Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

Learn more

How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

A recent Fronetics survey in 2017 found that 62% of B2B buyers relied on the internet as a core resource when searching for new business solutions. A good digital marketing plan links your clients to your offering through social media, blogs, your websites, forums, and mobile communications. Are you doing enough to get your products and brand out there? If not, you can bet your bottom dollar that you’re competitors are.

In this article, we’re highlighting 7 of the most effective digital marketing strategies that software companies need to adapt to maximize their online presence. Let’s start with the most effective one:

1. Invest in SEO

Most tech experts understand the technicalities of putting a usable website together but creating pages that attract good traffic and perform as a refined sales process is a completely different ball game. And it’s a game where the rules are constantly changing. Google releases updates to its search algorithm every day. The best SEO experts will be those with years of experience but are also constantly up to date with the latest changes to Google’s search brain.

The trick with SEO is to focus your efforts on pursuits that’ll yield the greatest gains. The best places to pour most of your long-term attention are:

• Technical and on-page SEO to enhance your website relevance to target keywords
• Creating 4-10 quality backlinks per month
• Content marketing to spread awareness (we’ll get into this more below).
• On-site blog posting at least once a week.

One of the most crucial steps in SEO is getting a first page ranking on search engine results for terms (keywords) that your customers are using to find solutions like yours. Here’s a good list of the best keyword research tools available right now. Once you’ve identified the keywords that are gaining traffic, you can create optimized landing pages, 5-10 quality blogs related to these search phrases, and add links with keywords reach anchor text in your content that point traffic toward your main landing/product pages. This is the main strategy to achieving higher ranks in Google.

2. Paid advertising

In 2016, Google released a report showing us that 28% of online searches convert into a sale. People use Google to search for things they’re ready to buy and paid ads to put your pages at the top of search results. Paid advertising has become the second-best performing lead generation channel for most software and SaaS businesses after organic search and SEO.

Why is it so popular? Paid advertising is scalable, very measurable which makes it predictable, and provides a proven ROI if handled correctly. Google Ads are a great place to start your first campaigns. Besides the standard text ads you’ve no doubt seen at the top of nearly every search you’ve ever conducted, you can also access more advanced retargeting strategies. These features allow you to advertise to users who’ve already visited sites relative to your market or have searched for your specific keywords in the past.

Exploit multiple social channels

Choosing the right social platforms is vital. Here are the world’s largest social networks and what each is good for:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is highly relevant if your software is primed for the B2B space. Users on LinkedIn are looking for business solutions. A 2017 report by LinkedIn suggested that 80% of B2B marketing leads from social media come through the LinkedIn network.

Facebook and Twitter

These platforms are great for engaging with your target audience and promoting your content. They both offer powerful paid remarketing systems that allow you to grow a following quickly.

YouTube

Youtube has become the second largest search engine after Google so it’s the best place to post video tutorials for your software, webinars, and entertainment content. Video demos and pre roll ad campaign will give people insight into your solution while also actively driving traffic to your website.

4. Outreach and quality link building

Guest blogging is about creating content for other websites that are already receiving large volumes of traffic. You can provide help and guidance on topics within your expertise or offer a new angle on topics that are related to your product. Do it often enough and your posts will expose your brand to large audiences within the software development space. You’ll also have the chance to place a link to your pages from an authority website which is great for SEO.

Landing a guest post on one of the biggest tech blogs out there is a tall order, but there are multiple levels of influential sites you can work with. You can also contribute to different groups on social media platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook. Aim for groups related to the software industry and you could be reaching thousands of potential users that you know are likely to have an interest in your product. This tactic can also be executed by SaaS, software, IT and tech digital marketing consultants who have more experience of doing it the right way. Marketers are facing rising expectations for personalisation and are expected to use at least 18 data sources when building their brand. It can help your audience gain additional context to your work if you include a diverse range of sources when building links. This increases your brand’s credibility and makes your data more authoritative.

5. Create tutorials and guides

Creating content that aims to help people solve problems is a powerful weapon that software development experts can certainly jump on. “How to” tutorials and best practice guides are a must if your solution is complex or tackles a unique problem. Companies look to invest in new software products because they want a means to step ahead of the competition. For companies without in-house development capacity, software development outsourcing offers a way to access specialized expertise while maintaining focus on core business objectives. Whether building from scratch or scaling existing products, partnering with external development teams like Netguru can accelerate time to market. The more you try to position your brand as the answer to their concerns, the more signups you’ll see.

Not only is helpful content great for exposure and awareness, it’s a great way to collect the email addresses of leads. Email marketing is the perfect way to develop deeper connections with your customers. Mailchimp is the largest email marketing platform in the world so it’s a great place to launch your first nurture campaign. You can also check Mailchimp alternatives if you are looking for other features or more affordable pricing.

6. Differentiate your software to others using comparison guides

Developed a product that has a leg up on an existing market leader? Create a webpage comparing your solution to your competitors and optimize that page to rank on the first page of Google and attract search traffic for your competitors brand searches. You’ll feed off the mass of users searching for their brand while exposing the advantages of your new solution as an alternative.

Avoid being too pushy and aim to provide a balanced review to help the reader evaluate the comparison with clarity. Make it obvious that you’re overly biased and you’ll turn people away quickly.

7. Build impactful reviews

You can solicit independent third-party review sites as well as work to increase the level of reviews you gain from users. Search for “software directories” or review sites and add and verify your profile there. Websites with a good number of user reviews will usually rank on the first page of Google because of their affiliation with these giant software companies and their domain authority.. These sites will provide good exposure and increase the credibility of your offering.

Use your content marketing channels to build reviews from real customers. Leverage your social media accounts to actively t ask happy users to review you on certain platforms. You should also be doing this with outbound methods. For example, using your CRM database to build a targeted list of customers, then sending a tailored batch of emails asking your users to leave you a review. Offer incentives like prize draws to increase the number of recipients that bite while ensuring the reviews remain unbiased.

That’s our 7! We hope this list of effective digital marketing strategies for software companies has helped spark a few light bulbs for you. It’s now more important than ever for software companies of all sizes to stand out by upping their digital efforts or working with growth marketing agencies like Northpeak. Knowing your options is half the battle, the other half is actively chasing the ideas on this list!

The post 7 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Software Companies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The B2B environment has also evolved to be mostly online, and this is where B2B digital marketing comes in.

Here, we will discuss all you need to know about B2B digital marketing: from its basic concept to inbound marketing to a discussion for all the different channels. By the end, you can have more insights into how to plan a B2B digital marketing strategy, and how to execute it well.

Let us begin.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

Learn more

How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

What Is Digital Marketing?

In a layman’s term, digital marketing refers to all kinds of marketing efforts that utilize any electronic device.

It’s important to note that electronic devices can be both offline and online. Advertising on an LED electronic billboard, for example, is offline marketing but is still technically a digital marketing effort.

However, nowadays the term “digital marketing” is used almost exclusively for online marketing efforts like social media marketing, online advertising, SEO and search advertising, email marketing, and more.

Digital Marketing VS Inbound Marketing

The terms “digital marketing” and “inbound marketing” have been used interchangeably in recent years, and some might even argue that they are virtually the same thing. However, they are technically two very different things from each other.

To truly understand this, we have to learn about the definitions of inbound marketing and its counterparts: outbound marketing and their key conceptual differences:

Outbound marketing—or traditional marketing—- refers to any marketing efforts that are designed to push our promotional message to as many people as possible. Showing an ad to those who are browsing a certain website is a common example of outbound marketing. Outbound marketing disrupts what the prospect/customer is currently doing, and thus they often resist the message.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is about putting our message out there and pulls or attracts prospects and customers. This is mainly done by publishing valuable, relevant content or information, and our audience can find them via the search engine. Inbound marketing is less disruptive since the audiences are the ones proactively searching for information, and so is generally more effective in today’s saturated marketing environment.

Thus, as you can see, digital marketing can be both inbound and outbound, depending on the campaign/channel. It’s true, however, that inbound marketing is widely regarded as more effective nowadays, and so most of today’s digital marketing campaigns are inbound by nature.

