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Have you attempted to incorporate inbound marketing and use its benefits for your SaaS business?
You are likely thinking about doing so, but you got stuck.
Most people starting inbound marketing face challenges as early as the planning stage.
Since every segment of inbound marketing has its purpose and relies on the success of other segments, plans to create them are complex structures.
To help you build an inbound strategy for your SaaS business, we’ll offer some key advice on how to harness its waste power and boost your company’s profits.
Let’s start with the basics.
What is Inbound Marketing and How It Applies For SaaS Businesses
Inbound marketing is a strategic approach to attract customers by creating content for your target audience and experiences tailored to them - from value to the medium used to deliver messages.
Research shows that leads coming from inbound marketing cost 61% less than ones made using traditional marketing.
As a result, all marketing strategies should play to the strengths of the product they are selling and the targeted audience.
It all comes to leading customers down the sales funnel.
However, the sales funnel for SaaS businesses is a bit different.
Let’s find out why.
Why Do SaaS Companies Prefer Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing allows SaaS companies to deliver the right message to the target audience at the right time for the best effect.
In SaaS inbound marketing, we can divide leads into 4 major groups:
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) - potential buyers
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) - a prospect who has experienced a brand’s marketing message and is ready to receive a pitch from your sales team.
- Product Qualified Leads (PQL) - a prospect that has used the product as a free trial or in testing.
- Expansion Qualified Lead (XQL) - already paying customers looking to expand features or benefits
Inbound marketing for SaaS requires relevant content available at all times to make the transition from MQL to SQL.
Online content as a foundation of inbound marketing offers you the option to update it as your company develops, which is ideal for an industry that changes daily.
How To Incorporate SaaS Inbound Marketing That Drives Conversions?
For an easier understanding of the process of creating inbound marketing content for SaaS businesses, we will divide them into 3 segments:
- How to create content
- How to distribute content
- How to adjust content for a more significant impact
In each segment, we will talk about what they cover and how to develop them to help you learn what to expect and avoid wasting time and resources.
1. How to Create Content for Inbound Marketing
Before you start creating content, let's talk about sectors that require special attention so your marketing always provides the best results.
1. Create an overall content plan
When you are working on Inbound marketing, always keep in mind that all segments must work together to achieve the best results.
And you should have some KPIs set to determine if the products are a success or a bust.
KPIs (key performance indicators) are parameters we set as goals for our marketing campaigns.
To avoid any gaps or contradictions in your content, you should create an outline for your marketing strategy.
In addition, a content plan will help you keep track of progress and streamline communication between teams.
As your company grows and more prospects come knocking on your door, a marketing plan will help your team address potential buyers' needs in the best possible manner.
2. Invest in SEO
The chief technology officers generally possess an above-average level of IT proficiency.
So, reasonable expectations are that they will investigate different products before contacting the company for cooperation.
And the first place they will look for information are search engines.
According to Backlinko research, 91% of queries are long-tail keywords.
Therefore, it's beneficial to address them accurately to “pick the low-hanging fruit” so you can write content to position yourself in search results.
Make sure to invest time in SEO and optimize your pages for search engines to position your business and increase the volume of potential customers coming to you.
3. Research Competitors
In SaaS inbound marketing, it's important to remember that you face competitor businesses that sell similar products to the same or closely the same audience.
If you research a bit about your competitors content and their marketing strategy, you can draw conclusions about what works and what does not.
In addition, you can notice your competitor’s gaps that you can use to grow your product’s demand in a way that offers new value to potential customers.
When it comes to content marketing, you can identify your competitors' content gaps, and use those opportunities to create content and position yourself in that space.
4. Persona-Based Approach
A persona-based approach to inbound marketing can be an effective way to reach potential customers.
It involves creating a profile of your ideal customer, or “persona”, which includes demographic information as well as interests and behaviors related to the product or service you are offering.
For example, let’s assume you’re selling a Website Analytics tool.
Your persona will probably be marketers in different companies, analysts, and tech-savvy users working with the data.
Knowing who your target audience is, allows you to create personalized content that resonates with them and encourages them to take action.
Identify their challenges, pain points, and characteristics, and make sure to incorporate all of that into your communication.
This could include blog posts, social media campaigns, videos, and other forms of content marketing tailored specifically for that particular audience.
By using this approach, you will be able to generate more leads and convert more customers through targeted messaging.
5. Automation
You should develop B2B inbound strategies and make them scalable.
If you do not address this issue, your long-term results of the marketing strategies will suffer.
To keep your business thriving even as your marketing department's workload expands, it's crucial to keep your marketing funnel and operations organized and streamlined.
Here are some examples of automation that you can implement:
- Automated email outreach - set a reminder or create automated email campaigns to share news and make sure they’re are always relevant with every update of your product.
- Create templates - have templates ready for repetitive processes where your team can insert desired text and have content ready to serve.
- Leads’ score - add points based on activity to measure how close your leads are to making a purchase.
- Ambassadors’ score - reward your best promoters, like influencers or long-term customers, that spread the good word about your business.
As a direct consequence of these processes, your workload will be lighter which allows you to focus on quality instead of catching deadlines.
Bonus Tip: Hire Professional Agency to Manage Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Delegating your inbound marketing activities to professional agencies with proven records and experience allows you to dedicate more time into other activities and running your company.
In addition, consistent results from marketing campaigns allow you to plan your company’s future.
2. How To Distribute Your Marketing Content?
If you create your content with a focus on people that are interested in your product it makes sense to distribute that content in appropriate places and manner.
