Mastering the Art of Demand Generation in a Niche SaaS Market

In late 2021, I embarked on a new journey with ArrowStream, a frontrunner in the SaaS domain for the foodservice industry, to spearhead their growth marketing initiatives. This was indeed a challenging venture, given the persistent shadow of COVID-19, the company’s transition to a fully remote environment, and my shift from nearly seven years of entrepreneurship to a corporate role. However, I realized that to surmount these challenges, I had to dive deep into the sector, comprehending its unique complexities and forging strong relationships with colleagues, who later became vital stakeholders in various event and webinar marketing campaigns.

Upon analyzing the Total Addressable Market (TAM), I discerned that it was rather constrained, encompassing approximately 700 accounts. This fact underscored that targeted and personalized communication would be indispensable for maximizing every interaction with potential clients. It is pivotal to acknowledge that the platform’s adherence was extraordinary, largely owing to the comprehensive onboarding process involving all key players such as suppliers, distributors, franchisees, and corporate entities, for the software to function at its best. Reflecting on the market dynamics, it became clear that optimizing every opportunity for positive engagement was not just a goal but a necessity. Building a synergy with the sales team emerged as a crucial strategy in orchestrating the delicate balance between mass outreach and individualized communications.

There’s no universal formula when it comes to account-based marketing or demand generation, but the tactics I implemented were fashioned to be versatile. In this piece, I delineate strategies that can expedite market penetration and enhance the marketing efficiency for enterprise SaaS products, specifically targeting foodservice companies with 50+ locations and an average Annual Contract Value (ACV) of $135K. These insights illustrate a holistic approach to leveraging the unique characteristics of the market, integrating various stakeholders, and ensuring that the offerings resonate effectively with the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

1. Double Down on Webinars

Developing a webinar takes anywhere from 6–8 weeks to plan, promote, execute, and follow up while requiring the participation of multiple stakeholders, including customers. I started by identifying the product I wanted to promote (we had eight offerings) and then created a more granular outline of the title, date, details, and recruiting speakers. I generally had two thought leaders attending from our end, a sales and product leader, and two contacts attending from a customer account. After finalizing the speakers, I worked with my team to develop a landing page with a visual of the speakers and event details to optimize conversion. I then used sequenced emails to promote the event to customers and prospects while running ads on LinkedIn to bring awareness to the webinar and grow the number of registrants. I used Hubspot for marketing automation, and the Go2Webinar integration made it a seamless experience for registrants to tune in. After the execution of the webinars, I made sure to send gifts to the guest speakers and follow-up emails to attendees and registrants with a link to the gated landing page to access the full video. I then went into Salesforce, assigned the leads to sales directors based on their patch, and notified account management directors about customers who had attended and their engagement rates during the webinar. During my tenure, my most successful webinar had ~ 100 registrants with a 67% attendance rate, which yielded 33 contacts (leads) across a handful of prospect accounts.

Prospects who attend webinars showcase an indicator of strong buyer interest, making webinars the most effective channel to generate leads. It also creates upsell and cross-sell opportunities for the account management team.

2. Prioritize Short-Term Results While Managing Long-Term Objectives

Juggling between long-term objectives, e.g., Website refresh, Brand refresh, and SEO, while showcasing short-term results through campaigns (LinkedIn Ads, Google PPC, webinars, and events) was a test of my project management skills. I doubled down on Asana to create detailed briefs and workflows consisting of tasks/sub-tasks and assigned them to other members to increase my capacity and do more with my time, which was crucial for me to see the larger picture while making progress toward weekly goals daily.

3. Increase the Effectiveness of Sales Directors’ Interactions

The content initiative was pivotal in arming the sales team with marketing collateral they could use to interact with prospect accounts and nurture the leads down the sales funnel. My job was to arm the sales team with blog posts, press releases, and creative social media content for them to share on LinkedIn and use as collateral to send emails to prospects. I worked with my team to ensure we had a weekly blog post based on buyer interest from search and engagement data and at least one social post that went out weekly. To avoid making the sales team restless, I had to launch new campaigns while iterating on existing ones continuously. I worked closely with the sales directors to coordinate press release content, get approvals, circulate via the newswire, and promote on social media and the website. I also worked with HR to identify employees to highlight in weekly blog posts, coordinate personalized Q&As, publish on the website, and promote on LinkedIn to impact employer branding positively.

