Updated January 2021: Today’s B2B SaaS customers do most of their research before ever speaking to a salesperson, so it’s no surprise that outbound marketing tactics such as cold calling are becoming increasingly difficult to get results from. Instead, the savviest marketers are focused on more impactful strategies like SaaS inbound marketing.
Nearly 75% of companies around the globe use an inbound marketing approach. However, inbound marketing for SaaS companies doesn’t follow a one-size-fits-all model, and you need to be strategic about what works best for your company and your audience.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss 5 ways to effectively engage with your target audience and establish your brand as worthy of being heard. Remember to adapt each tip for your organization. The big bonus you get when your boss sees the improvement in ROI will just be icing on the cake.
5 strategic SaaS inbound marketing tips
1. SaaS inbound marketing is driven by thought leadership
A B2B SaaS company needs to produce more than just pithy tweets and cute animal memes to stay relevant. Considering that 55% of decision-makers use thought leadership content to evaluate vendors, you need to be creating the kind of original, forward-thinking content that unequivocally establishes your position at the head of the pack. With the right inbound marketing for SaaS companies, you can leverage the power of subject matter experts and industry leaders alike in your content.
Original content created using interviews with experts and influencers is vital to the success of any SaaS inbound marketing effort. Encourage your company’s leaders to participate in podcasts, webinars, conferences and other speaking opportunities to leverage opportunities to position your brand as an authority in the industry. Producing educational content that highlights your company’s complex problem-solving capabilities with real-life use cases is another way to quickly build brand loyalty and drive results with inbound marketing for SaaS companies.
Unfortunately, many SaaS companies struggle to achieve thought leader status due to a lack of in-house capacity and writing skills, or freelance writers who just don’t understand the company’s brand or vision. It’s important to take the time to find a writer who knows what they’re doing and is a good fit for you.
2. Engagement is just as important as content
Your SaaS inbound marketing content could be the best thing since sliced bread, but if no one’s reading it, liking it or sharing it, you’re throwing valuable time and resources to the wind. Effective inbound marketing for SaaS companies can increase audience engagement, which has been proven among 70% of B2B marketers.
The key is to create engagement opportunities for your target audience, as well as connect with untapped market segments. Creating content that your audience wants to read and finds useful—for example, how-to content—is one way to generate engagement.
Distributing your SaaS inbound marketing content strategically is also paramount to ensuring that your content is being seen by the right people. The best places to share your content are the platforms that your audience already knows and trusts.
3. SaaS inbound marketing requires great storytelling
Not all SaaS content is inherently interesting—and some might even be, frankly speaking, downright boring. That’s why how you choose to convey information is critical to determining whether or not it captures the interest of your audience.
Innovative, eye-catching inbound marketing videos, animation, infographics and even flow charts can help illustrate a story that makes your content more relatable and far more memorable. These forms of content are also ideally suited to being shared with others.
While inbound marketing content that tells rich stories can take days or even weeks to produce in-house, using a professional SaaS content marketing agency can save you invaluable time, energy and resources. This will result in more time for you to focus on what’s really important—and maybe even beat the rush-hour on the way home.
4. Landing pages are key for SaaS inbound marketing
Building landing pages that are targeted at your prospects’ challenges, and that highlight how your SaaS products solve these problems, is a solid SaaS inbound marketing tactic that often gets overlooked.
You can get started with a tool such as Ahrefs or SEMrush that will identify the keywords your target audience is searching for. Then, you can create a product landing page with these keywords in the title, headers and body copy. A/B test a few different landing pages to see which one converts best.
The higher number of landing pages you can experiment with, the better. Research has shown that websites with 40 landing pages or greater bring in 12x more leads.
5. Co-marketing is your friend
It’s more than likely that your SaaS company has working relationships with other brands or platforms. If you want to significantly expand your reach and zero in on your target audience, co-marketing is an excellent way to boost your SaaS inbound marketing efforts.
For example, if your offering integrates with Amazon Web Services or Salesforce, you can reach out to decision-makers at those companies to find out about co-marketing opportunities. In addition to capitalizing on one another’s user bases and contacts, you could co-publish a white paper, use case or ebook—doubling or even triplinging your brand’s visibility.
Keep up to date with events, webinars and industry trends that could provide further co-marketing and brand placement opportunities. This will strengthen your SaaS inbound marketing strategy and won’t require a lot of extra legwork or budget on your part.
Need a hand with your SaaS inbound marketing?
If you’re anything like the other SaaS marketers we work with, you’re probably feeling swamped. After all, creating high quality inbound marketing content is time consuming. That’s why it’s crucial to get the most bandwidth possible out of the content you produce.
Increase the ROI of your content with our simple but effective checklist that covers 20 ways to promote your SaaS ebooks and white papers to their full potential. Download the checklist today.
