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What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a term used in marketing and advertising industries to draw customers or clients to a company or product through content published online. Essentially, digital marketing strategy that focuses on attracting customers by creating valuable content tailored to their needs is called inbound marketing.

In contrast, outbound marketing interrupts your audience by sending them content they don’t necessarily want. Inbound marketing connects people interested in your product or service with people who need your product or service.

Why you should use an Inbound Marketing Solution in your B2B SaaS today, not tomorrow

Let’s face it, whenever somebody says let’s write a blog post; all eyes roll because we understand how long and laborious blogging can be. Everyone except the executive understands that it’s a long-term play, yet executives or investors generally want SEO rankings under 3 months and tangible MQLs and MRR.

The truth is you need to be doing both inbound for the long-term and paid to keep your investors or executives happy today and tomorrow.

Inbound marketing for B2B SaaS should always be considered as a long-term strategy in addition to paid traffic channels. Inbound marketing has many elements: content marketing, marketing automation, and lead generation. All of these work towards getting you new customers.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that attracts a potential customer from search engines or social channels through content syndication. This is opposed to traditional marketing using outbound methods such as cold-calling, direct mail, or buying ads.

Inbound marketing generates 54% more leads than outbound marketing. Inbound marketing produces leads that are 61% cheaper than those obtained through outbound marketing.

The quality of leads and conversation from inbound marketing is generally significantly higher than outbound. That’s a no-brainer, yet many B2B SaaS brands are still resistant to the idea of embracing inbound as a real long-term strategic initiative and focusing their attention on paid. This is generally because of pressure from executives and investors. So once they get to MVP (minimal viable product) and PMF (product-market fit), they begin to struggle to get to hockey stick growth after 10 million ARR. This is where they start throwing money at trade shows, TV ads, and other expensive, risky ventures. 

As a senior marketing leader, it is your job to convince your decision-makers to embrace this as part of your holistic, long-term strategic growth in your SaaS. 

You must shift your brand’s attention and understand that inbound marketing is all about arming and delighting your potential customers with valuable content that can help them move the needle on their business. This means your service or product is just a secondary source. Supporting your customer‘s growth is about caring and providing them with the right tools as an afterthought. This is one of the reasons they’ll buy from you. You have to think about the value optimization curve from your customer‘s standpoint and understand where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow. 

Your content can be a powerful machine that can get your potential customers to become an active marketer for your B2B SaaS by spreading the messaging across their social channels and sharing it with other online communities. However, this only happens if your content truly elevates their brand to a higher level.

Essentially, it’s like word of mouth, but on the world wide web, which is one of the strongest types of marketing globally. There’s no better marketing strategy than a good word of mouth. Inbound marketing enables you to achieve this goal very quickly. All you have to do is share your thought leadership with others and answer their burning questions. 

It creates a captive audience for you by allowing you to build long-term relationships and trust with your clients. Regardless of whether you’re in the B2B SaaS or other tech spaces, you can make inbound marketing work as a part of your digital marketing mixed channel strategy. 

The very nature of inbound marketing ensures a long-term value creation strategy. This is critical for B2B brands who rely very heavily on paid media channels and want more sustainable growth over the long term. To sustain or build long-term MRR growth, you absolutely need to embed an inbound marketing strategy into your overall holistic strategy to build a strong, healthy B2B pipeline for your SaaS.

Inbound marketing fosters long-term relationships with your customers, creates a captive audience, and educates your customers even after buying from you.

Still not convinced about using inbound marketing for your products and services?

Look at it this way; inbound marketing is about delighting your customers during their customer journey as they get to know your brand one moment at a time and employing them to do your marketing for you.

This also means you have to reach them on the right device, in the right context, at the right time. This is a concept developed by Google, and they are 100% correct on this one. Your brand has to consider micro-moments when your prospects have a “brilliant idea,” and they’re reaching for content to learn about something. 

Are you being found online when they have a brilliant idea?

If not, start learning how to be there when your future customers have a pain point in their business. 

No marketing strategy works better than good word of mouth. Inbound marketing helps you enable just that with the flywheel methodology. 

What is the Inbound Flywheel Methodology?

The inbound flywheel methodology is the method of growing your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering prospects to reach their goals at any stage in the buyer’s journey with your SaaS brand.

