Nearly two months ago I published a blog post explaining why we re-positioned our marketing agency twice. Initially, back in 2013, we transformed from an SEO agency into an inbound marketing agency. Most recently, at the beginning of June, we made the big decision to only take new clients in the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) space.
We knew that being more specialised would help our sales & marketing, but like most businesses who have taken the specialisation plunge at some stage, were somewhat anxious about the impact it would have.
We were concerned that the specialisation would kill our existing deal flow, and that it would take a few months to start generating new SaaS leads.
Just 2 months into the new business strategy, we have some exciting data that indicates that's not the case.
Our First Blog Conversion Experiment
To put our repositioning into context, I'm first going to explain what happened when we made another major blog change: removing call-to-action buttons linking to landing pages at the bottom of blog posts, and replacing them with forms that could be filled in-line.
Our buttons used to get a click-through-rate of 1.5%, to landing pages which converted on average at around 20%. This was when we were blogging around general B2B inbound marketing topics, with minimal specialisation. It means on average, a blog page view would result in a form submission 0.3% of the time.
We theorised that by replacing the buttons at the bottom of our blog posts with inline forms, we could increase this conversion rate significantly. We went through all our old posts to make the change, and we were right. Conversion rates increased by 67%, going from 0.3% to 0.5%.
We were thrilled with the increase, but still not happy with the way our website was converting. We knew we could do better than 0.5% of blog views downloading our premium content.
Our 2015 Repositioning
When it came time to reposition ourselves in June, 2015, we thought it would have some impact on blog conversion rates, but overall be a splash in the water compared with the way repositioning would impact the bottom of the sales funnel. We weren't expecting anything major to happen quickly.
What do you think the results were? Would specialising in SaaS have a bigger impact on our blog conversion rates than our previous experiment? Or would it represent an incremental increase?
The results are shocking.
Conversion rates on blog posts covering SaaS topics, and promoting our SaaS eBook are 1.8%, compared with 0.5% on our general B2B/inbound marketing posts.
That's a 260% increase.
So if your SaaS company isn't generating as many leads as you think it should be from its blog traffic, instead of immediately focusing on the nuts and bolts of how your pages are setup, think very carefully about how specialised you are.
Could you focus in on a tighter niche, improve the relevance of your content and empathise better with a smaller segment of the market you're targeting, and capture that first?
The answer is almost always yes, and it'll have a huge impact on your conversion rates throughout the entire sales & marketing funnel.
To find out more about how your SaaS company can predictably scale revenue with an inbound marketing strategy, download my free 71-page eBook by filling in the form at the end of this post, or clicking here.
Appendix: Calculations & Data Screenshots
Before In-line Forms
CTA click-through rate:
Landing page conversion rate:
Calculation: 0.0146 x 0.2 = 0.00292 = 0.3% to 1 dp.
After In-Line Forms
Calculation: None needed with inline form, 0.5% as stated.
Statistical significance test: p=0.002, statistically significant=Yes!
Before SaaS Specialisation:
After SaaS Specialisation:
Calculation: Non needed, 0.5% and 1.8% as stated.
Statistical significance test: p=0.007, statistically significant=Yes!
