Tips for SaaS Healthcare Marketers to Shorten Sales Cycles and Boost Revenue
Life as a SaaS healthcare marketer can be really rewarding, but it ain’t easy. You’re navigating a complex landscape with technology that changes every day. Customers are excited; their choices are plentiful and also overwhelming.
Because of this, most sales teams report pipeline attrition and endless deal cycles that ultimately stagnate revenue growth.
Worse still, a recent Salesforce study showed that sales teams are only expected to hit 30% of their targets this year vs. the previous year at 70%.
As marketers, we all have to step back and swallow that pill because, frankly, we should be doing better for our brothers and sisters in sales.
Is the sky falling, or are there practical marketing methods that we can apply to help drive our ultimate goal as stewards of a SaaS company’s revenue?
In this article, I’ll review some of my best SaaS marketing tips that have previously helped us skyrocket website traffic, generate targeted leads, and, ultimately, revenue for one of our B2B SaaS companies.
Scroll on for a B2B marketers guide for leveraging digital strategies for your SaaS solution.
Our Marketing Efforts & Sales: Understanding the Challenge
The space is saturated, and you’re no longer the only “innovative and agile” SaaS business out there. Your target customers have loads of options, and even if your team’s sales demos are on point, things move at a glacial pace. Even worse, you might suspect that in time, your positive working environment will shift to the time-honored C-Suite game of “let’s throw our B2B marketers under the bus.”
As you know, deal cycles in the SaaS healthcare industry can be as lengthy as reading the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. And when it comes to identifying your audience, it can often feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. To top it off, our friends in sales might also point the finger at you, saying that marketing isn’t qualifying leads. Sales strategy issues aside, let’s start with the elements we can own to fix this problem.
What the Funnel Can We Do About This?
At Lighthouse Digital, we see clients having a disconnect between marketing and sales when the buyer stage journey doesn’t match the collateral you’ve produced for your marketing strategy. What do we mean by that?
Let’s touch on the fundamentals for a moment. All prospects move through a customer journey where they are first problem-aware, solution-aware, and ultimately decision-aware. Do we create collateral and hope our sales teams can cross the finish line? Or is there something that we can do to help the prospect to transition to a customer?
As a marketing agency, we need perfect-fit clients, too. But as a company, we never push for a sale. No one likes feeling manipulated, not you, not us, or anyone from our target audience. Ultimately, if we can provide the right information at the right time in your marketing funnel, prospects will decide for themselves and eventually buy.
How do we do that from an SEO perspective?
Commercialize your Marketing Strategy
The main qualifiers for your funnel-stage-specific content strategy are timing and intent. How do you determine those things? The unscrupulous SEO agency or SEO consultant will come to the table, promising you more traffic and opportunity as a function of just adding keywords and a blog post. Yuck. It’s more complex, and you likely know that. If that ever happens to you (or is currently happening), run. You can use autocomplete yourself and save thousands of dollars per month.
How do we do keyword research? First, we have a proprietary tool that tracks what keywords are top, mid, and low funnel. This gives us an enormous advantage and allows us to create an SEO campaign that captures, educates, and converts. Here’s a little more about how we leverage funnel-focused target keywords:
- Problem-Aware SEO Content: Take a good look at your website. Do a content audit. Is there anything on there that’s purely educational or engagement-based? Remember, this touch is like a first date. How do you count? How do you flirt? And also, how do you filter out? You can do your sales teams a huge favor by making sure you have plenty of these types of content pieces in the SERPs. Be bold and play the long game. Get the buyers six to twelve months out hooked on your social media, a cool podcast, or a video marketing campaign that has nothing to do with selling your service. When the time is right, they’ll move to the next step.
- Solution-Aware B2B SEO: Targeted keywords can help you crush this stage of the journey. Our SEO team specializes in creating content that draws your prospects in and away from the competition. This type of landing page isn’t just filled with passive information. It’s product/service-focused and showcases your solution as the superior option. We create effective keyword lists with all the keywords that capture decision-based behavior. The result? A pipeline full of ready-to-buy prospects.
- Decision-Aware SEO Efforts: Yes, there are plenty of ways for SEO to boost site traffic; we all know that. But can SEO help you convert? It sure can. Conversion optimization for any sales process is more than just a clever CTA. You’ve got to focus on content optimization strategies that use the language ready-to-buy customers enter into search fields.
If you’re sitting back wondering what keyword opportunities are out there for you and your SaaS brand, shoot us an email. We’ll be happy to give you a few of the best keywords for each stage of the journey.
Let’s move on to some actionable ideas you don’t necessarily need an SEO agency to help you with.
