The ultimate guide to SaaS marketing tools 2022

Let’s start with a disclaimer: there is no single martech stack that suits all companies and all needs. Depending on your expectations, audience, the notoriety and attractiveness of your company, some tools will be indispensable while others are more superfluous. A company that sells its products or services directly to the consumer (B2C), for example, does not use the same channels or the same techniques as another that only addresses companies and organizations (B2B); hence the different technological needs.

However, marketers have long dreamed of a five-legged sheep capable of meeting all their requirements. But some specific needs require specialized tools, which bring finesse and functional richness. The evolution of the market reflects this complexity: in a single decade, we’ve witnessed some 150 marketing solutions develop into… 8,000! This is a staggering increase, as evidenced by this other figure: of all the solutions presently on the market, one in five didn’t exist just two years ago.

Zoom into the heart of this growing market.

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Which SaaS solutions help generate leads?

Marketing automation has become essential to increase your campaigns’ efficiency and help you reach your business objectives. It can be defined as a series of actions designed to optimize lead generation and their progression in the funnel. So, how can you successfully generate leads, and with which tools?

Lead generation: guiding principles.

Generate, nurture, and convert leads. That’s what lead generation is all about. What’s a lead? Any person who has expressed an interest in your company’s products or services: request for information by phone or via your website, download of one of your documents, registration for a webinar or sales event, underlying signals, such as frequent visits to your product pages.

Lead generation is about attracting potential customers with relevant offers and content. Once you arouse their interest and they form a positive opinion, these prospects can be contacted directly.

Lead generation: how to proceed?

The final objective is to make a sale. The company achieves this in several steps:

1. Generation of contacts
   through various traffic sources;
2. Nurturing, or educating these contacts
   ‍(better understanding their needs and guiding them in the search for appropriate solutions);
3. Evaluation as a “marketing qualified lead.”
   Once the lead has shown enough interest in a company’s offerings, a company representative can call them to offer their services, with an initial personalized contact with the insights gathered. This information can come from a form filled out to download an ebook, watch a webinar or listen to a podcast, test a tool or trial version, and more.

All this is called the conversion funnel. Several models exist; this funnel model has the merit of simplicity:

• 1st Step: TOFU (stands for Top OF FUnnel).
  This is your company’s first contact with a potential prospect. You have the opportunity to “introduce” yourself to this future buyer. To do this, you have blog articles, posts on social networks, videos, and podcasts, etc.
• 2nd Step: MOFU (Middle OF the FUnnel)
  Prospects already know you and are genuinely interested in your company and its offerings. You need to continue to nurture that interest, through content such as white papers, webinars, and case studies.
• 3rd Step: BOFU (Bottom Of the FUnnel)
  A relationship is established, your random visitors have now become prospects, trust your company, and need a final nudge before becoming customers. Trials, demos, and sharing best practices are now your allies.

Before the development of the web and digital marketing, brands used to attract attention by posting themselves at an audience hub and shouting as loud as possible. Today, customers first seek information on their own. The first commercial contact is later, so a relationship must be established beforehand and then cultivated. Content is now the key to this. But the right content has to reach the right audience at the right time.

Such is the vocation of marketing automation solutions: to help brands orchestrate scenarios that move contacts through all the stages of the conversion funnel.