10 Keys To A Successful SaaS Outbound Marketing Strategy

Most SaaS business owners would agree that outbound marketing is a necessary evil in boosting brand awareness. It can be expensive, and it’s often difficult to generate a return on investment, but if done correctly, outbound marketing can be the key to success for your SaaS business. Outbound marketing is any type of marketing where you initiate contact with your customers, rather than waiting for them to come to you.
There are several different outbound marketing strategies that you can use to promote your SaaS business, but not all of them will be effective.
So how do you create a successful SaaS outbound marketing strategy? Here are 10 keys to keep in mind.
1. Content Takes Center Stage
If you’re not familiar with the concept of SaaS content marketing, it involves creating valuable pieces of content (like blog posts) that are meant to educate your customers and help them solve their problems. The keyword here is “valuable”-when you create great content, your audience will want to share it with their friends because they know others will find it helpful too.
Content should be available in multiple formats so that people can more easily consume the information. For example, if someone wants to read an article on your site but doesn’t have time now, they can save it for later by saving a link or downloading it as an ebook or PDF file.
The best type of content includes helpful educational materials like case studies and tutorials. You can also create high-quality videos demonstrating how to use your product (or even just explain why it’s superior). These types of videos are particularly effective because they show people what your product looks like in action-definitely something worth sharing!
2. Insights and Data
Insights and Data is a key strategy that will help you build your SaaS Outbound Marketing Strategy.
How?
You can use data to make decisions
Specifically, you’ll have better insights into:
- What type of content to create
- Who your target audience is
- When is the best time to reach them
- What channels are most effective
This is a really important key to success because it allows you to make informed decisions about your B2B SaaS marketing strategy instead of just guessing. And when you have more information, you can make better use of your resources and time.
You can use data to know what works and what doesn’t work
You can use data to track performance, determine success metrics, find new opportunities and optimize digital marketing campaigns.
Make sure you have access to many different sources of information already, like Google Analytics or Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
You can also research and buy data specific to your industry
This data will help you understand who your target market is, what their needs and wants are, and how they prefer to be reached. It will also give you an understanding of what’s working well and what could be improved.
3. A Customer-Centric Approach
You should be thinking about your customers’ needs and their experience with your SaaS company. Customer retention is probably the most crucial thing in SaaS, because it takes time to acquire a customer, but once you have them, it’s much easier to acquire more. According to HBR, it costs 5-25 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one.
A great way to improve customer retention is to focus on the customer experience. This means making sure that your product is easy to use and that your customers can easily find the answers to their questions. It also means providing excellent customer service so that if a customer does have a problem, they know they can rely on you to help them solve it.
Your customer-centric approach means that you create products for customers, not yourself. You also need to know where you can help them and how best to do that.
It’s also important to keep in mind that every touchpoint is an opportunity to improve the customer experience. This includes everything from the first time they visit your website to when they receive direct mail from you. Make sure that each interaction is positive and helpful, an extension of your brand.
4. Successful Lead Generation
There are a few key things you need to keep in mind when you’re generating leads:
A clear definition of who your ideal customer is
You can’t just generate leads-you need to generate leads who are actually interested in your product or service. You need to have a clear idea of who your ideal customer is to do that.
This means understanding:
- What their needs are
- What their pain points are
- What they’re looking for
Once you understand who your ideal customer is, you can start to generate leads that are more likely to convert.
A clearly defined lead generation goal
Before you start generating leads, you need to know what your goal is.
- What are you trying to achieve?
- Are you looking to increase brand awareness?
- Are you looking to generate more sales?
- Are you looking to build a database of potential customers?
Your lead generation goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
A clearly defined set of metrics to measure your success
In order to know whether or not your lead generation efforts are successful, you need to have a clear set of metrics that you can measure.
Some things you might want to measure include:
- The number of leads generated
- The number of leads converted into customers
- The cost per lead
- The number of leads that unsubscribe from your email list
- The number of leads that visit your website
- The number of leads that click on your ads
Making sure you have a clear set of metrics to measure will help you track your progress and identify areas for improvement.
5. Revenue-Based B2B Marketing
A revenue-based B2B marketing strategy focuses on making your SaaS business more profitable. This can be accomplished by increasing the number of new customers, increasing the average monthly recurring revenue per customer and/or increasing the lifetime value of your customers. By focusing on these three metrics, you will be able to ensure that your company is running at maximum efficiency with minimal waste.
