Inbound Marketing can be a powerful tool for many organisations, but in particular, SaaS companies can benefit from the inbound methodology. However, a stumbling block many marketers face is actually getting the budget they need to start their inbound marketing efforts. With so many different departments competing for spend at a SaaS company, it can be difficult to secure a budget over another department.

Proving ROI is one of the best ways to convince your stakeholders to allocate funds to your endeavour – who wouldn’t want to invest money when they know they’ll get a higher return on what they put in? With 53% of marketers saying that they see a higher ROI from inbound marketing tactics when compared with traditional outbound efforts (State Of Marketing 2018 - Hubspot), inbound marketing appears to be far more lucrative.

The key benefits of inbound marketing for Saas Companies are:

  1. Reduces the cost per lead.
  2. Increases website traffic organically.
  3. Boosts lead acquisition.
  4. Gives better quality leads to the sales team and therefore a higher conversion rate and quicker sales
  5. Improves customer loyalty to lower churn.

Cost per lead

Let’s begin by looking at cost per lead – the amount of spend it takes to bring in a new lead for the company. This is a critical metric, especially when a company is in its early years, and most revenue growth comes from taking on new clients.

Hubspot found that in 2012, inbound leads were 61% cheaper to acquire than outbound leads, and with sales teams also suggesting that inbound marketing produces higher quality leads (60% coming from inbound sources in 2018, compared to just 18% from outbound efforts), it’s clear that inbound can help you cut the cost per lead and improve the quality of the leads they are getting.

Increasing website visits

Inbound marketing doesn’t just lower the cost of leads, it can also help bring more of them to your website. Website traffic is a key indicator of how your business is performing – 70% of companies not hitting their revenue goals also had less than 10,000 website visits a month. It’s a simple idea really, since the more people you have looking over your content and offering, the more potential you have to sell.

A good inbound strategy will look to draw website visitors in with great, high-quality content, answer the questions they had, and start moving them down the conversion funnel. High-quality content has the potential to become an evergreen source of visitors to your website, potentially providing traffic long after its creation. This extra long-term business value is something outbound tactics simply can’t match.

Download the 6 Keys to Planning an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Increasing the number of leads

Great inbound marketing does require investment – creating content takes time and resources, and top-quality content even more so – however, it also produces results. Hubspot found that B2B companies that blogged 11+ times a month had 3 times the traffic and got 4.5 times the number of leads compared to those that blogged 0-1 times a month. And this benefit wasn’t just limited to bigger companies, in fact, smaller ones saw the highest return in lead numbers when they began to blog more.

This increase in the number of organic leads allows for sales to be more selective in which leads they pursue – with a constant stream of content, less-suitable leads can be nurtured until they’re a hotter lead.

Better quality leads

Inbound marketing has another added advantage: it produces leads of a higher quality. If customers have been browsing your content, and have been nurtured with email contact, they’re likely to be much more receptive on a phone call than those being cold-called out of the blue. Inbound marketing can help to produce a steady stream of warm leads, letting your sales team work on calling up those much more likely to buy.

This has the added benefit of maximising the amount of time your sales team spends selling. If your salespeople are prospecting leads to cold-call, they aren’t actually on the phone or emailing prospects, and they aren’t being as efficient as they potentially could be.

Increasing customer loyalty

Content is also useful as it can assist customers in all stages of their buyer’s journey and beyond. Great content can provide value to your existing customer base as well, and keeping them loyal is an often overlooked benefit. Retaining a customer is as valuable as acquiring a new one, sometimes even more so, if they can be upsold to. But in a competitive industry, with many competing software products, keeping your customers can be hard. Competitors are, rather obviously, eager to pick up that business, and will try their best to snatch your hard-earned customers away. Therefore, building loyalty is crucial.

Inbound marketing helps with that by keeping your brand in communication with your customers. A CRM system allows for contact information to be stored so you can see what resources they’ve downloaded and which pages they’ve visited – making it easy to provide them with extra valuable information, upsell related products, or potentially offer deals.

Summing it all up

Inbound marketing for SaaS companies can improve ROI in a number of ways, from increasing the number of sales to reducing the cost of acquiring new customers, to keeping existing customers more loyal. If you’re looking to do SaaS marketing, then you need to be using inbound – sticking to old-fashioned outbound methods will see the competition overtake you.

Inbound marketing can seem like a lot to take on – particularly if you’re a smaller SaaS company. Working with an agency like SpotDev can help to get your inbound marketing off to a great start – we’re experts in the field, and can help you start improving your marketing ROI.