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© Copyright 2024 B2B Hackers - All Rights Reserved • Educational Resources for B2B SaaS Digital Marketing • By Team4
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 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. more holistic and almost buddist in a way.
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.
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.
An important concept in Inbound Marketing is the funnel. The funnel is wasy 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 inbound marketing & sales funnel is a key concept in inbound marketing that describes the process of attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers. It is important because it provides a structured approach to guide potential customers through their buying journey.
B2B SaaS inbound marketing requires an appreciation of The B2B Buyer Journey. The buyer journey in B2B tech and SaaS companies can be long and complex. The higher value your product and the more enterprise companies you sell to, the longer and more complex it gets. 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.
Over the years there have been a number of different approaches and takes on the inbound marketing and sales funnel. More specifically people have started to add more specific stages to it. Below we have listed the most popular representations of the inbound funnel.
The inbound marketing and sales funnel provides a clear framework to guide your marketing efforts and ensure you are addressing the needs of potential customers at each stage of their buying journey. By understanding where customers are in the funnel, you can create more relevant and personalised content to nurture them through to conversion.
The funnel helps you focus your resources on the most promising leads, improving the overall efficiency of your marketing and sales efforts.By guiding customers through their journey, you can build stronger, more trusting relationships that lead to repeat business and referrals.
Measurable Results: The funnel allows you to track and measure the performance of your inbound marketing efforts at each stage, helping you optimize your strategy over time
This is the simplest inbound framework to understand. It splits the journey into three, awareness, consideration & decision.
At the top of the funnel, the goal is to attract new visitors and generate awareness about your brand, products or services through valuable content like blogs, videos, social media posts, etc.
In the middle of the funnel, the focus shifts to converting those aware visitors into leads by offering more in-depth content like ebooks, guides, webinars that help evaluate your solution to their problems.
Leads that have been nurtured through the consideration stage are now sales-qualified and ready to make a purchasing decision. Bottom-of-the-funnel offers like product demos, consultations, trials.
Hubspot uses the idea of a flywheel when they are talking about inbound marketing because they know that looking after your customers is a great way to generate new business. This is when a four stage inbound funnel and framework is used.
In this approach there are 4 different stages of the inbound funnel. From top to bottom we will take you through each one and explain it. Often the different stages are abbrievated into 3 sections ToFu, Mofu and Bofu - short for, 'top of funnel', 'middle of funnel' and 'bottom of funnel.
At the top of the funnel, the goal is to attract new visitors and generate awareness about your brand, products or services through valuable content like blogs, videos, social media posts, etc.
In the middle of the funnel, the focus shifts to converting those aware visitors into leads by offering more in-depth content like ebooks, guides, webinars that help evaluate your solution to their problems.
Leads that have been nurtured through the consideration stage are now sales-qualified and ready to make a purchasing decision. Bottom-of-the-funnel offers like product demos, consultations, trials help move them towards a purchase.
After converting a lead to a customer, the goal is to delight them through excellent service and continue providing valuable content to turn them into promoters of your brand.
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 theory of inbound marketing and that the main objective is attract new business through your marketing efforts, lets look at the most popular tactics used in inbound marketing strategies to attract, engage and delight potential customers and customers.
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.
Like SEO, Pay Per Click targets people looking for solutions and answers. Unlike SEO you are paying for those clicks so it can be expensive when not executed carefully. One bonus of PPC is that you can gain some immediate traffic to your website, unlike waiting for SEO to work.
Content marketing really feeds into eveything you do in marketing. Content is specifically useful for inbound marketing because it is this content that can not only attract buyers ut engage them and convert them when they are on your website. Content plays a role at every stage of the inbound marketing funnel.
Much like content, your website is the hub for everything inbound. Building multiple landing pages for all of your content and campaigns is essential to ensure you can attract and convert buyers. Landing page design is important part of improving your inbound lead generation numbers.
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.
Inbound marketing is one of the most popular and successful ways to grow a business online. It is specifically useful for B2B SaaS and technology companies that work in niche areas where people are using search engines to look for solutions.
Most successful B2B SaaS companies have executed an inbound marketing strategy in one form or another. The question isn't "is inbound marketing the right strategy?" its "how do i execute a great inbound strategy?".
Whether you decide to manage your inbound marketing strategy in-house or work with a an agency or consultant it can be a lot of work to get an inbound marketing strategy up and running because of the sheer amount of content you need to produce. The important thing to remember is to always focus on creating high-quality, informative content for your audience. It doesn't matter what stage they are at and whether or not they will buy from you. Just focus on being the most useful brand in your space.
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