The SaaS Growth Blog

Companies developing content marketing strategies are understandably eager to unlock the psychological tricks and secrets of successful content marketing. Content marketing is not magic: give your readers excellent content on a channel they're able to find and access, then tailor your content to their needs.

Voila! A successful content marketing strategy.

Psychological tricks are the icing on the content marketing cake. They sweeten the value of your marketing strategy, but they can't act alone. To get the most out of content marketing, you need compelling content and at least a handful of these psychological tricks.

So your business is raring to go, and your marketing plan is all set. You’re ready to capture those all-important leads and dazzle them with everything your product has to offer. However, once you have finally gotten the attention of your ideal customers, what then?

As strange as it may seem, some businesses never fully develop that critical next step. Getting a prospect’s attention is only the beginning of a long road toward transforming your fresh leads into the loyal customers and promoters of your business that you so sorely need for success (read more about that in the SaaS Marketing Journey). This is precisely where lead nurturing campaigns for SaaS kick in.

For so many businesses, the conversion process largely remains a mystery -- especially if there are multiple routes for a prospective customer to take: free trial, demo, phone call, whitepaper; the list gets complicated, quickly. Rather than investing in answers to address why leads aren’t enticed to become customers, companies often persist with the same infrastructure, hoping that the sales will eventually come. Or worse yet, they pump a bunch of money into an unproven process and don’t glean the results they were hoping for.

Building a quality, useful SaaS product is only the beginning of your journey. You will have to excel at attracting and converting leads as well if you want your venture to reach its full potential. In fact, because of average customer churn rates alone, in order to actually grow your business by one customer, you will have to acquire 47 new customers! That’s a 2% ratio for those of you doing the math. 

Picture this: Your daughter finally brings home her new boyfriend Jimmy, and whether it’s his greasy hair or his limp-fish handshake, you don’t like him. Instantly.

Now, you don’t know Jimmy’s GPA or that he spends every weekend volunteering at the local animal shelter – in fact, there’s a lot you don’t know. But, you feel your assessment is solid (and it probably is). That’s because people make shortcuts all the time when making decisions. We use “Rules of Thumb,” gut instincts, and intuition to make decisions all day long.

Image © by Grant Hatfield

Inbound marketing has introduced a whole new paradigm to the way marketing departments conduct business. Instead of focusing their time on killer print ads and commercials, savvy marketers have shifted to inbound marketing strategies such as blogging, landing pages and email nurturing – all with the goal of producing sales-qualified leads. But when inbound leads are passed to sales, there can be a disconnect on how to properly follow up and close the deal.

Inbound leads are a different animal – an easily spooked animal – and should be treated with a different sales approach. But unless your marketing department and sales department work as a team, you’ll likely make these common sales blunders.