The marketing world has seen a significant shift over the years. The way we sell our products and services has changed dramatically in recent years. The approach is shifting from trial-and-error, shotgun marketing towards more intentional, user-focused marketing initiatives, referred to as Inbound Marketing.
To market your product, you can broadcast information about your company, product, or service to a broader audience, or you can build something appealing to draw people. However, the concept of push-pull marketing is likely as old as marketing itself, and in today’s digital age, we have new jargon that technically replaces the terms “push” and “pull’. Particularly B2B Saas inbound marketing has transformed the marketing scenario.
Leveraging data on inbound marketing for SaaS, it is witnessed that 41% of CMO and CEOs have reported generating positive ROI [Source]. Furthermore, inbound marketing for each dollar spent generates 3x more leads [Source], and around 93% of organizations are implementing inbound marketing for lead generation [Source]. Intriguing, right?
Inbound marketing for your SaaS product can be your go-to strategy, just that a clear understanding of SaaS inbound marketing and traditional inbound marketing is required to get the most out of the approach. In this article, we have discussed all the know-hows of these aspects; let’s take an in-depth look.
Initially, let’s take a glance at what inbound marketing is all about. It is the process of assisting potential customers in finding your business. It’s a content-driven marketing strategy that gives a potential customer something worth. Before the customer is ready to buy, early contact can lead to brand preference and, eventually, leads and income.
There are a bunch of inbound marketing tactics that you can use to enrich SaaS brand exposure and attract new customers, such as pull marketing, content marketing, blogs, events, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and more. These tactics don’t make prospects feel like a product is being sold; you can appeal to the target market with the strategies.
Traditional marketing is more known to most of us: television commercials, billboards, and, more lately, ads on YouTube. On the other hand, traditional marketing is currently facing several issues in the age of the modern internet and social media: The cost of placing your advertisement is steadily rising. Even though online ads are often less expensive than, for example, television ads, they are increasing in price. People, on the other hand, are becoming more opposed to advertising. Even if they don’t use Ad-blockers, there’s a phenomenon known as banner-blindness, in which consumers actively disregard advertising.
On social media, people trust their peers more than advertisements. Even if you spend billions on advertising for your SaaS solution, it won’t be accessible if a prominent influencer speaks negatively about your product.
Influencer marketing, a relatively new inbound marketing approach that was once considered the next holy grail for SaaS growth marketing, is becoming more expensive and less effective. Nowadays, people know when an influencer is being promoted and are less receptive to the message.
Spending too much money on traditional advertising can backfire. Have you ever found yourself repeatedly watching a non-skippable ad on YouTube? Is there anything about the brand that irritates you? Would you purchase from the company? If the viewer isn’t already devoted to your brand, the response is almost certainly no.
Inbound marketing appears; there will be less resistance because you’re “drawing” customers in with appealing items, particularly content. Inbound marketing aims to add value to each interaction, build relationships and trust, and eventually convert the audience into paying consumers, aiding you in scaling a SaaS business growth.
Let’s roll out to get an idea of how inbound marketing can be an effective growth marketing strategy for your SaaS product:
SaaS Inbound marketing material is instructive, engaging, and well-received by potential clients. Inbound marketing for SaaS, when done correctly, can produce far more significant outcomes than traditional inbound marketing, which interrupts prospects rather than inviting them to participate. When customers find your company this way, it has an enormous impact on their marketing decisions in the future and how they feel about your brand in general. With this marketing, customers are in the driver’s seat, connecting you with people interested in what you deliver.
Inbound marketing aids in social media shares, boosts brand exposure, SEO efforts, leads conversions, and customer retention. Customers can interact with your business at any time if you have a robust inbound marketing strategy in place. It enables you to generate qualified leads for a fraction of the cost of traditional lead generation.
SaaS inbound marketing focuses on conversions and customer retention features, upselling and feeding business growth loops with valuable consumer data. Here are a few saas inbound marketing strategies:
The highlighted inbound marketing techniques can help you position your SaaS company effectively towards today’s knowledgeable audience. Assessing your audience and knowing the pain points is crucial to inbound marketing for SaaS, as the more you know about them, your strategy will be more successful.
Inbound marketing is different for SaaS products because the aim is to establish yourself as the industry leader and become visible in the crowded marketplace. The SaaS organization must develop the proper distribution strategy in the appropriate channels, ensuring that the content syndication platform gets the required content associated with your SaaS offering to place the product in front of your target market. In terms of SaaS inbound, how you deliver information plays a crucial role.
