responsibility to produce results that drive revenue for your business, there are a few mistakes we often see clients make that can hinder the success of the content promotion strategy.

Here are the top mistakes to avoid to ensure the marketing agency can deliver the results you’re paying for.

Expecting Instant Results

All organic marketing strategies take time to generate an ROI, and content promotion is no different.

In fact, there are a few reasons why it’s a red flag if a marketing agency promises instant content promotion results:

1. They aren’t allocating time to establish processes, meaning they’re likely using a random collection of hacks and tactics without any real strategy.
2. They aren’t allowing for time to iteratively test different approaches to identify what works for your target audience and maximize results.
3. They may be earning low-quality links from link farms that don’t drive real results (and can actually hurt your brand in the long run).

However, we also realize it’s risky to blindly trust that your agency is doing a good job and will eventually produce results.

That’s why we create forecasts for each of our clients, and they can track small wins and KPIs as we build out the strategy.

They should also be able to explain their content strategy and have proven systems and processes that generate consistent results.

Poor Communication

Another key reason many digital PR collaborations fail is because the client and marketing agency have poor communication.

Understanding the market and target audience is key to any successful marketing strategy. As marketing agencies don’t know your audience and market as well as you do, you’re setting them up for failure if you don’t work with them to fill these knowledge gaps.

Therefore, each marketing campaign we run at Powered By Search is a collaborative effort with our clients.

While we have the expertise and experience for running marketing campaigns, we’ve found that our most successful engagements are with communicative clients who provide input when necessary.

Chasing Shiny Objects

Finally, you’ll probably hear about plenty of new tactics at conferences and events, and while it might be tempting to try them out, deviating from the initial strategy laid out will only hinder your growth in the long run.

Constantly changing tactics makes it difficult to iteratively test and identify what works, and without testing, you can’t improve your strategy.

Additionally, a core part of our predictable growth methodology is building a flywheel that produces compounding results. If you’re always changing tactics, you won’t have a solid foundation that you can use to build out the rest of your marketing strategy.

The 3 Key Pillars of Our B2B SaaS Content Promotion Strategy

Supporting your marketing agency is essential for a successful collaboration, but the marketing agency must also have a proven system that consistently delivers excellent results.

Here at Powered By Search, we have an entire team dedicated exclusively to content promotion, and below we’ll discuss the exact strategy we use to generate long-term results.

This strategy can be broken down into three categories:

1. Strategy: Identify the right content to promote
2. Plan: Identify the quantity and types of links to build
3. Process: Use a proven outreach strategy

Strategy: Identify The Right Content To Promote

Many content promotion strategies focus on driving links to the homepage, which can help incrementally increase the authority of your website’s domain.

However, this isn’t the most impactful link-building strategy, as the page receiving the link will receive the most direct benefit.

The first step in our process is identifying the best pages to promote. To answer this question, we look at two factors:

1. The page’s value: We prioritize pages and blog posts that produce the most high-value sales.
2. Ranking improvement potential: We also prioritize blog posts and pages that are already on the first or second page and have a good chance of rising in the search results based on the competitiveness of the top ranking pages’ backlink profiles.

From a tactical perspective, here’s the three-step process we use to identify the best pages to promote.

Step 1: Identify The Website’s Keyword Difficulty Baseline

First, we create a keyword difficulty (KD) baseline for each client’s website. This metric is different from the keyword difficulty score provided by third-party SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush because it measures how difficult it is for that particular website to rank for a specific keyword.

To determine the KD baseline metric, we export the top ranking keywords (those in the top three positions in the SERPs), remove falsifying keywords (brand terms, etc.), and assign keyword difficulty buckets based on frequency in charts.

Weaker site

Stronger site

Step 2: Identify Quick Win Pages To Promote

Once we have a keyword difficulty baseline, the next step is identifying the pages to promote, considering both the page’s value and ranking improvement potential. Here’s how we identify these pages:

1. Export “quick win” pages (4-20)
2. Remove non-relevant keywords 
3. Add KD buckets and conversion data to determine the value of that page
4. Shortlist important pages/keywords

Step 3: Deep Dive Analysis of Each Page

Before adding these pages to our list to promote, the final step is checking that the blog post can improve based on its current status. 

1. Check for content type match: Is Google showing a blog post for the desired keyword? If we have a blog post, but it’s only showing homepages, sending links to our blog post won’t help increase its rankings.
2. Check for search intent match: If we have a guide or “how-to” blog post, but the searcher is looking for a list of different vendors, sending more links to our guide won’t help it rank for that keyword.
3. Visual content quality check and run a content audit: Before sending links to a blog post, we want to make sure it’s high quality and reflects the client’s current philosophies and offerings.

Finally, we prioritize blog posts to promote based on their highest value (most conversions) and likelihood of improvement. 

Plan: Identify The Quantity and Types of Links Required

Many content promotion programs fail because marketers don’t build enough quality links to a specific page.

For example, we prioritize boosting pages with high conversion rates even though many of these pages compete for relatively high difficulty keywords. It may require five or six high-quality links rather than just two or three to outrank the current blog posts dominating the SERPs.

Unfortunately, if you stop after two or three links, you may find that the blog post doesn’t climb the rankings at all, yielding little to no ROI for your efforts. So giving up too soon is a key reason link building efforts often fail.

The type and quality of links you build is equally important. Most marketers consider domain authority when evaluating link partnership opportunities, though this is a relatively narrow metric that can be easily skewed by link farms and doesn’t always accurately reflect the real value of a link.

Additionally, various other factors influence the value of a link, including the individual page’s authority and traffic, as well as the topical relevancy of that website and the individual page. 

Link placement (e.g., organically referenced within the text of the blog post rather than in the website footer) also significantly impacts a link’s value. 

Therefore, to ensure we’re sending enough of the right links to the blog post to achieve the intended results, here’s how we identify and execute this second phase of our content promotion strategy.

Step 1: Identify The Link Gap

During this phase, we look at how many links are required to achieve the intended result. 

This calculation answers the following questions:

1. Calculate the number of referring domains needed to close the gap: Based on the other top-ranking pages in the SERPs, this is the number of links needed to achieve the desired result. 
2. Calculate the link velocity gap: This considers how many links the competitors are earning to these pages each month, as link metrics are rarely stagnant.
3. Campaign duration: How much time will be required to build the required links to close the gap.
4. Calculate the Cost Per Link: This is the total cost, including labor, to earn each link.

Here’s an example of what our link gap analysis looks like:

Link Gap analysis

Step 2: Determine Link Type

Rather than exclusively considering the domain authority of the competition’s backlink strength, we also consider these metrics to accurately evaluate the quality of a potential link partner’s website:

1. Domain Rating of both the domain and specific pages of the potential link partner’s website.
2. Traffic of both the domain and page
3. Follow/No follow ratio of links on the website (we typically only build follow links)
4. Anchor text distribution: We look at exact match (matches the desired keyword we want to rank for), brand match, partial match (part of the keyword), and URL.

Here’s an overview of the link profile analysis on a domain level:

Domain-level link profile analysis

Page-level link profile analysis

Not all links are equally valuable, and some can even harm your brand.

Many marketing agencies use domain authority (sometimes referred to as “domain rating”) as a metric to measure link quality.

Yet domain authority isn’t a sufficient metric as some low quality websites that exist specifically to sell links (often referred to as “link farms”) have figured out how to game the system. While they may have a high domain authority or rating, these websites aren’t necessarily credible or relevant. Therefore, earning a link from them won’t help increase your website’s authority.