Inbound Marketing Strategies To Increase Lead Generation For B2B SaaS Companies

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. What is Inbound marketing?
3. Recent statistics depicting the need for Inbound Marketing
4. What role does Inbound marketing play for SaaS companies?
5. Significant benefits of Inbound marketing for SaaS companies
6. Inbound marketing strategies to generate leads for B2B companies 
7. Final thoughts
8. How ‘The Smarketers’ can solve your B2B Inbound Marketing needs?

Introduction

Today, SaaS (Software as a Service) is one of the most rapidly growing industries in the world. According to Market Watch, ‘’The Global Software as a Service (SaaS) market size is estimated to grow at a CAGR of almost 11% with USD 99.99 billion during the forecast period 2022-2027. The “YOY (year-over-year) growth rate for 2022 is estimated at 11.71%” by the end of 2027.’’ The reason behind this accelerated growth is the ever-growing technological landscape and the growing need for advanced software. Even the pandemic outburst accelerated the growth of SaaS companies as the majority of the workforce around the globe started working remotely and increasingly leveraged software and cloud services. Clearly, it is the peak time for SaaS companies to adopt innovative growth strategies like Inbound Marketing Strategies to generate new leads and increase growth.

As rightly said by Guy Kawaski, leading evangelist (MAC & Canva), author, and speaker, “If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.” 

Therefore, let’s now dive deep into the concepts of Inbound marketing and its significance for SaaS companies. 

What is Inbound Marketing?

Unlike traditional or outbound marketing strategies, which focus on reaching customers to get them interested in buying your product, Inbound marketing focuses on creating and distributing content that draws customers’ attention toward your brand. Inbound marketing strategies pull customers towards your product by attracting, engaging, and delighting them through the right content at the right time. Inbound marketing strategies include various pull marketing tactics such as content marketing, blogs, events, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email marketing, etc. Inbound marketing has four stages: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight. 

The importance of inbound marketing is growing significantly. This can be substantiated by some facts given by prominent research analysts. 

Recent statistics depicting the need for Inbound Marketing

According to Hubspot’s The State of Marketing Trends Report 2022:

• 27% of marketers say they will leverage Inbound marketing for the first time in 2022, while 11% of marketers say it will be their most significant investment next year. 
• 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority 
• Blogging is the third-most-common content marketing strategy for businesses, and marketers that prioritize blogging see 13-times the ROI of businesses that don’t.
• According to WebFx, 95% of search traffic goes to the first page of search results, and 51% of website traffic is driven by organic search. 

Evidently, businesses need to focus more on Inbound marketing activities such as on-page, off-page SEO, and content marketing to attract more customers. 

What role does Inbound marketing play for SaaS companies?

Inbound marketing plays a vital role for B2B SaaS companies as it focuses on easing the sales effort. Unlike traditional marketing methods, inbound marketing does not put customers under pressure to buy. Instead, it builds awareness, nurtures the leads with relevant content, and builds long-term relationships/trust with the customers. 

Significant benefits of Inbound Marketing for SaaS companies

1. Breaks the silos between sales and marketing: Unlike traditional SaaS marketing, where sales and marketing teams work in a siloed manner, inbound marketing aims to bring sales and marketing people together. The inbound sales personnel gathers all information regarding the customer personas and the type of content required by the customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. This information is then passed on to the marketing team to curate the content to educate, engage and delight the customer. 
2. Improves brand visibility: Inbound marketing helps you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. Your brand becomes more visible by constantly delivering content and keeping customers engaged. Finely crafted content and carefully placed SEO strategies allow customers to find you easily on the web.
3. Ensures scalability: With the growing SaaS industry, the need for scalable SaaS marketing strategies is also growing. Inbound marketing strategies are entirely scalable as they allow you to repurpose the old content into new marketing material that you can use to attract new customers. 
4. Helps you generate quality leads: Another significant advantage of Inbound marketing is that it helps you generate quality traffic and leads. When you constantly engage your audience with quality content tailored to their pain points and needs, you build a connection with them, which helps generate leads.
5. Turns customers into brand promoters: Inbound marketing strategies are built on a simple rule, i.e., always to help customers. Even after the sales, the customer is not abandoned. Instead, the customer is engaged more with after-sales content and advice to solve their problems (if any).

