10 years of best practices and tips for growing SaaS and Lead Gen companies. Send me your feedback on what you like.

1. 10 Tips for Growing your
SaaS & LeadGen Sales
with
Digital Marketing

2. © Copyright Zavient, Inc
● 10 years of digital marketing experience with big
companies and Startups
● Experience managing million dollar ad budgets for
SaaS, Tech and LeadGen companies
● Founded by an MIT Math grad
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3. © Copyright Zavient, Inc
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4. 10 TIPS FOR GROWING YOUR SAAS & LEADGEN SALES
WITH DIGITAL MARKETING
 Have one main sales funnel, and measure it.
 Pick the Right Ad Channel for your Type of Product
 Make ad Campaigns for every Product, Service, Industry and Use Case
 Your landing page should match your ad. Have a custom landing page for each product
 Use Retargeting
 Use Phone Call Ads
 Always be running A/B tests on your site
 Set up Dashboards for your Core Metrics, including Ads
 Content: Add custom content in your niche that has been highly researched for SEO
 Content: Build out your site architecture for every vertical and product offering you provide. Automate your buildout.

5. HAVE ONE MAIN SALES FUNNEL, AND MEASURE IT.
 Obvious but very valuable. Have a diagram so that everyone on your product team is clear on your main sales / signup
funnel
 Many tech companies haven’t bothered to wire up and visualize the conversion steps in their funnel. You can’t improve
what you don’t measure.
 Here is a typical funnel:
 Homepage
 Product landing page
 Lead Request Submission
 Build out conversion tracking of the funnel using analytics tools. Your goal is to see the dropoff at each stage of the funnel.
Hotjar is a good choice because it’s easy to use, and captures two key pieces of information:
 1) Conversion rate at each point in the funnel
 2) Video of dropoff at each point in the funnel
 Focus on the parts of the funnel with the lowest conversion rate (bottlenecks). Find any technical issues that may be
preventing customers from converting
 Set up separate funnels for desktop, iOS and Android. Focus most of your efforts on desktop, this is less traffic, but much
higher conversion

6. PICK THE RIGHT AD CHANNEL FOR YOUR TYPE OF PRODUCT
 Focus on the right context to showcase your product. Where would your customers expect to see ads for your product?
 For B2B: Google, Linkedin
 Google: Use when there is existing demand for your category, or similar products. If your competitors are advertising there, you should
also be advertising.
 Linkedin: Good when you need to reach targeted type of executive, such as VP Human Resources as companies with 20+ employees
 New Product Categories: Facebook
 If people don’t know about your product yet, Facebook can show it to a broad group of potential new customers, and help you test
many new ideas quickly, at relatively low cost
 For SMB: Google and Facebook should be your focus.
 Google: For products where you can show your products to consumers searching for something similar. Can actively optimize across
many different parameters to lower your Cost-Per-Action
 Facebook: Broad targeting and retargeting. Facebook has huge inventory, but fewer optimization options
 Amazon: If you sell a physical good, Amazon is a good choice. Amazon’s fees are higher than Google or Facebook, so you should max
out these other channels before adding Amazon. You also might want to consider Amazon as a defensive choice, if competitors or
counterfeits are there.
 Avoid: Twitter, Display – Low ROI, poor targeting, more click fraud.

7. MAKE AD CAMPAIGNS FOR EVERY PRODUCT, SERVICE,
INDUSTRY AND USE CASE
 Be rigorous about listing out every product and service you offer
 This is more important as you expand out your product portfolio. The idea here it to make sure you get every last bit of available interest
 There are some automated solutions, like Google’s Responsive Search Ads, which will crawl your site and create ads for every page on
your site. However, we’ve seen this end up with poor results, as you will have a lot of ads pointing to pages that don’t convert well, like
press releases or blog posts
 Create separate campaigns for different industries you target
 In search, this allows you to advertise your service more cost-effectively. Google will give you lower cost-per-click if you’re advertising to
tightly targeted markets, like “CRM for Architects” than just “CRM for professional services”
 Advertise every use case
 This is where you want to be rigorous about listing out all of your features.
 For example, if your product is “Time Tracking” and it includes a project budgeting feature, you’d want to test that as a separate
campaign, for customers specifically looking for a time tracking tool with budgeting. Make sure that ad goes to a landing page that
mentions this feature.

