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Why You’re Struggling to Reach B2B Decision Makers (And What You Should do Instead)

As someone who values privacy and social responsibility, I understand that cold outreach may not be the most ideal marketing channel for everyone. While it can be effective in certain situations, it can also be intrusive and potentially disruptive, and it puts the personal information of decision makers at risk.

However, I also recognize that cold outreach is a commonly used tactic, and it can be an effective way for startups to reach B2B decision makers.

That being said, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get the attention of B2B decision makers through cold outreach and other marketing channels such as SEO and organic social.

Therefore, if you’re looking for alternative ways to connect with decision makers in B2B companies, one option to consider is podcasting.

After reading this article, you’ll learn:

  • The common tactics that startups use to reach B2B decision makers, and why they can be ineffective.
  • Why podcasting is a more targeted and responsible approach to reaching B2B decision makers.
  • How to use podcasting to effectively connect with B2B decision makers

What Most Startups do to Reach B2B Decision Makers and Why They’re Ineffective

If you’re like most startups, you might have tried reaching B2B decision makers through cold outreach, organic social and SEO, with no success.

Here is a brief overview of these channels and why this is the case. 

Cold Outreach

Cold outreach is the most recommended way of reaching B2B decision makers. 

To do this effectively, most companies hire dozens of SDRs and BDRs for cold calling and cold pitching.

And despite the time and resources spent on them, it rarely produces the desired result.

The screenshot below is proof.

As you can see, this co-founder says he has only responded to two out of over 5000 sales emails he has received in the last few years. 

This means that if your email lands in his inbox, there’s only a 0.04% chance of him responding to it.

This shows why the cold emails you send to B2B decision makers haven’t led to the results you desire. 

Here are some reasons for this:

  • Decision makers are often busy. The last thing they want to do is read an unsolicited email.
  • They’re the target of other B2B sellers. This means there’s a high possibility that they get tons of similar emails in their inbox. This further reduces the chances of yours being seen.
  • Cold emails have a bad rep. This is not a factor of whether you can write the best cold email or not. They’re tagged as self-serving; hence, the thought of them sets people’s hormones raging. Yet, there’s almost nothing you can do about it. 
  • Even if you get into the 0.04% range, it can be further reduced by their readiness to purchase. Such that, when they become ready they forget that they once got an offer from you.

Organic Social

LinkedIn and Twitter are great places to find B2B decision makers. While seeing their posts and comments on your feed makes them seem easily accessible, it isn’t usually the case.

Here are some reasons:

  • For LinkedIn, most decision makers don’t accept connection requests. You can only follow them. This reduces the chances of your post showing up on their feed or building a personal connection with them in the DM.
  • Even when you connect with them, your chances of building a relationship are slim. Like emails, they most likely have several people trying to sell to them.

SEO

Investing in SEO is another option to explore when trying to reach B2B decision makers. That said, the downsides make it a strategy you should think twice about before going all in with it. 

These include:

  • SEO takes time and it’s uncertain. A quick Google search shows that it takes about 2- 6 months for a page to rank on Google.

This is a long time to wait if you’re a startup that wants to keep its revenue engine rolling.

What’s worse is that the time frame is mere speculation. Ranking on Google is determined by several factors that you have no control over. This is not the level of uncertainty to hinge your business on.

  • SEO is expensive. To increase your chances of getting results from SEO you need to invest lots of money. The best SaaS SEO agencies charge around $5,000 monthly. 

While this is similar to what it costs to hire a B2B Podcast agency, there’s a higher chance of reaching B2B decision makers faster with the latter.

As you can see, you shouldn’t depend solely on cold outreach, organic social, and SEO if your goal is to reach B2B decision makers.

Let’s dive into why podcasting is a viable alternative and why you should consider it.

Why it Makes Sense to Reach B2B Decision Makers Through Podcasts

If you’re like most startups, you might have tried reaching B2B decision makers through cold outreach, organic social, and SEO, with limited success. 

While these marketing channels can be effective in some cases, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get the attention of B2B decision makers through them.