Inbound marketing strategies to generate leads for B2B companies 

1. Buyer personas identification for targeted marketing: In Inbound marketing, one key strategy to generate quality leads is to determine the buyer persona. By identifying the buyer persona, you can focus on customers’ pain points, interests, needs, buying behavior, etc. This brings you closer to your customer and allows you to tailor your message to make them interested in your product and compels them to share their contact details with you to discuss further.

2. Gated content to gain contact information:  Another essential marketing strategy is to develop and distribute gated content to your buyer persona. Gated content is a type of downloadable content (such as case studies, landing pages, whitepapers, ebooks, etc.)  that can only be accessed after providing contact information (email id, phone number, etc.) or company details (company name, designation, employee strength, company email address, etc.) All this information helps you to generate leads based on your preferences. You can even use this information to reengage with the leads that have not been converted yet.

3. SEO optimization for higher ranking and visibility: Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most powerful strategies to generate organic leads. The more organic leads your business has, the higher the ranking across the web and the more credibility and visibility of your brand. However, SEO is a mix of various aspects that need to be set in place appropriately for B2B lead generation. First, identify the relevant keywords and embed those keywords into your webpage and all your digital content. Ensure a robust backlink strategy to divert most of your traffic to and fro across reputable sites. This ensures your website ranks higher on the search engine results page. 

4. Mobile optimization to capture leads: Today, users prefer to use mobile devices more than desktops as it allows them to access information on the go. Therefore, it is essential to create a mobile-friendly website to capture and convert more leads. Mobile optimization basically includes ensuring fast loading speed and easy navigation of webpages on mobile devices. Also, the content, images, and other multimedia should be mobile-friendly to deliver a great user experience. 

5. Social media marketing to engage the audience: Social media marketing is a well-known B2B marketing strategy that helps businesses attract new customers and retain existing ones to their brand and the high-value content that is produced on their website. Creating quality content and promoting it effectively on social media marketing go hand-in-hand. You can drive attraction toward your brand by actively engaging with social media groups specific to your industry. 

6. Email marketing to track and convert the leads: Another Inbound marketing lead generation tactic that really works is email marketing. Since every lead does not come across your social media feed or website content, providing a newsletter is an effective way to reach and engage with them. Email marketing is a great way to deliver news, blogs, newsletters, ebook, offers, etc., directly to people who have opted-in to receive it in their mailbox. By tracking the email delivery rate, open rate, asset download rate, and other key metrics, you can engage with the leads better and can convert them for your business growth.

7. Pay-per-click (PPC) to tap the untapped market: One of the important paid advertising tactics is PPC which falls under the inbound marketing lead generation strategy as it targets specific users who are actively searching for the solutions or services that your brand can offer. PPC is one of the effective ways to get your product or service placed right in front of your audience faster. In PPC, you pay specific charges to digital channels to place your content/website higher on the search results page to gain more attention from the users. This is done by using specific keywords, messaging and SEO aspects to attract qualified leads to click on your ads, maximize website traffic and drive lead conversion. 

8. Retargeting ads to bring visitors back to your business: Retargeting ads is another inbound marketing lead generation technique as it allows you to nurture your leads on external channels. Retargeting basically works by using cookies on your website to track visitors’ activity. Once the visitor leaves the website, targeted ads are sent to them on other websites to lure them back to your website. Suppose the users return to your website or spend more time on it before leaving; it indicates that the particular visitor is interested in your offerings and can be converted into highly qualified leads.   

Final thoughts:

It must be clear that SaaS businesses need to think from the customer’s perspective and determine their needs, pain points, and interests to generate more leads. All this information can only be achieved if you have the right SaaS marketing strategy, such as Inbound marketing strategies that keep the customer at the core. However, inbound marketing is not an overnight technique; it takes time and the right expertise to showcase results. 

How ‘The Smarketers’ can fulfill your B2B Inbound Marketing needs?

We have an in-depth understanding of B2B inbound marketing strategies and years of experience in serving clients across the globe. We help you leverage the inbound methodology to attract the right prospects to your business and, through strategic lead nurturing, convert them into delighted customers and forever brand loyalists. Schedule a 30-minute analysis of your marketing with our experts to know more.