With the advent of technology and businesses being conducted at rapid speeds, the traditional means of marketing have lost their edge. Marketing experts opine that old tactics like cold calling and mailing lists are expensive, inefficient, and can even drive customers away. There is a growing need for innovation in the marketing world that can help new-age businesses such as SaaS businesses to grow and flourish. That is where inbound marketing strategy comes in.
What is Inbound Marketing Strategy?
Inbound marketing strategy depends on the philosophy of drawing visitors to a particular product or brand to turn them into potential customers, rather than imposing the brand or product on prospects in the hope of generating customers.
Inbound marketing agencies use technology, useful content, and SEO best practices to their leverage for growing their clients’ businesses. They usually employ the following methodology – Attracting target customers with SEO practices such as keywords or backlinking. Building great content to educate them and resolve their queries. Successfully engaging them to the point they feel ready to buy the offered product.
Inbound marketing strategy believes in creating a relationship of trust with potential customers rather than forcing sales down their throats.
Why B2B SaaS Businesses need Inbound Marketing?
B2B businesses such as SaaS businesses need to build good brand images to attract external and internal customers. B2B inbound marketing provides a great solution to this problem and offers other benefits as well. 
Here are a few reasons to invest in B2B inbound marketing for SaaS businesses:
- An excellent B2B inbound marketing strategy helps cut through the noise of conventional marketing and delivers a clear and consistent brand message.
- Inbound marketing strategies target selected audience and save expenditure on having to advertise to a general audience.
- These strategies harness the power of social media to spread the message and generate quality leads.
- Leads generated by inbound marketing strategies are of the highest quality who are genuinely interested in the company’s products and can be turned into customers quickly.
How can Inbound Marketing help B2B SaaS Businesses?
Inbound marketing involves four essential steps to generate high-quality leads for B2B SaaS businesses that can boost their product sales.
- Attract
- Convert
- Close
- Delight
These steps are further explained below in detail.
Attract visitors
The primary step for growing any SaaS business is to attract the right kind of traffic to the website. The company can decide on their definition of right traffic only when they work on developing buyer personas. They can develop personas by getting intel from existing customers about their search and buying demographics, problems, and challenges.
It’s also a good idea to publish blogs addressing these problems and queries of the existing customers. Companies shouldn’t just stick to publishing blogs. It’s essential to creating good content for the blogs and optimizing them for search engines.
Companies should also be consistent with the publishing as consistency has often found to be the rapport builder with potential clients.
Social media can be a great asset if put to good use. Regular promotion of blogs all over social media can boost their digital presence and reach a much larger pool of potential leads.
Companies can also consider paid social advertising if their social media presence isn’t growing organically.
Convert visitors into leads
Once B2B inbound marketing brings in the attention of visitors, it’s essential to think about strategies to convert these visitors into quality leads. One great way to ensure that is by making an E-Guide available on the website for each product or service. The higher the number of downloads of the guide, the greater the indicator of lead interest.
Having a premium content section available only through paid subscriptions or membership will also help convert the curious visitors into leads who are seriously invested in the decision of buying from the company.
Close leads as Customers
Inbound marketing methodology requires SaaS companies to nurture their leads until they become actual customers carefully.
A marketing-qualified lead may either be a right fit for the product or have shown considerable interest in the product by investing time and money through paid subscriptions or filling out forms.
Nurturing these leads can require the SaaS companies to provide consistent special attention to these leads. The enterprises can employ devices such as newsletters, mailing lists, free trial versions of the product or service, free demo sessions, dedicated help-desk, and hosting regular Q&A sessions.
Positive reviews on the website by previous customers can also sway the leads into becoming customers. The critical thing to remember here would be to continually be on the minds of the leads while avoiding annoying them.
Delight customers to convert them to Promoters
Unfortunately, most B2B companies ignore this last step of B2B inbound marketing.
However, ensuring this step would organically earn SaaS companies qualified leads through word of mouth of the customers without having to invest anything for the marketing.
A satisfactory service during the sale and after sale period ensures that the customers are happy with the product and the treatment. A satisfied customer would be more than happy to recommend the company to their peers.
Companies can save millions in after-sale promotions just by investing in a sustainable relationship with the customers even after they have already purchased the product or the service.
A dedicated helpline number for query resolution, prompt after-sale services, and freebies like free upgrades can guarantee satisfied customers who would be willing to spread the name of the company.
To Sum Up
Inbound Marketing is a great tool to grow small, medium, and large-scale B2B SaaS enterprises organically. The strategies require the companies to put more thought and effort into building an excellent Inbound marketing team who can ensure exponential growth of the company.
Author Bio
Enoch is the CEO and Co-Founder of The Smarketers, a B2B Inbound and Account-Based Marketing Agency in India. He has 10+ years of success in creating marketing and sales strategies for global clients across industries like Technology, Healthcare, Manufacturing etc. Feel free to connect with Enoch on LinkedIn and Twitter.