As someone who values privacy and social responsibility, I understand the drawbacks of using cold outreach as a marketing channel. Not only is it intrusive and potentially disruptive, it also puts the personal information of decision makers at risk.

That’s why I prefer to use alternative methods, such as inviting potential customers to be interviewed on my company’s podcast. Podcast interviews offer a more targeted and personal approach to reaching B2B decision makers, and have a higher response rate than cold emails. This allows me to build relationships with potential customers and better understand their needs and challenges, while also preserving their privacy.

In addition, inviting potential customers to be interviewed on my company’s podcast allows me to use other networking methods, such as social media direct messaging, more effectively. By establishing a relationship through a podcast interview, I can reach out to potential customers through social media while preserving their privacy and avoiding the negative reputation of cold outreach.

Overall, inviting potential customers to be interviewed on my company’s podcast is a more targeted, personalized, and responsible approach to reaching B2B decision makers, and allows me to build relationships and better understand the needs of my target audience.

A recent HubSpot report shows that marketers are not backing down from investing in Podcasts. 

What does this mean?

Podcasting most likely has a direct impact on the bottom line. 

The interview-based nature of most podcasts make it most desirable for reaching B2B decision makers, as it fosters value sharing and relationship building.

Here are other benefits of investing in podcasts as a B2B SaaS startup:

1. Higher Chance of Conversion

According to the Elderman B2B thought leadership report, 61% of decision makers believe that a company’s thought leadership is the most effective way to demonstrate value.

This shows how much decision makers appreciate thought leadership content. The direct and original nature of podcasts makes them the best form of content for showcasing thought leadership.

So, if you can show up consistently with this type of content, there’s a higher chance of influencing their buying decision.  

2. Decision Making Doesn’t Feel Like a Transaction

Lots of times, demos are a sales death sentence. Asking a decision maker to request a demo at their first contact with your brand is outright salesy and can turn them off.

So, rather than sending an email and asking them to book a sales call or request for a demo, invite them as guests on your podcast and pitch the benefits to them. 

This will most likely pique their interest and increase your chances of getting a yes because it’s a win-win situation. 

This is because they get to showcase their knowledge and possibly talk about their brand. In turn, you’ll grow a deeper relationship that can lead to an organic demo request or signup.

3. Most Original and Impactful Type of Thought Leadership Content 

Thought leadership content can come in the form of social, SEO, and podcast content. 

However, podcasts are the most original form of them all. This is because, most times, SEO thought leadership content involves a middleman—the writer.

The writer collects the information and edits/formats it for grammar and/or SEO purposes. While there’s nothing wrong with this, I believe it takes away from the originality of the message.

Podcasts, on the contrary, skip the middleman step and give the thought leader the opportunity to pass the message in its rawest form. 

Also, social content comes in bits and pieces. This makes it less impactful than long-form content like podcasts. 

This, therefore, makes podcasts the most original and impactful medium for delivering thought leadership content. 

4. Easy to Predict the Outcome of Your Outreach

Podcasts are more predictable. This is unlike SEO where you publish your content, wait for it to rank, and start praying that your target audience finds it valuable enough to make a decision. 

Or social content where the reach is determined by an algorithm.

If you successfully invite a decision maker in your ICP to your show, there’s a higher chance of converting him/her to a customer.

5. Build Rapport with Your Target Audience Faster

As opposed to other ways of reaching B2B decision makers, podcasts make it possible to grow an instant connection between you and the listener. Here are the reasons why this is possible:

  • No matter how engaging written words are, they can never sound as authentic as spoken words. 
  • SEO content puts you in a fix between pleasing a robot and a human. But with podcasts, your audience alone is top of mind. 
  • The way you sound conveys a message about your personality to the audience, and if it resonates with them, they’ll grow a likeness for you that can extend to your brand. 

6. Most Convenient Form of Content Consumption for Decision Makers 

The busy schedule of decision makers makes podcasts most convenient for them. Unlike written content where they have to dedicate some time and give full attention, they can juggle listening to podcasts with other tasks like driving. 

