SaaS Omnipresence: How to Win In Your SaaS Niche

This week’s featured article is about how to absolutely dominate your SaaS niche using retargeting, outbound custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.

I have a feeling this might be one of the most valuable articles you’ve ever read on positioning your SaaS firm as #1 in the minds of your prospects, rapidly scaling up MRR, and increasing your sales conversion rates.

At minimum, forward it along to your marketing manager or agency so they can implement it.

And if you like it, I encourage you to take one minute and apply to join our community, SaasRise here. We’re building the #1 community for SaaS CEOs and founders focused on rapidly growing MRR. We’d love to have you in it!

I’ll be back in touch next week with even more killer SaaS scaling content. I’m here to help!

All the best,
Ryan Allis
CEO & Founder, SaasRise
SaaS Growth & Scaling Community

Omnipresence: How to Absolutely Dominate Your SaaS Niche Using Retargeting, Outbound Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences

By Ryan Allis, Founder of SaaS Circle & Former CEO/Co-Founder of iContact

Achieving omnipresence online in the minds of your prospects is actually not that difficult or expensive. And it can be set up in about one day of work by turning on retargeting ads, outbound sales list custom audience ads, and a customer lookalike list ads.

If you’re a B2B SaaS provider, you can achieve omnipresence for around $50 per day in ad spend on LinkedIn, Meta, and Google Display Network. If you’re a B2C SaaS provider, you can still achieve this, but your potential audience is larger so it will cost a bit more.

Being omnipresent online within your niche is absolutely essential to MRR growth and being respected by your prospects, partners, and potential team members.

And it’s really not that hard to appear omnipresent to the 50,000 or 100,000 people who might fit squarely within your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) – as long as you already have an email list of them to create a custom audience with or have at least 1000 existing prospects you can build a lookalike audience from.

And if you don’t already have this list, you can buy or build it quickly.

I define omnipresence as simply this: at least 25% of your ICP in your geographic target market is seeing one of your ads at least weekly.

If you can make this happen, you’ll see extraordinary differences in conversion rates, the way prospects treat your salespeople, and the way people talk about your brand in the marketplace.

So how do you set your company up to appear omnipresent online? There are 3 Steps to Digital Omnipresence for SaaS companies.

Just set the following up over the next few days (it’s maybe 3-5 hours of work total to do a basic v1 setup)…

1. Retargeting - Install retargeting pixels for Meta, LinkedIn, and Google Display Network and turn on $10/day of retargeting ads to start so that website visitors and prospects see your ads everywhere they go on the internet.
   

2. Outbound Audience Matching - (This is the one few firms do yet yet but is super powerful) Upload your outbound sales email lists to create a custom audience on Meta, LinkedIn, and Google Display Network and start serving ads to this audience so they see your ads before they hear from you via email.

   1. On Meta, this is called Custom Audience Remarketing

   2. On LinkedIn, this is called Matched Audience Contact Targeting

   3. On Google Ads, this is called Customer Match Remarketing
      

3. Prospect Lookalike List - Finally, upload your existing customer list (if more than 1000 customers) and/or your existing qualified prospect list to Meta and LinkedIn and create a 0.1% match Lookalike Audience. Then start serving ads to this audience which is highly similar to your existing customers or prospects. Track the CPL and CPA and scale up what works.

Do all three of these steps and you’ll appear to be omnipresent everywhere your qualified prospects go online on their computer or mobile phone. Even more specific tips on how to do all this the right way are below.

You can set up all three of these steps yourself within a 3-5 hours of work or if easier, simply forward this post to your marketing manager or ad agency to set it up for you. This isn’t rocket science. It’s just a matter of doing it.

Want someone to do this for you? If you don’t want to do it yourself and want an agency to set this up for you, you can hire the one I founded, Hive Digital.

Achieving Omnipresence for Bob The Prospect

Let’s take the case of Bob, an ideal prospect in your target market.

1. Bob is reading the Wall Street Journal online at 8am – boom there’s your ad via the Google Display network offering a case study.
   

2. Now it’s 2pm and Bob is on LinkedIn searching for job candidates. Boom – there’s your ad offering a demo.
   

3. Now it’s 10pm and Bob is scrolling his Instagram feed – boom there’s your ad offering a recorded educational webinar next week.

Everywhere Bob goes. There you are. All moving your prospect forward in the sales cycle and down the sales funnel. This is omnipresence.

All possible due to matching Bob’s email (which you already have or get from Seamless.ai, Apollo, Uplead, Zoominfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, etc.) with the email that he uses on LinkedIn, Meta, Google Drive, and YouTube. If it’s the same, it’s a match.