However, that’s not saying outbound marketing activities like online advertising doesn’t have its uses. We can basically think of inbound vs outbound as the case of time vs cost:

• Inbound marketing is typically more affordable (and even can be 100% free) but will take more time before you can see the results you desire. It can take months or even years before you can generate sustainable leads and customers from inbound marketing efforts.
• Outbound marketing, on the other hand, can virtually guarantee short-time results anytime, but the cost can be extremely expensive if you are not careful.

So, the idea is to find the right balance between your inbound and outbound marketing efforts so we can minimize cost while also maximizing time-efficiency.

B2B VS B2C Digital Marketing

Is B2B digital marketing different compared to its B2C counterpart? Although the main concept of the two remains the same, there are some important differences to consider, namely:

• The Audience

In B2C marketing, your audience is direct consumers, while in B2B marketing your target audiences are companies/organizations and the stakeholders within it.

It’s also important to note that in B2B digital marketing, there can be more than one stakeholder/decision-maker in one company, each of them can have different roles. More often than not, we’d need to tailor our marketing efforts for each of these stakeholders.

Although not always, the B2B audience tends to make their decisions based on logical reasons: they are looking for viable solutions for their businesses, and it’s going to be accounted for as an investment. So, B2B digital marketers must properly convey how the product/service can save costs, boost profit, and add significant value to the target company.

Also, price is usually the most important factor in the B2C purchase decision, but it is less pronounced in theB2B environment.

• Market Size

This one is fairly obvious. Since we are targeting direct consumers, the market is significantly larger in B2C marketing. On the other hand, in B2B digital marketing, the market is (very) limited and focused. This can be both a good and bad thing: it’s easier to conduct market research in B2B marketing, but at the same time we wouldn’t have too many wiggle rooms.

• Social Media Behaviors

In B2C marketing, Facebook and Instagram are the main platforms to target in order to reach wider audiences. In the B2B environment, however, LinkedIn is the main platform to focus on if we want to establish engagement and valuable connections with prospects and customers.

• Sales Cycle

In most cases, the sales cycle in B2C marketing is much lower than in B2B. Business transactions in B2B marketing need more considerations compared to B2C transactions, and typically the research process tends to be much longer.

• Content

Not always, but in B2C marketing we mainly need to create engaging, entertaining content that can play with the audience’s emotions. However, with B2B content we generally need more detailed, informative, and data-accurate content. B2B content is very important as a way to establish trust and to justify the company’s credibility and value to the potential audiences.

B2C Digital Marketing

In B2C digital marketing, price is a really sensitive factor to determine your overall digital marketing strategy. If your product’s price point is fairly low, then it’s quite likely that the digital marketing objective is to attract new traffic to the company’s website (or other eCommerce platforms) and get them to purchase the product right away.

So, B2C digital marketing is typically more focused on pushing for conversions rather than nurturing the leads. In short, creating a hyperspeed funnel right when someone visits your site until they make the purchase. This generally means using stronger CTAs and discussing your product much faster (higher up in the buyer’s journey stages) than in B2B marketing.

As a result of this principle, Instagram and Pinterest as visual social platforms are typically more valuable for B2C companies.

B2B Digital Marketing

Contrary to B2C digital marketing as discussed above, generally B2C digital marketing efforts are usually focused around online lead generation and lead nurturing. So, B2B digital marketing strategy is to attract more leads, qualify the leads, and convert the most qualified leads and pass them to your salespeople (or to your website, email newsletter, and other digital marketing channels).

LinkedIn is usually where the B2B demographic is spending most of their time online, although other social media platforms can also be valuable.

Why Digital Marketing is Important for B2B Businesses?

Above, we have established that the term “digital marketing” is now mostly used to refer exclusively to “internet marketing” or online marketing.

Thus the short answer here is fairly simple: even in the B2B environment, almost everything is done online nowadays. B2B stakeholders research for potential solutions and investments online, and even make the purchase 100% online. According to Google in 2018, 67% of purchases in multiple pack-and-ship industries were influenced by digital. Surely this number has grown in 2024 and 2025.

Simply put, online digital marketing is now the most effective and cost-efficient way to reach your target audience and grow your revenue. With digital marketing, we also have a number of endless channel possibilities including email marketing, video marketing, social media, and website-based promotions to reach our audience.

Last but not least, it’s far easier to measure the performance of any digital marketing campaign compared to, say, running print ads or direct mail. We can have an easier time justifying our marketing investments, evaluate results, and adjust our tactics/strategies based on data.

More versatile, more cost-efficient, and more trackable.

Important Principles In Developing B2B Digital Marketing Plan

Successful digital marketing is based on proper planning, so we can effectively generate awareness, leads, and ultimately, grow our sales revenue.

In general, a proper digital marketing plan should be based on four important principles:

• Define Your Objectives

Your digital marketing goals should be:

• Specific: that is, easy to understand and focused on a tangible object
• Realistic: in a way that it’s attainable. If an objective is too tough to accomplish, it can hurt you and your team’s morale. Break down big goals into smaller, more achievable milestones if necessary.
• Measurable/tangible: you can measure and evaluate your progress towards a specific goal by assigning KPIs and monitor metrics.

• Creating a Strategy

A digital marketing strategy is mainly about meeting your target audience’s needs and their purchase behaviors with your marketing efforts. So, it should always begin with proper B2B market research.

As mentioned above, your target company might have several different stakeholders with different roles, so you might need to create separate buyer personas for each of them. Figure out their needs, their pain points, and develop a marketing strategy to cater to these needs.

You can utilize various digital marketing channels to achieve this: social media, content marketing, search marketing, online ads, email marketing and more. Create a detailed tactic for each channel on how we can provide value and attract our target audience.

• Content-First Approach

Nowadays, content is no longer king, but everything. It’s very important to publish relevant and valuable content on all the different marketing channels: your blog, your social media post, your ads, information on your website and so on.

Content is what’s going to shape your digital marketing campaigns and our main way to establish trust and credibility as the thought expert of your niche: how you show prospects and potential customers that you are indeed a viable solution for their company’s problems and needs.

Develop content to establish your social media presence, and also for your salespersons and brand ambassadors to use. Also, remember that timing and consistency are very important in today’s always-online environment.

• Monitor and Evaluate

Always remember that your B2B digital marketing is not a one-off thing, but rather a long-term process that can take months if not years of consistency before you achieve the desired objectives.

Thus, it’s very important to establish a system to monitor and evaluate the progress of each channel and campaign. Assign KPIs and measure the right metrics according to your digital marketing objectives. However, you shouldn’t solely focus on tangible data and metrics, but also qualitative information like the quality of engagement, conversations, and other intangible metrics.

The most important aspect of B2B digital marketing is arguably about building relationships. So, consistency is very important here. Test your content relevance, quality, and consistency thoroughly, and always monitor the cost-efficiency and ROI of each channel.

The Digital Marketing Channels

Digital marketing, as we have established above, is technically an umbrella term that can refer to many different channels that utilize any electronic medium—especially online—.

“There are various digital channels and campaigns that can engage your audience throughout the various stages of their buyer’s journey. The idea of a proper digital marketing strategy is to have all the effective channels work together to achieve the overarching marketing goals.” – says Jacek Zmudzinski, Team Lead at MakoLab.

With that being said, below are the examples of important digital marketing channels, and a brief discussion of each. However, keep in mind that this is not an all-inclusive list, and there are certainly other digital marketing channels that aren’t specifically discussed here.

Without further ado, here they are:

Content Marketing

Content marketing refers to the processes of content development and content creation with the objective of generating brand awareness, building organic traffic, and ultimately generating qualified leads and grow your sales revenue.