This also makes it possible for them to listen to the podcast from start to finish and most likely take your call to action.

7. Easier to Build Authority

Most blog content pieces are ghostwritten. But for podcasts, ghostwriting is impossible. 

Your listeners are certain that whoever is talking about the subject matter is the expert. 

When your team and guests consistently show a high level of expertise, listeners begin to view your brand as an authority. 

And once that happens, they’ll trust you more and be willing to take action. 

With all this said, there’s no better time than now to join the 82% of marketers to reap the benefits of podcasting, especially if you desire to reach B2B decision makers.

So, how exactly do you go about it?

Here you go…

How to Reach Decision Makers With Podcasts: Forward Launch’s Interview-based Content System

At Forward Launch, we developed a 6-step framework for building ROI-driven podcasts for B2B startups.

Here is what they entail, plus a brief explanation of how we approach each one.

Step 1: Identify potential customers that would be highly beneficial for your company to target

This is an important step because it sets the groundwork for the type of content you will create and the types of guests you will invite to your show. 

Step 2: Invite ideal customers to discuss topics related to their roles and industry

We pitch the unique benefits that your podcast offers to them and what you’d like them to share during the interview. We use our extensive network of contacts to make sure we get the best guests for your podcast.

Step 3: Interview target customers in a recorded format

This helps you to show credibility and authority in your niche, which will help you stand out in the competitive market. 

Step 4: Build a relationship with your guests

If someone appears on your podcast, it gives you an opportunity to know more about them. 

Our team shows you how to foster relationships in a very natural way, which could bring them into your sales cycle. You can as well use the content as an outreach tool to reach more people like them.

Step 5: Publish the interview content

We take care of editing, mixing, mastering, and other post-production processes to ensure that your podcast is of the highest quality. 

We also handle the launch, hosting, and distribution of your podcast to your streaming channels.

Step 6: Repurpose the interview content into multiple formats

After launching the podcast, we help you repurpose and distribute it into different formats such as blog posts, social media posts, and video highlights.

This ensures that it reaches more people, increases visibility, and creates an aura of authority about your brand.

The Days of Struggling to Reach B2B Decision Makers are Over

I’m not asking you to ditch other ways of reaching B2B decision makers to focus solely on podcasts. 

But, as you may have experienced, the results derived from these channels are low, slow, and unpredictable.

Podcasts, however, have shown to be the most promising. And if you don’t know, you only need to create a podcast once, and with a solid structure and template in place, inviting decision makers and getting them to close a sales cycle will be easy-peasy. 

Sounds great but seems like too much work?

I get it! 

Setting up an ROI-driven podcast can be overwhelming, and that’s why at Forward Launch, we take on all the hassle and use our highly-specialized process to create and present you with a fully-formed podcast in 3 weeks.
So, if you need help setting up a podcast designed to attract B2B decision makers from day one, or you want to optimize your existing podcast to attract decision-makers, click this link to schedule a discovery session.

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Why I Set Out To Build an Interview-based B2B SaaS Podcast Agency

When I started Forward Launch Digital, I had no intention of offering podcast creation and marketing services. Initially, all I wanted to do was to help SaaS businesses handle the strategy side of their content marketing engine.

So, I would develop their content strategy in an excel sheet and provide extra guidance on the type of content to create, where, and when to publish.

But most of my clients weren’t satisfied and wanted more. Rather than handling the strategy part, they wanted a holistic approach to content marketing. 

That means handling everything from content strategy, content creation, content distribution, and measurement.

Since this was a full stretch beyond my initial offering, I had to decide:

Is a content marketing agency the next leap for me?

I deliberated heavily for months and decided to look at what’s lacking in the industry rather than becoming another “me-too” content marketing agency with no unique value proposition. 

And that led me to uncover some of the core areas B2B SaaS companies were struggling with and some gaps that I could fill:

Here are some of the key gaps that I identified.

Gap 1: B2B SaaS Startups Want Guaranteed Meetings with Key Decision Makers

It’s challenging to connect with key decision makers in most companies. Connect requests or DMs on LinkedIn rarely work. While cold emails hardly generate responses.

