Inbound marketing is a popular strategy for many B2B SaaS companies. In this guide we explain what it is and how you can get started with inbound marketing yourself.
Inbound marketing is one of the best ways to grow a fledgling SaaS business. Nearly every B2B SaaS company will deploy an inbound marketing at some-point. In this article we talk you through the basics of inbound marketing and how you can implement it for your own business.
Unlike traditional outbound tactics that interrupt prospects, inbound marketing earns their attention by addressing their pain points, educating them, and guiding them towards making informed decisions. By aligning marketing efforts with the buyer's needs and preferences, inbound marketing for B2B SaaS companies establishes long-lasting relationships and drives more sustainable growth.
This is done by creating useful content in different formats to help educate them and better their lives, business will naturally follow. Inbound marketing is actually quite a simple process. It almost goes against the grain in terms of how businesses are normally built, through selling and pitching. By stopping focusing on selling and starting focusing on how you can help, you can build a more sustainable, holistic and arguably more ethical approach to business growth.
Inbound marketing has emerged as a powerful approach for B2B SaaS companies - this is because it not only generates leads but also builds brand authority and fosters long-term customer relationships.
B2B SaaS companies are often tasked with scaling lead generation with minimal budgets (especially start-ups) that is why inbound marketing is so popular for tech start-ups, it is a low cost strategy with potentially high returns when executed well.
One of the main positives of inbound marketing is that you can drive traffic to your website through content optimised for search for nearly zero cost. If your traffic converts into a paying customer you can build a business with little or no advertising budget. The main cost to you is the time spent writing the content.
You can even use free tools like Google Search Console to monitor your performance in search engines. For example you can see in the graph below how this website had very few clicks from Google initially but has dramatically increased the number of clicks and web visits and therefore potentially increased the number of leads generated.
Outbound marketing and inbound marketing represent two distinct approaches to reaching and engaging with potential customers. Outbound marketing relies on traditional, often interruptive tactics, such as television commercials, cold calling, and direct mail, to proactively push a company's message out to a broad audience. It aims to grab the attention of potential customers, even if they may not have expressed a direct interest in the product or service.
In contrast, inbound marketing focuses on creating valuable, informative, and relevant content that attracts and engages a specific target audience. It leverages strategies like content marketing, social media, search engine optimisation, and email marketing to organically draw potential customers in, encouraging them to engage with the brand at their own pace. The key difference lies in the approach: outbound marketing interrupts, while inbound marketing attracts, building a more meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship with customers.
For a SaaS company that has a product that is 'self-service' and a user can just get up and running without any help from anyone else - inbound marketing can mean someone finds your product, starts using it and pays for it without speaking to anyone.
This means your cost of acquisition (how much you spend to acquire a customer) is very very low and means you can grow your customer base very sustainably without having to hire a sales team.
B2B SaaS inbound marketing requires an appreciation of the B2B buyer journey. This is because the buyer journey in B2B tech and SaaS companies can be long and complex.
The higher the value of your product and the more enterprise companies you sell to, the longer and more complex it tend to get. The B2B buyer journey is not typically linear as buyers move from stage to stage, back and forth and lots of different stakeholders tend to get involved, and of course some leave during the process.
As we mentioned, the buying journey for companies selling to other companies can be a long and complex one. However there is a simple framework marketers use to strategise called 'the marketing funnel'.
An important concept in inbound marketing is the funnel. The funnel is a way of describing how a potential buyer moves through the different stages of engagement, from a website visitor all the way through to an opportunity and new customer.
The funnel analogy is apt because the volume shrinks as you get further down the funnel mimicing the shape of a funnel.
Many companies generate all of their new business through inbound marketing. By attracting people to their websites with useful content, they are then converted into leads and some into customers. The theory and strategy is very simple but it requires an understanding of how search engine optimisation works + a solid business proposition.
As the years pass by the idea of the funnel has evolved with many now realising the need for a more holisitic approach where you try to attract and retain clients which in-turn generates a new business via referrals and word of mouth - HubSpot call this the flywheel.
In this model, satisfied customers become promoters who attract new customers, thus "spinning" the flywheel faster and generating momentum for business growth. This approach contrasts with the traditional sales funnel model by emphasizing ongoing customer relationships rather than treating sales as a linear process.
The framework and specific stages you choose to follow is completely up to you. They all are fundamentally the same. The main difference is the the 4 stage inbound funnel includes a stage for delighting customers which will therefore attract new business. This leads to a virtous circle of business - something that HubSpot describes using its Flywheel model.
Now we understand the basic theory and principles of inbound marketing we can start to think about how we can implement our own inbound marketing strategies.
As per the funnel and the flywheel, attracting website visitors is the first stage of the inbound marketing funnel. There are three core strategies you can implement when trying to attract website visitors that will move through your marketing funnel.
Tip: The key to inbound marketing success is to attract web visitors that are either in-market to buy or will be in the future.
PPC Advertising focuses on search engines like Google. As the name suggests you will be paying every time some clicks on your advert in Google.
