Scaling a B2B SaaS with a Facebook Ads Strategy

What is ZenMaid?

What’s Worked So Far

For anyone that did not find the Facebook group first, and say, were googling for problems, they would find a helpful article by ZenMaid that helps them solve a specific problem - anything from marketing a cleaning business to training and hiring staff.

These pieces of content would also drive prospects into a lead generation funnel that captured their name and email with lead magnets or free, downloadable resources.

These lead generation campaigns are especially crucial to ZenMaid, being not just a SaaS but a B2B SaaS, which means sales cycles are much longer than your average B2C sales cycle.

Like many similar B2B products purchased, a B2B purchase is taken only after careful consideration and research. It is almost never an impulse buy.

In this case, the software a cleaning company starts with is the foundation in which the rest of the business is built on, “locking” them in for the life of the business.

This lead generation campaign would nurture prospects, staying top of mind until they were ready to invest in this foundational piece of their business.

ZenMaid had incredible foresight to invest in this lead nurture campaign, considering that it would be a prerequisite part of their future campaigns.

More recently, ZenMaid had begun small Facebook retargeting campaigns that drove anyone that visited the ZenMaid website back to a piece of content in order to sign up for trials.

More on the effectiveness in the next section...

Roadblocks

While ZenMaid was growing steadily, there were a number of factors that limited them from breaking through their glass ceiling.

Investing in content marketing and Capterra ads, they were capitalizing on the warmest segment of their market with intent, ready to buy, ready to make a decision.

But new maid services pop up every day who aren’t problem-aware or solution-aware, which are much bigger market segments.

In order to get in front of their entire audience, not just the people searching for them, ZenMaid would need to experiment with getting in front of a completely cold audience who was not actively searching for this solution.

When ZenMaid began using Facebook Ads, finding B2B professionals on Facebook that never heard of ZenMaid was a challenge.

They continued to use Facebook just to retarget the traffic driven by Capterra, LinkedIn, and their other marketing channels.

It was around this time that ZenMaid had brought me up to both manage the retargeting campaign, and eventually scale to cold audiences.

But before I could present a roadmap, I provided an in-depth funnel audit that identified a number of problems to fix first.

Problem 1 - Goal tracking was not in place

This is the #1 problem I see in almost every single advertising account I’ve come across.

ZenMaid only was tracking free trials on Google & Capterra at the time.

And on Facebook, only email leads were being tracked.

It was not a big deal at the time because only small remarketing campaigns were being done.

But if we were to scale, we need to get the entire picture.

That means we need to know all the following KPIs:

• Leads / Cost per Lead
• Trials / Cost per Trial
• Paying User / Cost per Paying User
• Paying User Conversion Value
• Return on adspend

Problem 2 - No system to test, learn, and implement new campaign experiments

Aside from the tracking, there wasn’t a clear methodology with the paid advertising efforts.

All of the campaigns previously were driving people back to the website and relying on the website to convert them into a free trial or a lead, which meant there were a lot of holes to plug first.

I want to take this moment to commend ZenMaid on getting to this point in the first place using a Ready, Fire, Aim approach for the FB advertising.

The team was fairly busy managing their operations and improving their product, especially as they went through a massive redesign in 2017 when the first advertising tests were launched.

The fact that ZenMaid was actively working on the marketing alongside their product ensured a strong foundation to build atop of.

But if we were to scale up, we needed to make sure that we had a methodological roadmap to get us there.

Problem 3 - Cashflow & Time before rebills kicked in

Let’s get real. Facebook Ads are not cheap.

The number of advertisers doubles every year and the reality is most businesses will get left in the dust and bullied by larger accounts moving forward.

The companies that can afford the most to acquire a user will win at this game, and not the ones who are looking to lower their costs.

Any business that is dependent on the ROI from Facebook Advertising to pay for their operating costs is setting themselves up for failure.

This makes it tough for many SaaS companies who have a free trial period before they see any revenue from their advertising efforts.

To put it simply, a $100/mo SaaS company may need to wait anywhere from 2-4 months before they recoup the cost of adspend to acquire a paying user.

This runway needs to be longer with a higher churn rate.