Why?

Because when your customers succeed, you succeed.

This is the new modern age concept that many tech brands ignore, although it’s clearly a very simple yet powerful way to build up your B2B SaaS.

What is the Flywheel?

The flywheel is a business model used by HubSpot to illustrate how momentum may be generated in your company by prioritizing and delivering an exceptional client experience built right into your marketing campaigns. You must spin and build momentum in your flywheel by investing in methods that acquire and keep clients for it.

However, any friction that slows down your flywheel is a barrier. The main sources of friction for your customers are handoffs between teams; therefore, good alignment and communication are essential to keeping your flywheel rotating continuously. 

When your flywheel is driven by the inbound methodology, your marketing, sales, and service functions may provide force and eliminate friction during the attract, engage, and delight phases. All organizational departments are also responsible for removing impediments from your flywheel.

For example, marketing will likely play the biggest role in the attract phase by doing daily blogging, SEO, SEM, Paid social or event marketing. However, your sales team can also add power by engaging in social selling. Your customer success teams should press this lever further to apply maximum pressure to reinforce this further.

They can do this by educating your current client on the use of the platform, thus making it easy and convenient for your existing customers to make referrals. This is done through world-class support, and once your customers get a world-class experience from you, they become your biggest lead generation source because they love your brand and tell everyone how delightful it is to deal with your support team. Zappos understands this like no other brand.

The main key takeaway is that your flywheel allows you to grow your SaaS brand over time without continually investing in customer acquisition through paid media channels like programmatic, paid search, paid social or connected TV. Platforms like Google Ads, Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, Baidu, or even Yandex can be very helpful to get traffic quickly to your site. However, they’re like a band-aid to a deeper brand problem that needs to be addressed early, or long-term growth is extremely difficult to sustain for any SaaS.

The inbound flywheel methodology can be applied in three ways:

Initially developed and packaged into a framework by Hubspot, here is how it works: 

Attract: Drawing in the right people with valuable content from search engines or paid social channels to create conversations can establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage. They engage with you at the higher end of the funnel during awareness stages as they’re looking to learn more about your brand or might have a tech issue they’re solving. 

Engage: Generally, they’re looking to solve their pain points, not necessarily purchase your SaaS product or demo it immediately. At the engage stage, you must focus on educating your prospects on how your tech can solve their challenges and begin to slowly show them that you can take their marketing pain away. You should be presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals, so they become educated, and then they’re more likely to demo your product and maybe even buy from you.

Delight: At this stage, the customer has learned about your solution and likely did some comparison shopping and more learning on their own across the whole MarTech landscape. If they decide to buy from it is still your job to keep providing help and support (through Customer Success teams) to empower your customers to find success with their purchase in the long run. This generally reduces churn and improves LTV, making your investors and executives happier.

Let’s unpack some more inbound marketing strategies.

Using Attracting Strategies for your B2B SaaS

Attracting strategies

Content strategy development and creation are two components of inbound marketing methodology that appeal to your target audience or buyer persona.

To reach your audience, start with content creation such as blog articles, content offers, and social media content that provides value. Examples include guides on using your products, information about how your solution can solve their challenges, customer testimonials, and details about promotions or discounts.

To attract your audience members on a deeper level through inbound marketing, you need to optimize your content marketing with an AI-Powered platform. A modern-day SEO strategy will require you to target specific keywords and phrases related to your products or services, backed by linking-building and technical SEO. You must focus your content on solving your customers’ challenges and the many specific tactics or strategies that can help solve your user’s problems that keep them up at night.

This marketing approach will allow your content and information to organically appear on the search engine results page (SERPs) like Google or Bing. Your target audience can discover your content the same way as when you’re searching for this information. You have to focus on solving your customer‘s challenges, and search is an exceptionally powerful way to tap into user intent behind user search queries.

Engaging Strategies

When using inbound methods to connect with your target audience, make sure you’re engaging and interacting with leads and consumers to encourage them to want to develop long-term relationships with you. When utilizing these engagement tactics, provide information on the value your organization will give them.

The next stage is to figure out how you can increase your sales. If possible, document each conversation you have with clients and potentially an ideal customer and track which strategies work best for each situation. How do you manage and handle inbound sales calls? Focus on how customer care staff deal with inquiries from people or any viable prospect.

