What is SaaS Inbound Marketing?

The Benefits of SaaS Inbound Marketing for Small Businesses

Top SaaS Inbound Marketing Tactics to Follow

With the rise of SaaS businesses, the competition has become fierce, making it more important than ever to implement effective inbound marketing strategies. These top SaaS inbound marketing tactics will help you stand out from the crowd and position your business for success.

1. Know your Buyer

A customer’s buying journey is very different in SaaS as compared to a B2C company. In SaaS, a buyer pays close attention to a company’s online presence and its credibility in their industry. To determine a buyer’s journey, it’s important to know who’s your buyer.

To understand the audience, draw potential customers to your website by understanding their needs, challenges, and goals.

You can then map out the ideal customer profile by defining the

• Demographics (Age, gender, location)
• Psychographics (Interests, values, and beliefs)
• Behavior (where do your audience spend their time? What do they do on a regular basis? What does their surfing experience look like?)
• Needs (What are their primary pain points and what do they expect from your product and services?)

By getting an idea about your ideal customer, you can create targeted content that will help you nurture your inbound leads and improve sales performance.

2. SaaS Content Creation

Content creation forms a core marketing strategy in a SaaS company. Research and information are at the forefront of the customer discovery process and most of this research will come from a brand’s content marketing efforts. 47% of B2B buyers consume at least three pieces of content prior to booking a demo or engaging with a salesperson.

SaaS content marketing is the process of creating and producing engaging content. It is a highly effective inbound content marketing technique to educate prospective leads to show your product value. The content can include anything from blogs, case studies, press releases, guest posts, and emails, to video tutorials, social media posts, and testimonials.

SaaS content marketing is closely designed with keeping SEO in mind. It includes researching the latest keywords, competitor keywords, and valuable link-building on different platforms.

3. User-friendly Website

One of the golden rules of convincing is to show and not just say. Your website design should be able to clearly communicate your product objectives, features, and benefits and provide the right information to the users. Build a website that is intuitive, has aesthetic appeal, and is informative about your value proposition.

Make your site easy to navigate too. SaaS brands usually have dedicated landing pages for their individual features to explain the product and a resources section where users can access all forms of content. Include strong headlines that resonate with the audience and ignite their curiosity to further check out your website.

Add a clear call to action that prompts the prospect to take some action such as accessing exclusive whitepapers and eBooks, signing up for a demo, or signing up for a free trial. Your design needs to facilitate your objective of generating organic leads.

4. Product Trials

SaaS companies operate on the revenue model of providing subscriptions for a period of time. But not every customer is ready for a long-term relationship before checking out the product for themselves. Hence, a lot of SaaS companies have a free trial period for either two weeks or a month before they pay for the product as a whole. And if they enjoy the product, they’d be willing to pay for a subscription.

Trials are an effective and inexpensive way to generate inbound leads if you’re selling a product that needs to be experienced. You just have to ensure that the product has the ability to market itself. To do so, invest in a product management tool and leverage testimonials and customer feedback to work on making the necessary tweaks to the product and services.

In the end, ensure that you strike a balance between demonstrating your product value without overwhelming the prospect with too much information. It can ultimately help you secure highly qualified leads as you get to know the buyer’s intent.

Consequently, consider utilizing an interactive product demo software, embedding ‘product demos on your website,’ and using product tours and walkthroughs to help convert potential prospects and close deals more swiftly.

5. Personalize Email Marketing

Contrary to what many might believe, email marketing isn’t dead. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. More than half of B2B marketers think that email is the most effective form of generating revenue since it offers an ROI of 44$ for every 1$ spent.

But for the prospect to recognize your email amidst a pool of other emails, you need to ensure your email has everything that the prospect is looking for and is appealing enough. For example, check out this welcome mail of Shopify:

Image Source

Some of the steps you can follow are:

• Have a compelling subject line to garner attention
• Rightly time your emails
• Send just the right amount of emails to avoid spamming
• Include a CTA to generate traffic on selected landing pages

Fortunately, you’ll find numerous email marketing tools in the market such as MailChimp and ActiveCampaign that help you personalize the email marketing experience for the audience. You can automate scheduling and build end-to-end email marketing campaigns on them.