8. YOUR LANDING PAGE SHOULD MATCH YOUR AD
HAVE A CUSTOM LANDING PAGE FOR EACH PRODUCT
 Make sure your landing page matches your ad copy, the closer the better
 Ideally, the headline of the landing page should be the same as the headline for the ad
 The landing page should match in these ways: Product, Use Case, Industry
 If these pages already exist on your site and they have a good call to action, use those.
 If you don’t have these pages, you have two options:
 Built a parametric landing page that takes parameters from the ad, and uses those to customize
title, pictures, and content blocks
 Use a 3rd party service, like Instapage or Unbounce. These services let you easily create
parametric landing pages, and also have great features for AB testing different layouts, value
propositions, etc.

9. USE RETARGETING
 Retargeting lets you show display ads to
customers that have already been to your site
 The click-through rate (CTR) of a retargeted ad is
10x higher than the CTR of a typical display
ad. (0.7% vs .07%)
 Website visitors who are retargeted with display
ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website
 Can retarget using Facebook or Google
 You can create product-specific retargeting ads, so
that users see the specific products they were
interested in. This is also useful if you have
industry-specific landing pages

10. USE PHONE CALL ADS
 Google lets you create ads for mobile that go directly to a phone call, and bypass your website
 Depending on your niche, you can get warm leads for $12-$30 / call
 Combine phone call ads with very targeted keyword research to produce low cost calls:
 Create call ads for specific products and services your customers are looking for. These clicks will be much
cheaper than generic, high level service categories.
 Measure your results to determine what time of day gives you highest ROI, and bid that up
 Use a call tracking service like Call Rail to measure performance
 “Retarget” by calling back numbers that didn’t connect, and sending a text message to these
numbers later
 According to a study in Marketing Land, inbound phone calls are 5 – 10 times more valuable to
businesses than form fills.

11. ALWAYS BE RUNNING A/B TESTS ON YOUR SITE
 Always be running A/B tests to improve the conversion rate of your funnel
 Use an off-the-shelf A/B testing SaaS, or well-vetted library as you’re a/B testing solution
 When designing tests, focus on usability and value propositions for ideas on what to test
 Always separate out desktop and mobile. Separate out iOS and Android if testing mobile
 Keep a journal of A/B tests. Each entry should have a clear hypothesis you want to test, a metric that you will be
testing, a measure of significance, and your results. Example: Testing out value prop B as the headline, we will
consider it a success if it increases lift by .5% at 95% significance. Then make sure you document your results.
 Use qualitative feedback to get ideas for testing. Use onsite popups or in-person interviews or mechanical turk to
ask customers questions about what they like / dislike about your product, and mine these ideas for potential tests.
 Let learnings from ad campaigns inform your onsite tests. Ad campaigns can test value propositions and images at
greater scale more quickly than you can usually test on site. Leverage these learnings to get ideas for new tests you
can run on your site.

12. SET UP DASHBOARDS FOR YOUR CORE METRICS
 Define the most important metrics for your business, and create a main dashboard where you can track them
 Use separate dashboards to track each growth channel (SEM, Facebook etc.), so you can understand each channel’s
performance in depth
 Look at month-over-month, but also year-over-year. Many businesses have strong seasonal components, and looking at
year-over-year data allows you to make comparisons that take into account that January is usually much lighter than
December.
 Highlight your strong and weak performers to discover where to focus
 If your core metric is “Cost per Lead” highlight this by different page types (blog vs main site), different industry categories, different keywords that
users search for on your site, etc. The more ways you can slice your data, the more likely you are to find something interesting
 Set up automated reporting and alerts
 Many systems will have these built in
 Weekly reports for managers, Monthly reporting for higher up execs. Use reporting to track progress towards monthly goals.
 Alerts for conditions that require actions– spend is nearing budget, ads aren’t live, etc.

