Without a well-thought-out marketing funnel, your efforts to promote your SaaS product won’t be nearly as effective. The funnel will help you direct traffic, so to speak, and understand why certain users have converted while others have not. 

In order to be effective, every marketing funnel needs to be based on as much business-specific data as possible. If you are just starting out, use industry benchmarks to guide your funnel creation. However, you’ll likely need to tweak your expectations along the way, as concrete data starts pouring in. 

Identify the Proper Stages 

You will first need to identify each stage of your sales funnel. Most of them have three: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Others also have interest, intent, and evaluation stages. 

You will need to know what each stage means specifically for your business. For example, perhaps most potential leads will jump right into the consideration stage if your brand is a household name. Slack, for instance, is such a brand. Even if you’ve never used it, chances are you’ve heard of it. 

Map out as much as you can about each stage and the audience that comprises it. The better you understand them, the more effective the funnel will be. 

Don’t forget that leads can skip stages and that they can also go back a stage, especially if they have not engaged with your brand for a while. 

Understand What Each Stage Needs 

You will then need to create a specific type of content for each stage of the funnel. People who are already familiar with your brand won’t want to hear about what it can do in general terms. They will want to know the specifics and will need a more detailed and information-packed approach. 

Don’t forget to also consider how you will market each of these content pieces and where. Top-of-the-funnel content needs to rank well so that even people who’ve never heard of your brand can find it. Content targeting audiences in the awareness or evaluation stage can be served on your social media as well, for example. 

There will be a certain amount of overlap, as certain visitors in a later stage will also want to read your content aimed at top-of-the-funnel leads. However, don’t make the mistake of trying to appeal to this minority too. Stick to your designated audience and stage. 

Choose Your Metrics and KPIs

In order to measure the success of your efforts, you will need to set certain metrics and KPIs. Monitoring practically all of them will be practically impossible, so always limit yourself to support your business goals (more on that in a bit). 

For example, if you are trying to achieve more on a budget, your ad spend and cost per acquisition will be more important. If you want to raise brand awareness, you will want to monitor your social mentions. If you want to rank better, impressions will matter more. 

Try your best to ignore the metrics that don’t play into your overarching goals, even if they are underperforming. You will need a lot of effort to keep all of them going strong at all times. 

Set Your Goals

If your business is new, try not to set very specific figures for it. Once you see how your pages are performing and how each marketing tactic is working, you can start assigning numbers to each goal. 

What you should do instead is consider goals in more general terms: you want to sell more of a specific product, you want more email subscribers, you want a certain percentage of repeat customers, and so on. 

Align the metrics we’ve discussed above with said goals, and understand how a figure supports the goal. 

Know How to Reach Each Goal 

And now, for the fun part, and the most important part of creating a profitable SaaS marketing funnel: understand how the funnel actually works and what it takes to guide each lead from one stage to the next. 

You’ve set your goals and you have the metrics to support them. You know your stages, and you know what you need to deliver in each. How each stage leads into the lower one is key. 

When creating content for the top of your funnel, make sure there is a clear path forward. An email signup CTA is a good first step. When writing content for the middle of the funnel, ensure that it’s very easy to convert from there. Mention a specific product and link to other pieces of content that provide more information. 

There’s a very useful feature in Google Analytics, called “content drilldown,” which you can use. It will show you the journey your users take on your website. You’ll know where they’ve exited, so you can then improve that page to ensure people move further down the funnel.

Understand Where Sales and Marketing Meet 

Finally, you need to ensure that your sales and marketing efforts are aligned. These two teams are often at odds with each other, and you are missing valuable opportunities as a result. 

For example, if you are currently working on a specific feature of your tool and it may currently be a bit sluggish, don’t let the marketing team promote it. If you have added a new feature, make sure your marketing efforts reflect it. If your marketing team knows your customers have a certain question, let the sales team know so they can address it on time. 

If you are outsourcing your marketing, make sure to only work with good SaaS link building companies. They will already have plenty of experience in managing these two sides of the digital coin, and they can make a project run much more smoothly.

Wrapping Up 

Creating a profitable SaaS funnel can be a challenge. Know that you will need to keep tweaking it as you learn more about your audience and as you monitor how the first one is performing. As long as you are flexible about it, you will be successful in the long run.