Step-by-Step Guide: Drive Inbound Leads with Benchmarking

This week, I’ve been working on a benchmarking marketing campaign for a SaaS client. It makes for a brilliant middle-of-funnel campaign that can drive a massive number of inbound leads into your funnel.

I’ll explain how it works so you can create a similar campaign for your prospects. I’ll also outline how you can market the campaign to drive traffic.

We have a natural inclination toward comparing ourselves with others

It’s the same in business. Whether evaluating market competition, benchmarking performance, or assessing industry trends, comparisons are a fundamental tool for making informed decisions and gaining a competitive edge.

You have data. Put it to good use.

Most SaaS companies, like yours, will have data from their software or customers that can be aggregated and used in a benchmarking campaign.

Some examples for various SaaS industries:

Customer service SaaS:

• Average time taken to reply to a support ticket
• Average number of support tickets created
• Average customer wait time

HR and Recruitment SaaS:

• Average time to fill a job vacancy
• Average employee turnover rate
• Average applicant-to-hire conversion rate

E-commerce SaaS:

• Average website conversion rate
• Average cart abandonment rate
• Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Project Management SaaS:

• Average project completion time
• Average project cost overrun
• Average number of tasks completed per project

Sales Enablement SaaS:

• Average time to close a deal
• Average win rate percentage
• Average time to first contact a lead

Travel and Hospitality SaaS:

• Average hotel room occupancy rate
• Average booking cancellation rate
• Average traveler feedback rating

Have a chat with your product team. Aim to get at least 10 data points you feel your prospects would be interested in benchmarking themselves against.

Let’s get benchmarking!

I assume you’ve already guessed how this campaign is going to work.

We’ll ask people to enter their data on each of your chosen data points. We’ll then show them how they are fairing compared to your dataset.

Now you have the data, let’s create the campaign.

This is what you’re gonna need…

Landing page

As with all landing pages, you must focus on an attention-grabbing and clear headline. Something along the lines of:

‘Benchmark your customer service department against 1,000 other e-commerce websites and discover areas for improvement.’

Then, list out the measurement criteria and explain how it works. Make it clear that this tool is 100% FREE.

Have a big, fat START NOW button.

Question pages

List out each question for your visitor to enter their data. I love the Typeform-style forms that show one question at a time. These are proven to convert much better than long, boring-looking, single-page forms.

Results page

Show them their results and benchmark each of them against your data points.

Showing them the average of your data points often works well. You could also show them where they sit from the ‘highest to lowest’ range.

The red, yellow, and green traffic light system works well. If they score well above average, show them a green icon. Around average = yellow, and if they score well below, give them a red. Also, give them an overall average score.

Most people will hopefully score poorly. They’ll be desperate to increase these scores. This is the perfect opportunity for a call to action for your product!

Email nurturing

It would be pretty cool to email them their results in an automated PDF report. They’ll be able to forward the report to their boss (which will contain your juicy call to action and an introduction to your brand).

After sending the report, you can also send an automated follow-up email:

“Thanks for completing our benchmarking report. I’m confident we can help you increase your scores. How about we schedule a demo where I can explain more?”

How to drive traffic to your benchmarking campaign

Social media organic and paid social ads are an obvious choice. If you create something your industry finds truely insightful, with unique data, it could gain a lot of engagement.

Email marketing via your newsletter is a low-cost and easy way to get it in front of your existing leads.

Google Ads is a possible option for people searching for terms such as “How do I improve my customer service response time?”.

This will make for a great addition to your Resources Hub to turn more web traffic into leads. You can even promote with a banner or popup, too.

Your Sales Team are gonna love this tool. They could complete it together on a call with a prospect to highlight where your solution can help them.

Would you like me to make this campaign for you?

If you would like to partner with me and my marketing agency, Rocket SaaS, to deliver campaigns like this for your brand, just email us. It will come directly to me.