Welcome to the first episode of Forward Launch Your SaaS!
This will be a short episode in which I explain the format of the show, what you can expect from weekly episodes, and why I started the podcast.
The show features easy-going conversations with B2B SaaS startup marketing executives whose campaigns have resulted in impressive growth. In each episode, our guests share the one biggest piece of wisdom that other B2B SaaS marketing executives should know.
I’m the host – Keirra Woodard, the owner, podcast marketer, and B2B SaaS content marketing consultant of Forward Launch .
A few of the guests we have in our episode lineup include:
Sharon Biggar, VP of Marketing at Hotjar. She recently spearheaded a company rebrand that helped Hotjar’s revenue to grow more than 50% last year.
Nadia Milani, VP of Marketing at Proposify. Nadia has helped build high-performance teams, producing triple-digit growth in engagement, acquisition, and revenue. In 2020, Nadia was added to Marketo’s Fearless 50 list, being recognized as one of the top 50 marketers in the world.
Oli Bridge, CMO at Bonjoro. After joining in 2016, he launched the company from zero revenue into one of Australia’s fastest growing startups, with over 50,000 current users.
Why I started the podcast
A few years ago, I worked for a SaaS startup as a content writer… we never knew whether the content we published would actually resonate with people and produce leads and traffic for us. It felt like the content we were working hard to create was disappearing down a “content marketing black hole.”
I started freelancing and developed a system to help companies avoid the “black hole”.
Now through my podcast marketing agency Forward Launch, I help B2B SaaS startups create and publish content that resonates with their ideal audience 100% of the time, differentiates their brand from the competition, and systematically moves leads down the buyer’s journey.
I started the podcast to understand what unique insights other SaaS marketers have learned that helped their companies be successful.
Episode format:
Every episode will be available in both audio and video formats that will be published to podcasting platforms and to my website.
At the start of the interview, I’ll ask the guests about their background. Then, we will move on to the main question for the episode: What is the one biggest piece of wisdom that other B2B SaaS startup marketing execs should know?
At the end of each episode, I’ll ask the guest for step-by-step practical advice that other marketers could use to implement the main idea.
Typical episode lengths will be approximately 30-45 minutes. Episodes will be released weekly on Mondays.
I’ll keep the show going for approximately 30 episodes, and then re-evaluate the length and show format.
What to do next:
Subscribe to the email newsletterto be notified when new episodes are published and receive other bonuses like episode summaries, checklists, links to resources guests have shared, and more!
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Video: B2B Content Marketing – How to systematically move buyers down the funnel. You can read the transcript below (lightly edited for readability).
B2B companies often create and publish content regularly to generate website traffic. How can you systematically turn your website traffic into qualified sales leads?
Hey everyone, I’m Keirra Woodard, and today, I’m going to show you a process for making sure that your content converts buyers at every stage of the buyer’s journey and consistently produces high-quality sales leads for your business.
Typical B2B Content Marketing Process
Here’s the typical process of creating and publishing B2B content: the marketing team will create some content ad-hoc, usually based on what the sales team needs at the moment. Or, maybe they have set up a publishing schedule to publish, for example, one white paper a month or a certain number of blogs each week.
After they have published this content — usually to their website blog, maybe to their social media pages — this generates a little bit of web traffic.
But often, they find that it’s a struggle to turn that traffic into inbound leads.
Sometimes, there might be a white paper download attached to a blog post. But those white paper downloads end up being low-quality leads, as website visitors are usually not ready to buy anything yet.
Often, there’s not any downloadable content at all, and B2B marketers are relying on the website visitors to click to schedule a sales demo as soon as they read some content or visit the website. Often, buyers are not ready anything to buy anything yet, so potential customers are being lost.
But there is a method that you can use to systematically capture that lost traffic, keep marketing to leads, and nurture them until they are ready and excited to talk to your sales team.
Step 1: Identify which types of content are best suited for each stage of the marketing funnel
So here’s how to use content marketing to systematically move potential customers through the buyer’s journey and generate those high-quality business leads.
The first step is to identify which types of content are best suited for each stage of the marketing funnel.
So this is the buyer’s journey:
At the top, you have “Awareness”. This is when a potential buyer is becoming aware of your solution or product.
So think about how you become aware of a potential company. Maybe a friend refers you to a company blog, a colleague tells you about a webinar that’s coming up, or maybe you hear about a podcast.
