Inbound Marketing for SaaS

Revisiting your inbound marketing for SaaS strategy and looking to see some real results? At this point, your SaaS company’s goals are outlined, your buyer persona is defined, and lastly, the KPIs determining success are clear to your team. So, let’s review some key areas for inbound marketing success.

There are few things more exciting than receiving a message from a prospect interested in your SaaS business. After weeks of sending cold emails or using website popups to try and generate leads, having someone actually reach out to you for a change can be a breath of fresh air.

That’s why so many SaaS brands are beginning to invest more heavily in inbound marketing campaigns. With the right inbound SaaS marketing strategy, your customers consistently come to you, instead of you constantly looking for new ways to connect with them.

Not only does this make life easier for your marketing and sales team, but it also means you can collect more valuable leads. After all, if someone is actively getting in touch to ask you about your SaaS product, you know they’re already interested in whatever you have to sell.

Outbound vs Inbound Marketing: Why You Need Both

Before we dive into an exploration of how you can use inbound marketing to grow your SaaS brand, it’s worth taking a closer look at how inbound marketing fits within your larger promotional strategy.
All forms of marketing generally fall into one of two categories: efforts which push your branding and messaging to your target audience (outbound marketing), and strategies which pull your customers to you (inbound marketing). Let’s look at how the two options differ.

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing is one of the most common forms of advertising used by businesses around the world to seek out new leads. It’s a method which involves reaching out to prospects you believe might be interested in trying your product or service.

Types of outbound marketing include cold calling customers, publishing television and radio ads, or sending flyers to customers through direct mail. While this might seem old-fashioned, around 82% of buyers still accept meetings with sellers who proactively reach out to them. The biggest problem with outbound marketing is how time-consuming and expensive it can be. Thousands of cold calls could generate only a handful of qualified leads.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing takes the opposite approach to connecting with customers. The focus is on “pulling” prospects to you, by finding ways to capture their interest and attention. 63% of customers start their purchasing journey online, looking for information. Inbound marketing strategies appeal to these consumers, by providing them with useful insights to support each stage of the purchasing journey, from awareness to comparison and beyond.

Present your company to the people who are already actively looking for solutions to problems you solve, and allow them to make the decision of contacting you. Methods include SEO strategies, content marketing, and social media marketing.

The Four Pillars of Inbound Marketing:

While the exact nature of your SaaS inbound marketing strategy can vary depending on numerous factors, your campaigns will often revolve around four specific pillars:

The SaaS Marketing Funnel and Inbound Marketing

To fully optimize your inbound marketing efforts, you’ll need a clear knowledge of how the “marketing funnel” works. A marketing or sales funnel is the series of steps a customer takes throughout the buyer journey, starting from the moment they first start looking for a solution to their issues, and ending in a purchase, or after-sales service.

For the SaaS industry, there are a series of crucial stages in the marketing funnel, each of which requires its own inbound marketing strategy. You may also have heard these four stages be called the four main pillars of inbound marketing. Let’s review below:

A Closer Look at Inbound Marketing

Most SaaS companies need a combination of both outbound and inbound marketing to generate the best results. By combining the two options, you can generate a higher number of leads, boosting your chances of rapid conversions. However, inbound marketing is beginning to consume more of the average company’s marketing budget, for various reasons.

For instance, companies with inbound marketing strategies generate up to 126% more leads than brands with no inbound strategies.

What’s more, the cost of lead acquisition for inbound marketing efforts is now at almost 2/3 less than that of outbound marketing. So, what exactly does inbound marketing look like?

1. SEO Campaigns

The majority of marketers believe their search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are extremely effective at helping them to achieve their marketing goals. Many consumers in search of SaaS solutions start their journey by visiting Google in search of answers to specific questions, or solutions to their problems.

With SEO-based content, you can create articles which target the keywords your customers are looking for in each stage of their purchasing journey. The better your optimization is, the more likely you are to be the first thing your customers see on the search results when they’re looking for the software you can provide.

A solid SaaS SEO strategy positions you in front of your customers at the most important moments in their purchasing journey, presenting your business as a credible, innovative, and reliable solution to their problems. In most cases, creating a SEO-based inbound marketing campaign will include:

2. Paid Search

SEO campaigns bring “organic” inbound traffic to your website. In other words, they encourage customers to come to you, without you having to pay for a way to capture their attention. While this strategy can generate fantastic long-term results, it often takes a while, and some expertise to learn how to master the search engines.

This is why many SaaS brands also use paid search, to help with their position in the Google landscape. Paid search involves paying for specific pages from your website to show up when a customer searches for a specific phrase. You can use the Google Ads environment to bid for the keywords you want to rank for, and target a specific audience.

Paid search is excellent for grabbing the attention of your customers straight away, while you’re waiting for your SEO campaigns to generate results. However, it does require the creation of careful marketing strategies and landing pages which match your search result listings.

3. Social Media Campaigns

People don’t just interact with SaaS companies on their websites anymore. Increasingly, new generations of customers are beginning to use their favorite social media channels to search for the tools they need instead. In fact, Generation Z prefers to use social media over Google!

Social media strategies give you another way to connect with customers looking for specific software solutions in your industry. It can be a fantastic way to not only expand your brand reach, but also improve your chances of developing lucrative relationships with the right customers.

You can create content for social media that demonstrates your thought leadership in your SaaS space, and improves your company’s credibility. It’s also possible to engage with your audience through live videos, conversations, and comments. Plus, you can use social media to guide your customers back to your website with links to your product pages and posts.

Why is Inbound Marketing So Important?

Though there’s still a place for outbound marketing in the SaaS landscape, inbound marketing could be the best way to boost your chances of success in this competitive world. Inbound marketing is less disruptive and frustrating to an audience that’s growing increasingly tired of traditional advertising techniques. Inbound marketing can deliver:

Optimizing Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Optimizing an inbound marketing campaign for your SaaS company revolves heavily around getting to know your customers and their needs. Start with in-depth research into your target audience, or “Ideal Customer Profile”. You can assess your existing customers, or evaluate the customers targeted by your competitors for deeper insights into who you need to focus on.

Think about:

Once you have a deeper knowledge of your target audience, you can build your inbound marketing strategy around answering the questions your customers have, and helping them navigate each stage in the marketing funnel mentioned above.

During the “Awareness” stage, the focus will be on highlighting your knowledge of the problems your customers face, and showing them why your service or solution has the answers. Producing blogs about common issues related to your industry will demonstrate your expertise.

As your customers research solutions to their issues, think about what kind of points they’re likely to prioritize, based on your knowledge of your customer personas. Are your clients more likely to be interested in saving money, saving time, or simply achieving specific results?

During the decision stage, use your inbound marketing efforts to appeal to your audience’s emotions, and demonstrate credibility. Show how your SaaS tool can save your customers from encountering specific problems, and use evidence in the form of case studies, testimonials, and reports to back up your claims. Remember, throughout your inbound marketing journey, you should be:

Mastering Inbound Marketing for SaaS

The right inbound marketing strategy including a focus on the four pillars can be a powerful tool for SaaS companies. Not only does it help you to attract more of the right target audience to your software, but it also assists in strengthening the relationships you’ll need to develop with long-term clients.

Creating inbound marketing strategies for each stage of the buyer funnel, responding to the changing needs of your audience, and experimenting with different advertising methods will boost your chances of both gaining, and retaining clients. Make the most of your marketing efforts – start winning with your inbound marketing for SaaS today.