Why Savvy SaaS Brands Hire an Inbound Marketing Agency vs Staying In-House
Are you a B2B SaaS business owner trying to decide whether to reach out to an inbound marketing agency or keep your marketing in-house? If so, this blog post is for you! Here we will explore the pros and cons of each option so that you can make the best decision for your business when it comes to hiring the best B2B SaaS agency.
Before we do that, let us look at the inbound marketing methodology, common problems it solves, how it differs from the outbound approach, and everything else you should know before reaching out to inbound marketing experts or starting to work on your strategy.
Whatever choice you make, keep in mind that the more in-depth your strategy is, the easier it will be to achieve your business objectives and stay ahead of your competition.
What is Inbound Marketing and can it work for your B2B SaaS?
Inbound marketing is a term used in business to describe the process of drawing customers to a company or product through content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and lead generation. Whereas outbound techniques involve ‘pushing’ advertisements and selling messages to people, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward a company or product.
Inbound marketing aims to attract customers through high-quality, valuable content. Once the customer is interested in a company or product, it is easier to market to them through any channel.
Quality content is key in establishing trust and credibility with potential customers, laying the groundwork for future conversions. Companies that produce quality content will have increased website traffic, more leads, and a higher ROI.
When it comes to inbound marketing efforts, quality trumps quantity. It is better to have a smaller audience of dedicated fans who appreciate your content than a large audience of uninterested spectators.
This inbound strategy focuses on customers finding you through quality content and attracting prospects through relevant and helpful offers. This content can be blog posts, videos, eBooks, infographics, images, or anything else that provides valuable information to your target audience.
When you produce great content, people will naturally find their way to your company website. And once they are there, you can convert a prospect into a lead with targeted offers like free trials, eBooks, newsletter, and email marketing.
Content Marketing for B2B SaaS firms
Once your leads have landed where you wanted them, you will need to offer them something to keep them interested. Whether they visit your website through your PPC or SEO campaign, they will expect fresh and fruitful content that will help you convert them into customers.
The content you create should come in numerous forms with a common objective of helping your leads by answering their questions or solving their problems. The content you offer needs to provide value. Customers can easily spot fluffy, worthless content that will only waste their time, and having an inbound agency with quality SEO services will help you ensure your content marketing is on the right track as well.
PPC advertising for B2B SaaS brands
Many will wrongly assume that paid tactics like search engine marketing should not be a part of an inbound plan, but as search ads appear when a person is actively searching for your SaaS product online, PPC ads are not interrupting them in any way. That said, not all paid search aspects are a part of inbound marketing. For instance, Google Ads will be better off in your outbound marketing strategy.
Search queries show so much intent, and paid ads allow you to get faster on SERPs than with organic traffic. After all, Google will sometimes take several months before ranking your organic blog post with all the right keywords and structure. Also, PPC allows you to have more control over how and when you appear on the SERPs, and when combined with SEO, it almost guarantees impressive results.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The acronym SEO implies the process of optimizing the content and structure of your website to receive organic rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Businesses with a quality website and optimized content ensure that Google identifies and indexes the content and shows it when people type for relevant keywords.
For instance, if your business sells a time-tracking tool, a well-optimized website will get people who type in Google terms like ‘time tracking app’ or ‘track my time’ to your website. An SEO strategy involves keywords, codes, website structure, link building, and other technical details, ensuring Google recommends your website.
Lead Generation
There are many ways to generate leads, but the most efficient one is creating landing pages with a content upgrade offer. Landing pages are where your leads will land after clicking on your call-to-action button. It might be a product page, a form that requires filling out some information to download content, a subscription service page, or anything else that helps you convert your leads.
Unlike blog content, landing pages need to be straightforward and provide only essential information that will encourage the lead to take action. Ensure that the call-to-action that got this lead to your landing page aligns with the content on it.
