Top 5 Ways to Generate Leads for Your SaaS business | SaaS District

Leads are the blood that keeps the flow going to keep your business, your SaaS business and startup alive, right? Without that blood flowing, your business won't thrive, it won't grow, and it'll die. As you may have heard the saying, if you're not growing, you're dying. And that's exactly what happens when you don't have enough leads for your business to continue growing. And on today's video, I'm going to be covering the top 5 ways of how you can start generating leads for your SaaS business. Hey guys, welcome back to another video here at the SaaS District channel, the number one YouTube channel to learn all about SaaS. Now, my name is Akeel Jabbar. If you guys don't know me, I'm the investment director and GP at Horizon Capital, where we work with SaaS companies to help them take their business to the next level with our growth playbook. Okay? So we do that through capital or through growth operations, and we create the best playbook to help you scale to the next level. In today's video, I want to talk about how to generate leads for your SaaS business, because this is a common problem, right? A lot of businesses build a fantastic product. They've gotten their initial few clients, but they really need to generate more leads, more sales to get their product out there. Obviously there's so many different ways, many, many different ways in which you can invest your capital to help generate leads, to try and test out to see what works for your business, your product, your industry. Whether you're B2C or B2B, right? There's just so many different ways. But for SaaS companies, there's a few common, you know, lead generation and marketing strategies that work across every single industry. And that's exactly what I'm going to talk about today. So I recommend trying out all these 5, or at least one of them, and see what works for you, because I'm sure one of them will work for you as it does for many of our businesses in our portfolio. So the number 1, create premium content. Okay? So Content, content, content. Content marketing is huge. It's worked from the beginning and it's going to continue to work for years to come. So what do I mean about premium content? That could be blog articles, but what I'm talking about is case studies, ebooks, guides, white papers. People love this stuff, right? They want to learn. People want to understand how they can apply, you know, how this piece of content is going to help them with making their job easier or make their life easier or help them grow their business. So the way it works is quite simple. People exchange, you create this super high-quality piece of content, you give access to the public. But in exchange, what you're going to ask for is either their email address, their name, as much information as you can gather, right? Because the people who are going to be asking for that are going to be super high quality leads. If they're asking for it, it means that this is a problem they're actually looking to solve. And you know, you can probably give this through a simple landing page, right? So, you know, first name, last name, business name, you can get their company name, as much information as possible. Obviously the more you ask, the higher the filter and probably the higher the quality. But at the minimum you want their name and their email. Now one thing you want to keep in mind here that's super important is this content and the quality of what you're putting out has to be high quality. I mean, because if you actually, you know, try and do this, let's say you create it like, you know, high volume, a bunch of eBooks and guides and white papers, and the content isn't that good, it's actually going to have the negative effect and actually cause a bad reputation for you. It's actually gonna do the reverse effect instead of getting quality leads because they're going to be turned off from the quality of the content that you've shared with them, that they felt, okay, this isn't actually helpful for me. Why did I waste my time? Why did I give you my information? And it's just gonna lead to worse effects, okay? So that's number 1, create premium quality content. Number 2, integrations, integrating with other SaaS products. So this is probably the fastest way you can grow your business product, okay? So integrate with other softwares. And an easy way you can do that, if you decide, okay, where should I integrate? Where should my product integrate? Talk to your customers. Ask them what is their current tech stack? What are they using? What is the CRM they're using? What email marketing tool? What sales platform? You know, think about— ask them what they're asking and think, if I plug in and integrate with this tool over here, is it going to make their life easier? And what's going to happen is you're going to see a huge influx because you're going to leverage the other platform's audience, their tool, and their system that they've already spent millions if not billions of dollars. And by plugging in, You're going to add value to their tool and then it's going to drive a lot of leads and traffic over to your site as well. On top of that, what it does is, you know, if you have these big names on your websites like, hey, we're integrated with HubSpot, we're