B2B SaaS companies are yet to crack the code regarding networking with decision makers. This leads to a longer sales cycle and contract breakdowns.

Gap 2:  SaaS Startups Struggle to Create Expert-level Content

How many B2B decision makers book demo calls after reading a blog post? Not many. When done well, thought leadership content could drive signups for B2B SaaS companies. 

But most so-called “thought-leadership content” ranking on the first page of Google doesn’t meet the expectation of readers. 

And that’s enforced by Edelman, which reported in 2021 that 71% of decision makers claimed that less than half of the thought leadership content they read offered valuable insights. 

While Google has waged a war on low-quality content with the helpful content update, we still cross paths with more poor-quality content than high-quality ones.

Why is that so?

The reason is simple.

It’s difficult and expensive to create expert-level content. Not only that, finding expert writers who have industry expertise and can speak to your target niche is hard.

An excellent example of such a mismatch could happen if a company like Hotjar decided to outsource its content creation to freelance writers.

For context, Hotjar is a web analytics tool that provides visual insights into how readers interact with the pages on your website. Hotjar’s users are expert content marketers. They have advanced questions about heatmaps and how to uncover optimization opportunities.

Therefore, it would be a disaster for them to hire writers who have no content marketing experience nor understand how heatmaps work.

Unfortunately, this is the path most B2B SaaS companies take. 

The result…

They create regurgitated content pieces that fail to offer readers any unique insight.

Gap 3: B2B Companies Want to Shorten their Sales Cycle

According to Hubspot, it takes an average of 84 days for customers to go from leads to closed deals. Unfortunately, most businesses aren’t willing to wait for that long anymore. 

The pressure is on sales teams to double down on outreach efforts as they attempt to shorten the sales cycle.

While the marketing team is continuously creating content to generate traffic that leads to conversions.

With these discoveries, it didn’t make sense to go ahead with building another content marketing agency. Hence, I had to think of an alternative content format that could help B2B SaaS startups close all 3 gaps:

  1. Book guaranteed meetings
  2. Create expert-level content
  3. Shorten sales cycle

From my analysis, an interview-based podcast was the only option that provided these three-fold benefits. So, I decided to pivot into an interview-based B2B SaaS Podcast Agency.

To offer an excellent service to my clients, I had to research more about the nuances of the industry, and here was what I found:

My Discovery: Why B2B SaaS Startups Struggle with Podcasting

Podcast creation remains a viable revenue source for B2B SaaS startups, yet, only a few companies are utilizing it to its fullest. 

After interviewing several SaaS founders, here are some of the reasons why podcasting isn’t their favorite content marketing channel:

1. Time-consuming and labor-intensive

Launching a Podcast is similar to starting a blog. It involves  a lot of moving parts such as: 

  • Podcast channel design: To customize the podcast to suit your branding, you’ll create the cover art, professional image, and webpage mockup.
  • Scheduling setup: To add guests seamlessly to your calendar, you must create a scheduling system.
  • Copywriting assets: You need voice overs, episode intros and outros, podcast trailers, and ad copy to promote each episode

And lots more.

Putting all of this together will take months if you decide to create them in-house. 

2. Inconsistency: Starts but doesn’t record enough episodes to keep going

Launching a Podcast is easy but keeping it going is hard. 

According to Podcast Industry Insights, only 39.73% of Podcasts on Apple Podcasts have 10+ episodes.

This shows that most companies that launch podcasts, don’t ever record up to 10 episodes, before calling it quits.

This happens because most marketing teams launch podcasts without a clear goal, while others cease production once they struggle to attract listeners.

3. Failure to attract the right guests

Your Podcast is as good as the guests you interview. If your goal is to drive revenue from podcasting, having the right guests helps you add qualified prospects to your sales pipeline, which increases your chances of conversion.

SaaS companies often miss the mark in terms of attracting the right prospects. As a result, they fill their podcast pipeline with guests who have zero buying intent.

