Inbound Marketing Guide for B2B SaaS and Tech Companies

B2B buyer personas are detailed profiles of your ideal customers based on your efforts to understand them through accurate data and market research.

The insights from 15 000+ global consumers and business buyers show that 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. 

To create buyer personas imagine you have to create the LinkedIn profiles of your ideal customers. Here is what you should consider: 

• Demographics: gender, job title, company, industry, location, educational level.

• Motivations and goals:  What motivates your customers? What’s their end game?

• Interests: the topics they are interested in, the community groups, industry leaders, and influencers they follow.

• Behavior - What are they writing about, and are they engaging with other accounts? 

The better you know whom you are marketing to, the better your messaging will resonate with them. The same applies to your negative buyer personas.

Understanding who your ideal customers are was just the beginning. The next important thing is understanding their buying journey. 

The buyer's journey is the path someone goes through with your business to accomplish their goals, leading to a purchase. 84% of business buyers say they are more likely to buy from a company that understands their business goals.

The buyer's journey to a long-lasting business relationship with your brand can look like this:

1. Attract strangers to your website with valuable content.

2. Convert visitors into leads through forms.

3. Engage leads and nurture them to build trust.

4. Close leads to customers by solving their challenges with your product.

5. Delight customers by empowering them to find success with your products.

It's crucial to direct your inbound marketing efforts toward relevant activities that fulfill your purpose. One way to set your direction is to define your inbound marketing goals.

There are different techniques for setting goals with clear focus and direction, and one of them is the PACT technique:

• Purposeful. Choose a meaningful goal for your long-term purpose of building valuable business relationships instead of sacrificing your business reputation for a quick win.

• Actionable. A good goal focuses on outputs and actions you can take and control to achieve it. It should inspire action, so the team knows where to focus and what to do to achieve the desired outcomes.

• Continuous. Take continuous actions that help you achieve your goal. It encourages constant improvement rather than reaching a supposed end goal.
  
  
• Trackable. Track the progress of your activities towards the larger goal and whether or not you've completed them.

The 8 most popular types of content marketing formats:

1. Blog - to increase leads, search engine rankings, awareness, and credibility of your business. 56% of marketers who leverage blogging say it's effective, and 10% say it generates the most significant return on investment. 

2. Landing page - increase the number of leads through a website page that offers visitors valuable content in exchange for their information.

3. E-book - allows you to show your authority on a subject and go more in-depth than you would with a blog post.

4. Free trial - lets your customers see what they're getting before they commit to making a purchase.
   

5. Video marketing is becoming one of the top marketing strategies for B2B companies. 87% of video marketers  say video gives them a good return on their investment.

6. Infographics are a powerful tool that allows your audience to process information through statistics, visual data, and charts.

7. Podcasts - These long-form audio programs are a growing market, and it's the perfect time to add them to your content strategy if you're looking to reach a new audience. 49% of global marketers said they plan to increase their spending on podcasts over the next year.

8. Pillar page - broadly overviews a central topic and links to other articles covering specific subtopics in depth.

Content distribution channels

Additionally, it's crucial to include a content distribution plan to share, publish and promote your content through various channels to reach your audience. The three main groups of content distribution channels are: owned, earned, and paid.

The SEO strategy helps your content rank higher on search engines like Google. Google algorithms consider a wide range of ranking factors to decide how well a page ranks, with the ultimate goal to feature content that fulfills user search needs. 

Search engine optimization expands the online visibility of your business in organic search results and improves the quality of traffic to your website. As a result, it can bring you more conversions, win more customers and increase revenue.

SEO is an effective marketing strategy that includes on-page and off-page best practices to bring your content to the right audience.

Some of the factors that influence the success of your SEO efforts are valuable content, internal linking, site security, user-friendliness, page speed, quality backlinks, site authority, and mobile-friendliness.

Email marketing from the inbound perspective is about sending the appropriate email at the right time to the right person. In other words, knowing your buyer personas and at which stage of the buyer's journey they are to send them the appropriate email. 