Match rates for B2B lists are usually around 30-50% on LinkedIn (since most people use their professional email there) and around 15-30% on Facebook (since many people use their personal emails).

Measure the success of the retargeting campaign by the increase in visits to your site from people who are actively considering your product, increases in booked demos, increases in case studies downloaded, increases in SQLs, and a shortened length of sales cycle.

Measure the success of your outbound audience and lookalike campaign by the CPL, cost per MQL, number of leads, number of MQLs, number of demos, and number of closed customers in a quarter.

The difference between “just another competitor” and “the competitor that dominates mindshare” in the mind of your prospect is everything when it comes to sales demo show up rates, free trial conversion rates, and customer word-of-mouth.

This is one of the most fun topics to write about because it’s so effective right now at driving additional customer acquisition (through higher conversion rates, more trials, more demos, and shorter sales cycles).

These are the types of topics we talk about all the time inside SaaS Circle, our our private membership community for growth-focused SaaS CEOs and Founders. We started it September 15 and already have 56 members inside – all SaaS CEOs/Founders helping each other grow MRR faster. You can apply to join us here.

A Deeper Dive Into Retargeting, Outbound Audience Matching, and Lookalike Audiences

Now, let’s go a bit deeper into each of these three areas.

Step 1: Set Up Prospect Retargeting Ads

Show ads to bring people who have already visited your site in the last 180 days back to your site on Meta, LinkedIn, and Google Display network.

1. Retargeting will often shorten your sales cycles and increase the perception among prospects that “you are everywhere.”
   

2. Usually $10-$20 per day is enough to start depending on how many visitors you’re already getting. Around $10 in retargeting per 1000 daily visitors is enough to ensure most of your visitors see your ad a few times per week. So if you have 5,000 daily visitors (a lot for a B2B SaaS site), $50/day is sufficient retargeting spend.
   

3. Using custom pixels that fire when certain actions occur, you can show different ads based on the actions they’ve previously taken. For example:

   1. An ad for a trial user designed to get them to log back into the product and start using it

   2. An ad for a prospect who has booked a sales demo promoting a client case study PDF download

   3. An ad for someone who has only visited your site, encouraging them to download an educational PDF lead magnet and give you their email address so you can get them on your automated prospect follow-up list

   4. An ad for your existing customers telling them about new features so they use the product more and more.
      

4. If you don’t yet have a visitor’s email address, your goal should be to offer them something valuable in exchange for it so that you can get them on your list and into the top of your funnel.
   

5. If you already have your prospect’s email address, your goal should be to build authority with them (through case studies and valuable educational content) and drive them into a free trial or a sales demo of your product.

Step 2: Match Outbound Lists to Custom Audiences on Meta, LinkedIn, and Google Display

This is one of the most powerful techniques for “blanketing the airwaves” and ensuring that your prospects in your ABM lists that are being reached in your outbound campaigns know about your brand and value proposition BEFORE you email them.

1. First build or buy an email list for your exact niche and Ideal Client Profile (ICP). If you can build/buy a 20,000-100,000 contact email list of people in your ICP, that will be gold.
   

2. You can build the list using Seamless.ai, Apollo, Uplead, Zoominfo, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
   

3. I personally use Seamless.ai + LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Or you can use Google to find someone who’s already built an email list of people in your exact target market and purchase it.
   

4. Then, upload that email list to Meta, LinkedIn, and Google to create a Custom Audience using that list. Make sure the email list is at least 1000 contacts for it to work. The bigger the better, as long as all the contacts are in your ICP.

   1. On Meta, this is called Custom Audience Remarketing

   2. On LinkedIn, this is called Matched Audience Contact Targeting. You can choose to target the exact matched people on the prospect list (recommended to start with) or all the people who work at the companies on the list, or all the people with certain job titles at the companies on the list.

   3. On Google Ads, this is called Customer Match Remarketing

5. Depending on the social platform, around 15% to 50% of the emails will match an exact user profile.
   

6. Then, turn on ads to these audiences.
   

7. To be clear, with this strategy you’re showing ads to people who are in your target market but who are NOT yet active prospects or customers. They are however people who are in your target market (target job title + target company size + target industry) that you’ve sourced from built or bought outbound sales lists.
   

8. Send this traffic to a landing page either promoting a free trial of your product or a PDF lead magnet (case study or how-to guide that builds authority within your niche)
   

9. Calculate the CPL and CPA and if the CPL and CPA is profitable, scale up the daily ad spend.
   

10. Start with $40/day of ad spend and scale it up if it works. Offer either a free trial, free demo, case study, or educational PDF lead magnet in exchange for the visitor email address.
    

