For enterprise software companies, a smart website is key to converting leads — often demo requests, introductory meetings, or even registrations for a free trial. The strategies for accomplishing this aren’t complex, but sometimes you might not be utilizing them to their fullest potential. This roadblock is so common that 61% of marketers struggle the most with driving targeted traffic to generate SaaS PQLs (Product Qualified Leads).
Every B2B Saas business model is looking for that silver bullet to drive results with a website redesign but the fact remains that a successful website is a sum of many working parts. But when it comes to SaaS marketing, there is no single key strategy – many strategies work in harmony to move people from beyond your website into a sales funnel. These marketing efforts should also be aimed toward your target audience, not just anyone and everyone.
Factors Involved In Achieving Web Results
There really are a lot of factors that impact the success of a website. Each should be analyzed for how they are impacting results positively or negatively. Then you’ll get a better idea of what your marketing team needs to focus on the most.
Let’s just do a fast list of website factors and explore them more later.
- Getting the right traffic that wants to buy from you. Your website traffic should mostly consist of potential customers, otherwise, you won’t gain a high ROI. You don’t want just anyone visiting your site. They should have the drive to make a purchase with you.
- Site design that builds confidence and trust. Once your target audience explores your website, you want them to feel like they can trust your product or service. They shouldn’t leave feeling weary or not sure about making a purchase with you.
- A clear hero message that confirms expectations and peaks interest. Website visitors often leave web pages in just 10-20 seconds. You have a very small sliver of time to catch the attention of potential customers.
- Page design and layout that draws visitors to the next step whether a click or scroll. Your home page shouldn’t come to an abrupt stop. Give the visitor a reason to keep scrolling. Tease more content further down the page that entices them to stay. Here are some effective SaaS website examples that you can get some inspiration from.
- Clear articulation of information that matches what your audience is looking for. Your website should clearly exemplify what your company offers and the solution you solve.
- Blog post content that compliments what your company offers. This should improve your traffic potential since you’re providing educational content for your niche industry.
- Conversions and calls to action that match multiple phases of the buying cycle articulation of information. What is your ultimate goal and where do you want to lead your customers?
Before you continue reading…
You can also explore our Brand Positioning Audit Guide.
There are two things required to reach a destination – first to know where you want to go, but second to also know where you stand today. It’s true, if we asked Google maps to direct us to Pittsburgh, but it had no idea where we were then it could not show us the path we need to take.
Targeted Versus Not Targeted Traffic
Results are what is important and we’ve established that a number of factors go into achieving lead generation. One of the first steps in that process is website traffic – but not just any traffic – the key is to attract and drive the right traffic. You’ll accomplish this by finding and advertising toward your target audience.
What Does it Mean to Drive General Traffic?
- You gain a large number of general site visits, but that’s a vanity metric since you’re not increasing conversions with said traffic.
- You have not honed in on high-performing keywords, so your site isn’t optimized for your target audience.
- You have a high bounce rate. Lots of people are visiting your site, but either you weren’t what they were looking for or your site took a long time to load.
What Does it Mean to Drive the Right Website Traffic?
- The visitor has demand for what you offer.
- The visitor meets your ideal criteria to resonate with your message and validation
- The visitor has the means to purchase your offering.
- You’re focusing on high intent long tail keywords for your SEO that insinuates one of the three:
- Navigational : The visitor is trying to reach a particular area of your website.
- Informational : The visitor is trying to acquire certain information on a topic.
- Transactional : The visitor has the intent to make a purchase.
What is a Sign of Bad Traffic?
- You’re experiencing a high bounce rate and low engagement on your website.
- You’re not seeing an increase in conversions through the content you create.
- You have a low return rate on website visitors.
Why Targeted Traffic is So Much Better.
- Your business will yield a higher conversion rate.
- You’ll experience more shares from the relevant content you’re creating.
- Your visitors are coming to your website with a goal in mind, therefore they’re looking to you for a solution to their problem.
- Honing in on your website traffic naturally lowers your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
- When you have niche-focused content, you can establish yourself as a reputable source by acquiring relevant backlinks for your industry.
We often call it frictionless sales when a visitor meets the right criteria when they visit a website but are able to quickly and efficiently move through the conversion and sales process as a qualified lead. This makes the process easier for both the buyer and the seller.
This is why optimizing our website traffic strategy is so important to not just producing qualified leads and increasing conversion rates but also having those visitors fly through the sales process.
