Nick Brown is the Founder and CEO of accelerate agency, a SaaS SEO & content agency. Working with enterprise and scale-up brands.
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Whatever type of marketing you do, I’m sure you know all about funnels. You almost certainly have your company’s funnel mapped out on a slide deck, and if I asked, I bet you can explain it in detail to the CEO, COO or one of your sales managers. But let me ask you: Do you have a “pre–funnel”?
If you’re in SaaS marketing, you need to.
A pre-funnel is the mechanism for preparing future customers to be “funnel-ready” when they next need your SaaS product. For example, if you provide HR SaaS, your product might only be appropriate for companies with 20 or more employees. But what about growing companies that still only have 15 employees? Or 10? Wouldn’t it be good to ensure they know your brand and value your product before they become potential customers?
That’s what the pre-funnel does. If you’re the CMO of a growing SaaS company and don’t invest in a well-designed pre-funnel, I think you are taking a huge risk. Here’s why.
An SEO Pre-Funnel Is the Next Level
When SaaS companies launch, they tend to initially rely on paid search, also known as pay-per-click (PPC), to generate sales early on. PPC is great for producing leads quickly and on-demand. As companies get bigger, however, they outgrow this source of sales leads. This is because the marginal cost of leads derived from PPC increases as you compete for more and more keywords. Eventually, the cost per acquisition grows too high to justify more PPC spend. This can create a pretty serious growth trap.
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The way to avoid this trap is to implement a strong, organic SEO strategy long before the returns of PPC have diminished too much. You need to start early because ranking for important SaaS keywords takes time. Once in place, however, a good SEO plan lowers the cost per lead as you grow. When you reach this point — getting more leads for a lower cost per lead — you may think you’ve cracked SEO.
But — and this can be a nasty surprise if you’re not ready for it — even organic SEO has a ceiling. There are only so many keywords to rank for, and while ranking first for a major keyword is fantastic, you will never, of course, rank higher than first.
But is there a next level to SaaS SEO? Yes; that’s the “pre-funnel” I’ve been talking about.
How a Pre-Funnel Can Help With SaaS SEO
Ranking for SaaS keyword searches is really important, but it’s not a complete digital marketing strategy. Potential customers do not all suddenly realize they need a product and then type the desired keywords into a Google search bar. Sometimes this happens, but human beings are complicated, and we don’t make purchasing decisions in a vacuum.
Here’s what I mean: Imagine you’re a company that needs that HR SaaS I mentioned before — and you’ve just hit 20 employees. Now imagine that you’ve been reading content from one HR SaaS provider for months, maybe years, before you hit the 20-employee mark. Is your Google search going to be something nice and general — the sort of keywords everyone is competing for? Or might you instead search for a specific term used regularly in the content from that SaaS company? Or would you simply search for that SaaS provider by name?
That is the magic of the pre-funnel. When done correctly, potential clients are already familiar with a SaaS brand and will have built trust in the company over time. Instead of casting the net widely for their next SaaS purchase, they will likely just start with a brand they know. Can you afford to not be that brand?
Attracting Personas, Not Customers
The job of a pre-funnel is not to target people ready to buy. It is to target the types of people who might buy in the future. Who are these people?
They’re not people with problems who are looking for solutions. People with problems to solve are customers now and will be attracted to your normal SaaS SEO content (assuming you’ve got a good SEO strategy, of course). The people you want to attract to your pre-funnel are the types of people for who your product was designed (also known as “personas”).
You likely already have a list of personas that were created during your brand design. This is who you want to start consuming your pre-funnel content. And there are more personas you should consider attracting, too. Early on, when your SaaS product was in the user experience (UX) stage of development, the UX designer may have also drawn up a list of user personas. These are not always the same as marketing personas, and it would be good to attract them to your pre-funnel as well. If you don’t have access to your product’s UX personas, go find them ASAP — someone at your company will most likely have them on a file somewhere.
Who Does Pre-Funnels Well?
HubSpot is a prime example of a SaaS company with a great pre-funnel. They have a comprehensive and renowned sales and marketing blog. Only some of the content relates to HubSpot’s own products. Instead, they focus on creating content that is certain to interest the types of people who are likely to someday need a product like HubSpot.
What happens when that day arrives? Someone who has been reading HubSpot content for years is likely to suggest signing up for HubSpot. And it’s likely that the decision-maker who needs to sign off on the purchase knows all about HubSpot, too. And then, instead of searching for “customer relationship management software,” they will most likely just search for “HubSpot.”
Creating this type of brand awareness and loyalty before a potential customer even engages with your marketing funnel should be the ultimate prize for any marketing. Honestly, if your company does this well, congratulations — you’ve just won the internet!
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Author: Nick Brown, Forbes Councils Member