You have to measure the major KPIs to get the idea if the marketing efforts are going in the right direction, and whenever there are discrepancies, quick adjustment is required to mitigate the risk of damaging brand impact; in content delivery, you have to set tactics such as animation, infographics, engage visitors and deliver a memorable message.
Let’s run through the facts to assess the difference and similarities between traditional inbound and inbound marketing for SaaS:
Traditional marketing entails meeting your target demographic throughout their day, which you can accomplish in diverse ways: television watch, news read, or radio. When they see your advertisement, your target audience may not even be thinking about your product. Traditional marketing focuses on leaving customers to remember your brand when they want or need a product.
Saas Inbound marketing is primarily about meeting the client when they first recognize they require your product or service. With inbound marketing, people might answer queries when looking for a solution. It’s all about getting to know these people and answering their early inquiries so you can help them through the process if they decide to buy. This establishes your organization as not simply the industry leader but also the obvious choice when it comes time to act.
Traditional inbound marketing is more about spawning interest, often through broad branding messages placed in mass mediums. The messages are distributed to vast demographic groupings that may or may not be your target market.
The inbound marketing for SaaS methodology focuses on an individual rather than a group to generate interest. To do so, you’ll need first to create your target persona. What are their names? What sort of interests do they have? What type of automobile do they drive? While these may seem random questions, the more we learn about these people, the more we understand their behavior. Once we know who these people are, we can respond to their typical queries and create lead nurturing material to meet their needs. This entails getting in front of our personas when they’re ready to ask inquiries. While we may not receive hundreds of impressions as with traditional marketing, the quality of those impressions improves significantly.
Traditional marketing and advertising entail conveying your message to as many potential prospects as possible in the hopes of receiving a response. Traditional lead generation techniques include Direct mail, Telemarketing, Networking, Referrals, etc.
While you might reach a large number of potential leads, conversion rates are often low, and the cost per lead is exceptionally high.
It’s all about delivering value to a visitor to obtain leads through inbound marketing for SaaS. They may receive education, insight, or assistance in exchange for their information. Inbound marketers may quickly qualify a lead using this information and assess whether the visitor and the product are a good match.
Traditional marketing approaches might make reviewing results difficult and inexact. Often, we get a projection of prior acts’ perceptions. If you advertise on television, radio, or print, you will only be given your figures at the end of your campaign. This limits the number of adjustments or alterations you can make as the campaign progresses.
The plethora of tools we can use to measure the performance of a campaign is one of the best things about marketing and advertising using the inbound marketing methodology. Marketing is no more a guessing game or an estimate. Many tools are available for a free or low cost that can readily track a campaign’s success or failure. Here are a few examples: Google Analytics, CrazyEgg, HubSpot
These tools can quickly and precisely reveal what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to make adjustments and modifications during the campaign.
Traditional inbound marketing is similar to releasing a carrier pigeon and hoping it will arrive at its destination. We don’t have the power to stop it or change its direction. While testing methods like focus groups can be used, they are costly and rarely as accurate as you would like. Even slight errors, such as a misspelled word, can result in your campaign being seen by thousands of people wrongly.
New inbound marketing for SaaS has a distinct advantage in that it allows you to change in real-time as you witness genuine user reactions to your campaign. We can see what succeeded and why using our hypothesis, testing, and review. We test and monitor frequently, and the more we adapt, the more successful our marketing activities become.
The approach also aids in shortening the traditional elongated SaaS sales cycles and educating the savvy prospects along their journey to finding the ideal SaaS solution.
Without a doubt, inbound marketing is the way of the future. It increases the bar for our marketing efforts. That being said, without our old, traditional competitor, inbound marketing would not be what it is today. Inbound marketing for SaaS expands the reach exponentially and sets you as an industry leader who can solve the target market’s pain points.
Here the success of the approach is inclined towards the marketing strategies; consistent data analysis based on clear KPIs, optimization, and testing is essential to measurable success. Keeping up with competitive insights and adjusting strategy directs a more significant ROI on your marketing investment.
The best way to leverage Inbound marketing for your SaaS is to get more in-depth knowledge about how to effectively implement it in your growth marketing strategy to reap the benefits.
If you are floating around confusion about how to proceed, FirstPrinciple can be your reliable companion. To know more about FirstPrinciple Growth Advisory For SaaS, contact us today!
Ameet Mehta