97% of larger SaaS companies advertise with LinkedIn Ads and 51% of website visitors come from direct traffic. Your website is vital for producing leads and converting them. Don’t let it go to waste!
How To Drive The Right Website Traffic
If the right website traffic can move more streamlined through our website and sales process, it is important to employ tactics that do that. You may have a lot of relevant traffic potential right at your fingertips, you just may not be utilizing the right strategies.
The key concept is to evaluate your channels for how those people will match the criteria that we mentioned above. This is your target audience that should be your main focus.
Getting the right website traffic for marketing channels
Search Engine Optimization
When you optimize for the right phrases, it drives organic traffic that has a high demand. According to the Search Engine Journal, 49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel. So an SEO strategy should be at the top of your priorities for driving website traffic.
Make sure you include a relevant search term in the title and meta description. This will not only be the first thing people will see, but it will influence how you rank in the search engine.
Paid Advertising
When it is done right, it can drive a lot of the right people with demand – search advertising obviously is targeted at people with a need. When you advertise toward your target audience, you’ll naturally drive more leads.
Partners and affiliates are other strong channels for visitors that have demand. Influencer Marketing Hub states that 8 out of 10 brands run an affiliate marketing program. This channel is so popular because partners/affiliates increase your brand awareness and referral traffic.
Meaningful, Long-Form Content
Create blog posts that provide value to your audience. According to Optinmonster, companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites. So it’s a win-win for your viewers and your online reach. Produce high-quality content that’s relevant and aligns with your business goals. You can even try and guest post on other relevant industry-leading websites to build up your reputation.
Your content strategy for blog posts should correlate to your overarching goal for what you want to accomplish for your business. If it’s not aligned with your goals, you may not be creating quality content for your relevant audience.
Evergreen Content
Make sure you’re creating evergreen content while also giving a unique perspective that’s industry specific. Create content that will never go out of date with long tail keywords that you’ll gain the most organic traffic from.
Evergreen content drives prospects to your SaaS sales funnel, continually drives traffic to your website, improves SEO rank, positions your brand as an industry leader, and connects with audiences through other channels.
You can backlink to this type of content throughout your blog posts to further improve your SEO initiatives as well.
Social Media Platforms
Use social media platforms to advertise to your ideal customers while also creating various types of content. Increasing your reach across your social network can help your business gain quality traffic to your website and as a result, more leads. Create content that resonates with your target audience and they’ll naturally want to do business with you.
Utilize Facebook ads to get more social traffic to your business. This referral traffic is super helpful for your visibility.
Data Analytics Tools
Utilize tools like Google Analytics to optimize your website for your particular target audience. Tools like this give you key metrics on your website performance. Using the data it provides will allow you to gain better insight into the areas you need to improve on.
97% of larger SaaS companies advertise with LinkedIn Ads.
AND
51% of website visitors come from direct traffic.
Strategies for Converting Product Quality Leads
Product-led business models have a singular focus to sell by getting visitors to try. This model is moving from consumer apps and smaller, simpler B2B apps into larger more enterprise software as well. But introducing your product or service with a free trial or demo is not enough to pull in conversions.
Your target market must find the product, software, service, etc. a beneficial or valuable solution to whatever problem they sought to solve. Without that recognition, your freemium customers will never upgrade. Give them a reason to do business with you.
There are different strategies you can use depending on what stage the user is in your buying funnel.
Early Stage Strategies
One way you can convert leads in the early stages is by gathering an email list and sending content to your customers’ inboxes can be extremely beneficial for your business. Creating this form of content gives you the capability to form marketing-qualified leads. These are the people that gain useful knowledge from your free content and therefore are great contenders for potential conversion.
Another common way to catch early interest in your product is by utilizing social media. This is an easy way to gain a following and give your audience any updates or new offerings you may have.
Mid-Stage Strategies
Mid-stage strategies give you even more of an opportunity to create valuable content for those interested in your business. For example, webinars are extremely common and effective in the SaaS industry. It’s a great way to bring your software to live and showcase it’s abilities to your target market.
Offering free downloadable content to your audience can be a great addition to further increase their interest in your product or service. Even though all of this is “free”, doesn’t mean it’s not impacting your business goals. These are useful tactics to nurture trust with your customers and establish yourself as an industry leader.
Late-Stage Strategies
When customers are the most interested in your product, it’s best to offer them the option to sign up for a free trial. When you provide a freemium option for your product, it gives your potential customers a taste of what they could have if they buy your full version. It’s one of the most effective ways to increase your conversion rate.