4. Podcasting effort doesn’t drive revenue growth

If done right, you can go from a podcast guest to a closed deal in a few hours or days. Yet, most B2B brands find it difficult to see the impact of podcasting on their revenue. 

These and many more are some of the reasons B2B SaaS startups fail to successfully launch a podcast or abandon it midway, even if they actually get started.

Our Process for Creating ROI-driven Podcasts for B2B SaaS Startups

Podcast creation is a time-consuming task. So, we developed a holistic approach to it.

That way, we take the stress of creation off your shoulders.

All you need to do is show up and interview the guests.

Here’s the 8-step process that we use to make this possible:

Step 1: Strategy call

Every Podcast creation process starts with understanding the ICP. Our initial strategy call helps us know your target audience and pain points. We also brainstorm content and branding ideas to ensure that your podcast is appealing to listeners.

Step 2: Define show concept

We dive deep into the why behind the podcast and its unique identity. At this stage, we help you to nail down the show name, episode length and publishing cadence.

Step 3: Create show collaterals

This is where the real work begins. The goal here is to set up and launch your podcast. This includes developing the key components like cover art, music selection, and hosting account setup.

Step 4: Copywriting

We generate a benefit-driven copy that highlights the value proposition of your podcast and differentiates it from competitors.

This includes creating the show description, intro copy, outro copy, Ad copy, and the introduction episode.

Step 5: Scheduling setup

We will also help you set up a scheduling system on Calendly that adds meetings to your calendar whenever guests make a booking. We’ll also draft the questions that the guests will answer before scheduling an interview with you.

Step 6: Reminders and follow-up 

We set up an email follow-up system that sends reminders plus meeting briefs to inform the guests of key talking points, so they are prepared for the interview.

Step 7: Interview Scripts

We generate scripts to help you come up with insightful questions before, during, and after the interview. That way, you’ll engage the guest and never run out of questions to ask them.

Step 8: Distribute Podcast Content

Every podcast is as good as the listens it gets. Our distribution strategy includes repurposing podcast content into SEO blog posts, and sharing it as a newsletter to your audience.

Let’s Help You Create an Interview-based Podcast for Your B2B SaaS Startup

As you can see, creating podcasts is a tedious and time-consuming task. However, with the right strategy and processes in place, you can reduce the sales cycle of your B2B startup and generate leads from them in no time.

If you want to launch an ROI-driven podcast, we’d love to help you.

My agency offers a 6-step process that simplifies the podcast creation process and drives remarkable growth for B2B SaaS startups. If you’d like to work with us, click here to book a free discovery call, and I’ll get in touch with more details.

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B2B Content Marketing – Systematically move buyers down the funnel

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:

Chart with a funnel shape. Awareness is at the top of the funnel. Examples of awareness content are blog posts, podcasts, and webinars. Consideration is in the middle of the funnel. Examples of consideration content are ebooks, white papers, email newsletters, and webinars. Decision is at the bottom of the funnel. Examples of decision content are customer reviews, case studies, and sales demos.

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.

Chart with a funnel shape labeled 'The Marketing Funnel'. The funnel has the word attract at the top, educate in the middle, and convert at the bottom

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. 

Funnel which contains three boxes. The title is 'Example, selling marketing automation software to small businesses.' The top box says "3 blogs - “How small businesses can improve marketing results”" The middle box says: "3 emails, 2 white papers - “Why small businesses should use marketing automation software”" The bottom box says: "Case study and live demo webinar - “Why our company’s marketing automation software is best for small businesses”"

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

Before and after diagram. Before: Create content ad-hoc or based on calendar Generate some inconsistent web traffic Struggle to turn traffic into inbound leads After: Create content tailored to specific stages of the marketing funnel Pinpoint exact content that will move audience through the buyer’s journey to capture more traffic Educate buyers before they talk to sales reps, producing higher quality leads

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.

Want more tips on B2B content marketing?

Get tips sent straight to your inbox on how to generate consistent, high quality business leads from your content.

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B2B SaaS Marketing – Turn content into a powerful revenue driver

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.

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