Furthermore, make certain you’re always solution selling rather than product selling. This will guarantee that all transactions result in mutually beneficial agreements for customers and your business since you offer value to your right-fit clients.

Delighting Strategies

Customer satisfaction is enhanced by delighting inbound strategies, ensuring that consumers are delighted, satisfied, and supported after making a purchase. Your team members should become advisors and experts who can assist clients at any time through these tactics.

Customers love to be understood, so make sure that your chatbots ask them questions and give useful answers. Surveys should be integrated into the conversation at suitable intervals to assist, support, and request customer feedback.

Chatbots may also assist current clients in adopting a new approach or strategy that you’ve introduced that they want to take advantage of. A satisfaction survey may also be distributed six months after customers buy your product or service to obtain feedback and suggest improvements.

Another important inbound strategy for satisfying consumers is to utilize social media listening. Customers may use one of your accounts to provide comments, ask questions, and share their experiences with your goods or services on social media. Respond to these discussions by providing useful, supportive, and encouraging responses that demonstrate you care about and understand them.

Finally, an inbound marketing approach focused on delighting clients should assist and support clients in any scenario, whether or not your business benefits from it. Remember that a happy client becomes a brand ambassador and promoter, so treat all transactions and customer interactions, both large and small, with care.

How to Get the Most From Inbound Marketing Services

Engage Professional Inbound Marketing Solutions

An inbound marketing agency has a team of experts who work together to bring in business for their clients. They are well versed in copywriting, marketing, and social media marketing. Hiring a team is usually cheaper than hiring individual specialists.

Before signing the agreement, ask the agency about their marketing approach with their inbound marketing service that they plan to use to generate results for your SaaS. This could touch on previous work they’ve done with a similar SaaS brand like yours and/or similar size businesses within your industry. 

If you’re looking for deep expertise, many specialized agencies can typically deliver on their promise, but only if they’re “known for that” in the marketplace. It makes perfect sense to hire a digital analytics agency to build out your CRM and digital analytics so you can effectively understand your data pipelines across different ecosystems. 

Of course, hiring them to handle your SEO is not always the best idea, although they may have a pretty good team. The bottom line is that you should look for agencies or fractional marketing leaders with a proven track record of growing marketing teams, running successful demand generation programs for clients, and helping B2B SaaS clients scale quickly. 

How do you do hire for inbound marketing solutions effectively? 

#1) Look for a marketing leader with deep expertise in creating effective inbound content marketing programs through search engines using SEM (search engine marketing) or SEO (search engine optimization), positioning your brand messaging, designing demand generation programs. Your in-house or Fractional CMO should understand how to build data-driven KPI frameworks and display a strong understanding of creative development for digital media platforms that can drive MRR performance. 

#2) Look for a Fractional CMO who’s likely been in their role at least 2 years or ideally 4 and someone who’s not afraid to experiment with new channels and other new digital ways like podcasting. Your leader should also understand the importance of data-informed strategies and can connect the user journey steps across the user’s multiple touch-points as they jump between different channels in today’s chaotic, noisy world.

#3) Digital savvy for a B2B SaaS CMO is critical today because most SaaS companies tend to go to market with a digital-first approach. While a brand-focused executive is great to have on your roster to complement your CDOs or CMOs digital strengths, a Chief Brand Officer (who’s more old-school focused) can play a critical role in achieving hockey stick growth past the PMF (product-market fit) point.

While digital officers are arguably the sexier of the two types of marketers, Chief Brand Officers might be able to complement your Fractional CMOs weaknesses, particularly if they’re heavily focused on digital-first go-to-market strategies. 

#4) Ask your future agency if they’re specialists or a jack of all trades. What do they specialize in, and what are they offering as an add-on to potentially appease you to get you to sign on the dotted line? The things they’re not specialized in are things that you should outsource to other agencies that directly focus on that. We don’t believe full-service agencies are experts in every domain, even if they claim that on their website. They’re likely great at search marketing or analytics but are not good at creative work or producing high-quality video creatives and CRM and Marketing Automation and a dozen other things. We understand the temptation and the convenience of a one-stop shop. However, our experience tells us that diversifying your portfolio across various agency partners is better. Hiring a marketing manager to manage these relationships in-house will likely provide you with access to the best expertise on the market with the highest ROI in the long run. 

