The B2B SAAS industry is growing fast and getting more competitive every day. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you must start thinking about how to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
You’ve probably heard about inbound marketing for consumer brands, but do you know how it applies to your business?
In this article, we’ll cover six ways that B2B SAAS companies can use inbound marketing techniques to reach customers, engage prospects, and generate revenue faster than ever.
B2B Inbound Marketing Strategies for SAAS Companies
1. Create top-of-the-funnel content
Top of the funnel content is designed to capture leads. It’s typically free, a lead magnet, and can be used for email list building.
It’s also typically found at the top of your marketing funnel, meaning its content that you share with prospects who have just learned about you and your business. Some examples include blog posts, PDFs, and e-books.
Sharing such content will enable you to build trust, credibility, and familiarity with potential customers before asking them for anything valuable like their contact information or even a purchase.
2. Use a content calendar to organize your workload and output
Use a content calendar to manage your workload and production. A content calendar, whether you use it in Word, Google Sheets, or a dedicated app, is a tool that helps you organize and track your content.
It’s not just about creating the right pieces of content; it’s also about planning how much time you need to plan each piece of content and how much time is required from everyone involved.
If someone in your organization takes on an unplanned task (like responding to an email request), this will likely impact the rest of their workday—and by extension, yours.
Try to be proactive when dealing with requests so that others aren’t interrupted in their workflow.
A calendar allows you to plan so that all your pieces are created when they need to be while keeping in mind any other factors such as holidays or company events that might affect how much time you have available during each week/month/quarter etc.
It also helps ensure deadlines are met, tasks are completed on time, and stress levels stay at an appropriate level throughout the process so your team can focus on what matters most: creating excellent marketing material that resonates with prospects and consumers alike.
3. Plan a video series to get people talking about you
Video is much more than just a way to show off your product. It’s also a great way to tell your story and showcase who you are as a company.
If you’re anything like me, videos are one of the first things I look at when researching a new tool or service.
If the video is well done and provides valuable information, it’s pretty easy for me to decide if I want to learn more about that particular product or service.
4. Tell your brand story through great content
Great content is a critical component of B2B inbound marketing for SAAS companies. You need to tell your story in a relevant way to your audience and help them see how they can benefit from using your product or service.
It’s also essential to build trust with your target audience by highlighting customer success stories and other forms of proof – like case studies, testimonials, and reviews.
Finally, create content that resonates with them and gets them excited about working with you.
Developing an effective content strategy for b2b SaaS companies takes time, but it’s worth it because the suitable types of content can help you stand out from competitors who are doing the same thing.
Developing a content strategy explicitly tailored toward B2B SaaS companies requires research into competitive analysis while considering market trends so that you know what types of information would appeal most effectively to prospects within this niche market segmentation category.
5. Publish an ebook or white paper that helps your customers
The best way to do this is to write about a topic relevant to your customers but not covered by other companies.
This can be a hot-button issue that affects many people in your industry, or it could be a niche challenge faced by just the specific group you target.
Write what other people are searching for on the internet. If you notice specific keywords being searched frequently, there’s probably demand for content related to those topics as well.
Try using Google Trends and keyword research tools like UberSuggest or SEMrush (both of which also provide suggestions if you want more ideas).
6. Develop and execute an inbound sales plan
There are two steps to developing a sales process:
- Define what you’re selling. You can only create a sales funnel if you know your product or service. If this sounds obvious, it isn’t always so in practice.
- Map out your entire customer journey. This starts from the moment they hear about your company and even sign up for free trials, to the critical moments where they might choose whether to do business with you or not. Those moments are known as “touchpoints” because they are where contact occurs between prospects and companies looking for them.