Nowadays, content marketing can involve various mediums and channels, such as:

• Blog: the most obvious content marketing form and still the most popular even with the emergence of videos and podcasts, especially in the B2B environment that is generally more “serious”. Consistent publication of blog posts can establish the company’s position as the thought leader and expert of your industry. Proper execution of blog marketing can provide more opportunities to convert random website visitors into qualified leads.
• Video marketing: fairly obvious, video is everywhere nowadays. However, it’s true that video marketing is less popular in B2B digital marketing compared to B2C. There are, however, various implementations we can try in B2B video marketing like education/tutorials of your product/service, behind the scenes showcase of your product and team members, and so on. Video marketing is effective in building trust and credibility, but also how you can show the human aspect of your B2B digital marketing (this is why showing real humans and not just animation in your videos is important).
• Infographics: a cost-effective way to present visually aesthetics content that can also be effective in providing al lot of relevant information to your audience in an interesting way.
• Ebooks, whitepapers, research results: great forms of long-form content that are useful as lead magnets where we exchange the valuable content (often contain valuable data and unique information) with the audience’s contact information and mainly email address. This is one of the most effective ways of generating leads for your company. You can also create promotional materials like brochures, flyers, and posters using tools like a poster maker to enhance your content marketing efforts.

It’s important to note that content marketing is not only the content creation process but how we promote the content is just as, if not even more important. Use various marketing channels to build more traffic to the content and create backlinks, which is going to be very important for the next channel we’ll discuss: SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is, in a nutshell, a series of optimization done to your website so your pages can rank higher on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), mainly Google SERP.

SEO is mainly done together with content marketing. In fact, we can think of SEO as the best and the most effective content promotion effort. SEO in combination with content marketing are the backbones of inbound marketing, which we have discussed above.

Getting ranked higher on Google SERP is obviously very effective in increasing the organic traffic to your website, and arguably SEO is now even more important than ever in the saturated digital market—even for B2B—-.

So, SEO is alive and well, although indeed there have been notable changes to how we should approach SEO in recent years. Although SEO might seem like a complicated and arduous process at first, it is actually quite simple to explain. Our site can be ranked higher on Google SERP if:

1. Your content is relevant and valuable for your audience
2. Your site is properly optimized to maximize user experience so the site visitor can stay for as long as possible
3. Google (and the other search engines) should be able to crawl and index your site properly, and accurately recognize all the different elements and content

So, here are the crucial elements of a B2B SEO strategy based on these three factors:

• Content is king. Your SEO will only go so far as the quality and relevance of your content, period. No amount of SEO optimizations can help shallow, low-quality content without any value. Clinching content value involves removing grammatical imperfections from it, properly formatting it with the right tags, and using a plagiarism checker to ensure uniqueness.
• Keyword optimization. Including the target keyword(s) throughout the content naturally while maintaining readability and value
• UX-related optimizations like improving the site’s speed, ensuring mobile-friendliness, optimizing menus for easier navigation, optimizing the content’s structure and layout, and so on
• Technical optimizations to ensure Google can properly index your site. This includes optimizing headlines and META tags, implementing structured data markup, optimizing robots.txt file, and so on
• Getting more backlinks, arguably the most important of them all. Backlinks are like the votes of confidence on the internet, and it’s important to note that the quality of the incoming backlinks is more important than quantity.

It’s important to understand that SEO is a long-term strategy, and so consistency is key. In general, expect to invest at least 6 to 12 months before you see the desired SEO results.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is obviously where the audience is nowadays. In 2019, there are 3.2 billion daily active users among the major social media networks.

That is, around 42% of the population all around the world, and we can certainly bet that most of our B2B target audience—execs and managers in the companies— are also active in these social media platforms. So, in short, if we are not putting our marketing efforts on social media, we are going to miss out.

In general, there are 5 major social media networks to focus on today:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. LinkedIn
4. Twitter
5. Pinterest

Depending on your niche/industry, you might also want to pursue opportunities on YouTube and the recently popular TikTok. In the B2B setting, however, LinkedIn deserves a special mention, since it has been proven time and time again as the place to generate B2B leads.

With that being said, Social media marketing can be divided into three different categories:

• Organic social media marketing: growing your own followers and traffic, and then share your content to these loyal audiences
• Paid social media marketing: organic reach in all major social media platforms has declined rapidly in recent years. This is why we need to counter it using various paid advertising offered by these social media platforms.
• Influencer marketing: working with influencers to spread your promotional messages to their loyal followers.

As with SEO and content marketing, content quality and relevance are the most important factors in determining social media marketing success.

PPC Advertising

PPC stands for Pay Per Click, referring to the pricing model of the advertising: you pay the ad publisher every time your ad is clicked by the audience.

We have mentioned that inbound marketing is generally the more effective approach nowadays. However, it’s not saying PPC advertising—as an outbound marketing channel—doesn’t have its place.

As mentioned further above, outbound vs inbound is mostly the case of cost vs time, and wisely investing in PPC ads can help offset the lengthy time investment of, for example, your SEO efforts.

• Google Ads is the most common and most popular PPC publisher, simply due to the massive size of Google as a platform (encompassing the whole internet). Google Ads can be very expensive and can reach a lot of potential audiences, but is often the most expensive option.
• Facebook Ads, another popular platform. You can, for example, “boost” your Facebook post, customize a video or image post, display a slideshow ad, and so on.
• Linkedin paid options. Linkedin offers various types of PPC promotions like Sponsored Messages, where you can send direct messages to specific LinkedIn userbase based on certain demographics data.

The key to a successful PPC campaign is targeting. The more specific you are targeting the right audience, the higher the conversion rate of the PPC ads, and thus the higher your ROI.

Email Marketing

Even with all the new technologies, platforms, and marketing channels, email remains one of the most important platforms we can use to directly communicate with our audiences.

In fact, email marketing is still the marketing channel with the highest ROI in 2025 and can generate up to 4,000% ROI (that is, $4,000 for every dollar you spent). This is even after GDPR and its equivalent in regulations, which has significantly affected email marketing.

Why? Because apparently people still prefer to receive promotional messages in emails (so they are more likely to open them) compared to other platforms. In a B2B setting, email marketing is also quite versatile, and we can send various types of emails depending on the objectives, such as:

• To promote new content (i.e. new blog post or video)
• Promote new events, limited-time offers, discounts, etc.
• Drive people to your website
• Welcome emails for new customers and prospects
• Follow-up emails for site visitors who downloaded something or purchased a product/service
• Holiday and seasonal promotions
• Specific promotions for loyalty program members
• Customer/lead nurturing via tips, tutorials, and other educational content

Affiliate Marketing

Depending on your niche/industry, affiliate marketing can be an effective approach to promote your brand or product/service.

Affiliate marketing is essentially commissioning people outside your company (the affiliate marketer) to promote your business. When an affiliate marketer sold your product, which is tracked via affiliate links/cookies, you share some of the profit to this marketer.

Admittedly, affiliate marketing campaigns in the B2B setting are relatively rare and it’s much more common in B2C businesses. However, it’s definitely possible for certain B2B products/services for example if you are selling B2B SaaS solution.

Online Public Relations

Online PR—or digital PR—, is simply the process of securing earned online media from reputable sources like digital publications, blogs, websites, and social media influencers. If you are familiar with the concept of traditional (or offline) PR, then online PR is a fairly similar process just in the online realm.

Since the online world is a much wider environment than offline, we can use more variety of channels in online PR efforts, such as:

• • Encourage more reviews for your company. Online reviews are arguably the most important form of PR nowadays. When someone reviews your company online (whether it’s positive or negative), it is always valuable. Engage and respond to all reviews, including and especially the bad ones. This is one of the most effective ways of encouraging even more reviews in the future.
  • Social media outreach to find influencers, reporters, and so on. We can try to find journalists on social media platforms or even platforms like HARO (Help a Reporter)  or Quora. Build valuable relationships that can open up earned media opportunities in the future.
  • Guest posting. Fairly self-explanatory, find opportunities to publish your post on other websites and blogs.

• Engaging comments. Respond to comments on your blog and social media conversations. The idea is to build relationships, engagements, and productive conversations around your niche.

Understanding B2B Marketing Automation

It’s important to note that marketing automation isn’t exactly a marketing channel, but refers to the technology or software that can automate some marketing tasks or operations. Thus, marketing automation can improve the performance of different marketing channels, save time and costs, and ultimately maximize results.

