What is Inbound Marketing? 

You can think of inbound marketing as a methodology that attracts customers by offering helpful and valuable content and experiences that are customized for them. 

It is opposite to outbound marketing in many ways which work by interrupting the audiences with content that may not always serve their purpose. 

Inbound marketing essentially focuses on getting customers to find the brand rather than the brand finding the audiences.

Importance of SaaS Inbound Marketing

The online sphere has given brands a kind of superpower. Marketers now know how to get people to click on things. On top of that, they also know how to get this action to happen organically in a free manner. This kind of knowledge is extremely important for new businesses in particular.

This is precisely what inbound marketing strategies do. They are not interruption-based. Rather they give customers the choice and the power to make informed buying decisions. All the efforts in inbound marketing align with buyers’ thinking, their purchase habits, and what they want.

For B2B SaaS companies, all these points are even more important as you’re selling an intelligible product. SaaS marketing brings on the surface the needs of a customer which they are not even aware of.

SaaS Inbound Marketing Strategy

1. SaaS Content Creation

SaaS’s marketing strategies begin with content that must focus on customers. Meaning, it should take into account the behaviors, problems, and needs of the customers. 

Knowing all that begins with the right project management systems for marketing agencies like Function Point to track all your efforts and assign it to the right team members:

User Research

For SaaS businesses, understanding the buyer persona(s) is super important. A buyer persona is a model that describes your ideal audience. Think questions like:

• What does your target demographic of an ideal customer look like?
• What pain points do they have?
• How can your SaaS product offer a solution to that problem(s)?

Asking only these questions should paint a clearer picture of your ideal customers. As you go more into detail asking more questions, your buyer persona will get clearer.

Keyword Research

To conduct thorough keyword research, you must take care of 3 key principles:

• Stick with keywords relevant to both your audience and business.
• Pick keywords that carry enough monthly searches to turn profitable yet not so much competition that they become unmanageable. 
• Go with keywords that you can write multiple pieces of content on. 

For research purposes, you can use tools like UberSuggest, Google’s Keyword Planner, and SEMrush.

Developing High-Conversion Content

To create quality content, always start by observing the market and see what kind of content is ranking high SERPs. 

Look into things like – nature of content, structure, and keyword insertion. 

After you have an inkling of major topics and their formatting, you can either try to beat it by creating better, bigger, and more detailed content. Or, you can try to approach the content with a different angle/approach.

2. Content Promotion

SEO Optimizations

SEO for SaaS companies is a very broad topic. As a subject, it can be discussed for days. But, there are some key areas on which you must focus, such as:

• Mobile-responsiveness of the page. Make sure that the page loads within less than three seconds. Loading time more than that is a bad practice SEO-wise.

• Make sure to incorporate the keywords naturally within the content. Try to use semantically related words.

• Write structured content. Pay attention to grammatical errors and typos. Always write unique content.

• Pay special attention to backlinks. It’s good to have quality inbound links pointing to your site. However, if you try to get too many poor-quality backlinks, your site could face serious repercussions. Try to aim for 2-3 backlinks each month and make them high-quality.

Social Media Promotion

Social media promotion can be of two types: paid and organic. Organic content promotion happens when you have a huge number of followers. So, when you share something interesting, more people naturally feel like reading it and sharing it.

Paid promotion, as understandable, is when you pay for your social media advertising. Facebook’s Boost Post is one feature you can use for paid content promotion on this social media platform.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing essentially involves reaching out to an influencer with a huge following or a reputable site and getting them to recommend your product and/or content. 

The goal is to reach an already engaged audience rather than you creating it from scratch. Every SaaS business needs to find the right kind of influencer and work out ways in which to get their product mentioned by the influencer.

One way to approach influencer marketing is to mention an influencer within your content and then reach out to them. It’s possible that they might just share back your content with their followers. But, for that to happen, you must churn out high-quality content.

Guest Posting

Guest posting involves reaching out to reputable sites within SaaS niche and pitching a topic to them. Guest posting (although time-consuming) can be quite an effective way to secure quality backlinks. 

3. Optimizing Conversions for Your Content

When you reach a point where your monthly search volume is over 1000 visitors, it’s now time for you to turn those visitors into leads. 

Using e-mails is one way to do that. Come up with ways in which you can capture your user’s email address by creating landing pages and asking for free trials.

The thing is, social media platforms can delete your page without any prior warning. In the same way, Google can also de-index your site any time. In the middle of such uncertainty, emails are the one thing that will stay with you.

Here’s how you can go about converting your visitors into leads with the power of email marketing:

• Offer premium content – The content could be an ebook, a checklist, or some kind of long post that addresses users’s pain points. Make sure that it’s high-quality and well-researched. Before sharing the content, ask users to share their details like email address, etc.
• Offer free trials – This is something that every SaaS marketer should do. Offering free trials of your product gives people a chance to test drive the product before committing to it.
• Create landing pages – A landing page can be anything such as something describing your product’s feature. Make sure that your content is actionable and includes relevant CTAs to prompt an action.

Bottom Line

Inbound marketing for SaaS marketers (if done rightly) can turn out to be a cash cow. Hopefully, this post helped shed some light on how to leverage inbound marketing the most.