13. ADD CUSTOM CONTENT IN YOUR NICHE THAT HAS BEEN
HIGHLY RESEARCHED FOR SEO
 SEO is like farming. It can take several months for a page, or set of pages, to start moving up in Google.
 Your SEO process should start with keyword research, understanding the core words customers are using to find
your site, and those that are popular in your industry
 Keyword research tools:
 Google Trends, https://trends.google.com/ - Free, and easy to use
 Google Keyword Planner, part of Google Ads (Adwords) – Free, but requires you to set up an adwords account
 SimilarWeb, https://similarweb.com/ See top organic keywords for competitor sites
 Low cost paid products that show all keywords driving organic and paid traffic for competitors:
 SEMRush, http://semrush.com/
 SpyFu, http://spyfu.com

14. ADD CUSTOM CONTENT IN YOUR NICHE THAT HAS BEEN
HIGHLY RESEARCHED FOR SEO
 Create a cluster of keywords you want your article to rank for. There should be a main phrase and several similar phrases
 Structure your article so that the main phrase is the title, and the other phrases are used in the article, possibly as section titles. For
example, your main phrase might be “Best NoSQL databases” and a subsection or additional phrase might be “Best NoSQL databases on
AWS”
 Google focuses on E*A*T – Experience, Authoritativeness and Trust as website ranking factors
 Include Author Names & Biographies at the bottom of the article.
 Link each byline to a detailed author bio page that links not only to other content they’ve written for you, but to authoritative content they’ve
published on other sites. Also link to their social media profiles and anything else online that would help establish their identity and authority.
(This is especially important for YMYL pages.)YMML stands for “Your Money or Your Life” -- Google looks more critically at pages that are
supposed to help consumer with major life decisions
 Lists and answers to questions tend to rank well. “What is the best NoSQL database in 2020” might rank better than just “Best NoSQL
databases”
 Include a section about your company on the content page to boost E*A*T. Third-party star ratings, awards and reviews also help. This
“about” section should be on every content page. It can be part of the main content, or a sidebar.
 Use Schema.org markup to tell Google what your page is about, so that your answer will show up in Google’s highlighted “answer box”

15. SEO: BUILD OUT YOUR SITE ARCHITECTURE AS BROADLY AS
POSSIBLE. AUTOMATE YOUR BUILDOUT
 For SEO, it’s important that your site architecture be Broad rather than Deep. Google has a “crawl budget” of how many
links their crawler will click on in your site. In general, that times out at 4 clicks deep. So you want to make sure that most
of your good content is no more than 3 clicks from your home page
 A good general site architecture will have top-level categories for Industries and Products / Features
 If your software works with an ecosystem of other software, you will get SEO benefit from having a page for each tool in the
ecosystem. A good example is Zapier, which automates data movement between different software tools. Their site has
pages set up for many, many different software combinations.
 Automate your buildout: As the number of integrations and use cases increases past 60 or so, you will want to program
your site to automatically build out these pages from a master template, rather than building each one by hand.
 Use Your Custom Data: If you have custom data that you can leverage for each page to make it more useful for your
customers, that will also make it rank higher in SEO.
 For further examples and details, see my Kindle short, SEO for Startups: https://www.amazon.com/SEO-Startups-Google-
thousands-searches-ebook

16. © Copyright Zavient, Inc
Our Core Services
● Google & Facebook Ad Management
● Landing Pages / Conversion Rate Optimization
Also:
● Local SEO & Google My Business (Google Maps)
● Content creation
● SEO
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17. © Copyright Zavient, Inc
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18. How can we help your business grow?
Contact us:
RMILLER@ZAVIENT.COM
(415) 859-8060