More importantly, your landing page should only have one goal. Do not use it to introduce your team, explain the product, demonstrate use cases, and ask leads to buy the product. Use one goal and one goal only. Whether it is to sell, schedule a demo, leave an email address, or something else. With more objectives, your leads will end up wandering on the page and closing it in no time.
Common Problems Inbound Marketing Can Solve
Inbound marketing solves several business problems, including increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and driving revenue. By creating valuable content that attracts people to your website and promotes engagement with your brand, your inbound marketing work can help you reach more potential customers and convert them into paying customers.
It involves creating content relevant to your target audience and publishing it on your website and other channels like social media, email newsletters, and blogs. As people consume this content, they will gradually become more familiar with your brand and interested in doing business with you. Inbound marketing also helps you track how successful your campaigns are so you can fine-tune them for even better results.
And because inbound marketing is a more cost-effective way to generate leads than traditional marketing methods, it can also be a more effective way to grow your business and boost the results of your sales team.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Almost every buying cycle nowadays starts with an online search. If you appear at the top of search results on Google or are active on a searcher social network, this will help you organically improve your brand awareness. That said, you will need quality content and messaging to appear in these inbound channels.
Improving Brand Preference
Companies need to educate, entertain, and interact with their leads before a purchasing decision. That helps build trust and increase the chances of choosing you over competitors when they are in the buying phase. By becoming a familiar brand, you are at the beginning of building valuable, long-term relationships with your customers that pay off in the long run.
Generating More Leads
A common problem of many businesses is they need more leads but do not have enough money to invest in a lead generation strategy. With inbound marketing, you can invest money without spending too much at once, and more importantly, your results will also gradually improve. Content that organically attracts leads is the best lead generation tactic, regardless of the industry.
Lack of Staff to Do Inbound Marketing
The more you invest in your inbound marketing, the more benefits you will see. However, not everyone has the time, money, or staff to do it. Inbound marketing requires the knowledge and skills of an inbound marketing agency to ensure outlining key themes, content, and distribution aligns with the overall digital strategy.
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing pulls leads in through engaging and valuable content, while outbound pushes sales messages out to the potential customer through paid advertising and cold-calling.
Inbound marketing is a more sustainable, long-term strategy as it relies on creating quality content that people will want to read and share. The outbound approach in marketing can be more effective in the short run but can quickly become expensive and less effective as consumers become savvier about advertising.
Simply put, inbound marketing is about drawing customers to you, whereas outbound is about pushing products or services onto unsuspecting customers. Inbound marketing relies on creating quality content that people will want to read and share across social media platforms and other channels. The goal is to provide valuable information to help potential customers solve their problems.
The outbound approach often involves using paid advertising methods such as creating advertising campaigns on Google, display advertising, cold calls, and cold email campaigns. It is less about providing value to potential customers and more about getting them to take a specific action, such as making a purchase. These methods are often less effective than inbound ones because they interrupt people instead of attracting their attention organically.
Audience Engagement
The outbound approach uses platforms with a large following and occasionally interrupts them with disassociated ads. The objective is to get a small percentage of that audience to focus on the interruption and convert it into a customer.
Inbound marketing is based on customer permission. Companies choose to use platforms where their target audience wants to communicate and provide valuable information about their issues or concerns.
Brand Positioning
With an outbound approach, there is a lot of competition, and everyone is fighting for attention. That leads to a strategy that uses attention-grabbing elements over value. To stick in traditional advertising, companies must always look for ways to present themselves in front of the general public and hope that one of their potential customers notices them.
With inbound marketing, the story revolves around you. You are creating the content that your leads anticipate. With a quality marketing strategy, businesses tell stories to their audience in a way their potential customers prefer. They delight, inform, and engage their audience before asking them to spend their money.
Marketing Strategies
Any outbound strategy will be linear. Companies determine which platforms bring the best results and focus on them while eliminating the least effective ones. That leads to creating a unified message used on all chosen platforms.