Content Strategies for Streamlining Deal Cycles
According to a recent Hubspot survey, an astonishing 88% of marketers know that they have to keep or increase their SaaS SEO strategy. Why? Because by channel, SEO is still reducing CAC while boosting leads and conversions by 11% (according to the same study). So what’s responsible for all that?
These days, targeted content should be a must for any SaaS marketing strategy. It’s got to be specific to your buyer personas but also needs to meet them at the right stage of their journey.
For Top-Funnel Queries – Direct your traffic to 1-pagers, whitepapers (real whitepapers, not a 3-page infographic), and VSLs.
Mid-Funnel Targets – They’re weighing solutions, so be sure to optimize all your case studies to meet the intent of your target market. Outline the biggest and best KPIs you have. Don’t be modest.
Low-Funnel Traffic – Conversion rate optimization begins and ends with creating a seamless user experience. No one wants to be manipulated or sold. They want the purchasing process to be easy. When was the last time a completion page was implemented as part of your strategy?
If your internal marketing team needs some help, our SEO experts are crazy passionate about giving you all the glory. Achieve your goals while letting us do all the content creation.
Here’s what Matt Nguyen of Gitlab had to say about our SaaS SEO agency team:
“This team has shown me over the years their ability to get great results for their clients. An agency partner that has their client’s best interest at heart. I have and continue to recommend their services.”
Drop us a line. We’d love to flip the script and put you on the receiving end of a product demo! Our SEO audit will show you where the money keywords are, and we’ll even forecast your ROI.
SaaS Product Marketing: What to Do & Not to Do
Pop quiz. Raise your hand if you ever feel stuck in the tradeshow trap. Sure, getting in front of your SaaS market sounds like the right play, but it’s a super expensive way to get top-funnel awareness. Pens, balls, and cozies only drive up customer acquisition cost. There’s a few better things to consider. So make trade show appearances semi-annual as part of a robust marketing plan, and certainly not more than that.
The best watering holes for the modern-day SaaS customer are all digital. Of all the channels available, tradeshows and direct mail didn’t even make the list regarding ROI. Which channels did?
Influencer Marketing: This is an excellent way to promote your SaaS product. Second to the ROI provided with search engine optimization, influencer marketing is a great way to showcase your service and streamline sales cycles. This channel plays to emotions, and although we’re in a B2B space, decision-makers still have feelings. You’d do well to spend the time doing what it takes to pull those strings.
Social Media: By extension, social media is another essential piece of the content marketing puzzle. If you’re not leveraging that channel, you should. Our team of social content marketing pros skyrocketed engaged accounts for one SaaS platform by over 1000% in just 30 days! The eyeballs are there. You just have to know how to grab them.
Video Marketing: This channel is another heavy hitter. Take the antiquated sales letters of yesteryear and give them a modernized, usable form. Plug a short clip of your verticals’ subject matter experts onto an SEO-optimized page and watch your search rankings explode. Videos are engaging and do wonders for any growth marketing effort. You can make these videos testimonials, reviews, interviews, industry updates, and more.
Email Marketing: This is another essential digital marketing tool for long-term nurture. Marketing emails are a great way to court high-funnel prospects, but they’re also a great customer retention tool. We need to remember the customer after the sale. Send updates, offers, exclusive content, and other assets to make the relationship more valuable. Those who’ve bought from you will buy again – provided you keep the relationship going. You don’t need enterprise mail tools to make this happen. Something simple like Mailchimp is enough to get the job done. You can create custom campaigns for all audience segments in minutes.
Referral Program: This is one of the best and most overlooked of all marketing channels. Everyone inhabits a sphere of influence. Why not maximize the value of an email address and ask your current customers for others who might benefit? Kickbacks can include a percentage of the sale, a certain period of your service gratis, and more. Referral marketing is really powerful. If you have yet to ask your customers for a referral, you are likely missing out on a significant portion of revenue growth. Our SaaS SEO service clients are provided with a few templates to kickstart new business. Want some?
Your Software SEO Strategy & Streamlined Sales
There’s more to our SEO consulting services than just pointing at vanity metrics. The soul of all our efforts comes down to your ability to sell. Sure, appearing in the search engine results pages is an essential part of what we do – but it’s not all we do.
The team at Lighthouse Digital Marketing believes in something we call branded SEO. It’s your marketing message infused with our highly effective SEO strategy elements. Most SaaS SEO agencies will throw your content into a template – or worse – some AI content generator. This reduces the quality and impact of your content strategies – not to mention prolonging sales cycles with diluted information.
We trust that you’ve found this information useful. If you need an SEO agency to step in and act as your SEO department, we’d love to hear from you. We’ve helped loads of other B2B SaaS marketing teams accelerate growth and sales. We’d love to see if we can do the same for you.
Ten minutes is all we need to see if we’re a fit.
