SaaS inbound marketing is the concept of attracting a software’s ideal customer persona (ICP) through various external channels so that they either sign up for a software demonstration or choose to sign up through a free trial. Inbound marketing can sometimes be referred to as demand generation, since it’s technically along the same lines of what the concept is doing.
The premise behind SaaS inbound marketing is that you’re connecting with the software buyer at the many stages for which they evaluate a solution: awareness, consideration, decision, and delight (your solution works for them).
Key Takeaways
- SaaS inbound marketing is the act of marketing to top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel software buyers to generate demand for your software product.
- The objective of SaaS inbound marketing is to create a cheap cost of acquisition (customer acquisition cost) per customer along with a marketing flywheel effect (naturally recurring prospect base with only having to do “the work” once).
- Key strategies for SaaS inbound marketing consist of podcasting, video marketing, LinkedIn marketing, SEO, and more.
What is SaaS Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing for SaaS (software-as-a-service) businesses often consists of a variety of strategies that are used in tandem to help encourage software solution considerations all along the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision, and delight/purchase). To understand inbound marketing for SaaS, we need to understand these stages:
- Awareness stage (top-of-funnel): This is a stage where the software purchaser begins to understand that they may have a problem. In many cases, they might be looking for higher-level solutions or information that’s leading them to determining what the actual problem they have is. In short, the purchaser is doing their research.
- Consideration stage (middle-of-funnel): During this period, the name helps identify exactly what occurs, the buyer is considering whether the problem is deep enough or valuable enough to consider a solution. In most cases, it’s considering the amount software solutions may cost and what the value of the solution is to that person or company.
- Decision stage (bottom-of-funnel): At this point, there’s some type of research that’s performed on an individual solution or a business. This is when the purchaser is evaluating price, SLAs (service-level agreements), and other details of what the software solution provides.
- Delight or purchase (action): Ideally, your solution keeps the purchaser (this is where your CAC:LTV ratio comes into play). They’ve evaluated you and are happy with the solution that you provided.
The entire purpose of inbound marketing for SaaS is to generate visitors and share of voice (or eyeballs) around all stages of these purchase funnels. If you’ve ever chosen a software solution for yourself, you’ve most likely done this and maybe didn’t think about it.
Related: B2B SaaS SEO Guide
B2B and Enterprise SaaS Inbound Marketing
B2B and enterprise SaaS inbound marketing isn’t much different from general SaaS inbound marketing. However, depending on your ideal customer persona, you may have more tailored approaches to the marketing methods that you use and the types of places that you spend time promoting those methods.
As an example, B2B and enterprise SaaS inbound marketing might be better suited for channels like SEO activities, LinkedIn marketing, earning paid media references, and garnishing reviews on software review websites like G2.
Top SaaS Inbound Marketing Strategies
Here are the various places you could create inbound marketing activities for a SaaS business:
1. LinkedIn Marketing
LinkedIn marketing is an effective way to generate demand for your business. Especially if you’re a B2B software solution. Ideally, you’d start creating content (podcasts/webinars/videos) that’s highly impactful to the audience that you want to target.
From there, you can start to build a community of people who are listening. And then start to speak with them (through that content) about problems (awareness) that they might not know that they have.
This has been a highly effective way of generating top-of-funnel demand for many influential names in SaaS.
2. SEO
Search engine optimization is still an incredible channel. And highly underutilized. In many cases, most prospects (or leads) are going to go to Google to look for a solution to a problem they have. Or even just simply type into Google a particular problem they’re dealing with.
There are a variety of SEO tactics that work quite well to generate demand:
- Creating informational content that establishes a brand as a thought leader.
- Optimizing or creating landing pages that speak to specific niche personas and issues that persona is dealing with (i.e., keywords like mass tort lawyer case management software, personal injury lawyer case management software, and more).
- Creating pages that help prospects learn more about your specific brand and software solution (i.e., comparison pages, pricing pages, solution walkthroughs, and more).
Related: SaaS SEO Guide
3. Video Marketing
Video marketing includes channels like YouTube, LinkedIn, webinars, and more. The idea is that video demonstrations or even podcasts can help to establish the brand as a thought leader in the space. Video marketing has been one of the larger inbound marketing strategies for SaaS businesses in the last 6-years. Thanks to the popularity of podcasting and the ability to include multiple guests on podcasts, it’s easier to establish a community of people with aligned interests and problem sets.
What seems to work especially well is when SaaS companies use their own software and provide a case study to share. For example, an SEO business (like Ahrefs) supplying a case study on how they used their own software to grow traffic.
4. Paid Media Referrals
Paid media referrals is still a highly attractive opportunity to pursue. In fact, when SEO isn’t working for your own business, this may be a great way to get established. In short, many websites include lists of software solutions for particular problem sets. And there’s so many out there.
