5 Creative B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies to Test in 2024

Eighty-five percent of B2B companies believe generating leads is the most important marketing goal.

They’re not wrong. Leads are the lifeblood of any B2B SaaS company. Generating leads and nurturing them into customers is how you grow. And if you don’t, you die.

Finding product-market fit takes time. You’ll iterate quickly during this phase and speak with as many potential customers as possible.

To ensure you’re building the right product, you’ll need feedback about problems, solutions, and features, which means you need leads!

But not all leads are created equal. Iterating based on the feedback of poor-fit leads is a recipe for disaster.

You need to go fishing in the right pond with the right bait. Where do your ideal customers hang out? What message and offer will stop them in their tracks and get them to click?

This article will give you some of our most creative B2B SaaS lead generation strategies you can start implementing today.

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Why You Should Test B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies

B2B SaaS lead generation is about getting prospects to raise their hand and say, 'I'm interested in what you offer.' Leads typically give you their contact information in exchange for something valuable.

As a result of spammy, BS marketing, people are more and more hesitant to give up their email or phone number. To consistently generate leads, you'll need to overcome that hesitation by offering something truly irresistible.

When you get lead generation wrong, you risk:

Wasting time and resources on poor-quality leads
Misalignment of marketing and sales teams, with both blaming the other
Creating more work for salespeople to try and convert leads into customers

It can be tempting to fall back on legacy lead generation tactics or even buy leads, but competition is intense in the SaaS world. In fact, there are over 30,000 SaaS companies in the world.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, the same old tactics aren’t going to cut it.

To attract and convert qualified leads, you’ll need to deeply understand your ideal customer profile and test creative tactics to bring them into your world.

5 Creative B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies

Build a Referral Engine
Host a Webinar
Create Offers for Your Best-Performing Content
Distribute Content on Multiple Channels
Embrace the Split Test

1. Build a Referral Engine

Companies often sleep on this strategy. It’s easy to look for the next shiny object and focus on traffic and conversions. But in the process, you forget that happy customers are your best marketers.

Building a referral engine is a great play. Your head is probably moving straight to case studies and testimonials, right? You might even be thinking, “I’ve already got 4 case studies on my website!”

OK, but how old are those case studies? Do they speak to your buyers now? A lot might have changed in their world. You need living case studies to really move the needle.

For example, you could provide a prospect with a case study and position it as, “Here’s what we’re currently doing for X,” instead of saying, “Here’s what we did for Y in 2014.”

Treat testimonials and case studies as social proof for one part of your referral engine.

If customers love working with you, they’ll be more than happy to refer your SaaS product to their circle, but you need to ask. They have enough going on in their lives without thinking about promoting your business.

But if you ask for a referral, why would they not?

Here are a few ideas for building your referral engine:

Create shareable content and ask your customers to share it.
Send emails directly to your customers asking for referrals.
Offer rewards for a referral–you might offer a free month or free upgrade if a customer refers a new customer–or you could offer a gift certificate or voucher.

Pro Tip: Form a strategic partnership with a business that doesn’t compete with you but targets the same audience. Refer each other’s services.

2. Host a Webinar

A compelling way to engage your SaaS audience is to host a webinar. It’s a creative way to get your product in front of potential customers and doesn’t cost much to execute.

Not convinced? Check out these statistics:

The average webinar generates between 500-1000 leads.
38% of marketers say webinars provide higher quality lead generation than other channels.
48% of B2B buyers consider webinars the most valuable form of content for their decision-making.

There are more where those came from. Done well, webinars are a fantastic way of generating leads and pushing prospects over the line. And they fit the current workplace trends.

Many companies are embracing the remote or hybrid workplace.

If they’re considering a SaaS tool and want to get buy-in from the entire team, a well-crafted webinar will create excitement and show the capabilities and benefits of your SaaS product.

Be passionate and engaging.

Pro tip: check out Russel Brunson’s “The Perfect Webinar” to level up your webinar game.

To get as many people as possible to watch your webinars, you’ll need to aggressively promote them on your social channels, blog posts, and through email.

A great play is to co-host a webinar with another thought leader in your space and borrow their audience.

You both reach more potential customers, and you could even create an offer that encourages people to use your products together as a solution to their problems.

3. Create Offers for Your Best-Performing Content

We’ve talked a lot about content in other articles, such as this one: SaaS Content Writing: How to Attract, Engage, and Delight Your Customers.