Leveraging Inbound Marketing Automation Tools

A good inbound marketing solution will include various automation tools like Active Campaign, Hubspot, or even full-blown platforms like Adobe Experience Cloud. These tools or platforms help you understand how to automatically move prospects down the buyer’s journey without adding a dozen new marketing employees for “that new initiative’ your CMO wants to implement.

Incorporating these tools is the standard practice in today’s marketing world, and most people are accustomed to semi–quasi personalized messages. However, personalization MarTech is getting significantly better every year (and more creepy 🙂 ). 

Choosing the right MarTech can be overwhelming, and sometimes you need an agency partner who has the chops to help you with the selection process and potentially save you some money in the long run. So, don’t be shy about asking your agency partners to help you with the vendor selection process.

A good inbound marketing agency will educate you on the proper tools that fit your SaaS business needs and help you shortcut the process, and likely support you with the implementation. Many inbound marketing agencies are certified in specific customer experience or ABM platforms like Act-on, Active Campaign, or Hubspot, so look for their certification status on their website partner’s page or in their marketing collateral. 

Institute a culture of data-informed decisions and stay open to continuous testing to improve customer retention

Your inbound marketing agency should be using data to drive decisions about your SaaS growth. Suppose you’re not using the right MarTech. In that case, this can really hurt your growth at the 10 million mark. You’ll run into a scalability problem with your data-collection, media buying, and focusing on the hottest MQLs ready to buy now, not 10 months later.

These decisions typically range from CRM data collection practices to media buying platforms and aligning channel marketing to your growth goals. Once you’re past the MVP and hit PMF, you must start focusing on instituting an ABM strategy and a lead scoring practice to boost your MQL to SQL conversion rates and improve the bottom line. Speed of outreach to the right prospects in today’s markets separates fast-growing B2B SaaS companies from those that stagnate or reach out at the wrong time, ultimately slowing growth as competitors catch up and gain market share. 

Your marketing teams need to be able to align purchase intent data and make suggestions to improve the speed of MQL to SQL handover. Ultimately they need to align user intent with your media buying practices and connect your SQL intent data to media buying algorithms and audience signals. Whether you’re buying traffic from Google Ads or Facebook, it is ultimately up to you to feed the correct CRM audience signals to your bidding solutions within your media buying platforms. 

To get the best results in the long run, stay open to testing new ideas and test non-stop as fast as possible with as much statistical significance as you need to draw feasible conclusions.

Here are some things you should be testing in your B2B SaaS regularly:

• Pricing strategies
• Headlines,
• Content length,
• Posting frequency, time of day for posting on social media,
• Creative A/B testing on media channels,
• Message testing,
• Layout changes on the website

Ultimately, your customers will tell you which content they love by evaluating consumption and MQL conversions. By taking a data-driven approach, you will get a better return on your marketing spend over the long haul.

13 Important reasons why should you consider inbound marketing for your B2B SaaS

1. Cost-effectiveness: Inbound marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach new customers through digital channels. Compared to outbound methods such as cold-calling or purchasing ads, inbound marketing costs less and generates a much higher ROI.

2. Reach more people: By creating valuable content, you’ll attract more website visitors and, in turn, more leads. Inbound marketing attracts people who are already interested in what you have to offer, so the chances of converting them into customers are much higher than with outbound methods.

3. Build trust: When potential customers find relevant content you created online, they’ll see that you’re an expert in your field. This builds trust, which is essential for turning leads into customers.

4. Get in front of buyers early in the buying cycle: Inbound marketing targets potential customers when they’re early in the buying cycle when they’re still researching their options. By getting in front of buyers early in the process, you’ll have a greater chance of winning their business.

5. Stand out from the competition: With inbound marketing, you can set yourself apart by providing valuable content that they can’t or don’t publish.

6. Reach buyers in new channels: Inbound marketing reaches buyers through social media and search engines. This gives you a wider reach and allows you to connect with more potential customers.

7. Capture more leads: Inbound marketing captures more leads than traditional outbound methods like cold-calling. By publishing quality content, you’ll attract more visitors to your website, which will be added to your lead funnel.