On the other hand, inbound marketing requires a more holistic approach. That is why an inbound marketing company might suggest simultaneous use of all online channels, uninterrupted work to optimize your website, content development, analytics tool implementation, etc. Unfortunately, many businesses do not understand these complexities, so they opt for an inbound marketing strategy, applying it with an outbound approach.
Market Messaging
Outbound messaging will always be fluffy, complicated, and information-worthless. As outbound marketers do not have a lot of room to work with, the goal is to stand out instead of providing informative content. They also have no idea where their ads will show, and their messages become unnatural, boring, or forced.
Inbound marketing messaging is specific and useful. The message is being offered to the lead instead of being forced. Messaging here is delivered with more quality to ensure it educates and engages. To provide the needed information, inbound marketers provide only that, eliminating what is unnecessary.
Reasons to Use Inbound Marketing for your B2B SaaS
There are several reasons to use inbound marketing, especially if looking to target specific customers, build an audience or your visibility, or generate qualified leads. After all, inbound marketing can help you attract qualified leads that are more likely to convert into customers or clients.
Also, inbound marketing can help you build relationships with your target ICP (ideal customer profile), leading to sustainable business growth. Besides constantly looking to attract new customers, many businesses profit from up-selling or cross-selling to their existing customers.
Finally, inbound marketing is a cost-effective way to reach your target market and grow your SaaS business. Companies implementing inbound strategies can more easily connect with their potential customers and create meaningful relationships. This will help them better understand the needs of their customers, which might be helpful when building a new product or service.
Inbound marketing is an effective marketing strategy for any company, from a small B2B SaaS business to a large enterprise. Is there a B2B SaaS business that doesn’t seek more qualified leads from different sources and nurture relationships with existing customers? Ergo, every size and type of SaaS business needs inbound marketing, regardless of their niche.
Best Inbound Marketing Strategies for B2B SaaS to Leverage
After we went through the inbound methodology, it is time to learn how inbound strategies work. The best inbound marketing strategies create quality content that engages and delights customers. When customers are delighted, they are more likely to share your content with their friends and followers, which amplifies your reach and helps you attract even more customers.
Quality content is key to any inbound marketing plan. You need to produce content that is original, informative, and interesting enough to compel people to read it, share it, and come back for more. If you can accomplish this, you will be well on your way to building a successful inbound marketing campaign.
Inbound marketing strategies focus on creating, publishing, and distributing content that pulls people towards your business and product, opposed to traditional outbound techniques like cold calling or spamming.
Inbound marketing is becoming increasingly popular because it is a more effective way to reach buyers already interested in what you have to offer. And when done correctly, it can be an extremely effective way to attract new leads and turn them into customers.
1. Using Facebook to Create a Target Persona
Before creating compelling content, you should understand what your customers and leads want to learn. For such a strategy, you need in-depth market knowledge to react fast. Review your Facebook Page Insights and learn more about your audience and ideal prospects.
These demographics can help you create your buyer persona and give everyone in the organization an idea about who is interested in your business. Add as much detailed information as possible to have a comprehensive overview of who your ideal customer is.
2. Surveying Your Customers and Leads
Another simple and efficient way to learn more about your target audience is through a survey. You can conduct a list of simple questions and share them with your existing and potential customers.
However, all the questions you ask must lead to one question, the most important one: “What is your biggest issue?” This will help you understand what problems they are facing and how your content can provide information that helps solve these pain points for them.
3. Create and Share Compelling Content
We have mentioned it several times, but the quality of the content sets apart a successful inbound strategy from an unsuccessful one. Creating general, self-serving content will get you nowhere.
The leading content marketers continuously adapt their content to match the needs of their target audience. Also, they are aware that serving the same content to people in different phases of the customer journey is a horrible idea.
4. Make Your Content More Visual
Content is not just text. What about your images, videos, and infographics? This content has an even higher converting rate than text, and it needs to be a part of your inbound marketing strategy. Support your existing articles with videos or images that provide additional information relevant to that topic.
