Driving traffic isn't easy.
Everyone is trying to get a piece of your target audience's time, and it can feel like driving the traffic that your SaaS company needs to grow is a real grind.
Don't give up though, there's tried and tested strategies that will drive traffic given enough time and attention.
In today's post I discuss 4 tactics you can use to attract the visitors you need to grow.
Blogging
Blogging is one of the best ways to drive sustainable traffic to a company's website. Did you know that businesses that blog 15 times per month generate 5x as much traffic as those that don't blog at all? (Source: Inbound Marketing Benchmarks From 7,000+ Businesses).
The secret to attracting targeted traffic to your SaaS company's website is blogging about the problems your buyer personas are experiencing. For example, if your company had a product that helped companies to improve productivity, you could create blog posts around productivity tips for organisations.
As you continue to blog around the problems your target personas are having, your content will rank in search results and begin to attract traffic. For example, if you wrote a post: "How to Improve The Productivity of Your Software Development Team", it could begin to show up in search results for queries like "improve productivity software development", "software development productivity", etc.
People making these types of searches are likely to be receptive to your product, too. They've indicated that they have a problem your product can help them solve, which is what makes blogging such a powerful traffic driving strategy.
If you're thinking about blogging to drive traffic to your SaaS, or are already doing so and not getting the results you need, you'll want to take a look at my earlier post: 5 Blog Mistakes That Destroy Lead Generation Efforts.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing can be an excellent source of targeted traffic for your SaaS company, so long as you are sensible with your strategy.
When developing your buyer personas, it's important that you find out which social networks your target personas are using, and how they're using them, in order to develop the best strategy for attracting their attention.
For example, if you are selling enterprise CRM software, then you're probably wasting your time putting a lot of effort into your facebook page. The people you're targeting likely spend less time than average on the social network, as they're extremely busy. It is likely however that the senior sales people you're trying to get in front of use LinkedIn. Sales teams are typically extremely active on LinkedIn in the day-to-day, using it for prospecting and networking with peers.
A good strategy for getting in front of these people may involve a combination of using LinkedIn's blogging platform, engaging with sales team members via LinkedIn groups, setting up a LinkedIn company page and regularly sharing the content you produce for your blog.
If you're still not convinced that your target audience is using social media, you'll want to read my previous post: Do Decision Makers Use Search and Social Media in The B2B Buying Process?
Networking
Another great way to drive traffic is by networking with other people in your industry. Which bloggers are influential? Which members of the press? Who could you get to know, who has access to the personas you are trying to target?
By networking and befriending industry influencers you can build mutually beneficial relationships. As an example, you could network with another SaaS company selling a different product to the same target audience, and cross promote each other's content, or co-create blog posts, eGuides, webinars, etc.
Networking can be a great way to quickly drive highly targeted traffic and amass a loyal following if you can build relationships with the right people.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Finally, another good source of well targeted traffic is PPC. PPC campaigns can be run on search engines, like Google, and also social networks, like LinkedIn. Generally speaking there are two types of targeting available to you with PPC campaigns:
- Search query - for search engines like Google, you usually primarily target people making specific searches.
- Demographic information - for social networks like LinkedIn, targeting is usually exclusively demographic based. For example, you could specifically target software developers at 10-50 employee companies.
PPC traffic is great for quickly testing out changes to your website, or offers (for example, you could run a campaign to see if your new free trial page converts better than an old one). It's also good for attracting traffic that's proven hard to reach in other ways. For instance, targeting ultra competitive search queries that you struggle to rank for with your blogging strategy.
Just always be aware that with PPC, it can be easy to just keep increasing your budget to drive more traffic and leads, when an investment into longer term marketing strategies like blogging, or social media marketing, will usually deliver a better long term ROI. Always be on the look out for the 5 signs your marketing strategy is too dependent on paid ads.