1. A User-Friendly Landing Page
The landing page is one of the stops potential buyers visit as they pass through your sales funnel.
Here are some tips on how your landing page can enrich visitors’ experience and boost your sales:
- Easy to navigate - Visitors should access most information in 1 or 2 clicks, anything more, and you risk losing their attention.
- Persuasive sales pitch - Offer further incentives for people to dedicate their time and money to your product.
- A call to action - Include easy-to-spot and effective CTAs. For example, create a button in bright colors to point out how important it is.
- Elaborate visitors' benefits - It should provide more information than your email or social media post that led the person to your page.
- Explain your work process - Explain how you plan to fulfill promises given in your marketing promotions and pages.
2. Utilize the Power of Blogging
A blog primarily comes under the attractive category of inbound marketing, and you can see it on top of the sales funnel.
Incorporating a blog allows you to get site visitors by creating content that matches what they're looking for.
It is simple math, fewer visitors mean fewer sales, but even further than that your brand recognition will grow much slower.
Businesses with a high frequency of posting blogs have a higher chance of staying relevant and attracting new visitors.
When blogging, it's important to remember that visitors should find your content interesting as a person and business representative.
3. Incorporate Email Marketing
According to research, Email marketing generates $43 in revenue for every $1 invested, on average.
You should make emails part of every stage in transitioning customers through the sales funnel.
For instance, some of your website visitors have not made a purchase but have subscribed to a newsletter, so you can invite them to a casual gathering.
As mentioned, emails are relevant for all aspects of inbound marketing.
For example, in the beginning, you can send cold emails, or when you have loyal customers, you can offer to upscale their account or build a relationship with them.
4. Offer eBooks and Whitepapers
Ebooks typically range a bit longer than blog posts but considerably shorter than white papers.
They are more interesting to read and typically have a design that is abundant in visuals.
Similar to research papers, white papers are typically more intellectual presentations intended to deliver information.
In contrast to an eBook, the whitepaper is a serious presentation that is created by professionals for professionals.
What’s great about providing these formats on your website is that they are super powerful tools for gaining leads.
5. Be active on Social Media
Social media platforms, at their core, divide people into interest groups, so they have done your job for you and gathered potential customers in one place.
Social media presence is more and more important in everyday life as it is in business information gathering.
Usually, when we say social media, our mind drifts to Facebook or Twitter, but one of the largest social media platforms in the world is actually business oriented.
You guessed it right, it is LinkedIn.
If you want your name to mean anything in any industry, especially online-based products, you should spread your network via personal connections and industry-relevant content.
3. How To Improve Inbound Marketing Over Time?
One of the greatest benefits of online content is that it is not set in stone, except for emails, so pay special attention not to make any mistakes before pressing “Send.”
And here’s what you should do additionally.
1. Track your performance
Data gathering is a process where you cover your page traffic and search engine metrics for keywords you focus on.
Even more direct and relevant data you can gather directly from page visitors by offering them to complete a poll or tracking all of their activity on your page, not just subscriptions or purchases.
Content tracking should also include progress and changes your competitors make, again learn from others to boost your development process.
2. Optimize content and processes
Once you have compared data from search engines, page visitors, and competitors, you can investigate to find where are strong and weak points in your marketing.
For instance, a high number of visits to landing pages but a low percentage of sales completed indicate that landing page content should go through some refresh.
To improve your marketing campaigns you can use A/B testing methods as a direct way to find what performs on your website and what’s not.
Analysis of content is a task you should complete every couple of weeks.
Do not jump to conclusions that some type of content has subpar performance after just one set of comparisons and that some content is a late bloomer.
Invest some time, analyze, test, and improve to make sure you get to an optimal solution.
Conclusion
Despite its complex structure, Inbound marketing has a lower price per lead created.
Companies focused on long-run development usually hire professional agencies to run their inbound marketing from planning all the way to optimization at the start.
And you can do that too.
Let Omnius team do it for you, while you focus on the product.
Book a 30-minute call to learn how we can help you incorporate inbound marketing into your business and make your business reach its full potential.
FAQ
What is the SaaS inbound strategy?
The SaaS inbound strategy is a marketing approach specifically designed for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.
It involves attracting, engaging, and converting potential customers by creating valuable and relevant content.
This strategy leverages techniques like content marketing, SEO, social media, and email marketing to organically draw users to the SaaS product or service, fostering long-term customer relationships.
What does SaaS mean in marketing?
In marketing, SaaS stands for "Software as a Service."
It refers to a software delivery model where applications are hosted in the cloud and provided to customers on a subscription basis.
In marketing, SaaS often implies promoting and selling software solutions to businesses, focusing on demonstrating their value and functionality to potential users.
What is inbound and outbound in SaaS?
In SaaS marketing, "inbound" refers to marketing efforts that attract potential customers to your product or service through content, SEO, and other non-intrusive methods.
"Outbound" marketing, on the other hand, involves reaching out to potential customers through direct sales efforts like cold calling or email campaigns.
SaaS companies often prioritize inbound strategies for their cost-effectiveness and customer-centric approach.
What does inbound marketing mean?
Inbound marketing is an approach that aims to attract, engage, and delight customers by creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and helpful content.
Instead of pushing products or services on potential customers, inbound marketing focuses on building trust and establishing relationships.
It typically involves content creation, SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing to draw customers in and provide them with the information they need to make informed decisions.