By the time ZenMaid had an advertising budget to invest in this channel, they had a healthy base of paying members that ensured they could afford to cashflow this operation - not to mention, they had an effective high-converting funnel.

The next section details exactly what campaigns we used to start, what positive feedback indicators we were looking for, and our numbers from this time period.

What We Did Together

Phase 1 - The setup and onboarding

Our official engagement started in January 2019.

Before launching any ads we always start with an in-depth marketing funnel audit.

This audit wasn't just for ads but took stock of all their landing pages, all their lead generation pages, every marketing asset at our disposal, and took note of what tracking needs to be in place before we spend any money.

A lot of our insights were not even covered in the scope of the service that we offer but was relevant to the overall success of the business.

After the audit, we worked with their head developer to implement the best way to accurately track all the KPIs that we mentioned before.

With his help, we were not just tracking opt-in leads, but also... 

• who registered an account with username/password
• who added a valid credit card
• who started a free trial
• and then who got billed for the first time at the end of the trial.

Phase 2 - Launch ads with the lowest hanging fruit

Only after all the right tracking in place, we started with the most very basic Facebook retargeting campaigns.

“Facebook retargeting campaigns” are campaigns that specifically only show ads to people who have already been to the ZenMaid.com website and have not signed up for a trial.

Given that ZenMaid was driving qualified traffic with Capterra ads and LinkedIn, this was an easy low-hanging fruit to start with.

The ZenMaid marketing team had created a few basic campaigns for these website visitors to go back to the website either to sign up for a free trial or to digest various pieces of content.

Since those campaigns were already working to get some leads which turned into trial users, we started doing more targeted campaigns driving warm audiences to lead magnets, or opt-in pages, in order to get emails instead of asking for a free trial directly.

And since we were tracking both free trials and rebills, we were able to see measure the effectiveness of these lead generation campaigns that converted leads into free trials and paying users.

NOTE 1: There are 150 “Subscription” events in February because we manually fired the pixel for all current users retroactively.

NOTE 2: “Subscriptions” track the # of rebills and does not accurately reflect the # of unique users attributed to ads.

In these retargeting campaigns, we were acquiring free trial users at about $50 on average. 

I’m hypothesizing that their trial-to-paid conversion rate is mostly attributed to ZenMaid’s awesome onboarding process where they invited a free trial user to a demo walking them through all the benefits.

And yes, we put ads in front of our free trial users to get them on this demo to help increase the trial-to-paid conversion rate.

Phase 3 - Scaling to cold traffic

Once we saw that the warm audiences were converting from the lead generation campaigns, we started to target cold audiences, or people that have never heard of ZenMaid, to the same funnel we were using.

Boom!

We started acquiring leads between $4 to $7 initially (this is bound to increase with volume).

Since these audiences were not searching for a solution when an ad appeared, the intent was not as high. 

Those leads converted to trials at $120 per person, which gave us an indicator to keep growing cold traffic on Facebook.

We ramped the advertising spend to $100/day - half going to retarget warm audiences and the other half bringing in new leads.

That means by month 3, we are profitable, factoring trial cancellations and their ever-reducing churn of 4% (!!!). 

Despite these wins, the front-loaded adspend required did create a cashflow strain.

The next section dives into what we’re doing to offset the front-end cost of acquiring users by achieving the “holy grail” of marketing...

Overcoming Obstacles

ZenMaid was not expecting Facebook ads to work for cold traffic, just as most B2B companies believe.

As a result, there wasn’t an adequate budget set aside initially for cold traffic on Facebook. Once ZenMaid re-allocated funds to pour into this platform, we had the issue of available cashflow on our hands.

Amar and I started brainstorming about what we can do to recoup some of our advertising costs on the front end. We considered the “front end” as the lead generation campaigns. 

Our solution was to offer a low-ticket info-product that was extremely valuable to anyone in the maid service industry, regardless if they had an existing software solution or not.

ZenMaid already had this product available so it was a matter of creating a new funnel to send traffic to it for validation.

We took a “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach to put together this offer, which was presented on the opt-in thank you page allowing us to piggyback off of both the organic and paid traffic lead gen campaigns.

This was implemented in early July 2019 and have gotten our first few sales on day 1, recouping at least 30% of the adspend.

