Most people in the SaaS industry are familiar with data analytics. They know data should be integral to their digital marketing strategies, and that the right insights can help teams test their theories, learn about their audiences, and make informed decisions.
But what does that look like in practice? How can a B2B SaaS marketing agency use marketing metrics to identify tactics that work for their audience and inform their strategy?
We asked Rebecca Graves, co-founder of the Spot On Agency, to share how we apply data analytics in marketing to help our clients make meaningful improvements. Here were her main takeaways.
Measuring conversions is essential for any marketing strategy. Defining what marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) mean for your business can help you align your marketing and sales strategies,, ensuring that your marketing tactics send high-quality leads to your sales team.
"You should track conversion metrics from MQL to SQL and from SQL to opportunities to identify if you have a leaky funnel. Then, you can determine how marketing can send more high-quality leads to sales efficiently." — Rebecca Graves, co-founder at Spot On
However, focusing on conversion before you have enough website traffic is a common mistake. After all, you can’t turn visitors into leads if you can’t get enough prospects into your marketing funnel.
Moreover, using data analytics to test and refine your strategy requires statistically significant sample sizes. If you don’t have enough visitors, your data insights may be inaccurate and send you down the wrong path.
Therefore, you must drive high-quality traffic before investing in generating conversions. An experienced B2B SaaS marketing agency can help you do just that by crafting a holistic SaaS marketing strategy that encompasses SEO, content marketing, online advertising, social media marketing, and more to attract your target audience.
At Spot On, we partner alongside you every step of the way. And after you’ve gained traction, we help you leverage data insights to identify gaps in your marketing funnel, recommend impactful website improvements, and choose the most effective B2B SaaS marketing channels for your brand.
Your marketing strategy should address all buyer journey stages — from awareness and consideration to decision and loyalty/advocacy. To account for each stage, you need to consider the performance of your entire SaaS marketing funnel.
SEO and content marketing are essential for guiding the audience through the customer lifecycle stages. Analyzing your SaaS marketing funnel metrics can give you insights into where you're losing prospects and how you can create content to fill gaps.
"You must use content to guide your audience through the customer journey. A B2B SaaS marketing agency knows what works and which SEO keywords to target for specific stages to answer your audience's questions, address their pain points, and connect the dots." — Rebecca Graves, co-founder at Spot On
When addressing their funnels, SaaS companies tend to make some common mistakes, including only creating top-of-the-funnel pieces (e.g., a blog post about HIPAA-compliant billing for EHRs) without publishing mid-funnel content (e.g., case studies and product comparisons) to address buyer concerns, nurture relationships, and build credibility.
We’ve also seen many companies dive straight into promoting demos, neglecting to educate leads on how a solution solves their pain points and why it’s better than competitors’ products. Warming up leads is particularly critical in healthcare, where broad-scale changes often involve multiple decision-makers and extensive deliberation on the cost of abandoning an existing system.
To determine if you have a leaky funnel, track the number of unique visits, time-on-page, bounce rates, and exit rates for each type of content. Then, identify patterns to evaluate which topics resonate with your audience and what you can improve, optimize, or discard.
Getting prospects to consume your content is just the beginning. Are they taking the next steps? Data insights on how visitors interact with your website help you make targeted improvements on website design and user flow to drive conversions.
A B2B SaaS marketing agency uses behavioral analytics tools like Hotjar to see how visitors interact with your content. Hotjar creates a heat map to help you understand user behaviors and learn how far down visitors scroll, what links they click, and from which point they leave the page. Then, you can use the insights to adjust your website to guide visitors toward a desired action.
Moreover, an experienced agency partner also optimizes your website with the right keywords to attract high-quality traffic. For example, we’ve helped many tailor their content to the right audience by shifting from broad keywords that attract consumer-focused traffic to more specific terms that bring in the right B2B audience.
We also examine forms and landing pages, two critical elements for engaging audiences. Driving traffic without converting visitors is a recipe for poor ROI. We conduct A/B tests, evaluate a page’s conversion rates, and recommend strategic improvements, such as revising page content or reducing form fields to minimize friction.
The B2B SaaS marketing channels you use to distribute content are as important as your messaging. You may post on LinkedIn and Facebook and get similar traffic volumes. By tracking leads through to conversions, however, you might find that LinkedIn leads are more likely to turn into customers.
“We use metrics to see which traffic sources bring in the highest-quality prospects and identify the right channels for our clients. We also use data analytics to understand the role of each channel in your marketing strategy. For example, one email may seem insignificant, but it can play a pivotal role in promoting a webinar, building anticipation for a product launch, or getting leads to download a white paper.” — Rebecca Graves, co-founder at Spot On
An experienced B2B SaaS marketing agency helps its clients set the stage for success by identifying the right KPIs based on their business stage and goals:
After we map out the right KPIs for your company, for example, we then set up proper tracking and attribution to compare channel performance, such as using UTM parameters for every campaign link, integrating platforms like CRM, analytics, and marketing automation for a full-funnel view, and implementing a multi-touch attribution model to assess the impact of a campaign on the entire buyer journey.
With this solid foundation, we can perform a cohort analysis to track users by acquisition channel and understand each channel’s long-term value. Our team can also help you break down performance at each buyer journey stage per channel to evaluate the quality of the leads.
Collecting data is the easy part. Identifying the right KPIs and making sense of all the metrics is where the magic happens.
An experienced B2B SaaS marketing agency uses advanced tools and techniques to slice and dice the data — analyzing it in isolation and with a big-picture lens to generate meaningful insights.
“We use Databox to pull data from multiple sources, such as Google Analytics, Search Console, HubSpot, Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. Our consolidated dashboard helps us connect the data points, see the big picture, identify trends, and turn insights into action.” — Rebecca Graves, co-founder at Spot On
A B2B SaaS marketing agency helps you track your monthly, quarterly, and annual metrics, then proactively identify potential issues to adjust your strategy based on your business objectives. An experienced agency will be transparent about the data and processes — the good, bad, and ugly. You're probably not getting the complete picture if you only receive good news.
At Spot On, we combine our data expertise with years of healthcare marketing experience to help our clients build a strategy-first SaaS healthcare marketing plan. Schedule a meeting to discuss how we can help you maximize your ROI with data insights.