Here are some important implementations of B2B marketing automation across various channels:

• Email automation: Email marketing automation is not only about automatically sending emails to our email list, but ultimately about sending the right message to the right audience at the right time. It’s about the ability to send personalized content to a targeted audience with a specific, personalized schedule. Email automation can also include the function to segment our contact list automatically according to the needs of a specific campaign or promotional message.
• Lead generation and nurturing: For example, by engaging specific prospects only after they’ve met certain triggers or criteria. For example, we can send a lead with specific content or email when they’ve signed up for our free-trial campaign. This can be very useful so our valuable resources only go to prospects with the highest conversion rates.
• Social media automation: The number of your posts and consistency are two of the most important factors in ensuring social media marketing success. At the same time, manual posting can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Social media scheduling and automation tools can help us save time and resources for the things that matter.
• KPI tracking, analytics, and reporting: B2B digital marketing can involve many different people, channels, platforms, campaigns, and more. Marketing automation tools can help us track the performance of each of these, perform analytics, and provide a comprehensive report in real-time.

B2B Digital Marketers And Their Roles

What does a B2B marketing consultant and expert do?

The answer to this question can be fairly complicated, but in general, B2B digital marketers have the responsibility to:

• Build awareness to the B2B company, so your target audience is aware of your brand’s existence and its products/services)
• To generate leads, capture the contact information of people/companies that have indicated an interest in your company or your product/service.

That’s it, basically.

Different digital marketers can have different roles and/or responsible for different channels, but in the end, their responsibilities will boil down to the two above.

With that being said, typically the digital marketers can focus on different KPIs for each channel to measure the channel’s progress according to the two objectives above.

For example, a digital marketer specializing in social media can measure “followers growth” which can be a strong indicator of how well the social media channel can generate leads. On the other hand, SEO marketers might measure “organic traffic” more closely.

In smaller companies, one or two digital marketers might act as “generalists” that will manage several different channels and campaigns. In larger B2B companies, it’s more typical to have several digital marketing specialists that each focus on just one digital marketing channel and/or campaign.

Here are some examples of these digital marketing roles, and brief discussions of each.

SEO Specialist/SEO Manager

KPIs:

• Organic traffic
• Link profile
• SERP ranking

B2B SEO agencies and services typically focus on how the business’s website can rank higher on Google (and other search engines) to drive more organic traffic to the website. The person oversees all the required optimizations (look at the SEO section above) of the SEO campaign, monitors the progress over time, and adjusts the SEO strategy if necessary.

Content Marketers

KPIs:

• Organic traffic to each content and overall traffic
• Subscribers/followers growth
• Dwell time on page

Content marketers might refer to content creators but also the person who is responsible for the content promotion process. Their responsibilities include planning and supervising the execution of the content calendar and content strategy. Content marketers must work with other teams to make sure all elements of the business are properly supported with appropriate content.

Social Media Marketers

KPIs:

• Followers growth
• Impressions and reach
• Engagement and shares

Pretty self-explanatory, the role of a social media marketer or social media manager is to manage social media marketing: plan and establish a posting schedule, supervising content creation including visual content, and so on. They might need to work together with a content marketer (as discussed above) to develop a specific content strategy for social media.

How To Track B2B Digital Marketing Performance

Digital marketing efforts—-or more specifically, online marketing efforts— allow us to track their performance and results in practically real-time.

If, for example, we set up a traditional billboard on the side of a crowded highway, it is difficult to accurately know how many people have visited the website, how many people visit your store after they saw the billboard, and how many people actually purchase from you.

Yet, if we set up a Google Ads campaign, for instance, we can easily track everything and measure the ROI of the campaign.

For example:

Analyzing Organic and Paid Website Traffic

There are various digital analytics tools, like the free and handy Google Analytics that can accurately track the exact number of traffic that have visited your website and their referral source (i.e., whether they are coming from Google search or after they’ve clicked on your ad).

You can also track other related metrics like how many pages they’ve viewed—and which pages—, the device they used to visit your site, their location, the page after which they’ve bounced from your site, and so on.

You can use this data to evaluate many things, including which marketing campaigns and efforts you should prioritize. For example, if 30% of your website traffic is coming from a specific query on Google search, then you should definitely focus on this keyword on your next SEO and content marketing campaigns.

On the other hand, if only fewer than 5% of your traffic is coming from a specific ad, then you might not want to invest more money in this ad campaign.

This is simply not possible with traditional, offline marketing. With proper digital marketing analytics, we can quite easily identify our audience’s preferences and adjust our strategy and tactics to cater to these behaviors and needs.

If we can make the most of this situation, we can maximize the conversion rate and optimize the ROI of our digital marketing campaigns by spending our time and resources on the channels that actually matter.

If we compare it with traditional, offline marketing. It’s very hard if not impossible to figure out exactly how your audience is interacting with your promotional messages and your brand before they make a purchase. So, we can’t properly evaluate whether an offline marketing channel (i.e. a billboard or a magazine ad) is actually effective.

With digital marketing on our website alone, we can gather more insights into how we can attract prospects and customers, and plan a better marketing strategy.

Implementing Marketing Attribution

Although we have mentioned that the key advantage of digital marketing over offline marketing is how we can monitor progress, there are digital channels and campaigns where measuring their contributions to revenue can be quite difficult.

For instance, if we’ve found out that a specific customer made a purchase after they clicked on your online ad (1), consumed your content (2), checked out your website (3),  and downloaded your ebook (4), then how did the four different channels contribute to this customer’s purchase?

Pretty tough to answer, right? This is how a marketing attribution model can help.

Marketing attribution is, in a nutshell, the process of analyzing marketing touchpoints or events (essentially, actions made by users or customers) that are encountered by a customer from where they first learned about your business (awareness) until they actually made the purchase.

This is mainly done by assigning credit for each event or touchpoint. Let’s use an example to illustrate this. Let’s assume here are the events/touchpoints that happened before a specific customer made a purchase:

1. Seeing an online ad
2. Visited the website
3. Consume content
4. Signed up to email newsletter
5. Received an email offering a limited-time discount
6. Purchase

So, there are five events or touchpoints. Now, there are several ways we can assign a marketing attribution model to these five touchpoints, and here are the common ones:

• Last-touch or last-interaction model: the last event (in the example, the email offer), would receive ALL credit for the revenue
• First-touch or first-interaction model: contrary to the above, the first event (the online ad) would receive 100% of the credit for the revenue
• Linear model: each event/touchpoint in the conversion path would share equal credit for the sale. (In this example, each channel would receive 20% of the total credit)
• Time Decay model: the touchpoints closest to the actual purchase gets most of the credit. In this example, the email offer (for example) might receive 50% of the credit, while the online ad might receive only 10%.
• Position-based model: here, 40% of the credit is assigned to the very first and latest touchpoints/events, and the rest (20%) is distributed equally to the other events in the middle.

There are more ways we can assign marketing attribution models depending on our business process and/or industry, and above wasn’t an all-inclusive list.

Marketing attribution allows us to identify trends of how our audience do their research and make their decisions to buy our product/service. Again, this allows us to properly assess which channels and/or campaigns are effective in growing our revenue, and which simply don’t work.

Another function of a proper marketing attribution model is to find ways to improve your business’s buyer’s journey by connecting the dots between marketing and sales. Arguably this is even more important in B2B digital marketing where sales cycles tend to be much longer and a lot of nurturing needs to happen. Sales and marketing must work together in nurturing and qualifying prospects until they are really ready for purchase. Data suggested that sales-marketing alignment can help sales conversion rates by 38% and improve retention by 36%.

Content as a Lead Generation Device

Another important distinction between digital (online) marketing and offline marketing is how the audience consumes content.

In an offline marketing setting, we can’t effectively track how many people who actually reads your brochure and how many threw it straight away into the trash. This is not actually the case with digital content: we can accurately measure how many people viewed the content on our page, how long they spent on a page, the actions they took after they consume the content, and so on.

We can also measure how each content performs as a lead generation device by implementing a gated content method: offer valuable content for free in exchange for their contact information, which you can capture using forms. We can accurately measure how many leads are generated from a single content.

B2B Digital Content

What types of content should my business create?

This can be a very difficult question to answer. Ultimately, the kind of content to develop should depend on your audience. More specifically, what your audience needs.

In B2B digital marketing, however, this can be even more complex due to one key fact: in B2B digital marketing, we are mainly targeting companies, and there can be several different stakeholders in a single company, with different roles and needs.

So, in B2B content marketing, we’d need to create several buyer personas for these different stakeholders’ roles. Again, these different personas can have different goals and needs, and so our most important step is to identify their objectives, needs, and challenges.