In addition to this new info-product, ZenMaid had recently hosted the first annual virtual summit for cleaning companies that featured over 40 industry experts sharing their secrets about how they grew their cleaning businesses to 6, 7 figures and beyond.

Aside from the hundreds of leads the virtual summit brought in, this online event also gave us another opportunity to recoup our advertising costs by selling lifetime access to the virtual summit talks.

My team took ZenMaid’s raw speaker videos to cut together this highlight reel that we used to drive ads to.

(no sound)

SHAMELESS PLUG: As an advertiser, I equip you with video production process that ensures your videos are formatted specifically for Facebook Ads.

It’s still too early to say confidently whether this new funnel is going to be a success or not.

In previous months, we have done smaller advertising experiments where we test different audiences, creatives, and messaging. These experiments could only yield so much conversion lift or impact on our advertising.

But testing a drastically different funnel like this is what is necessary to stay ahead of the changing landscape of Facebook advertising.

While this powerful platform can be highly leveraged, it also takes an extraordinary amount of testing and strategic insight to make work.

Plainly spoken, it is not a “set it and forget it” platform.

This case study will be updated in the future after we have received data from this new funnel.

Conclusion

The only reason Facebook advertising worked for ZenMaid is because ZenMaid’s marketing strategy was being developed in tangent to the development of their software product.

At no point did ZenMaid relinquish responsibility of the company’s marketing to an outside provider but rather worked closely with various vendors to drive the strategies forward.

Their software may not have always been the best one for maid service owners as they grew.

However, they did manage to stay competitive through their marketing initiatives to eventually claim market dominance.

(Bonus) How To Set Up Your SaaS's Marketing Foundation For Scale

For many of you reading this, you may have realized that Facebook advertising may not be a viable option for you. I hope that realization will save you a ton of wasted adspend and hours.

If you’re a new SaaS, then this is way past the realm of what you should be thinking about spending your marketing dollars into.

Content Is King

If your SaaS is past the validation stage and you have some users, then it is time for you to create content that will set the foundation for future marketing efforts.

The Facebook Ads strategy that we used for ZenMaid relied heavily on the content used and would not have been possible without it.

How do you create content when you’re so busy?

You make time for it and get help by outsourcing pieces of it.

There is no magic bullet here. You can’t outsource the responsibility.

If you’re in your early stages, that means you, the owner, has to be the face of the company. 

Commit to a content creation calendar. Choose 1 platform and 1 medium based on where your audience is hanging out.

Video marketing is trending upwards and publishing on YouTube can serve as pillar content that can be redistributed to other channels later.

But if you are not comfortable on camera, don't force it. Start by simply writing high-quality blog posts on the company blog.

Once you have the content out there, you can start to distribute it across all social channels.

Create A Lead Magnet, Build An Email List & Nurture Your Prospects

Once you start getting traffic, create a free resource that you can provide your audience for an exchange of their email address to begin generating leads.

Start creating a nurture sequence, by emailing them once a week or whatever frequency you can commit to. This will help keep your prospects top of mind until they are ready to do business with you.

This is the foundation to your funnel. Once you start tweaking these elements and refining them, then you can start to think about advertising.

How To Start Paid Advertising

If you’re reading this and your SaaS already has…

Then you are prime for paid advertising.

You may be tempted to “start small” and hire a freelancer or have your in-house marketing manager begin this initiative.

This almost always creates more issues down the road by spending resources undoing mistakes and figuring out what has been done already than starting fresh, the right way.

Regardless of the provider, I recommend finding a solution where someone works alongside you as a marketing partner and not just another vendor looking for short-term success.

If you resonate with that perspective, please schedule a strategy call with me below.

After choosing a time, you’ll be prompted to answer a short questionnaire that helps me prep for the call.

Why do I need to prep for the call?

I research your business FIRST before I can reliably ensure I can help you get you to where you’re going.

Every single person that has received this initial strategy session found invaluable clarity that saved them lots of money in both advertising spend and time that they would have spent learning what would work for their business.

Lastly, if I can’t help you, I’ll tell you straight up and give you personalized insight to help you bridge the gap.

Got Questions? Drop them below!