The question is, can you increase SaaS inbound leads with inbound marketing? And the answer is, quite simply, yes. Inbound marketing focuses on providing quality content to your audience, which makes it an extraordinary sales generation tool that will enhance your lead generation process.
The fact it’s quickly established itself as the dominant marketing method for the 21st century isn’t without good reason.
By now, you’ve probably got a good understanding of the basics. But how can you generate even more qualified leads and sales for your SaaS company with inbound?
Here are some of the top tips from our marketing team that’s generated many thousands of leads for our clients.
There are many ways to approach an inbound lead generation strategy and a sales funnel. However, if it is your first time, these will be 2 great tips to generate leads quickly.
1- If you don't have one already, create a blog and use internal links to lead users to the relevant landing pages. You may have a great product or service but that doesn't mean you can't offer some valuable content as well.
By creating a blog, you will generate more interest in your site, and increase the likelihood of generating new leads for your business. Blogs are meant to be curated for both search engines and humans. That is why doing keyword research will be your main focus to reach your target audience.
2- Publish your content on LinkedIn. As most of you know, LinkedIn is a professional networking site for professionals and it has over 400 million members worldwide. The platform is an ideal place to promote your SaaS company because it offers a broad reach to qualified prospects.
It’s also an excellent resource for content marketers as you can use LinkedIn’s publishing features to share posts with your connections. And because most people who sign up for LinkedIn are looking for jobs or trying to network, this platform is perfect for generating leads from qualified prospects.
Whether you’re a marketer or entrepreneur, or work in any other role, you know your company’s value proposition is everything.
Your marketing material should be carefully crafted to make that proposition as obvious and enticing as possible and, when everything works, leads increase and sales are generated.
The problem is, people are forgetful and the initial hype, stirred up by your tantalising copy can wane faster than you would like.
Review and monitor your inbound marketing funnel to make sure you are delivering the right content at the appropriate stage. Prospects get distracted, they move on to something else, perhaps finding one of your competitors, thereby forgetting your compelling marketing material that got them so fired up.
No problem. Because inbound marketing is versatile and offers numerous ways to resell your value proposition at different stages of your prospects’ buying funnel.
Examples include:
The foundations of inbound marketing are based on content. And when you’ve got a content-based, inbound marketing strategy, your options are, for all intents and purposes, unlimited.
Always be on the lookout for opportunities to resell your value proposition.
Key takeaway: People forget value propositions quickly. Weave the benefits on offer into your inbound marketing content so people never forget why your company is such a good match for them.
Read How the Top Companies Chase and Close SaaS Sales Leads
In order to increase marketing qualified leads that drive great ROI for your SaaS business and once you’ve got a solid blog, you should set up landing pages encouraging data capture with free resources and nurturing email campaigns.
Look for other “hooks”, or valuable digital assets you can use to get prospects engaging with your brand.
One good example is creating free mini tools in the form of browser plug-ins, smartphone apps or desktop applications; a common practice adopted by many SaaS companies, even if their core product is a web app accessed via the internet.
If you’re a managed services provider you could look to Amazon Web Services for inspiration. You might not have the resources of this behemoth brand, but it it’s a good example you could draw inspiration from.
Key takeaway: The internet is awash with new ebooks these days. If you can find an additional hook that’s relevant to your company and helps solve your prospect’s problems, you stand out from the competition.
Solving prospects' problems and giving people a choice will help you generate more leads and sales.
An effective Inbound marketing strategy offers you several ways to take advantage of this principle.
For example:
Key takeaway: Everyone has a preference for methods of communication. If you can tailor your marketing material to give people options, they’re more likely to pay attention to it
Guest posting is a key component in your inbound marketing efforts and plan.
You probably know that quality backlinks containing relevant information from high domain authority websites are crucial for your search engine optimization, but it's easy to get lost in the metrics when deciding where to get a post.
Yes, the domain authority, Page Rank and Alexa ratings can all help to decipher the value of a backlink. But, one commonly overlooked way is to think about the synergy between the audience of the target website and your product or service.
Will they resonate with your company’s message? And, can you really help them? If so, it’s time to tap into your audience.
Here’s a handy checklist to plan for an audience tapping guest post:
This latter point is the secret sauce in this strategy. It makes it particularly enticing for the target site to publish your content (after all, they have an exclusive that their audience won’t find anywhere else) and the site’s readers will reciprocate with their time, attention and engagement.
Key takeaway: Don’t fall into the easy trap of basing guest post location decisions on SEO metrics alone. Find relevant audiences and tap into them to grow your own.
The blogs posts and e-books you have right now probably require prospects to enter their emails so they can download or receive regular updates for the two respectively.
This is a valuable strategy and an essential cornerstone of increasing leads for your SaaS business.
But you can take it a step further, too.
This raises the concept of “gated content”, a strategy that is best used for your most detailed, premium content marketing material.
For example, create a white paper that really solves your customers’ problems or provides industry insights they’d be hard-pushed to find elsewhere. Consider investing in relevant and paid market research reports from the likes of Gartner, hiring a freelance analyst or conducting surveys or research of your own.
By creating reports, you can put them behind a sign-up form that requires more information than just the prospect’s email, because the value on offer is much higher.
Make the value high enough and it will entice people to enter enough information to give you a sales qualified lead that you can more easily market to in a significantly more targeted way.
The result? Higher conversion rates from higher quality leads and more sales which is one of the main goals of saas inbound marketing.
Key takeaway: Quality blogs and free e-books are great. But consider going one step further, standing ahead of your competition and gating very valuable, bespoke content that will make a big difference to your audience’s lives.
When you first look into inbound marketing, your priorities are often clear. You curate a content promotion strategy that might involve guest posts, create your blog, optimise your website with landing pages and target your audience with marketing material and in ways never before possible with the goal of getting more website visitors. That's why it works.
But remember, always look for those ways to push things further and to attract qualified prospects to your buying funnel without relying solely on your sales team.
Inbound marketing software and tools such as HubSpot give sufficient flexibility to allow for real creativity. When you make a sport out of looking for new angles like the five suggested in this article (and as any of our clients will attest), your SaaS business will see stronger leads and sales with each passing month.
Why not contact us to find out how we can boost your lead generation with inbound marketing?