1. In its most basic principle, our digital content should aim to help these audiences meet their objectives, provide a solution for their needs, and overcome their challenges.
2. The next stage is to develop content (based on the above’s principle) in relation to what stage they are currently positioned in their buyer’s journey. The closer the person is to the actual purchase, generally, the more specific and “aggressive” the content should be.

Doing these two principles can narrow down our options, but there are still a lot of different things we can try. In general, here are the common stages of the buyer’s journey and how we can approach the content on each stage:

• Awareness Stage: when your target audience is just aware of your business and your product/service

• • • Informative/solutional blog post, providing an actionable solution or tips in a blog post. Great to attract a new audience looking for specific information and can increase your organic traffic when paired with SEO.
    • Video content, very shareable nowadays and you can also attract new audiences.
    • Infographics, shareable and can generate a lot of backlinks (for SEO purpose), so can attract a new audience when this content is shared on social media.

• Consideration: the audience is considering your product and comparing it to your competitors’

• • • In-depth, unique content like ebooks, whitepapers, research reports, and so on. Very effective in lead generation purposes so we can share these content pieces as lead magnets.
    • Video content is still effective and popular in this stage, for example, to educate our audience about the unique benefits of your product.

• Decision: the audience has narrowed down their options and just need a final push before they’ll purchase your product

• • Case studies can be a very effective form of social proof to influence their purchase decision. In B2B content marketing, factual case studies are often very important in maximizing conversion rates.
  • User/client testimonials are also very effective, although they are typically more common in the B2C environment. However, they can still be effective in the B2B setting especially when you have big and famous clients.

It’s important, however, to note that although it’s easier to measure progress and ROI with digital content marketing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll see results faster than offline marketing.

There are various factors that can affect this but will ultimately depend on how well you understood your audience’s needs and issues. If you have a proper B2B content marketing strategy and have created high-quality and relevant content to cater to these needs, you can see sustainable results within 6 to 12 months.

Conclusion

The most important key to successful digital marketing is really to really understand our audience and create a B2B digital marketing strategy that can cater to this audience’s needs and pain points. Creating relevant and valuable content should be the center of any digital marketing strategy agency.

Digital marketing can work for any B2B business in any niche/industry. Whatever your company sells, the main principle above remains: if you can understand your target audience and drive value, you can acquire more customers and retain existing ones.

The post How to Create a B2B Digital Marketing Strategy that Drives Sales and Revenue appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Top 6 Lead Generation Companies

Based on the factors we have discussed above, we have researched numerous lead generation companies that have already established their credible reputation. We’ve assessed companies with the best qualities of databases, most reliable tactics and methods, and other factors. Based on that, here are our recommendations for the top 6 lead generation companies, in no particular order:

1. MikeKhorev.com

MikeKhorev.com is the online hub of Mike Khorev, a globally recognized SEO and growth marketing consultant specializing in B2B technology, SaaS, and complex digital products. The firm has worked with funded startups and established tech companies worldwide, helping them achieve measurable organic growth and revenue impact through data-driven SEO strategies.

One of Mike Khorev’s core strengths is his deep focus on technical and AI-driven SEO. Rather than relying on generic playbooks, strategies are built around in-depth market research, advanced analytics, and full-funnel optimization. This includes everything from keyword mapping and content architecture to attribution modeling and conversion-focused optimization.

Engagements are structured for speed and clarity. Clients typically begin seeing structured execution within weeks, supported by transparent reporting and performance dashboards that track rankings, traffic, and revenue contribution. Every campaign is customized, ensuring alignment between SEO efforts and broader business goals.

A defining differentiator of MikeKhorev.com is its results-oriented approach. By combining technical SEO expertise with behavioral data analysis, Mike Khorev identifies high-intent opportunities and prioritizes actions that move prospects through the funnel efficiently. This allows clients to not only grow organic visibility, but also convert that visibility into qualified leads and revenue.

2. Nine Peaks Media

An SEO based lead generation company with a global-reaching reputation. Nine Peak Media uses various digital marketing channels to generate qualified prospects, but especially focuses on organic lead generation through content marketing and SEO (inbound marketing).

By consistently producing high-quality and relevant content, Nine Peaks Media can help your business in not only generating leads, but also to establish your credibility and online presence. On the other hand, by ensuring these pieces of content are ranking on top of the search engine results page (SERP) for the right keywords, you can get a reliable, sustainable source of long-term traffic.

Nine Peaks Media also emphasize the importance of online reputation management, and provide the service to manage reviews of your brand and to maintain a positive presence on social media platforms.

3. Vsynergize

Vsynergize has been one of the top lead generation companies in more than a decade, and especially focuses on using various available channels to generate the best possible quality leads to their clients.

One of their specialties include data-mining for custom-tailored customer databases where clients can get qualified prospects. Vsynergize then will use various verification method to ensure the clients get the best possible fit according to their buyer persona.

Providing various outsourcing services from data cleansing to appointment setting, Vsynergize can be a good choice if you are looking for a one-stop digital marketing and outsourcing service.

4. TechnologyAdvice

TechnologyAdvice is also a full-service digital marketing agency and marketing tools provider with lead generation as one of their core services.

One of the key qualities of TechnologyAdvice is their huge proprietary database of over 45 million customer contacts from all around the world. Which, when paired with their sophisticated data mining tools, can ensure a great source of qualified leads for any businesses.

Technology advice will use different lead generation and lead nurturing methods according to the client’s needs, from telemarketing to social media marketing to SEO, as well as automating some of your marketing processes.

5. Netline

Netline specializes in using content marketing and content syndication to generate more leads through inbound approaches.

Content syndication, is a nutshell, is publishing content on your business’s behalf on third-party sites to get more leads and backlinks to your own site. This approach can be very effective especially for businesses that can capitalize on content and inbound marketing.

Besides content-focused strategies, Netline also offers various other marketing methods from account-based marketing to funnel acceleration to programmatic advertising solutions to generate more prospects.

A one-stop lead generation service that will suit especially businesses with an existing content marketing presence.

6. CIENCE

CIENCE is a San Francisco-based lead generation company with a global reputation, and called their business PAAS, People-as-a-service.

The idea behind PAAS with CIENCE is combining human intelligence and creativity with digital approaches including A.I. and machine learning to research, generate, and nurture new prospects.  So, their service will focus around dedicated, personalized staffing to grow your business, according to your needs.

CIENCE divides their services into two: outbound and inbound SDR (Sales Development Resources), and will work together with you from researching your needs and your ideal audience’s behavior to developing strategies to actually generate the prospects you need.

Important Factors When Choosing  A Lead Generation Company

Lead generation, by definition, is a relatively simple concept involving three key processes:

1. Attracting people to your brand (or in most cases, your website/landing page)
2. Capturing their contact information, effectively converting a random visitor into an actual lead/prospect
3. Figuring out whether this lead is qualified and worth nurturing (lead qualification).

So, when choosing a lead generation company, we should consider their expertise in these three main processes, namely:

1. How They Actually Attract Visitors

Lead generation companies can use many different approaches to attract and engage with prospects. So, figuring out their approach can be a major factor in determining your choice.

Remember that not only the quantity of the leads is important, but also the quality. So, the process can be really important here, and those that focus on assessing and capitalizing on purchase intent are generally the most reliable. Here are some of them:

Telemarketing

Pretty self-explanatory. The lead generation company calls their contact database to measure their interest. While telemarketing might seems old-school for this digital age, it’s actually a very effective personal approach where the company can measure potential interest for specific products/services.

Content Marketing

Another effective approach nowadays is attracting prospects through content marketing. This is very effective since the lead generation company can establish the client’s position as the expert of the niche, attracting more qualified leads in the process.

Generally, in this approach we use lead magnets to capture the content reader’s information, for example by offering a more in-depth content in the form of ebook or white paper in exchange of their email addresses. Content syndication, which is publishing your content in third-party sites in exchange of leads.

Usually companies who use this approach will also provide content development and SEO consultancy services.

Nurture Campaigns

Here, the lead generation company nurture an existing contact list to convert them into actual leads. The company can use email marketing, online surveys, phone calls, and other approaches to engage the potential prospects.

