How we increased inbound MQLs by 463% in 12 months with growth marketing and a limited budget

This article is based on my experience working in growth marketing for Chaser, a B2B SaaS platform in the receivables space where we increased marketing qualified leads by 463% from May 2020 to May 2021. Whilst this is based on my experience marketing our SaaS solution, I hope many of the findings and lessons learned will be applicable to other marketers in the B2B space.

As anyone who has worked in marketing for a startup will know, when it comes to generating leads, budgets are tight — you can’t just throw $10,000 at an ad campaign with a catchy message and hope it works. You need to use budgets wisely, measure everything you can, and wherever possible — have clear proof of results and return on investment.

“A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable” — Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing

Whilst not everything in marketing can be precisely measured and pinned down to its exact impact on bottom-line revenue, it’s important to do what you can. The results we achieved were measurable due to having diligent tracking linked back to our CRM in place.

How we increased MQLs by 463% in 12 months

Add ‘soft’ call to action options on your site

When a member of your target audience visits your website, what options do they have?

Sign up? Start a free trial? Book a demo?

These calls to action are a brilliant way to capture interested leads who are already at the mid-funnel level and ready to make the time commitment of setting up a free trial, getting started, or booking in a time to speak one-on-one with a sales professional at your business. This gives your sales team warm prospects who have already shown a high level of intent toward your solution.

But how are you catering to website visitors who are on the fence about your offering?

To give Chaser website visitors a ‘taste’ for the software, without asking for too high a commitment, we also promote a softer call to action. Interested prospects can join an ‘introduction to Chaser’ and product demonstration webinar. These are group webinars with a Q&A which overcome the pressure of a one-on-one demo for those on the fence. Since implementing this softer call to action on our website, we’ve seen a 198% increase in marketing qualified leads generated by our website, compared to when we used only ‘free trial’ and ‘book a demo’ call to actions.

Whilst this is a brilliant way to expand your leads from website conversions, you still need to get these leads in touch with your sales team, or get them using your solution themselves — so preparing a well-crafted follow up sequence after the webinar with at least six touch points is advisable. By sharing a mix of educational content and reintroducing stronger calls to action (book a demo, free trial) throughout our sequences we’ve seen great success in re-engaging leads and pulling them further down the funnel.

Run multiple campaign angles simultaneously

When it comes to addressing your target markets’ pain points in your campaign messaging, one size most definitely does not fit all.

Previously, we had chosen just one campaign messaging angle per month and used this exclusively across our marketing channels to generate marketing qualified leads in that given month. This was extremely easy to manage and track, and meant that ROI and performance between months could easily be compared.

However, if your chosen campaign angle doesn’t resonate with your target audience in that given month your prospects can lose interest, and you might lose that lead forever. For example, if a prospect in your mailing list or your ads target audience is only receiving emails or advertisements across the whole month for [specific pain point that does not relate to my business], they are going to tune out — or worse, unsubscribe. This is unfortunately something we saw a lot at Chaser when running just one campaign angle per month.

Now, we use at least five messaging angles simultaneously to generate marketing qualified leads in a given month. Whilst this is much more complex to manage and track, the results are exponentially better.

When we were running one campaign angle per month, our key conversion form was getting just 21 submissions per month.

Now we have this form cloned across at least five separate landing pages, each with their own campaign messaging angle, and a unique set of promotions across our channels. This form now gets an average of 219 submissions per month, with the same budget and promotions across our channels. Serving varied messaging throughout the month in this way increased our form submissions by over 900%.

This approach lets you hammer down into more niche pain points that your audience may be experiencing, and rotate the messaging you serve up to them until you find what works, and what will convert them. At Chaser, our marketing budget was limited, so these rotating messaging approaches were used mainly across email nurture, extremely targeted Linkedin sponsored posts and InMails, and native advertising across our website and high-traffic blogs.

Capitalise on high-traffic pages

One of the first opportunities I spotted to grow leads when I started at Chaser were some extremely high-traffic blog pages which were getting over 30,000 page visitors per month. None of these visitor details could be captured unless they chose to click ‘Get started’ on the websites’ nav bar and completed a form (<0.01% conversion rate).

Whilst it might be the case that you don’t have a super high-traffic blog post to work with yet, I would still advise you to take a look at your top-visited pages in google analytics and imagine the journey of someone viewing that page.

What did they come here to find out? What search terms did they use? Which (if any) of your website pages had they visited before?

Then assess if your call to actions are really appropriate for what that visitor has come to your website to find.