For example, let’s say you wanted to target ‘time tracking software’ and people who are looking for time tracking software. In many cases, you can search for blogs or companies that are reviewing these solutions and see if you can pay them to review yours.
As a result, you’ll get a highly vetted review of your solution and promotion of it. This can also work for Twitter (X) influencers who you can pay to do the same thing: review your product and see if they’re willing to promote it.
5. Software Reviews
Earning software reviews is a great way to generate demand. However, it’s not usually the starting point for your buyer and their journey. For example, they may land on a G2.com page if they’re already well aware of what they’re looking for. Meaning, they know which company they want to choose and are simply double-checking that the reviews align.
Meaning, software review websites tend to be a validator for your buyer in their journey (consideration and decision stage) rather than the awareness stage. However, when you combine the increase of software reviews along with top-of-funnel strategies, that’s really where the magic can happen.
At that point, you’re starting to combine multiple levels of the buyer's journey, supporting the desire for them to learn more about you.
6. PPC and Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is still a great way to generate demand. In fact, it’s the fastest way to start getting your brand name into the market. And to see whether specific persona’s are going to be more attracted to your solution than other personas.
Google, Facebook, Reddit, Quora, Yelp, and many other platforms all have advertising platforms that can be used. And should get tested to examine your product-market-fit. SaaS businesses often have a more difficult time with platforms like Facebook or TikTok as they tend to lean more consumer.
However, platforms like Reddit, Quora, and Yelp can all be great places to target audiences with keyword targeting and audience targeting at a cheaper rate than Google.
7. Email Marketing
Generating an email list and content marketing to an email list is still a highly effective solution in 2024 and going into 2025. The most common way to generate an email list is to pay to promote content and either “gate” the content behind an email form. Or to simply ask the end User to sign up to the newsletter with their email.
The concept is that as you begin to discuss problems in your industry, news in your industry, and more—that you’re establishing a larger audience that you can pull from at a later date. This, as a byproduct, establishes you as both a thought leader and community facilitator, which can go a long way in aligning with your SaaS solution.
Common SaaS Inbound Marketing KPIs
Any type of marketing activity needs the ability to be measured and have attribution tied to it from the conversion aspect (whatever conversion you’re trying to measure). Here are some of the most common inbound marketing KPIs:
MQLs and SQLs
MQL (marketing qualified lead) and SQL (sales qualified lead) are more common KPIs to track. These are when a sales or marketing professional can validate that we’ve successfully attracted the right type of buyer (and job title of the buyer) for our software solution.
Time on Page or Engagement
Engagement or time on page would be leading indicators (things that happen before your conversion) of finding the correct audiences. As an example, if your paid advertising campaign generated a lot of short engagement on the website, it’s likely not targeting the correct personas.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate would be another leading indicator, however, better suited for SEO campaigns, paid media campaigns, and more. This would show us (usually through GA4/Google Analytics) whether the visitor was interested in learning more about the website.
If you find that you have a high bounce rate, it might be time to perform conversion rate optimization on your website to figure out where the presentation of your solution isn’t becoming appealing enough.
Visits by Referrals
Better for paid media campaigns and software reviews (either G2, guest posting, listicles, or otherwise). Visits by referrals would help to segment which domains the visitors are coming from. This can be done through GA4/Google Analytics and see whether there’s a decent amount of inbound traffic coming from your efforts.
Keyword Rankings
Only suited for SEO campaigns and your SEO efforts, however, keyword rankings is a great leading indicator that would suggest traffic from your ideal customer persona would be “on the way.” Using tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush can be helpful in tracking your keyword rankings.
In addition, setting up Google Search Console for your property and analyzing impressions, clicks, and click-through rate of organic search can also be highly beneficial in understanding overall performance or forecasting performance.
Tips for SaaS Inbound Marketing
Here are our best tips when trying to “crack the nut” of your inbound marketing campaign:
1. Use session replay tools
Tools like FullStory or HotJar can be incredibly helpful in figuring out why Users aren’t filling out forms or signing up for a free trial. Session replays could help you find out whether there are simple mistakes that weren’t immediately evident to you during landing page creation.
2. Broaden the flywheel
In many cases (B2B, B2C, B2B2C SaaS products), your objective is just simply widen the flywheel of both top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and then what will become bottom-of-funnel (when a customer is evaluating your solution).
It may require some time and effort to truly expand your reach far enough to make the flywheel start to work on its own. Time, patience, and unique effort (meaning saying something different and useful in your space) are usually required to get the flywheel to work.
3. Be your own unique self and brand voice
Copying what others have done, especially with inbound marketing campaigns, is typically a great way to ensure that your efforts will never work. It’s important to have your own unique style, voice, distinction, and more.
When prospects really feel like you’re highlighting a pain point that they have and presenting them with a solution, they’re far more likely to want to reach out to you to learn more about it. In short, you need to generate some intrigue.
Other SaaS SEO Resources
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November 5, 2024
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