Here’s the Skinny

The content you write must target your buyer persona. Each meticulously researched persona gives clear, concrete insight into a customer’s pain points, interests, aspirations, and buying behaviors.

Imagine you’re writing to one person. Answer the questions they’re asking and be helpful and relevant. Most importantly, ensure your content aligns with the buyer’s journey.

Now, what happens once your ideal client has read your content?

Do you provide a compelling next step? Look through your best-performing content. What’s the click-through rate like? Are people converting?

It might be that your best-performing content is old, so you haven’t looked at the CTAs. Or perhaps your offer isn’t targeted enough. Let’s change that!

Creating a Targeted Offer

Targeted offers take into account where the buyer is on their journey. Let’s say one of your most viewed articles is “The 5 Best Scheduling Apps for Online Coaches.”

You’re one of the five options, and you want to provide a compelling next step for the buyer.

At this point in their journey, the buyer is considering options. Why should they go with you? A great play here would be to offer a free trial or access to your product for a limited time.

What do they have to lose?

Give your potential customers a chance to test your services without pressure to buy.

You can use opt-in or opt-out options here.

Opt-in is better because no card details are required. Opt-out is less successful because people don’t want to enter their card details for fear of being charged after a certain period.

Making it Irresistible

A free trial or access to your product is an incentive in itself. But not without proof. You want people to squeeze every last drop out of your offer, so you need to guide them.

Speak to the outcome of what your product will do for them. Say what your product is but, more importantly, what it does, and use examples of outcomes from the real world.

Are you saving time for your clients? Are they managing their business better? What are the tangible results?

You might also think about offer stacking here. What else does your potential client get when they convert on your offer?

Give them free add-ons like training, personalized email onboarding, and access to exclusive content through community groups.

4. Distribute and Repurpose Content on Multiple Channels

Creating content, hosting webinars, and email marketing. All of these strategies work. But without a robust distribution and repurposing strategy, you’re leaving money on the table.

You need to capitalize on where your audience is. Who does your product help? Or who does it have the potential to help the most? And where do they hang out?

If it’s on LinkedIn, create optimized content for LinkedIn.

Start conversations and send relevant and helpful materials their way. Wherever your leads congregate, use those platforms to make your content go further and generate more leads.

One piece of content can be split into many. For example, a blog post can become:

3 Linkedin posts
6 Twitter posts
1 newsletter email
A 10-minute video
5 clips for Tik Tok
An Instagram carousel
A podcast topic

There are plenty of other possibilities depending on where and when you want to reach your audience. Be sure to engage with your audience on a personal level.

Answer questions, create polls based on the content, and drive leads to relevant offers.

Want some help with content distribution? Check out our Content Repurposing Kit.

5. Embrace Split Testing

With all the strategies above, you’ll create tons of usable data. You’ll be able to tell what’s working and what isn’t so you can optimize your lead generation strategies.

One way to optimize your strategies is to use split testing, otherwise known as A/B testing.

What could you change if a page or an offer isn’t converting like you thought it would? You might need to experiment with page layouts, messaging, or design elements.

You can also experiment with email subject lines, formatting, and CTAs.

Using calls-to-action (CTAs) as an example, A/B testing involves creating two versions of the CTA but changing one element. Half of your visitors will see one version; the other half will see a variation.

You could position your CTA at the top, middle, or bottom of the page. Or perhaps all three!
Change the color of the button
Change the language
Use an image instead of a button

Now you can determine how your visitors engage with each version of the CTA based on your changes. Once you have a clear winner, permanently change the CTA to the successful variation.

Creative B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies: Test Them Yourself

The five strategies above are five of many. But to make the most of your marketing dollars, these five cost-effective strategies should create marketing ROI.

Try them out! Limit yourself to testing one at a time to ensure you go all in on one strategy and then build from there.

Lead generation isn’t all about numbers. You want to attract & convert the right visitors to your website, not just a large number of people who won’t buy.

The best offer will simultaneously attract best-fit leads and repel poor fits.

We urge you to think about the buyer’s journey when trying to convert your audience.

Ensure your website’s copy resonates, create strong lead magnets, and differentiate yourself from other SaaS companies.

Of course, driving leads is only part of the equation. You need to think about your whole marketing strategy; otherwise, leads get lost.

If you want to delve deeper into lead generation and discover the gaps in your customer acquisition efforts, use our free tool, the Growth Grader.

All our clients use it, and it will serve as a starting point for your growth roadmap.