Or, create an educational video that will help people understand how to make the most of your product or service. There are so many options with visual content, and the biggest mistake you can make is not to use it as a way to engage your customers and leads on an even deeper level.
5. Use Storytelling in Your Content
Yes, inbound marketing is data-based, but your content should be everything but dry and look like a finance report. It should be based on storytelling. People relate to stories, not numbers, and when you tell a compelling story that inspires them to engage with your brand, you have achieved your goal.
Storytelling helps businesses emotionally connect with their audience, which leads to brand recall. Even if your lead hasn’t made a purchase now, they could remember that story you shared a few months later and act upon it.
6. Acquiring Leads with Free Content
It is not easy to convert your website visitors into leads who will give you their email address just like that. To motivate them to do that, most inbound marketing agencies will suggest offering free content in exchange for contact information.
Determine what your customers will appreciate as free content and prepare it for them. It can be a guide, instructional video, eBook, report, or anything else that you think will be an effective lead magnet.
Why You Should Outsource to an Inbound Marketing Agency
All this information might be overwhelming for someone not experienced in digital marketing, and it is only the tip of the iceberg. That is why most businesses will decide to hire an inbound marketing team that will help them engage better with their customers, generate qualified leads, or any other inbound marketing goal.
Inbound marketing is a complex and ever-changing field, and it takes a lot of specialized knowledge and experience to do it well. An inbound marketing agency will have a team of experts who can help you as their client achieve the results your business needs.
Hiring experts can help you attract more qualified leads and convert them into customers with a proven methodology. They have the right skills, experience, tools, platforms, and ideas for effective content and digital marketing campaigns that will help you reach your target market.
Also, inbound marketing takes a lot of time and effort and is challenging to do it properly if you’re also trying to run your B2B SaaS business. Outsourcing the work to a digital marketing agency will free up your time and resources. A quality digital agency helps each client improve their online presence. They know how to create efficient SEO and social media campaigns that will help you reach more people online.
Top 5 Inbound Marketing Agencies Right Now
As businesses are becoming more aware of the importance of inbound marketing, there is a growing trend of inbound marketing agencies in this field. If you are determined to hire the best inbound marketing company, these are the names you should keep in mind.
1. Algocentric Digital Consultancy
As a B2B SaaS digital marketing consultancy, we provide our clients with AI-powered digital marketing services. Our consultancy is proud of our hands-on approach when working on client accounts, ensuring we also consistently educate our clients about their campaign progress and find new ways to satisfy their digital marketing needs.
2. ImpactBDN
It wasn’t until Impact converted into a publishing company from just another digital marketing agency that they became one of the best in the game. On their website, you can find one of the best marketing articles on the Internet, establishing themselves as leaders of the industry and experts in different digital marketing services.
3. Kuno Creative
From content marketing and demand generation to lead nurturing and marketing automation services, Kuna Creative is one of the inbound marketing agencies that offer it all. The agency has helped numerous brands with its quality strategies and became one of the leaders in the digital marketing world.
4. Smart Bug Media
As the name indicates, Smart Bug Media is a digital marketing agency that gathers the smartest in different areas of digital marketing. The company is not competing to have more clients than their competitors, which allows them to dedicate their resources to each account properly. Also, their inbound marketing service caters to their clients on a more profound, meaningful level.
5. Media Junction
Although its foundation is website design, Media Junction is so much more than just that. The digital marketing agency provides a wide range of marketing services, including inbound sales alignment and other inbound marketing services. The guys at Media Junction also love sharing their success with others, so most of their case studies are on the company website.
Finding the best inbound marketing agency for you is not easy. You should seek those with a praised marketing team and enough time to dedicate to each client. Whether you work in a small business or multinational corporation, not maximizing your inbound marketing efforts is something competitors will surely use against you.