8. In inbound marketing, the focus is on quality over quantity. This means that you’re more likely to attract customers interested in what you have to offer, rather than just anyone who comes across your website or ad.

9. Inbound marketing solutions offer a range of features designed to help you attract and convert more leads, including lead capture forms, landing pages, lead nurturing campaigns, and more.

10. Certain Inbound marketing software can make it easy to track the success of your inbound marketing campaign, so you can see what’s working and what’s not.

11. An inbound marketing solution like AI-Powered content optimization can help you improve your search engine rankings, resulting in more targeted organic traffic to your website.

12. Inbound marketing solutions make it easy to create targeted email marketing campaigns, which can help you increase sales and boost customer loyalty with the right message to the right prospect at the right time.

13. Inbound marketing solutions can help you build relationships with potential customers by providing valuable content that they can use and share with others in their network to boost your marketing efforts.

 

Top FAQs around Inbound Marketing Solutions

Who uses inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is an effective solution for businesses of all sizes, particularly for B2B SaaS. Whether you’re a small SaaS business owner looking to generate more leads, or a large enterprise trying to improve your search engine rankings, inbound marketing can help you achieve your goals.

Inbound marketing is also a great solution for companies looking to build relationships with potential customers by providing valuable content that they can use and share. An inbound marketing solution allows you to track how much traffic is coming to your website from different sources, so you can focus your efforts on the channels that are most effective.

What exactly is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a software platform that helps you automate your marketing and sales engagement to generate more leads, close more deals, and accurately measure marketing success.

While inbound marketing is a great strategy for creating brand awareness, it doesn’t result in sales or moves prospects along the buying journey all by itself. Marketing automation bridges the gap between real conversion and the engaged audience that inbound marketing creates.

For example, with marketing automation, you can keep your sales team in the loop about all of your leads, allowing them to respond quickly when a lead created through inbound marketing shows signs of being ready to close on a sale.

What exactly is ABM (Account-Based Marketing)?

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic inbound marketing solution that focuses on specific accounts and/or industries to improve revenue and growth. It involves creating personalized content and campaigns targeting key stakeholders within those accounts. ABM can be used in conjunction with other inbound marketing solutions, such as lead generation and lead nurturing, improving results.

ABM is an effective inbound marketing solution for B2B SaaS companies. In one study, ABM increased deal sizes by more than 50%, and in another, it was found to increase conversion rates by 10-15%. ABM can also help improve customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC).

If you’re looking to improve your SaaS company’s revenue and growth, consider using ABM as your inbound marketing solution. It is an effective strategy for many businesses and can help you achieve your goals.

Why Partner with an Inbound Marketing Agency?

B2B SaaS marketing is a complex world of messaging, measurements, innovative tactics, and strategies. We get it. We’ve been there and seen the wild west. It is not easy to stay on top of it all or find the time to do everything that needs to be done to continue growing and keeping your investors happy.

If you’re looking for an inbound marketing solution to help you grow your monthly recurring revenue, partnering with an inbound marketing agency is a great option.

Here are 7 reasons why partnering with a B2B SaaS digital marketing agency focused on proving an inbound marketing solution is a great idea.

1. An inbound B2B SaaS marketing agency has the experience and expertise to help you achieve your SaaS growth goals.

2. An inbound marketing agency has a team of dedicated experts who can help you create and execute a successful inbound marketing strategy from start to finish in a measurable way.

3. An inbound marketing agency can help you create a more robust and successful demand generation program to convert more of these leads into customers.

4. An inbound marketing agency can help you improve your website’s search engine rankings and get more valuable free organic traffic to your site.

5. An inbound marketing agency can help you create targeted content that resonates with your audience and drives results, and maps that content to your customer avatar.

6. An inbound marketing agency can help you streamline your data collection process and install a digital analytics program. This can help you track your progress and make better data-informed decisions about your inbound marketing strategy to grow faster.

7. An inbound marketing agency can provide you with the deep expertise in-house marketers often lack and other resources you need to grow your business.

Partnering with an inbound marketing agency is a great way to achieve your growth goals. An inbound marketing agency can provide you with the experience, expertise, and resources you need to succeed. Leave us a comment or contact us today to learn more about how we can help you grow your SaaS brand.