Then, after their free trial is coming to a close, that is the perfect opportunity for your sales reps to catch users at the right moment and inquire about upgrading. This is low-hanging fruit you can tackle regularly. Your sales team can use data from freemium users and decipher when the best time is to swoop in and follow up with them.
Hone in on product usage data. Learn the behaviors of your freemium model users and find new ways to entice them to fully commit to your product. You need to offer something at a higher level that they need to add to their plan. Otherwise, why would they want to upgrade?
You don’t want your qualified leads to lose interest in your product because it’s stagnant and limited. Your product team should always think innovatively about different features and ways you can solve your customers’ problems.
Making Early-Stage Conversion Act Like Late Stage
It’s like the saying goes, “on time is late, and early is on time”. A new tactic is to have simpler turnkey conversions that push visitors into signing up. Think of a site that offers a design program offering the ability to crop a photo, but requires a trial to remove the watermark. You need something that is contingent on the user fully signing up to get the full experience. You don’t want to show all your cards in the free trial version of your product. It’s like how TV shows leave you with cliffhangers that make you crave another episode. Leave them wanting more.
It’s important that you don’t drag your feet with leads either. The overarching goal is to get visitors into a product quickly, therefore, reducing friction. Ensure that your sign-up process is easy and the user acquires instant access to your product or service. If the process is clunky and confusing, that’s an instant red flag for customers.
Personalize User Onboarding
Prospects are most likely to upgrade to a paid subscription or plan if their product experience is personalized. However, not personalizing prospects’ onboarding or welcoming process is one of the biggest oversights. It’s incredibly imperative to tailor-make every element of this process, everything from welcoming them, setting expectations on future achievements, educating them on relevant information, etc.
Your product team should always keep the customer experience in mind when they a creating the interface and features. If onboarding is confusing and the product is too difficult to manage, you have a high chance of losing that customer. If the customer is paying a subscription for this product, it needs to be seamless and personalized no matter what.
Be Interactive and Drive Adoption
Product tours are a fairly standardized norm, but we know your goal isn’t to be standard, it’s to be innovative! Producing interactive content can significantly elevate your brand, and most importantly, it can increase confidence in choosing your product. According to Outgrow, 88% of marketers say that interactive content is effective at differentiating their brand. Static content can only get you so far. If you create engaging content for your target consumer, you’ll increase your lead nurturing and drive more conversions.
Collect Customer Feedback
Collecting feedback from your users will help you gain insight into your product in areas where you can make improvements to drive more conversions in the future. Ignoring feedback even from freemium users will keep your businesses from evolving and you’ll remain stagnant. They can tell you firsthand what needs to be improved. This type of feedback is vital for your product teams when they go to make changes/improvements.
Pay Attention to Your MQL to SQL Conversion Rate
A key metric you should keep on your radar is your average MQL to SQL rate. A normal percentage of this is around 13%. Your MQL should become a qualified lead that will turn into an SQL. Company websites in fact are the highest performing for MQL to SQL conversions. This is why it’s imperative to utilize your website as a top priority for sales. Your MQL should nicely transition to your sales team for them to follow up and get them to upgrade.
These tactics are a lot more about inbound and people looking for something rather interruptive where you are trying to convince them to have demand. Hubspot explains the importance of inbound marketing perfectly. It’s very important to build strong relationships with your customers and prospects in order to gain qualified leads.
Organic traffic is extremely important and beneficial for business owners to focus on. The overarching goal with any of these strategies is you want to decrease your bounce rate and improve your lead generation by increasing the amount of relevant traffic you’re getting from your website. Not only that but you want to improve your organic traffic in a way where your website does the selling for you.
Work smarter not harder when it comes to strategizing for quality traffic generation.
Remember: You also need to be creative and purposeful with your product-led growth strategy. According to ProductLed, when PQLs are used the conversion rate for free accounts is 3x higher. This helps you identify which free accounts are most likely to convert to a paid version. Many companies are looking to increase their marketing budgets to focus on their PQLs to sell to their ideal customers. Honing in on these potential customers will in turn increase your recurring revenue instead of having many users remain with the free version of your product.
Final Thoughts
Generating SaaS PQLs can seem intricate to tackle, but if you follow these best practices, you’ll be good to go. From SEO, blog posts, and advertising campaigns, to analyzing your website data, there are endless possibilities for your targeted traffic potential.