integrated with Salesforce, that helps with your reputation. People trust you, right? You get that improvement in your overall brand. That's a huge boost in terms of how people are going to perceive you and trust you for wanting to do business with you. Now, the key thing is if you're going to speak to another SaaS company and say, hey, can we integrate you? Most of them will be happy to do it. The only thing you have to consider is how's your product going to benefit their audience? Okay? So you have to make sure there's the right fit and that by integrating, you're going to spend the money and development budget to be able to integrate with them. And that by adding that feature into their product that they don't have to go out and build themselves, their users are going to benefit from using your actual product. Okay? So just keep that in mind. So that's number 2, integration. Number 3, build network or viral effect into your product. Right? So you probably see this with e-commerce stores, right? You see this with a lot of different businesses. They ask you to share after you've signed up or made a purchase, right? And you can do the same with SaaS. It's the exact same thing. Every time, you know, it gets to the point of where you hit that aha moment, right? That, uh, what we call it time to value, right? So the moment people start using your product and like, ah, now I see the value of why I signed up and, you know, entered my credit card and they're really enjoying their experience. You want to hit them up and say, hey, share this with somebody, share this with a friend, share this with somebody else, your colleagues. And you'll get a bonus, an upgrade, a discount, whatever it is. So you want to incentivize them that the more they use it, the more they like it, the more they're willing to share it and incentivize them to share it more to get that free kind of lead generation from the network effect. Number 4, hosting webinars. Absolutely love webinars. And the reason why is people who attend are very, very interested in a topic or about your company. Once people are attending a webinar, that requires a huge time commitment, usually, you know, 30, minutes to an hour of your day. So they have to subscribe, they have to remember, and they have to show up and sit there to learn and educate themselves. So they're putting a time commitment, means they're very, they're interested. They're probably super high quality lead compared to, you know, some of the other lead generation tactics I talk about. You know, people who come on to a webinar are generally going to be a lot higher quality. And if you're wondering, okay, well, I don't have a list, I don't have too many people, and, you know, I don't have a market or email list I can target to get on a webinar, partner with other leading experts, right? There's people out there who already have a list, who have that audience. And do a joint partner webinar with them. And the way that works is, you know, ask them, hey, can we do a joint partner webinar? Love to jump on and share with your audience for free. I'll create the content and I'll speak together. We'll jump on and we'll, we'll educate them on some of the stuff that we are doing. And if they're, if it's valuable to them, then you'll be able to get some of their audience and some of their leads to come over and learn about you, your product, and then obviously become leads for you. All right. So that's number 4, hosting webinars. Number 5, start guest posting or guest podcasting. Okay, so, and the reason why I love this is it's kind of like the last thing I said with webinars. You get to go out to bloggers, influencers, publishers, and, you know, big brands, big, big companies out there, maybe in similar space or same market and audience, and you get to create content for them. So you can say, hey, I'm going to create a piece of content, whether it's a guest article or I'm going to jump on your podcast, and you're going to share all this information with them. And you're going to be able to leverage all their audience back to you. And that helps build your reputation, it helps build your brand, and that helps build authority, which is super important for SEO. And it's important for driving qualified traffic back to your site. Now just make sure when you're, say for example, you're doing a guest bio, make sure you include your full name, your website, your company name, and so that you can get a link back to your website and people can know who exactly, who you are and why they should learn more about you. There you have it, guys. That's number 5, guest posting and guest podcasting. Those are the top 5 ways I talked about how you should start generating leads today. So there you have it, guys. Thanks again for watching today's video where we talk about the top 5 ways to generate leads for your SaaS business. If you liked this video, make sure to smash that bell button, like, and comment below. I'd love to hear from you. What are some other ways that you guys are generating leads for your business? What are you finding that's working? What's not working? I want to hear from you. And if you guys have used any of these 5 methods, what's worked the best? All right guys, so I hope you enjoyed. Thanks for watching SaaS District and see you guys on the next episode.