The Buyer's Journey Starts Online
Latest studies show that nearly 82% of buyers conduct their research online before making any form of purchasing decision. Buyer’s are taking to the web in search of valuable information that is going to help them in their decision making process before they even begin to consider different vendors.
Saturated Market
The tech and SaaS company is littered with software branded as “industry leading” and “world class” phrases. Within this crowded market it’s vital that your business stands out above the rest by presenting itself as a thought leader. Establishing thought leadership will allow you to be a source of information for potential buyers and it also ensures that your brand is front of mind when they actually come to making a final purchasing decision. An excellent example of this is HubSpot who publish countless amounts of blog posts, ebooks and various pieces of content online to build themselves up as thought leaders.
Long Purchasing Decisions
SaaS purchases aren’t transactional purchases and often require extensive research before a decision is made. Because of this utilising the proper tools to nurture potential prospects is vital to improve close rates and to continue to be front of mind. Having workflows setup to collect data and to send them regular emails is a massive part of inbound marketing and driving prospects to close.
High Value Customer
SaaS customer are often high value customers and generally pay for their software on a subscription basis (often monthly or annually) which makes acquiring customer even more desirable. A customer = recurring revenue which is vital for a businesses growth and scalability. The more recurring revenue a business has the more predictable it’s growth can be and the more attractive it is for potential investors. Because these customers are entering into a long term contract with SaaS businesses it’s important to build that trust early on with them.
Data Driven Approach
Marketing can be very misleading when it comes to proving out its ROI especially when you may be only managing one part of the marketing funnel. With the proper tools and inbound strategy it allows you to measure the full funnel, therefore showing what marketing channels are generating X amount of traffic, what marketing channels are generating X amount of leads and what marketing channels are generating X amount of revenue.
Targeted Approach
Almost every SaaS company has their ideal customer that they want to target. This is known as a buyer persona. Inbound marketing is a very targeted form of marketing and the idea behind it is to drive your target audience to your website through providing them with relevant content that they will get value from reading. An entire inbound strategy is focused around a handful of buyer personas and that aim of that strategy is to drive them to your website and establish thought leadership amongst them.
Not Expensive
Paying for advertising on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google can eat into any companies budget making the cost per customer quite high. Google Adwords can be extremely expensive and may not produce results without the proper landing pages, data collection forms and calls to action in place. Inbound marketing is a much cheaper and more viable to generate new customers. In this day and age a large majority of people use ad blockers on their browsers and will often avoid clicking on links they believe to be advertisements. Inbound marketing is a great way to combat this as it’s much cheaper than paying for clicks and isn’t coming across as “salesy” or “pitchy” to potential visitors.
Long Term
Inbound marketing is great for long term business marketing. It allows your business to build up its credibility and authority amongst Google search engines therefore ranking your website higher in the long run. Google spiders crawl every web page on the net in order to access if it’s ranking correctly for the proper keywords. Google scans this content to make sure that it’s relevant and valuable to potential visitors. The more relevant content a business has on its website the better the chances are of it ranking higher in Google as result.