The benefits of PPC for SaaS is that you can quickly guarantee traffic to your website and potentially generate leads and awareness.
The downsides is that it can be expensive and difficult to ensure you are getting the right type of traffic to your website through the adverts. We've written a separate guide on PPC for B2B SaaS here that you can read in more detail.
SEO is one of the most prolific tactics used within an inbound marketing strategy. This is because so many buyers use search engines to explore and find solutions. If you are at the top of search results for some key queries you can expect to generate a lot of inbound leads through your website.
The great thing about appearing at the top of a search result is that the clicks are free. Meaning you will gain web traffic for no cost. Its a bit like having a premium advertising spot, except you didn't have to pay for it.
SEO is an art in itself and there are many specialist SEO agencies for B2B SaaS companies that just focus on SEO, this gives you an idea of how much investment can be put into it alone. We have also written our own guide to B2B SaaS SEO and in particular keyword research which is one of the most important aspects of SEO.
Content is the fuel of everything when it comes to marketing. When it comes to inbound marketing it is a good idea to use the inbound funnel as a template for mapping your content marketing strategy, ensuring you are producing content for each stage of the buyer journey.
Your inbound content strategy should align with the different stages of the inbound funnel. These means producing content for different objectives. From content to attract people to your website through to content that helps convert them into a customer and builds trust and authority once they are on your website.
There are of lots of different types of content that can be utilised in inbound marketing. We've listed some of the most popular types below and how they can be utilised in an inbound marketing strategy.
Guides and ebooks are great for inbound lead generation. You can offer useful content in exchange for personal details and nurture those contacts over time. Guides and ebooks can be used at the top of funnel as well as further down the buyer journey to show authority and expertise in a certain topic.
Videos are a great and engaging way of providing useful content such as tutorials. They are also great for middle of funnel and bottom of funnel content such as case studies and showing more information about your company and the values and ethics.
Infographics are visual representations of statistical information that are a lot more engaging than a written article. Infographics are widely used as part of SEO campaigns and Digital PR because of the opportunity to 'sell' them to publications and receive backlinks to your website.
Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters are written articles on your website. The pillar page is a long educational article that has a 'cluster' of smaller more specific articles linked back to it. This theory and strategy is widely adopted by tech companies and nearly everyone follows the same approach.
Business podcasts have become a popular content marketing tactics more many tech companies. You can not only create the podcast but you can easily transcribe and share the content on your website to provide additional written content.
Case studies are typically used the middle and the bottom of the funnel to aid buyer decision making. They can sometimes also be used at the top of the inbound funnel to attract buyers to your website depending on how the case study is shared.
After you have drawn people to your website your next goal is to convert that traffic into leads. There are many different factors that contribute to conversion. Some of these may be out of your control unfortunately.
Factors that can contribute to conversion on your website include branding, positioning, messaging, pricing, calls-to-action, website performance and client testimonials. These are all examples of components that can influence a persons decision to submit a form on your website.
Trust signals are elements on a website that help to build trust with potential customers, significantly influencing conversion rates. These signals reassure visitors of your legitimacy, reliability, and safety, encouraging them to engage or make purchases.
Common trust signals include customer reviews and testimonials, professional website design, visible contact information, trust seals from third parties, endorsements and awards and transparent pricing.
The call to action on your website is the action you want people to take on your website. For SaaS companies this are usually things like "sign up for a trial" or "request a demo". The CTAs for software companies usually always relate to demoing or trying the software.
Above is a typical landing page you would come across for a SaaS company and is often what you would want your web visitors to land on and take action on.
Depending on the type of software you sell you will see different calls to action. Cheaper, simpler software solutions will let you sign up for free and onboard yourself. With a more enterprise B2B SaaS product you make want to force someone through a sales process and a demo schedule.
As you can imagine, signing up for free as a CTA usually receives more conversions than 'request a demo' because it requires less commitment from the buyer.
As signing up for a trial is not applicable to someone who is not looking for software right now, you can still generate leads for a longer term relationship by providing useful content like templates that they can download.
The next stage of inbound marketing is to convert these leads into customers. Arguably the most difficult part of inbound marketing. For SaaS marketing and SaaS products a lot of this is out your hands because it relies on the quality of the product itself.
The theory of inbound marketing and SaaS is that you can acheive 'Product Led Growth' - this means people sign up as customers and use the product with little interaction with people and the product is the main tool for growth.
This is a challenge for SaaS marketing teams because a lot of them don't get the opportunity to influence the product and therefore this part is out of their hands.
Their are lots of tools out their like intercom and userpilot that specialise in helping companies improve the onboarding experience of their products - we talk more about content marketing and its role in the product in our guide to SaaS content marketing.
Inbound marketing is one of the best strategies for growing a young SaaS business. Its a low cost and high return strategy when done well.
By creating quality content for your audience you will naturally increase the amount of web traffic you get and eventually this will translate into new business.
We have built businesses on the back of inbound marketing, and if you don't have time to do it yourself, don't worry, you can work with a specialist B2B SaaS Inbound Marketing Agency.
