These days, marketers have access to a wider range of strategies and tactics than ever before. It can be hard to choose from this long menu, especially if you don’t have a bottomless budget thanks to a massive fund raise, so here are five that we’ve found work best for reaching high-value prospects for B2B SaaS startups and service providers.
Industry trade shows are a great way to network with prospects, potential partners, and vendors. After going dormant (or fully virtual) for the last two years, in-person trade shows are coming back, once again providing unique access to potential prospects and partners
For a startup, trade shows provide unparalleled opportunities for your sales team to get in front of a large number of people from potential customers in your industry. Trade shows also often provide attendee lists, which can be used to build your prospect list after the fact.
Achieving success at a trade show involves participating pre, post, and at-show activities. These will help you gather both top and bottom of funnel opportunities that you can nurture into customers or partners.
Don’t expect to just show up and win, however. Preplanning is an absolute must for success at trade shows, otherwise, you could waste a lot of time and money. Be sure to put plenty of thought into designing your booth, your materials, what events your team will be attending, and how you will follow up with potential leads.
Planning on attending a trade show in the near future? Check out our Trade Show Success Tips white paper to learn how you can get a high return on your investment.
Another way to reach high-value prospects is by leveraging industry publications. These can offer powerful reach but are often expensive since the publications know how valuable their audience is to advertisers.
We suggest buying advertising space in an industry publication’s email, but avoiding typical: "We're company X - and we rock!" type ads.
Instead, you should choose a piece of high-quality content (e.g., an ebook, guide, or whitepaper thought-leadership type piece) and invite readers to read it in your ad content. The link in the ad should point to a landing page on your site where they can download it (and thus provide you their contact information). If your offer is compelling enough, you will add a significant amount of high-quality contacts to your prospect list.
Google paid search ads are one of the oldest tricks in the book, but there’s no denying that they can work quite well, especially for capturing bottom-of-funnel demand. (Also, don’t overlook Microsoft’s search ads, which are served on their Bing search engine as well as a few other Google alternatives; typically, there’s less search volume than Google, but costs are lower).
B2B companies have to be really careful when choosing keywords, especially if the businesses they sell to serve consumers instead of other businesses. If you gauge intent wrongly, you can spend thousands of dollars on searches made by consumers and researchers instead of business professionals, wasting your entire budget without generating a single quality lead.
Additionally, for some startups (particularly early-stage ones), search ads may not be able to drive significant volume because whatever problem they’re solving is so new, not enough people are searching for potential solutions (or know that they have a problem).
When it comes to top-of-funnel demand generation, Linkedin advertising offers the best targeting options for B2B - and since its a business website, the audience is mentally primed to consume business-related content.
What makes LinkedIn stand out is the ability to target people by job title and industry (or company). For more established companies that have a good understanding of who their customers are, LinkedIn ads are a great way to get your best content in front of potential buyers or buying-decision influencers.
Like the industry publications, LinkedIn knows the value of its audience and clicks are not cheap. Be sure to have a good outreach and nurture process in place if you are going to use this channel. Additionally, most LinkedIn users have a personal email associated with their account, not their business email, so do not discount Gmail, outlook, yahoo, and similar addresses automatically (if you are, you should stop this practice even if you don’t plan on advertising on LinkedIn).
Another way to attract a large number of high-value prospects is running or participating in an industry webinar. If you're just getting started, partnering with someone more established in the industry would work better, the partnership lends credibility and they can market the webinar to their more established audience, leveraging their lists to drive plenty of attendees.
You can also get multiple pieces of content from a webinar, including offering a recording of the webinar as a piece of gated content and then turning the webinar content into a written asset.
As an additional benefit, hosting or participating in a webinar can be a great way of getting a company founder or executive to sit down and discuss topics that can be used to drive content creation.
Participating in a webinar forces executives to get organized and put their thoughts together in advance – and it usually produces great results, generating commentary that can be used for creating compelling content that resonates with your target audience.
If you are the one physically running the webinar, there are many moving parts. First, we recommend starting at least four weeks of marketing time ahead of the webinar date in order to prepare and recruit. Second, if you're working with HubSpot, you'll benefit from following our thorough Webinar Checklist. We run webinar campaigns every month for clients and have perfected what promotional items to send out, when, and what to do after webinars to gain the most benefit. Feel free to download our checklist here.
While these strategies can significantly and rapidly expand prospect lists, they also require ongoing investment. However, optimizing your website for search engines and publishing content that ranks is crucial to long-term success, as we explain in our post SEO: Still the Best Long Game in Town. While you build that foundation, however, these (and other) lead-generation tools will help you generate leads for your sales team (and sales for your company).