By Kaci Antoine, Content Specialist
With the SaaS market growing by 18% each year, it's no secret that there is a lot of competition in the SaaS world.1 And as customers do more research and get input from more stakeholders, lead generation for B2B SaaS companies is increasingly difficult.
The SaaS Market is growing by 18% each year.
-BMC
B2B SaaS marketing teams tend to focus on paid ads and other outbound strategies to generate leads. In contrast, marketers who use inbound marketing tend to narrow their focus on landing page optimization or basic email automation, but impactful inbound marketing encompasses the entire customer experience lifetime.
Implementing inbound strategies can help you build confidence and trust with leads and push them toward making a purchase decision.
Leverage Buyer Personas with Inbound Marketing
Generating leads through inbound marketing starts with defining and engaging your buyers by developing and researching buyer personas. Inbound marketers use buyer personas to market their products more effectively with messaging that appeals to their target market.
Companies develop buyer personas using demographic data and information gathered from interviews with actual customers or qualified leads. Marketers can use buyer personas to:
- Create content that addresses their pain points and needs
- Determine which channels to use for outreach
- Identify the right messaging for each persona
Buyer personas are a critical component of inbound marketing, so before implementing additional inbound marketing strategies, ensure you have thoroughly researched and developed your personas.
Inbound Marketing Strategies for B2B Saas Companies
1. Use Gated Content to Generate Leads
Offer value and build trust by offering gated content. Gated content targeted to your buyer personas provides value and builds trust with potential leads while allowing you to learn more about them.
When using gated content in lead generation for B2B SaaS companies specifically, content should educate readers on their pain points — the causes of market forces affecting their business, and a high-level overview of how leads can solve those pain points.
At the top of the sales funnel, leads aren't typically ready to hear about solutions to their problems, so content should be educational and establish you as a trusted resource in the client's industry. Consider using a free eBook, a white paper, original research reports, or a free trial of your product as gated content.
Ultimately, gated content:
- Provides complete information to your audience in a way that builds trust.
- Establishes your business as an expert.
- Builds relationships with people who have engaged with your brand.
- Helps you re-engage people who haven't converted yet.
2. Target and Optimize for Mobile Users
In 2017, Forrester Research reported that 62% of B2B buyers use smartphones to research work purchases, and in 2019, the mobile app user base for SaaS products grew at two times the growth rate for web users.2 3
With more and more consumers using mobile devices to research products and solutions before making a purchase decision, they expect the sites they're using for research to be easy to navigate (and will quickly bounce from sites that aren't).
To make your site easy to navigate for mobile users:
- Use short-form fields and buttons that are easy to click with one hand (or thumb).
- Keep your landing pages short and clear, with no unnecessary text or images.
- Optimize the loading speed for mobile users.
3. Improve User Experience
User experience is a significant issue for B2B companies. B2B sites have an average bounce rate as high as 75%, which means they're failing to engage users with their content and convert leads.4
Improving the user experience on your website will help you solve this problem. When it's easy for users to find the information they're looking for and see the benefit of engaging with a conversion point, they'll be more likely to do so.
B2B SaaS websites should also provide an experience specific to the user's pain points, goals, and what you know about them. Using smart forms, progressive profiling, and your understanding of your buyer personas will help you create a positive, tailored experience.
Improving the user experience requires thinking about how people currently interact with your website or app. What pages are people bouncing from? Where do they drop off when they're browsing? Are there landing or pillar pages generating a lot of traffic but with low conversion rates?
The answers to these questions can tell you where your website's user experience needs improvement.
4. Provide Customer Support Resources
Many SaaS companies struggle to convert leads who haven't used their product and aren't sure it will be useful to them. SaaS solutions can be highly complex, so companies must make support products easy to find and read when designing their website to show potential leads that they'll be supported and guided through implementation and use.
Make user guides, demos, product documents, and other support resources available and easy to find on your website. You can even post them to social media or on your blog to boost SEO efforts and show leads doing preliminary research on how your solution works.
Case studies can also help you instill confidence in potential leads by showcasing customers' positive experiences with your product and the unique ways they've used it.
5. Account-based marketing for SaaS
Account-based marketing (ABM) is an incredibly effective strategy for B2B SaaS companies aiming to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market. With the SaaS industry growing rapidly, B2B lead generation has become increasingly challenging. Inbound marketing, combined with ABM, can help B2B SaaS companies effectively engage with their target audience and drive conversions.
ABM for SaaS companies helps to target and engage ideal customers with buyer-centric messaging directly. B2B software companies can build lists of ideal companies they want to work with and leverage inbound and ABM strategies to attract and nurture them throughout their buyer's journey.
How will you use inbound marketing for lead generation?
Switching to an inbound marketing strategy — or expanding your current inbound marketing focus — is an excellent option for B2B SaaS companies that want to boost their lead generation. Inbound marketing attracts targeted prospects and helps you set them up to convert to leads and progress down the funnel into paying customers. Get our guide for lead generation for your B2B SaaS company to learn more.
Sources
1BMC, The State of SaaS in 2022: Growth Trends & Statistics, September 17, 2021
2Digital Commerce 360, More Business Buyers Use Phones and Laptops to Order Online, Mar 29, 2017
3Mixpanel, 2019 Product Benchmarks Report, 2019
4 HubSpot, 6 Steps to Reduce Your Bounce Rate [+ Platform-Specific Tips], February 03 2022