In our case, thousands of website visitors per month were coming to our blog to get free email templates that would help get their invoices paid. This popular blog featured 4 free email templates that readers could copy and paste, to send to their customers.

From the viewer’s perspective, they were probably in the middle of chasing customers to pay invoices, looking for some good templates they can quickly copy — not thinking about ‘Getting started’ with a receivables automation platform.

To capitalise on this high traffic page and better cater to the viewer’s needs, instead of ‘Get started’, I put call to actions throughout this blog page offering viewers a free PDF guide of the ‘8 most effective email templates to get invoices paid’. This gave viewers an extension of the information they were originally looking for, in an easy-to-access format, in return for sharing their email address with us.

This change was implemented in March 2020 and has already generated 1,354 new leads in our CRM — it is still our biggest source for new leads today, and our third-largest source for marketing qualified leads.

Run events your target audience care about

Particularly in the B2B space, your target audience will often be business leaders and professionals who need to — or should be — staying knowledgeable about their fields and trends in their area of specialism.

This gives B2B marketers great opportunities to provide educational and thought leadership content that appeals to their target audiences’ need for expanding their knowledge, keeping up to date, and professional development.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, our business took a rather passive approach to events — our events strategy did not go far beyond attending key industry trade shows where we would have an exhibitor stand, and we rarely hosted events of our own.

However, with in-person events canceled we needed to find new ways to generate leads. In 2020 I started organising digital thought leadership panel events that would address hot topics in the finance industry and topics of interest to our target audience. These events had great uptake and proved to be a valuable source of new leads, with each panel receiving over 200 registrations and generating 60 or more new contacts per event.

In general, to spot ‘hot topics’ to discuss in panels you can get ideas from:

• Google alerts and industry news outlets — keep an eye on news stories related to your business’ area (In Chaser’s case, we follow news on receivables, cash flow, credit control, finance automation, digital transformation, and accounting software to name a few).
• Linkedin — Linkedin is a great tool to spot topics there is a general ‘buzz’ around. Ensure you are connected with existing thought leaders in your industry — what topics are they posting about? If you are connected to members of your target audience on Linkedin, it’s worth taking a look through what they are posting or interacting with. This should give you a feel for topics to address, and the sort of phrasing your target audience are using around these topics already.

Recruiting speakers

Once you have selected a topic, you can seek out thought leaders and experts in this area to share their insights and advice. This is one task I found slightly daunting when I started arranging panel events and reaching out to potential panelists — ‘Would someone this knowledgeable want to spend an hour on a webinar giving advice for free?’ ‘This person has never heard of me, or the business I work for before! Surely, they are just going to ignore my email.’

If you are arranging a panel event my advice is to be pretty fearless and reach out to anyone in your industry (even if you have to reach out cold!) who you think would be a great speaker — chances are, they will be pleased you thought of them and happy to take part.

Tapping into your panels’ networks

When you have a panel in place you can agree to share registrant details (GDPR-opt-in dependant!) with panelists and share responsibility for promoting the event, this gives you a chance to tap into your panels’ networks and reach audiences you otherwise would not have been able to. To make it as easy as possible for panelists to promote our events, we tend to prepare promotional banners in our panelists’ branding along with pre-written social and email copy for them to share.

Panel events have been such a reliable source of leads that they are now a staple in our marketing planning, and we arrange events quarterly. We use panel event-specific follow-up sequences to engage leads with further educational content and to nurture and convert them to marketing qualified leads.

A few examples of previous panel events:

• How to recession-proof your business with better cashflow management
• Improve cash flow and increase efficiency in your business in 2021: fintech panel
• Rethink finance: learnings from the pandemic and what finance teams are doing now

Conclusion

Key pieces of advice based on how we increased marketing qualified leads:

1) Add soft call to action options on your website. Whilst adding soft call to actions to our website worked wonders for us, I do recommend testing this and tracking it carefully to ensure you aren’t losing leads, as in some cases, greater choices can mean fewer conversions.

2) Run multiple campaign angles simultaneously. Keep your messaging fresh and rotate throughout the month — repeating the same messages over and over can cause your target audience to tune out.

3) Capitalise on high-traffic pages. Consider your website visitors’ intentions when they are viewing high-traffic pages, what did they come there to find and how you can better serve their needs.

4) Run events your target audience care about. Not only is this brilliant for building brand awareness, but it gives your target audience the insights and information they crave and over time will help them view your business as a thought leader in this space.