Segmentation plays a big part in the success of an email marketing strategy because it helps to send the most contextual messages to smaller groups of similar profiles. It is also an essential component of behavioral marketing that targets audiences based on their behavior, interests, intentions, geolocation, and other metrics.

The other two big players in the effective email marketing strategy are personalization and data-driven analysis. The goal is to collect more data, segment your contacts into groups and nurture them by creating highly personalized experiences.

If you’re wondering what good click-through rates for the tech industry are, here are some email benchmarks you should consider:  22.7% open rates, 2.0% click-through rates, and 9.8% click-to-open rates.

Marketing automation helps you manage processes across multiple channels and complete repetitive tasks faster and more accurately. It allows you to target prospects and customers with automated messages according to instructions called workflows. This way, you achieve more efficient interactions and better results.

For example, a customer can receive a follow-up email immediately after requesting information rather than waiting for someone to reply manually.

In 2021, HubSpot reported that 76% of companies use automation. It increases operational efficiency and grows revenue faster as a more straightforward way of completing time-consuming responsibilities.

John McCarthy is considered one of the "founding fathers" of artificial intelligence. He presented his definition of AI as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" at the founding event of AI on the campus of Dartmouth College in 1956.  According to McCarthy, a system has AI if it performs actions considered intelligent if performed by humans.  

Gartner defines artificial intelligence (AI) as a technology that applies advanced analysis to interpret events, support and automate decisions, and take actions. It can make your marketing automation more intelligent and positively impact your business outcomes.

AI is a powerful marketing solution that gathers data and adapts to improve the customer journey, delivering a personalized experience. With AI, you can boost marketing campaigns' ROI by interpreting user behavior and generating hyper-personalized digital ads.

According to Forbes, 70% of millennials feel frustrated when companies send irrelevant emails, and 74% feel frustrated when the website's content is not personalized.

The 3 forces that govern AI in marketing are algorithms, data, and networks.

A Stanford study found that judgments on a company's credibility are 75% based on the company's website design. 

Since your website is responsible for your company's credibility, it should not be a final product. Instead, it should be a foundation you constantly build and optimize to increase your business growth. Here is where Growth-Driven Design (GDD) can contribute to reaching your goals.

GDD is a more innovative approach to web design that drives optimal results by learning about your visitors through data and continually improving the site's performance. It reduces the frustration and risk of traditional web design and doesn't require an up-front investment.

According to HubSpot, here is what 350 agencies from more than 40 countries reported seeing six months after launching a website using Growth-Driven Design: 14% more website traffic, 16.9% more leads, and 11.2% more revenue.

According to a study by WorkBoard, 69% of high-performing companies say that the most important and effective way to build a high-performing team is to communicate business goals company-wide.

The best opportunity for improving business performance is having a clear revenue goal aligned with roles, systems, and technology. Sales and marketing teams should align and make an SLA agreement to accomplish that. 

With an SLA agreement, the marketing team promises to deliver a certain number of leads to sales, and the sales team promises to contact them within a specific timeframe. 

Before purchasing, buyers engage with brands via multiple touchpoints, and marketers need to understand which channels generate leads and convert customers most successfully. 

With the digital marketing analytics strategy, you can structure a business goal into outcomes based on three broad categories: 

Since we live in a data-driven world, your organization should use accurate data to control your processes, reach conclusions, and improve. The first step leading to control and improvement is measurement. 

As a marketer, you can prove the impact of marketing on business goals by using the suitable marketing attribution model that focuses on the metrics relevant to the C-suite rather than vanity metrics.

For instance, with HubSpot's Multi-touch attribution reporting, you can find out which channels and content help you meet your goals. You can set up parameters and assign credit to various teams for the relevant interactions from your buyers' journey.

In HubSpot, you can choose between seven attribution models to assign revenue credits for the relevant touchpoints: first interaction, last interaction, U-shaped, W-shaped, linear, and full-path.