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5 Reasons Why SaaS Companies need Inbound and Account Based Marketing for Maximum Results

SaaS Companies

What is your monthly website traffic, if you are in the SaaS business?

100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000… it will be soon you can see 10,000,000 or more sprawling to your website and making SaaS companies purchases.

We are saying this confidently because we have seen companies grow from 0 to thousands and then millions in their traffic numbers by leveraging inbound marketing and then optimizing with the help of Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

Your SaaS business also has the potential to grow big and start attracting customers.

With the surge in different marketing approaches and trends, there is often ambiguity about which approach needs to be deployed and when. We aim to clarify this for SaaS companies that are intending to explore Inbound marketing and ABM.

Read More: How to Increase Upsell and Cross-sell Revenue with Account-Based Marketing?

5 reasons your SaaS business needs Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a bottom-up approach that aims to pull as many leads as possible. The bottom of the funnel is wide and makes its way towards the top where customers are seated.

When you know little about your customers and are still figuring out the channels that need to be optimized, inbound marketing is the way to go.

Here is more clarification on why Inbound marketing helps your SaaS business.

Gain Critical Mass

Inbound marketing with a combination of paid and organic means would help SaaS players gain critical mass. What is the critical mass that we are referring to? Inbound marketing has a multiplier effect when you fit in impulsive responses for the lead to act upon. Ask them to share their data such as an email ID or phone number, share a post, or download an item.

With ads and search engine optimization (SEO) trends, you can gain that critical mass. Some good stories that would inspire you are those of Zapier, ZenDesk and Hubspot. They have achieved their initial loyal audience in less than three years and have also hit the list of ‘Top 50 Global SaaS Companies’. They have relied heavily on inbound marketing to achieve this rank.

Spread wings. More leads.

More and more. You need a lot of leads in an affordable and efficient manner to validate your business sooner than later. Inbound marketing helps you test to fail fast and learn fast. And, in the SaaS industry, this approach is highly productive.

Inbound marketing also helps you build a long email list of leads which can be nurtured and converted into opportunities over a period of time. Bringing them close to converting into customers.

Find optimized channels and sources

With consistent inbound marketing efforts, you would be able to analyze and pin down the 20% of channels and sources that bring 80% of revenues to your business.

Inbound marketing helps you figure out those optimized channels and sources that bring more of those qualified leads that matter most to your business.

Find hyper-focused audience

As a newbie, your startup would be struggling to define your customer in reality. While you may have successfully developed a customer profile, it may or may not meet the criteria of your real customer. It simply helps you know your customer better.

This is a learning process that needs to be realized early. The customer definition that brings more business to your company would be a precursor to ABM. This exercise will help you complete the initial steps of ABM which is the creation of demographics and technographics.

Leverage remarketing

SaaS companies thrive on remarketing when it comes to inbound marketing. This also helps you pursue high potential customers until a conversion occurs. Retargeting Ads and other remarketing efforts help you lower costs and increase ROI with limited manual effort.

Read: Is Account-Based Marketing right for your B2B company? : A quick checklist

5 reasons to evolve toward ABM

Inbound marketing is great but needs your business would reach a point where your team will decide to go up-market. This is when you want to optimize everything — landing pages, customer profiles, content, product, website, costs and more.

Sell Enterprise packages

Less than 1% of leads convert into customers in the SaaS industry. This number needs to change and increase for better efficiency.

There will be a time, after achieving critical mass, that you will want to start focusing on selling customized, enterprise product plans. This is because standardized plans would reach saturation over time and your existing clients would want more customization to their existing needs.

Go Upmarket

SaaS business owners will cross the chasm over a period, both within the organization and in the industry. This would again require you to increase your average ARR (Annual Recurring Return) by selling more enterprise pricing plans rather than the standard ones.

To achieve this, you would have to adopt a top-down approach. This requires you to profile the type of customers you choose to bring on board even before targeting them. ABM techniques standardize these steps for you.

High LTV and low costs

ABM brings in larger clients with defined criteria. This helps in enjoying a higher Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer and reduces the cost of the acquisition of a customer. It works towards reducing resource costs.

Align sales and marketing

ABM is the best deployment if your organization needs an immediate sales and marketing alignment. Communication, content, customer profiling and targets, all together would be synchronized to fulfil sales and marketing goals.

This inherent nature of ABM would raise your organizational cohesion a level higher.

Personalize and optimize

As mentioned earlier, ABM deals with hyper-focused customer profiles. This drives you to create personalized content and experience all through the customer’s journey. This further requires you to optimize each channel for the prospect and customize the experience for him/her.

With the deep and granular level of personalization required, there are already AI tools that can help you achieve this.

Holistically, account-based marketing services help SaaS companies in enhancing customer experience. You begin creating a great experience with inbound marketing and grow it into ABM — this leads to more revenues and more business.

ABM for B2B companies

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