6. Invest in SEO for Organic Traffic

Inbound marketing is all about pulling the customers towards your brand rather than the other way around. Increasing our brand awareness through organic means is a great way to start. Search Engine Optimization is a no-brainer for today’s SaaS companies. It is what drives audience engagement at the top of the funnel and provides them with relevant content that matches their search intent.

Here’s a brief overview of the SEO process that you can follow:

• Use SEO tools like Ahrefs and Smerush to research the search phrases that are ranking in your industry.
• Analyze the keywords that the competitors are using and find keywords and content gaps.
• Pick the right combination of targeted phrases and keywords and produce quality content around it.
• Ensure that you include internal links to create sub-topics or clusters of the main content.
• Regularly tweak your existing content to fit the latest keyword trends.
• Lastly and most importantly, be consistent with your SEO efforts. Do this activity monthly and review it to get insight into content and keyword trends.

7. Collaborate with Influencers

Influencer marketing has become a mainstream marketing strategy where an authoritative figure promotes your product and urges their followers to make a purchase.

You can rope in an industry expert, a reputable site, or a tech influencer with a substantial following to publicize your product or even a piece of content. Influencer collaboration provides you with an opportunity to create valuable backlinks and even directly target audiences that belong to your industry niche.

For example, say you’re a customer support tool and you’ve added a major platform integration and have to market it. You can source an influencer who’s a pioneer speaker in customer support and reach an agreement where the influencer will post a tweet thread and talk about the feature in detail on product launch platforms. Since they already have credibility, their followers will find it easy to trust your brand and check out your offering.

8. Enhance Social Media Presence

SaaS companies need to equally pay heed to their social media presence along with their websites and other platforms. Just remember that since it’s a B2B industry, some social media platforms work better than others. Don’t just limit yourself to Facebook or Instagram.

It makes sense to broaden the spectrum and leverage platforms like LinkedIn where you have professional groups and decision-makers. You can also put increased focus on Twitter and use it to promote your content, latest features, and posts. The best example is of Slack. It has leveraged all its social media platforms to engage its users through informative and youthful content.

As a SaaS brand, you can also engage in non-traditional channels such as Reddit, TechDiscussions, and Spiceworks community. Keep posting from time to time, ensure that you reply to queries, and post links to your content to drive organic traffic to your website.

9. Track and Optimize

Just like all marketing campaigns, your inbound marketing efforts also need to have KPIs. Some of the top metrics you can have are:

• Measuring organic traffic across your website (homepage, blogs, etc)
• Number of keywords in top 10 SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)
• Number of MQLs
• Conversion rates

Just remember that for inbound marketing, you’ll see results in a period of time. You can measure them every month and compare the number after every 3-6 months.

Top 5 Channels to Promote Your SaaS Inbound Marketing Campaigns

Here are the top 5 channels to promote your SaaS inbound marketing campaigns:

1. Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok – you name it! Social media is undoubtedly the king of digital marketing. With billions of active users, social media platforms provide the perfect platform to reach your target audience. Engage your audience with creative posts, ads, and influencer marketing campaigns to promote your SaaS and drive traffic to your website.
2. Email Marketing: Don’t underestimate the power of email marketing! Email marketing is one of the most effective channels to nurture leads and promote your SaaS. Use personalized emails, newsletters, and automated email campaigns to keep your subscribers engaged and convert them into loyal customers.
3. Content Marketing: Content is the backbone of any inbound marketing campaign. Create high-quality blog posts, ebooks, webinars, and videos that provide value to your target audience. Use SEO techniques to optimize your content and drive organic traffic to your website.
4. Referral Marketing: Referral marketing is an excellent way to leverage your existing customer base to promote your SaaS. Encourage your customers to refer your product to their friends and colleagues and offer them incentives like discounts, free trials, or exclusive content.
5. PPC Advertising: Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your website. Use platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads to create ads that target specific keywords and demographics. Experiment with different ad formats like display, search, and retargeting ads to find the best combination for your SaaS.

Wrapping up

Inbound marketing is not an option unless you have an inexhaustible supply of money that you can quickly and continuously spend on paid ad campaigns.

Just streamline your inbound marketing strategies and target the right people with the right content at the right time.

In doing so, you can expect a steady increase in ROI and organic business growth that paves the way for long-term customer relationships.

FAQs On SaaS Inbound Marketing

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