11. Then get the lead onto an automated email nurturing sequence designed to get them to take a demo/sign up as a customer.
    

Combining Outbound Audience Ads With Outbound Email: If your Annual Contract Value (ACV) is above $10k (minimum needed to make outbound cost effective), you can also send 1:1 emails to the people on the list (aka outbound marketing) so that the prospect is hearing about your product via email and via ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Google Display Network. You can do this yourself (see Reply.io, Outreach, or YAMM), via an SDR, or via an outsourced firm like Revenue Accelerator).

Step 3: Start Marketing to a Prospect Lookalike Audience

Now let’s talk about how to acquire more customers and prospects that are psychographically and demographically similar to your existing customers and prospects (similar interests, geographies, ages, genders, job titles, income levels etc.).

Lookalike audiences are audiences on Meta (Facebook + Instagram + WhatsApp + Messenger) and LinkedIn that are highly similar to existing customer lists or prospect lists. Here’s how to do it.

1. Upload your customer list to Meta and LinkedIn to create a custom audience of people who are very similar to your existing customers psychographically and demographically.

   1. This only works on Meta and LinkedIn. Google Display used to have something called “Similar Audiences” but they don’t any longer.
      

2. I recommend using a 0.1% match to start with (which means only people who are 99.9% similar), then calculating the CPL/CPA, and then if you max out the 0.1% match moving to a 0.2% match, and so on.

3. Do an initial test of ad spend to this audience to determine the CPL and CPA.

   1. Decide on whether you are optimizing based on the cost per lead, cost per MQL, cost per SQL, or cost per customer. If you have a low price (under $200/mo) and a short sales cycle (under 2 weeks) optimize based on cost per customer. If you have a high price and a long sales cycle, optimize initially based on cost per MQL or SQL.
      

4. You’ll want to spend enough in the test that you get at least 2-3 paying customers from the audience

   1. A good rule of thumb for a test budget is whatever the amount of money usually needed to acquire 2-3 incremental customers or 20-30 incremental qualified leads (enough leads that a couple convert into paying customers over the following months).
      

5. A $5k-$10k test for each channel (LI, Meta) should do it for most SMB/Mid-market SaaS providers. It may take more like $25k to do a proper test to determine the CPL and CPA for a higher produced offering.
   

6. Be sure you know your maximum CPA that you’re willing to spend to acquire an incremental customer.

   1. For venture backed high growth SaaS companies this is usually around 9-12 months of upfront revenue spent on S&M to acquire an incremental customer.

   2. For bootstrapped SaaS companies where profitability is essential, this is usually around 3-6 months of upfront revenue spent on S&M to acquire an incremental customer
      

7. If your CPA is below your maximum CPA, scale up your ad spend. If it’s not, improve your landing page, audience, call-to-action, ad, and offer continually until it is.
   

8. Keep doing testing and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) on your ad image, ad headline, ad copy, landing page, lead magnet, and follow-up sequence so that you can reduce your CPL and CPA – and be able to increase your monthly spend so you can dominate your market.

Follow the steps above and you’ll likely see a noticeable increase in your sales activities and new MQLs per month.

Have questions about how to implement this? Apply to join SaaS Circle and I’ll personally help you out inside the community.

Achieving Digital Dominance In Your Niche

Digital dominance combined with clear CPL and CPA goals is the way we got iContact to 70,000 paying customers and $50M ARR and a $169M exit to a publicly traded company and that way I guided the CEOs of Tatango, Green Packet, Seamless.ai, Pipeline, and Dow Janes to over $250M in collective annual sales and over 400,000 paying customers.

And digital dominance (combining paid search + paid social + content marketing + outbound sales + affiliate marketing) is the way you’ll break out the growth plateau and get your SaaS business above $50M ARR and to a 9 figure exit.

I hope this guide has been helpful. For more support, take a moment to join our weekly SaaS CEO mastermind here. We meet every Wednesday! We’re building the #1 community for SaaS founders focused on rapidly growing MRR.

About this article: If you like this article and want more my free 1240 slide SaaS Growth Playbook goes into even greater detail about each stage of this process.

How to Work Together: For more resources and to learn more about our B2B SaaS CEO Coaching service working directly with Ryan, visit www.hillcanyon.com.

Join the Community: For more how-to-scale-up support and content, apply to join SaaS Circle, our mastermind community for growth-focused SaaS CEOs. We offer a free two-week trial to the community for qualified SaaS CEOs and founders.

About The Author

Four Helpful Free SaaS Growth Resources

The most in-depth guide for scaling up SaaS companies from $0 to $50M in ARR. Including over 1,200 slides on every aspect of SaaS scaling.

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We’ll see you next week with more great SaaS growth and scaling content!