It’s important to note that this type of outbound marketing strategy is different than a lead generation campaign because it doesn’t require you to create new leads. Instead, it focuses on converting existing leads into paying customers by providing them with information about your products or services through various channels like email campaigns, ads and other forms of digital communication such as webinars or eBooks.
6. A Plan for Failure
In the world of outbound marketing, there is no one right way to do it. It’s all about having a plan and repeatedly testing until you find what works for your business.
To fully understand how to implement an effective outbound strategy, you must understand the difference between strategy and tactics. After all, if you are going to put together a successful marketing campaign, then it needs to be backed by a strong foundation. It starts with understanding your current level of knowledge in relation to your target market.
The best way for this is through research: talking directly with potential customers about their experiences with similar products or services; finding out what they look for when making decisions about buying; asking them why they chose one company over another (or why they didn’t choose at all). Just because someone might not know precisely what they want doesn’t mean they don’t have preferences when shopping online (or offline), so take advantage of these opportunities whenever possible!
7. Marketers are in charge of the funnel.
Marketers are in charge of the marketing funnel. The funnel is defined as the process that leads a potential customer to become a paying one, and they are responsible for defining it and executing it.
This may not sound like a big deal, but until recently, marketers were often left out of this equation because they didn’t own the technology or data required to create an effective conversion funnel. Marketers were relegated to thinking about campaigns, social media posts, and email marketing while salespeople did all of their own lead qualifying and nurturing with tools like SalesforceIQ (which has since been acquired by Oracle).
Now things have changed. SaaS companies have begun adopting marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot or Marketo which allow marketers to take full responsibility for each stage of their lead’s journey from top-of-funnel awareness generation through bottom-of-funnel conversion.
8. The Right Mix of Channels
This is where analytics come into play. You need to be able to track the efficacy of each channel and make sure it’s not just a one-off success story. If you’re using multiple channels, you can start to see what kind of results they produce over time, and use that information to help decide which ones are most effective for your business.
This is also why “spray-and-pray” doesn’t work-you want a targeted strategy with a targeted set of channels that will help bring in new leads who actually want what your company has to offer (and won’t waste their time or yours).
That said, there are some basic guidelines for choosing the right mix:
- Email should always be a part of your outbound strategy. It’s one of the most personal forms of communication and allows you to reach a large audience with relatively little effort.
- Social media can be a great way to connect with potential customers, but only if you use the right platform and post relevant, interesting content.
- Google Ads and other paid ads can be effective, but they need to be well-targeted and not too intrusive.
- Webinars or eBooks can be a great way to generate leads, but only if they are truly valuable and offer something that your target audience is actually interested in.
- Referral programs can be a great way to get customers, but only if they are relevant and offer something of value.
9. The Importance of Integration
Integration is the glue that holds your marketing strategy together. It’s the process of bringing together all of the tools, data, and processes that you need to make your SaaS business function at its best.
Without integration, you’re likely to have holes in your marketing strategy: for example, not being able to see how well a particular campaign or initiative performed against others. Without integration, it’s difficult to track how each element is contributing to achieving your business goals.
Fortunately, with marketing automation platforms, integration has become much easier. All of your data is in one place, and you can use it to inform your decisions about where to allocate your resources.
10. A Lean and Mean Team Is a Winning Team
A team is a group of people who work together to achieve common goals. SaaS companies have managed to leverage the power of teams to achieve outstanding results effectively.
When it comes to outbound marketing, especially inbound marketing, it’s important to have a lean and mean team that can get things done quickly and efficiently. A well-organized team will be able to communicate effectively, set clear objectives for all members, provide regular feedback on performance and growth opportunities for each member, as well as make strategic decisions about what’s working and what isn’t working with the current strategy.
A good example of this is HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification Program (IMCP). This certification course focuses on teaching marketers how to use B2B content marketing as part of their lead generation strategy. It provided them with an overview of various topics including SEO optimization techniques like keyword research or social media marketing best practices.
SaaS Outbound Marketing Strategy is key to growth
Growth is the key to success, and outbound marketing is key to growing. It’s no surprise that companies with strong sales teams have higher revenue-and bigger earnings than their competitors.
But how do you get your first sales to hire? And what if you don’t have a large budget for hiring or training an in-house team? Are there any options available other than hiring expensive salespeople from outside firms?
The answer: absolutely! The best part about outbound marketing is that it can be done at scale without breaking the bank. With the right software and strategy, even small businesses can grow into thriving organizations by utilizing their own marketing automation tools, social media presence, and email list to build relationships with prospective customers one at a time.
Don’t forget to read our blog for more SaaS growth marketing tips.