4. Differentiate Your Brand From Competitors

We noticed that there weren't many industry-specific communities pumping out content, whether in the form of a podcast or video, which led me to launch "The Ben & Mike Show." In this 30-minute monthly stream, two industry veterans talk about everything in the food service industry, including the latest industry-specific news headlines, food of the month, corporate job changes, and other fun segments. I recruited two internal stakeholders who also happened to be industry veterans to act as actors in the show and worked with them to develop the show presentation. I then promoted the event on LinkedIn, targeting prospects and customers, leading to social engagement and top-of-funnel brand awareness.

I worked with my team to develop creative advertising campaigns consisting of memes and clever copy to differentiate the brand and generate brand awareness among customers and prospects. I measured success through the number of clicks and time spent on the page. Suppose the lead spent a long on the page, strongly indicating buyer interest. It is rewarding to have customers talking about how funny your ads are, a kind of word-of-mouth highly valuable in our industry with a small TAM.

5. Track Attribution While Nurturing Leads Down the Funnel

On average, we had a sales cycle between 3–6 months and 15 marketing-led interactions that influenced the contacts in each account before the decision maker made a purchase. That meant that to track the impact marketing best was having on the sales pipeline, we had to track things like ad clicks, email opens, webinar registrations, and website visits. Based on each sales director’s patch, I created lists within our ABM platform that showcased search intent and engagement from all our prospective accounts.

I worked with a data enrichment vendor to increase account depth and enrich the contact database, positively impacting audience targeting. I then worked with marketing operations to create the marketing effectiveness dashboard within Salesforce, which allowed us to keep track of all the leads while measuring the impact marketing had on the existing pipeline by monitoring KPIs such as event and webinar registrations.

6. Build Community and Syndicate Content

To increase brand reach and awareness organically, I worked with my team to identify communities across social sites, online forums, and groups to repost blogs and social posts. In addition, I checked in daily on our LinkedIn page to identify positive interaction opportunities, reply to threads, reshare, and engage with content. Finally, by syndicating the content across a mix of social accounts and websites, I expanded the digital footprint and discoverability of the content, leading to an increase in overall website traffic.

7. Create Lists and Segment Your Audience

I created and exported lists within Salesforce to refine campaign advertising across LinkedIn, which meant more targeted advertising, leading to higher click rates and less money wasted on showing ads to the wrong prospects. I also created lists in Hubspot for email marketing campaigns to promote events and webinars. I segmented our customers based on geography and created templates for sales directors to use for personalized email outreach, positively impacting KPIs such as click-through, conversion, and engagement rates.

8. Leverage Keywords Intelligence

One of my long-term objectives was SEO, which meant I continuously monitored and optimized lists consisting of category-specific keywords using the Moz tool. It enabled me to see what keywords we wanted to rank for and use that insight to iterate on website copy to become more competitive and increase our ranking for specific keywords. I was then able to use this insight to sharpen the messaging that went into email outreach copy, which positively impacted the effectiveness of the ABM campaigns. I also used the insight to set up the Google Search PPC campaigns, knowing how to best position product and landing pages based on search volume and keyword queries.

9. Repurpose Webinar Content for Campaigns

I worked with the designer on my team to chop up webinar content into smaller pieces for lead generation to get the most out of webinars that take 6–8 weeks to plan, promote, and execute. I used 15 and 30-second video snippets to promote the webinar content using LinkedIn Ads. I also created gated lead collection pages with a 2-minute webinar recap video. I then made Google Ads tied to these landing pages to rank for search queries with higher volumes.

10. Retarget Website Visitors

My team and I ran retargeting campaigns across Google Search and LinkedIn to increase marketing nurturing effectiveness. Once a prospect account visited the corporate website, I retargeted them across Google and LinkedIn with paid advertising to ensure we were top of mind. This tactic enabled the brand to stay top of mind amongst prospects while moving leads down the funnel.

Make Incremental Improvements

Building your demand engine on day one won't be possible as it is a process to get all stakeholders involved and parlaying with the marketing team. However, the quicker you get the blueprint down, the sooner you can start executing the playbook. At ArrowStream, I set up weekly calls with various product teams to stay ahead of the pack, know what was going on with multiple initiatives, and leverage that insight for marketing campaigns while enabling sales directors with collateral. The more intertwined you are with what’s going on in the company, the easier it will be for you to dissect the most critical growth levers to double down on. Schedule a call with RiteGTM to fix your go-to-market problem today.