You’re not looking for anything specific at that point.
You’re either looking for general educational content to help you get better at your job, or you’re looking for a solution to a specific problem and you’re just browsing the internet.
So that’s how you come across a particular company at the awareness stage — when you’re not looking for anything specific.
Next, there’s the “Consideration” phase. Think about it: you’ve already determined that you have a particular problem, but you don’t know how to solve that problem yet. So you start considering different options on how you might be able to solve it so maybe you pick up an ebook or white paper.
Maybe you’ve gotten on an email newsletter for a particular company, or sometimes you’ll watch a webinar or some kind of demonstration. You’re comparing different types of solutions to figure out what’s the best way to solve your problem. You move into the “internet research” stage once you know that you’re trying to solve this problem in a particular way.
And then, once you’ve narrowed it down and you know exactly what type of product or solution you’re after, you start reading the reviews, you may get some case studies, you may hop on a call with a salesperson, or do a demo. You’re ready to buy, and you’re comparing options between different providers.
Step 2: Determine what your target audience needs to understand at each stage of the buyer’s journey
There is a process for buyers to move through that buyer’s journey for your particular company. Your target audience needs to understand what you’re selling, why it’s important to them, and how it’s going to solve their particular problem. This information moves them closer and closer to making a final purchase decision.
So here’s the marketing funnel:
As a marketer, you want to attract customers and educate them. And then, when you’re trying to get buyers to make a decision, you convert them by demonstrating why you’re better than your competitors.
Here’s a specific example. Suppose you’re selling a product — Product X — to businesses.
You want to attract businesses with a general topic that’s relevant to your audience. Perhaps you’re assuming that your audience doesn’t know how to solve the problem they have. Or, maybe your audience doesn’t know how to define the problem yet. This is why you’re writing about general topics in the attract phase.
Next, you want to educate them by explaining what the benefits are of purchasing products from this category. You want to ask yourself: “Why should they buy the particular type of product that I’m selling?” (Not my product specifically, but this category of products.)
And now, you start explaining why Product X is the best of all of the options that are out there.
Step 3: Create content tailored to your target audience for each stage of the buyer’s journey
Suppose that you are a software company, you sell marketing automation software, and you’re selling this to a target audience of small businesses.
At first, you might create awareness content. You want to attract your potential customers with some blog posts on a general topic.
If we’re talking about small businesses in general, they probably don’t know about any specific ways to improve their marketing results. You’re just attracting them so they become aware of your company.
Perhaps you post these blogs and include a call-to-action. Instead of asking potential customers to just book a sales demo, you include an attractive offer like “download this white paper” or “download this ebook,” and that gets them onto your email list where you can re-market to them.
Then you can move them into phase two. You can send them a handful of emails; for example, you could send them white papers on why small businesses should be using marketing automation software.
So now you have people from small businesses who want to improve their marketing results. They are interested enough to sign up on your email list. Now you have the opportunity to show them content about why marketing automation software is right for them. You’ve moved them into the consideration phase.
After reading your email newsletter, they know marketing automation software is right for them. So you start sending them some bottom-of-the-funnel content. You send them case studies. You send an email inviting them to a live demo webinar. Maybe you have a sales team member reach out to them and ask them, “Are you interested in having a one-on-one demo?”
The topic of this bottom-of-the-funnel content centers around “Why our company’s marketing automation software is best for small businesses.” You’re trying to get them to make a decision. You’re trying to show them why, of all the options, they should buy from your company — not anyone else’s marketing automation software.
New and improved B2B content marketing process
Previously, we were creating content ad-hoc or coming up with a calendar that only showed us how many blog posts or white papers to produce.
And we were creating lots of different types of content, no matter what we needed at that moment. That was generating some inconsistent web traffic for us, and we were struggling to turn that traffic into inbound leads.
But now, we know what type of content will be most beneficial for our business to create because we know we need content for every type of target audience at each stage of that marketing funnel.
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Video: B2B SaaS – How to turn content marketing into a powerful revenue driver. You can read the transcript below (lightly edited for readability).
B2B SaaS marketing teams create and publish a lot of content. But how can you make sure that the content you’re creating is getting results in terms of driving business leads, and ultimately, revenue?
Hey everyone, I’m Keirra Woodard, and today I’m going to show you a method for using content marketing as a powerful revenue driver for your B2B SaaS business.
