When it comes to marketing your SaaS company, nothing is more effective at generating quality leads than an inbound marketing approach.
In this short blog, we’ll explain what inbound marketing is, what you need to implement an inbound marketing strategy, and how to get some help in doing it for your B2B software company specifically.
Related Content: A Complete Guide to B2B SaaS Marketing
If you’re new to these terms, don’t worry. They’re straightforward to grasp.
Outbound marketing refers to the classic approach of reaching out to your potential customers where they're at. This includes mass advertising, cold calling, going to trade shows, etc.
Inbound marketing is the modern approach of building a helpful online resource that attracts, engages, and delights website visitors. Instead of going out to them, your potential customer comes to you.
To successfully attract website visitors for an inbound marketing approach, you’ll need to establish your brand as a helpful and authoritative industry force through insightful content.
This means working with a copywriter and an SEO analyst to create assets on your website that attract, engage, and delight visitors.
Some examples of these content offers are:
With a combination of great content with great strategy, you’ll be on the way to making your software offering an authoritative solution for your targeted industry.
Now that you know what inbound marketing is and which content you can make for your website, the next step is determining what sort of content is best for a software company like yours.
Your content (as well as your website) should engage visitors at each step of their buyer's journey. The buyer's journey refers to the natural steps one takes in solving a problem or capitalizing on an opportunity. It runs in three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.
When visitors come to your website, they will be in any one of these three stages, so it is pertinent the inbound marketing practices and content strategy you produce coincide with each of them.
In the awareness stage, your visitor knows they have an issue, they just don't know about the solution yet. This is called a "pain point". For SaaS companies like yours, this probably has something to do with error-prone and time-consuming manual tasks. The content you develop here – like blogs – shows visitors that you understand that pain point and, with outright advertising to them, you make them aware of a possible solution.
In the consideration stage, your visitor knows that software – like yours – is a viable option for solving their problems with error-prone and time-consuming tasks. Here, you use content such as eBooks and webinars to demonstrate your industry authority and convert visitors into viable leads for your business. You showcase how software can work for their problem or opportunity and allow them to learn how yours is the best.
In the decision stage, your visitor is ready to buy. This is where you use case studies and other forms of media that demonstrate your software as the perfect solution.
Producing all this great content for your website can be a bit exhausting and tiring for you and your team, even if you have a director of marketing. Many B2B software companies look to a SaaS marketing agency for some help creating great content, optimizing the content they already have, and providing insight on which content to create.
If this sounds like the sort of help your B2B SaaS company could use, schedule a time to talk with us. The first call is free, and we’ll give you a preliminary overview of our services and your current online positioning in terms of inbound marketing.