The goal here is to create a new list consisting of more qualified prospects where your sales team can convert more effectively.

Database Mining

In this approach, the main goal is to “mine” new contacts through various methods including using software and programs to crawl public records and existing databases.

The technology used by the companies can greatly vary (and can sometimes be a scam). So, if a lead generation company offers you this kind of service, make sure to have them demonstrate their approach and learn about it as much as you can before making a decision.

2. Quantity and Quality of Existing Database

Besides generating brand new, organic prospects for your business, some lead generation companies will offer to sell their own contact database.

It’s important to understand that in general, organic contact lists (the ones generated from various methods we’ve discussed above) will perform better than these third-party databases. However, these databases can still produce great results when used properly and when they fit your buyer persona.

It’s important to consider both the size of the database and whether the prospects in the list are aligned with your ideal audience. Buying these leads can be very expensive, and so it’s important to only buy those with the highest chance of conversions.

Some companies will push you to buy these leads, even when they don’t have a campaign that can fit your needs. Avoid these companies, and make sure their database is properly aligned with a program that fit your business.

Conclusion

Choosing the right lead generation company is not simply about finding a vendor that can deliver a high volume of leads. It is about partnering with an agency that understands your market, your sales funnel, and your long-term business objectives. Credibility and a proven track record should always be the foundation of your decision, as these indicators reflect an agency’s ability to generate not just traffic or contacts, but leads that are genuinely qualified and sales-ready. As highlighted throughout this guide, lead generation is a complex and evolving discipline. Buyer behavior continues to shift, digital channels change rapidly, and competition grows more intense each year. Because of this, businesses must look beyond surface-level promises and carefully evaluate how a lead generation provider attracts prospects, captures data, and qualifies leads before passing them to the sales team. An agency that prioritizes alignment with your target audience and funnel stages will consistently outperform one that focuses solely on lead volume. Inbound strategies such as SEO, content marketing, and content syndication have proven to be especially effective for companies seeking sustainable, long-term growth. These approaches not only attract higher-intent prospects but also help build authority, trust, and brand visibility over time. While outbound tactics and third-party databases can still play a role, they must be used strategically and supported by strong nurturing and qualification processes to avoid wasted spend and low conversion rates. Ultimately, outsourcing lead generation should be viewed as a long-term investment rather than a short-term expense. The right partner will integrate seamlessly with your existing marketing and sales efforts, provide transparency through reporting and analytics, and continuously optimize campaigns based on performance data. When done correctly, working with a reputable lead generation agency can create a predictable pipeline of qualified prospects, strengthen your overall marketing strategy, and drive consistent revenue growth over time.

Key Takeaways

• Lead generation is critical but complex
  Generating leads requires time, expertise, and constant adaptation as buyer behavior and digital channels evolve.
• The wrong leads can hurt sales performance
  Poor-quality or misaligned leads waste sales resources and can be counterproductive, making lead quality as important as lead volume.
• Top lead generation companies use different strengths and models
  Some focus on SEO and inbound marketing, others on outbound, databases, content syndication, or hybrid human + AI approaches.
• Choosing the right provider depends on alignment with your funnel and audience
  Businesses must evaluate how agencies attract traffic, capture leads, and qualify prospects – not just pricing or brand reputation.
• Inbound methods deliver more sustainable, long-term growth
  SEO, content marketing, and content syndication tend to produce higher-quality leads over time compared to one-off database purchases.
• Databases can work – but only when used carefully
  Third-party databases can be effective if they match buyer personas and are paired with the right nurturing strategy.
• Lead generation should be viewed as a long-term investment
  The best results come from agencies with proven track records that align lead gen efforts with broader business and revenue goals.

FAQ’s

Q1. What should I look for when choosing a lead generation company?

You should evaluate how the company attracts visitors, captures contact information, and qualifies leads. Their methods, data quality, transparency, and alignment with your target audience are more important than just lead volume or cost.

Q2. Are inbound lead generation strategies better than outbound ones?

Inbound strategies like SEO and content marketing generally produce higher-quality, more sustainable leads over time. Outbound approaches such as telemarketing and database mining can still be effective when executed properly and aligned with buyer intent.

Q3. Is buying lead databases a good idea?

Purchased databases can work if they closely match your ideal customer profile and are used alongside proper nurturing campaigns. However, organic leads typically convert better, and poorly targeted databases can waste budget and sales effort.

Q4. How do lead generation companies qualify leads?

Lead qualification can involve behavioral tracking, engagement scoring, manual verification, surveys, calls, or data validation. The best providers prioritize purchase intent and funnel readiness rather than raw contact numbers.

Q5. How long does it take to see results from a lead generation agency?

Timelines vary by strategy. Outbound and database-driven campaigns may deliver faster results, while SEO and content-based lead generation usually take longer but provide more consistent, long-term growth.

The post Top Lead Generation Agencies To Grow Your Brand appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

Learn more

How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

1. First, Know Your Metrics

Unless you enjoy throwing money down a dark hole without ever really knowing what becomes of it, you’ll have to get to know some basic metrics. Without measurement, marketing is just a guessing game driven by hunches and whim.

Before dipping your toes into the vast, icy waters of SaaS marketing metrics, it might help to understand why they’re the backbone of every successful SaaS marketing strategy.

Without metrics, you’ll never really know how effective your SaaS marketing strategies are. That’s pretty obvious. But perhaps more crucial, for any company that wants to grow, is that metrics can reveal areas of opportunity. Whether it’s new markets, new customers, or new products, moving forward requires looking back at your metrics. Here are a few of the most important marketing metrics for SaaS companies:

1. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). CAC is a measurement of how much it costs to convince someone to buy. Combining sales and marketing expenses for acquiring visitors, then measuring how many of them become leads, and in turn measuring how many of those leads become customers, you’ll arrive at CAC.
   Yes, there’s a bit of math involved. But in the old days, all companies could do was ‘spray and pray’, relying merely on how many leads they got to tell them whether their campaigns were working. Thanks to data-driven advertising campaigns that use tracking codes and powerful data-crunching tools, companies have this great new metric to help them assess their SaaS marketing efforts.

2. LTV (Lifetime Value of a Customer). Hopefully, you’ll have repeat customers, which brings us to LTV. There are all types of customers, and hopefully, through careful targeting and constant mindfulness of customer satisfaction, your business will attract the ‘good’ kind — the kind that sticks around for a long time. The more of those you have, the better your LTV metrics will look.
3. ROI (Return on Investment). The most elemental metric of all, the classic ROI. Simply put, it’s the benefit of your investment divided by the cost of that investment. This metric is versatile, simple, and beloved by SaaS marketing experts since the beginning of time. It’s also a bit rudimentary, which is why it’s best used when combined with other metrics like LTV and CAC.

2. Now, Dig In and Study Your Competitors

Now that you know what to measure, here’s some actual strategy. This first plan of attack is used not just by marketers, but by anyone attempting to win at anything: study the greats. Want to play guitar? Study Slash’s technique. Want to rise to political power? Look at historical figures who’ve made it.

In our case, we’re studying the competitors — especially the really successful ones. We’ll be looking at:

• Get familiar with digital marketing strategies they use for their startup
• How strong their social presence is
• Their organic rankings
• How many backlinks they have
• Whether they run AdWords ads

Ahrefs.com will help out a lot here, showing data on organic ranking, backlinks, and Adwords.

3. Then, Create an SEO Strategy

If SEO marketing for SaaS companies seems dull to you, then perhaps it’s time to adjust your perceptions. True, it’s different from B2C because you’re targeting a narrower, more specialized audience — buyers and business owners. Both groups are generally more knowledgeable than the mass markets that B2C companies deal with. Business buyers are already well past the half-way point on the buyers’ journey by the time they’re ready to engage with an SaaS company’s website.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t respond to engaging content.

Marketing your SaaS company is, in some respects, just like marketing any product to a general consumer audience. Try and provide content that’s useful and which engages your visitors, and then you can start thinking about conversion. This technique, known as content marketing, generates triple the amount of leads when compared to outbound marketing techniques like trade shows and cold calling.