Typical B2B SaaS content creation process
So here’s the typical process of creating and publishing content:
First the marketing team sets up a publishing schedule. Often, this is a calendar they’re using to create and publish a certain number of blog posts, social media posts, etc. every week, month, or quarter.
The content produced as a result of following this publishing schedule typically targets multiple different audiences. For example, business-to-business SaaS companies typically have several different subscription tiers: they might have one tier for small to medium-sized businesses, and they might have a different tier for enterprise companies.
Each of the different businesses you’re targeting as customers will require targeting a different persona within that company. For example, some of the blogs that you’re producing on your website might be targeting VPs or executives at a company, whereas some of your blogs might be targeting middle managers.
As a result of this process, the business leads that are generated tend to be pretty unpredictable every quarter.
There are lots of different types of content — there are blogs, there are white papers, there are case studies, there are webinars — and they’re all bringing in website traffic and leads of varying numbers and varying quality, all from various target audiences. That makes it very difficult to track, measure, or improve lead generation results over time.
So what can we do about that?
I’m going to show you a way to systematically figure out what content is the most important to create to drive high-quality business leads and ultimately revenue.
Identify target audiences that drive revenue
The first thing you want to do is identify the target audiences that are going to drive revenue for your business. So maybe for example you’re a SaaS company and you’re selling marketing automation tools or software.
Maybe you have two main audiences:
Perhaps one subscription tier is targeting small businesses. So within those small businesses, a lot of the time you’re talking to marketing managers and they’re the ones making the purchase decision.
Maybe you’re also targeting larger enterprises, and you’re marketing to marketing VPs that are higher up on the executive level.
Set traffic and lead goals for each target audience
The next thing you want to do is figure out exactly how much web traffic and qualified leads that you’re going to need for each audience, to reach your business revenue goals.
Example: Selling to small businesses
For example, the goal for your company is to get 20 sales each month to small businesses, and maybe the audience that you’re targeting within those small businesses is marketing managers.
So you would need, based on your historical customer data, about 40 qualified leads to get to 20 sales per month. To get 40 qualified leads, maybe a benchmark you can use based on other companies’ typical conversion rates is that for every 4000 website visitors, you’re going to get 40 qualified leads.
So you put out your content for this audience of marketing managers and you get 10,000 website visitors and five qualified leads specifically from marketing managers at small businesses.
So what do you do? You don’t need to create more top-of-the-funnel content for this particular audience of small business marketing managers. You’re already getting more website visitors than you thought you would get.
The issue is, it’s not enough qualified leads. So, what you would need to do in that situation is create more bottom of funnel content — more case studies, more webinars demoing your solution, more calculators — whatever it is that’s going to move this audience from following your content to buying.
Example: Selling to large enterprises
Let’s look at another example. Maybe your goal is to get two sales a month from large enterprises, and the audience you’re targeting within those large enterprises is the marketing vice presidents.
You need about five qualified leads from those marketing VPs to be passed to the sales team.
To get those qualified leads, you need about 500 website visitors from this audience per month.
So what you got was 100 website visitors from marketing VPs. But, you only got one qualified lead at the end of the month. So, what do you do in that situation?
Well, you got the ideal conversion rate. There’s one qualified lead for every hundred website visitors, so the conversion rate was ideal. You don’t need to create more bottom of the funnel content for these marketing VPs.
You need to invest in more top-of-the-funnel content like more blogs or white papers because you want to attract more marketing VPs into your marketing funnel.
Making your B2B SaaS content marketing systematic
With this system, you’ll know exactly what piece of the marketing funnel to focus on to get more leads. You’ll know whether to use top-of-the-funnel content like blogs and white papers to attract new people from a particular audience, or whether you need to focus on converting them. You’ll also know how to break that up and segment that for each audience.
The performance of your content is telling you exactly what you need to create next to get more leads.
Before, we were just creating content to fill the calendar. We were brainstorming content for all the different audiences at one time, and the leads we were getting were inconsistent.
But now, with this system, your content creation will be directly tied to generating revenue.
You will be creating content only for the specific stages of the buying funnel that are tied to bringing you more leads and more revenue.
And you’ll never waste time creating any content that isn’t going to be directly tied to you getting more leads right now.
Want more tips on B2B SaaS content marketing?
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