How can Inbound Marketing help your software business grow?

How can Inbound Marketing help your software business grow?

How can Inbound Marketing help your software business grow?

An Inbound Marketing strategy can be extremely beneficial to a software company, boosting its growth. However, the success of this process depends on a series of elements.

First, it is necessary to produce intelligent content in the different communication channels used in your company’s digital marketing. This will help in attracting and retaining customers.

Another very important issue is the constant analysis of the results of actions carried out in your marketing. This is essential to ensure the optimization of your strategy.

The third element that also deserves attention in Inbound Marketing for SaaS companies is the proximity between the sales team and marketing. It is worth noting that this is the key to creating the most assertive actions to sell software.

How can Inbound Marketing help your SaaS business?

According to a survey published by Institute Data Report in January 2021, most of the discoveries of new brands in Brazil take place on the internet.

40.5% of people said they discover new brands through search platforms such as Google.

Ads on social media are also very relevant, 40% of people say they have known brands through them.

Website ads were the source of new brand discovery for 45.5% of people.

The survey also indicates that recommendations and comments on social media are of great importance in this process, as 37.9% of people discover or have already discovered brands in this way.

These numbers show the size of the potential of a digital strategy that integrates multiple channels. And it can be done in your software company with Inbound Marketing.

The purchase decision process in the B2B market, as is the case with most software companies, tends to take longer. After all, it is not just a person making the decision, but a group that considers a series of information at the time of purchase.

You have to earn their trust, and creating authority for SaaS is one of the most effective ways to make that happen.

Software companies need:

Furthermore, software companies need to have a long relationship with their customers, as it is a paid service, which needs a lot of loyalty to be successful.

Therefore, understanding the entire journey of customers when creating their marketing strategies, both in campaign development and content, is essential.

In this sense, Inbound Marketing becomes the best option to guide people to the final decision making. After all, it integrates a series of tools and can be strategically used focusing on your company’s ultimate goal. For your digital strategy, Inbound also offers:

• Loyalty and relationship with your customers.
• Tracking leads in the funnel.
• Better communication at all stages.
• Data to strengthen the sales team’s strategies.
• Brand authority.
• Assertiveness to contact only the right person.

Understand better how to take advantage of the different tools:

Blog

Creating content for your company’s blog means having more pages to be indexed on Google. This means being much more competitive against common sites that don’t explore this possibility.

What’s more, this increases the likelihood that other sites will link to you, which gives your brand more authority, improving your ranking in search engines. As a result, it is possible to increase the volume of visits to your website, as well as the number of leads captured. 

Anyone searching for “Inbound to software” might end up finding this article, for example, starting to get into the Flow funnel. 

Articles posted on the blog can also be used by the sales and marketing team as ammunition for nurturing leads at each step of the funnel. For this, it is possible to use tools such as email and social networks.

An example of how to do this in practice is sending a stream of emails with other middle and bottom-funnel articles and blogs to leads who have downloaded a top funnel eBook. This way, you can guide this lead closer to the purchase decision.

Generally speaking, your blog content needs to be split into two:

Content-focused on attracting leads

Materials should seek to educate and not just sell. Therefore, build intelligent content based on market trends, and the pain of your persona and ICP.

Content-focused on customer retention

This is the space to talk about everything your company offers to customers, and also to create a relationship with this audience. Therefore, offer relevant content and take the opportunity to explain the tools, showing the benefits against the daily challenges they deal with.

Social networks

A great channel to build relationships with your audience through relevant posts, both in stories and in the feed. It is important to seek engagement and create a community that truly identifies with your brand, as this will convey credibility to those who are discovering your solutions now.

Pay attention to your company’s positioning on social media, frequently analyzing which actions and strategies have achieved more engagement and results.

It is worth noting that when the social network strategy is present for a technology company, it is possible to have a conversation with different audiences, such as employees, partners, and customers.

This becomes, therefore, a tool that reinforces authority and that can also be used to share the company’s achievements, strengthening its expertise and relationship with the entire community involved and sharing relevant links, such as articles on its blog.

This is also an important channel for creating audiences and conducting remarketing campaigns to bring more leads into the funnel.

Email

This is another great channel to maintain a positive relationship with your existing customer, or with leads you’ve converted to eBooks and other landing pages. Email can help to build loyalty and up-sell.

Emails are also very assertive in the process of guiding the lead through the steps of the funnel, especially when applying automation flow strategies.

A study carried out by McKinsey & Company points out that an email marketing campaign is 40 times more effective in the process of attracting new customers than actions carried out on channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

Another survey conducted by Exact Target says that around 91% of people check their email inbox daily. This points out this tool as a very important option to create robust and efficient strategies, which can be very well explored in Inbound for software.

Paid traffic

Don’t just rely on organic reach to attract new leads on search engines and social media. It’s important to exploit paid ads, with smart targets to get in touch directly with your target audience and ICP, even more efficiently.

Note that this is also a great option for remarketing strategies!

Invest in paid traffic on tools such as:

• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Instagram Ads
• LinkedIn Ads

Those are the main options, but there are other important tools as well. Your company should look for what is best for your strategies.

Also, don’t forget to optimize the funds invested in Google and Facebook Ads, analyzing data and results frequently. So you get better results with your investments.

Landing pages

These are essential tools in an Inbound Marketing strategy. With an eBook or ad LP, you offer something of quality to your audience and, in return, you only ask for some basic information, such as type of company, title, and, above all, contact details.

For that, you need to have a well-structured LP, with the right SEO strategies, that appear well placed in Google search, attracting more people to your funnel.

This is an essential step to enable other inbound strategies, such as sending emails, for example. Thus, this option is highly effective in the processes of attracting leads and in the relationship with your customers.

According to the book The Ultimate Sales Machine, by Chet Holmes, only 3% of a company’s potential customers would be ready to make a purchase from a paid campaign that reached him.

That said, if your landing page, and even your blog, receive a visitor that is included in the 97% of users who are not ready to buy, it needs to be strategically structured to guide this user to his final decision.

Software Web site

This is one of the foundations of a well-structured Inbound Marketing strategy. A website focused on conversion and optimized for SEO, appears in your client’s Google searches, presents your solutions for the lead, and guides you towards the final decision.

But for that, the structure of a website must be done intelligently at all stages, from content creation to programming.

There are several essential elements for a high converting website and much of the Inbound Marketing strategy depends on an excellent website to work and be possible to measure results.