It also helps to have content that’s actionable, and that doesn’t just sit there. If your whitepapers aren’t doing the trick, or if your self-promotional blog posts aren’t converting, it’s time to reassess your SaaS SEO strategy.

To do this, map keywords to the buyers’ journey and create your content accordingly. For example, did you know that 94% of B2B buyers research their purchases online? That right there is a very strong case for putting out some fantastic whitepapers to capture those buyers at that stage of their purchasing journey.

Begin by using keyword planner tools and ahrefs.com to come up with keywords suggestion. Then, create landing pages for each set of keywords you come up with. Finally, support those landing pages with a series of on- and off-site blog posts on the same topic. If you need help you can always reach out to SEO consultants to get professional help on ranking your website on the first page.

4. Next, Optimize Your Website For Conversion & Capture Emails

By now you sense that just having a pretty website is not enough. To capture leads and convert them to subscribers, you’ll need your website to work harder and capture emails for you. Then, once you know as much about your prospects as possible, hit them with stunning emails that reach them at the right time in the buyers’ journey.

Maybe they responded to a whitepaper download CTA. Or maybe they subscribed to your blog after reading a particular post. It’s that sort of information you’ll need to study in order to know where they are in the buyers’ journey.

That will set you up nicely for generating effective nurture campaigns for all those emails you collected. Different prospects will receive different series of emails, depending on how they came to you. Some of your emails will serve to convert prospects who didn’t subscribe to your software, for example. Others may target people who have let their free trial of your SaaS service expire.

Others will be nurtured along the buyers’ journey differently — there are dozens of touchpoints at which you can create opportunities for conversion. Sending the right email is key.

5. Don’t Forget to Submit Your Profile on Review Sites

Just as general consumers turn to Yelp to help them decide where to eat and shop, business software consumers turn to review sites as well.

There are plenty of SaaS directories for listing your business and, since online customer reviews are growing in influence, it’s essential that you check these directories out. Some of the biggest names include:

• Trust Radius
• Capterra
• GetApp

6. Finally, Run Ads

Identify your ideal customer, run paid campaigns and target them on Adwords, Linkedin and Facebook. One thing to keep in mind, so that you don’t bust your budget, is to remember your long tail keywords.

This is especially true for SaaS companies, who may be up against some very stiff competition. Let’s face it, there’s always a big dog who’s all but cornered the market in SaaS products and services.

Then, if you want to up your SaaS marketing game, you’ll want to also set up remarketing campaigns on all platforms and social media sites.

One Final Word…

Now you’ve got your six steps and your work is cut out for you. Better get cracking, since gone are the days when marketers could get by without knowing about metrics, buyer’s journey, keyword-driven content, email nurturing campaigns, and all the ways to use powerful data to run targeted ads.

If you’re feeling a tad overwhelmed, or if you feel your SaaS company can never compete in SEO, think again. SaaS businesses of all sizes are making steady progress with all these techniques I’ve outlined for you here. It’s a matter of studying your customer, learning your metrics, and working with experienced SaaS marketing consultants that fit your SaaS business to a tee.

The post 6 Steps to a Complete Marketing Strategy for SaaS Companies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

It Starts With Research

There’s more to a successful marketing strategy than just your great ideas. You need to do some research so you can back up your plan with actual data. Often, you’ll be surprised at what you find. Your customers may feel much differently than you thought they did, for example. It’s much better to prepared and learn this kind of information early on than have it turn up as a nasty surprise at a more damaging stage. Find out which customer profiles spend the most. Which customers will be most likely to come back?

Get to Know Your Audience

If you want to effectively market to a group of people, you need to get to know them. Your target audience should be something that defines your brand and can be something you come back to when you need to make adjustments to strategy. Find out where your audience spends their time online. What kind of social media do they like? Sites such as Facebook allow you to target your audience based on up to 10 interests. The more knowledge you have, the better you can interest your target market.

Find a New Place to Advertise

One sure sign of an outdated marketing strategy is a company that refuses to (or doesn’t think to) change where they advertise. Don’t throw your money at banner or magazine advertising just because it used to work. People see these conventional ad spots so often that they unconsciously ignore them; they don’t work. Get creative with your advertising dollars.

Use Creative Visuals

People respond to visuals. Identify some unique visuals you can use to make your brand stand out and put them out there. Maybe you’ve got a nice-looking logo, a cool mascot, or even just a very recognizable and branded color scheme. Remember you’re trying to get attention, but you’re also trying to keep that attention, so they’ll remember you later on. People see hundreds of ads in a day, so you need to find a way to make them remember yours. Try and keep things consistent aesthetically so your campaign will be familiar, but not boring.

Spend Your Resources Wisely

When you’re allocating your ad dollars, remember that not every platform is as effective as the next. Do your research and determine which ones are actually worth your money. Some platforms may work great for one business, but that doesn’t mean it will be as effective for yours. Search advertising, for example, can be very useful for an established brand or product/service, but not very useful for a startup company.

Try Micro-targeting

There’s no sense in marketing to everybody. A huge target doesn’t mean huge profits, it likely means you’ll appeal to nobody. The more specific you can target the better. Don’t target women, micro-target young middle-class women in urban areas. Think about what your product does and then think about who will benefit from it. Once you’ve got a target you can create much more effective ads specifically appealing to them.

Throw a Popup Event

Holding a fun event can be a great way to introduce yourself to the community and show them your value. Your best bet is to do something fun that people will want to do, rather than just throwing a trade show. Ask yourself, what would you want to do at a popup event? You could give people a fun inside look at what you do and even let them try something out.

Conclusion

Digital advertising should be a part of every business’ marketing strategy. Life happens online and that is where your audience spends a lot of their time and looks for new solutions to their problems. Improve your marketing strategy with these seven digital advertising ideas.

The post Improve Your Marketing Strategy with these 7 Digital Advertising Ideas appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide to inbound marketing strategy, we will divide our discussion into three big parts. By the end, you can develop a sound inbound marketing strategy and start implementing it.

Let us begin with the first one.

Targeting The Right Audience

Knowing who to target and understanding their needs are very important factors for the success of your inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is ultimately about delivering valuable content to your target audience. Without knowing their needs, you simply can’t deliver value.

The market is also rapidly changing, as do the behaviors and needs of your audience. Focusing on the target audience that matters will also help you in dealing with this changes. So, how can we effectively determine the right audience? Below, we will share some of our methods:

1. Social media insights

If your business already have performing social media profiles with several hundreds followers for each, you can analyze their demographic data to figure out your existing customer base.

Most major social media platforms offer features to analyze the demographic data of your followers, especially their gender, age, and location. For example, if you have a Facebook Page, there’s the “Insights” tab on the top of the page for this purpose.

This is also why social media should be one of your main ways of publishing and promoting content.The more followers and fans you have, the more data you’ll have, and the better you can understand your audience.

2. Conducting Online Surveys

Conducting surveys can be very effective to know your target prospects, and you can easily do this if you already have a growing email database. Also, there are many different tools that can assist you in this process.

The main goal here is to find out your target audience’s needs and problems, so you can ask a question like “what is your current biggest issue related to X (your niche/industry)”. By figuring out their problems, you can then develop content pieces providing solutions to these issues.

3. Conducting Interviews

While broadcasting surveys can be an effective way to figure out the general picture of your target market, it is fairly difficult to capture an in-depth data with it. This is where phone or even in-person interviews can fill in the gap.

Select a few of your existing customers (it’s better to conduct interviews with existing customers compared to prospects, since generally they are more willing), and ask them if it’s okay to conduct short phone calls or video chats (a maximum of 10 minutes). Again, your main goal here is to find out their current problems: ask their current struggles, the solutions they’ve tried in the past, and what are they looking in a solution.

You can then use this data to develop your content.

4. Content Development

Content quality is obviously the core of any inbound marketing strategy. In fact, in theory, if your content quality is excellent, you won’t need any strategy at all.

On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content pieces. Even when a low-quality content somehow rank on the top of search engine results, it won’t bring any business, period.

The value of your content is directly tied to your audience’s needs: a good inbound marketer should always adapt their content according to the current needs of their audience. Yet, it’s not the only thing you should consider when developing your content.

Here are a few areas you should focus on:

Content types

First, understand that textual content, especially blog posts, is still the most effective content form in generating new leads.

However, more and more businesses are shifting towards podcasts and videos, and not without its reasons:you can’t consume textual content while driving or while working out in the gym. Podcasts and videos tackled that issue.

Yet, when researching for services and products, people trust textual content more, especially due to its ability to cover in-depth information.

So, a majority of your content should be textual, while podcasts, videos, and webinars can assist these textual content pieces. For example, you can create a podcast covering an outline for a topic, and offer a link to a more in-depth blog posts covering the same topic. If necessary, you can offer e-books or white papers for even more in-depth information.

Content length

This is the main principle you should understand: the longer is always the better, as long as you can maintain engagement throughout the whole content. Yet, we all know that maintaining quality will be more difficult with longer content pieces. The key is finding that balance.

For textual content pieces, the average word count to maintain this balance looks like to be 1,890 words. For videos? This research by Minimatters might help.

Optimizing titles

Titles, or headlines, if you will, are the first thing people read when they stumbled upon your content, and so they are the ones determining your click-through rate (CTR).

Optimized titles are also important for SEO purposes. You should include your target keyword in the title while making sure the title is also appealing to human readers. Putting the target keyword at the front of the title will also help. For example, if your focus keyword is “Local SEO”, you can make a title like “Local SEO: Top 10 Tactics for Higher Google Maps Results”.

You might want to check this guide by QuickSprout on optimizing headlines.

Optimizing snippet

Similar to titles, your snippet (META description) is very important not only to improve CTR, but for SEO purposes. Include your target keywords, but make sure the description is comprehensive and engaging for human readers.

You might want to check this guide by Neil Patel on how to optimize META description.

Diversify your media

Even if you should focus on primarily textual content pieces, you should utilize other media like images, infographics, audio, and even videos to enrich your content.

Remember that these additional media should support your core content, do not use them just for the sake of it. You can also optimize these images and videos for SEO benefits.

Tell a compelling story

Every human being is attracted to great story: we either spend our lives consuming exciting stories (through books, movies and so on) or writing our own (literally, or by living a successful life).

So, even if your content is technical and data-driven, doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting and fun. Use storytelling techniques to enhance your content, use a conversational approach to engage your audience, and aim to create an interactive story.

Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value if no one consumes it. This is why content development is just half of the process, and you shouldn’t neglect content promotion as the core part of your inbound marketing strategy.

There are various ways to promote your content, and below, we will list some of the most popular (and effective) ones:

1. Social Media Marketing

Quite obvious, with so many people using social media nowadays, it is one of the most effective platforms to promote anything.

The thing is, organic reach on major social media platforms have declined rapidly in recent years. So, you will need to consider paid promotional options. Your main goal here is to have more people sharing your content, which can bring exponential benefits both for short-term and long-term basis.

2. Guest Posting

When done right, guest posting can be very effective inbound marketing strategy. Why? Because you get many different benefits with one action: you get backlinks (probably not immediately, but very possible), you get awareness and authority, and you develop relationships with influencers and high-quality sites.

There are several key principles to a proper guest posting campaign:

• Consistency is key, find as many sites accepting guest posting,and approach all of them
• Take notes on sites with high engagement rates, these are your priorities
• Build relationships before you pitch them with your blog post: engage in their conversations, comment on their previous posts, and so on
• Don’t focus on getting backlinks at first, aim to get authority

3. Influencer Marketing

Utilizing influencers not only can effectively promote your content pieces, but you will also get the benefit of getting backlinks from their authority sites.

Again, here are some key principles for a successful influencer marketing campaign:

• The most important step is finding the right influencers for you. There are many tools that can assist you in this process, for example, Buzzsumo.
• Gradually build a relationship with these influencers. Engage them on their social media profiles, join their conversations, and only after gaining their trust, you can propose them for a content promotion opportunity
• Don’t solely focus on major influencers and celebrities, micro-influencers can also provide values

4. Host a Webinar

You can utilize webinars to promote your brand or your personality, while also indirectly promote your content. Host a free webinar session in exchange for their email address, which can be an effective lead generation device.

If you can provide value, people who attended your webinar might also be interested in future content, as you establish your position as the thought leader of your niche.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective tactic not only to promote your content, but also to encourage those who have consumed your content to convert.

Here are some important principles for a successful email marketing campaign:

• Be consistent and think long-term, regularly provide excellent content through email marketing. Don’t focus on hard-selling your products, but focus on providing value
• Understand the behavior and needs of your email subscribers (back to section I). You simply need to provide them with proper values, a reason to stay subscribed
• Personalize your email marketing by using first names. Many email marketing tools can help with this
• Use an interesting, engaging subject line.
• Keep your email messages to-the-point and engaging, you can use animated gifs, images, and even videos, but make sure they have decent loading speed
• Make sure all email messages are mobile-responsive

6. SEO

SEO is obviously an inseparable aspect of inbound marketing, and the primary way you can increase your content’s visibility.

To maximize your SEO results, there are four main areas to focus on:

• Make sure your content is targeting a proper keyword with enough search volume. Check the top-ranking content pieces of this keyword, and aim to develop a better content
• Optimize these keywords on your content, but don’t overstuff the keywords. Include keyword variants and make sure they occur naturally
• Use various content promotion techniques discussed above to generate more backlinks
• Work with SEO expert and consultant to streamline your traffic improvements and avoid search engine penalties

Remember, however, that SEO is a long-term game. Be consistent with your SEO optimizations, and expect at least 6 to 12 months before you see your content on the first page of search results.

Utilizing Your Content to Achieve Results

Inbound marketing won’t bring any value on its own, unless it can generate traffic (leads), educate customers (lead nurturing) or encourage conversions.

Below, we will discuss how to optimize inbound marketing in those three different areas.

1. Lead Generation

The most common practice in this aspect is to offer free but valuable content to acquire leads. You can offer well-researched reports, white papers, e-books, or even in-depth videos and webinar sessions in exchange of their email address.

The key here is obviously the value of your content: the more valuable it is, the more leads you can capture. Check out some of the best examples of this practice, as compiled by Contently.

There are other tactics you can try, for example, offering your readers to subscribe to your email newsletter within your blog post.

2. Lead Nurturing

This is the stage where most inbound marketing practices shine the brightest. Your content will be a powerful weapon to nurture your prospects until they are finally ready to purchase. There are two main goals here:

• Establish trust and credibility. The thing is, people only want to purchase from brands they can trust. This is the most important purpose of inbound marketing.
• Educating your audience about your product or service, especially your unique value proposition. Only when people realize your unique values, they will purchase your product and not your competitor’s.

In this stage, inbound marketing will be even more effective when combined with other lead nurturing campaigns like email marketing and social media marketing among others.

The key here is to refer to the two main goals discussed above when planning and developing your content pieces.

3. Conversion

There are two different conversions to discuss here: converting visitors to prospects/leads, and converting leads into actual customers.

Inbound marketing is very effective in driving blog visitors into leads, as we have discussed on the lead generation section above. However, inbound marketing is less effective at converting leads into actual customers, although it’s not impossible.

Here are some key tactics you can implement to optimize conversions:

• Optimize your site and landing pages

Make sure all your pages, including your email content is mobile-responsive and have fast loading speeds.

If you include links, make sure it is easy enough to click on mobile device.Similarly, make sure all forms are easy to fill on phone screens, and don’t use too many fields (4-5 is the maximum).

• Optimize CTA placements

You can include CTA buttons within your content. Yet, make sure the placement doesn’t disrupt the user in consuming the content. You might want to check this guide by Crazy Egg (written by Neil Patel) on optimizing CTA buttons.

• Monitor and Refine

Monitor the performance of your content, and aim to refine future content pieces according to this data. You can also re-optimize or even leverage existing content pieces.

End Words

As you can see, although inbound marketing seemed like a simple strategy at first, there are many different tactics and optimizations you can implement to maximize your results.

Inbound marketing is a very effective way especially to generate and nurture leads. The key here is to understand your audience, especially their needs and behaviors, and provide values and solutions according to their needs and problems.

If you work with a professional digital marketing consultant to implement inbound marketing properly, you will see sustainable growth in your business.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.