As a SaaS business owner, your online presence, brand authority and online marketing activities are as important (if not more important) as your product.
I wanted to specifically highlight this for SaaS business owners, because the stakes are not as high in many other industries. If you think about it, different businesses can leverage a combination of different strategies (both offline and online) to generate leads and customers. Without a doubt, online marketing is the most popular marketing technique used nowadays. It’s much more cost-effective compared to traditional marketing methods, it provides more reach and helps sell your product to customers all over the world. No brick and mortar business (or any business that can have some other presence offline) is as reliant upon exceptional online marketing efforts as SaaS. On top of that, the competition in SaaS is so fierce, that you can get swallowed up by some unknown startup in just a matter of months. Even giants like Unbounce, Moz, Kissmetrics, Quick Sprout and HubSpot continuously work their butts off to improve their products, marketing efforts, brand authority, online presence, and generally, striving to improve a little bit everyday not to lose their rankings, market share and brand power. In this particular industry, it’s very possible to lose market share to a small SaaS product that was started by two guys in a garage (WhatsApp) even if you are a pioneer and belong to one of strongest companies in the world (Skype). See this post if you want to read more on that matter. Now in the same context, try to imagine yourself opening a small shop in your neighborhood and aiming to beat Walmart. Ouch, good luck with that. The point is that if you want your SaaS company to grow and generate profits (which are by the way, the two out of three most important SaaS business success metrics), you need to have an exceptional marketing team. Now a lot of SaaS companies don’t have the budget, space or time to maintain their own internal marketing team, which is why they outsource their marketing activities. In the fast-paced business world of today, and with SaaS requiring constant and considerable investments in research and development, this is a fairly common and justified tactic to go with. This is exactly why companies that are dependent on their marketing activities need to pick their partner agency carefully. Since SaaS is most dependent on establishing a strong online presence, it’s technically your highest priority (after R&D) to pick an agency that really knows what they’re doing and can actually help grow your online presence with tangible efforts (generate monthly reports and help grow revenue, for instance), not just jabbering and fancy wording.
How having the wrong inbound marketing partner can ruin your SaaS business
Inbound marketing is one of those online marketing techniques that suits SaaS perfectly. The truth is that inbound marketing is a lot like SaaS in terms of business model: most SaaS companies need to grow aggressively and invest large sums of resources early on, to be successful in the long run. The more you invest upfront, the more you are rewarded in the end. This is exactly the case with inbound marketing. It takes time to really start generating results, and that time has to be fueled with resources. As long as you can invest upfront, the beauty of inbound (which, for your case, means less cost per lead acquired, more website visits, more high quality leads, lower CAC and higher customer LTV) will make you a winner in the long run, in terms of establishing a strong online presence and brand authority. This is why inbound and SaaS go so well together and why having a strong inbound marketing strategy will help you win more when you start winning. When you hire an inbound marketing agency, you are technically entrusting your business to others and will depend on them in terms of market share, growth and profit. Choosing a poor inbound marketing partner will likely deliver a huge blow to your SaaS business. We are not suggesting that it will destroy your business (after all, having even a bad marketing strategy is better than having none at all, since you can at least find the mistakes and improve upon them), but it will definitely push you back by a ton and you will lose money.
Who is Incredo anyway?
Incredo is a rapidly growing inbound marketing agency and Official HubSpot Gold Partner that was founded in 2014. We are an Armenia-based agency with a powerful, results driven, hybrid marketing team focused specifically on working with SaaS businesses, from medium to enterprise level.
We know and understand the needs of SaaS, and recognize the huge impact that online marketing leaves on your business (both negative and positive). Depending on your business goals, we strive to provide the most satisfying results in terms of customer acquisition, visitor to lead to customer conversions and establishing thought leadership online, mainly through social media and SEO tactics. During the last two years, Incredo has effectively delivered what clients call “successful online marketing” to over 50 clients worldwide, including some of the well-known INC 500 companies.
Okay, so why Incredo in particular?
- Results driven approach to marketing – Unlike many other marketing agencies out there, our strategy, planning and work processes are specifically focused on results. While it’s true that inbound marketing needs time to start generating satisfying results, it doesn’t mean that the time before it gets to that point is worth nothing. We deliver month over month consistent growth in terms of website visits, leads and customers, while also building brand presence and expanding your reach online.
- Extensive experience in SaaS – One of the most important distinction between Incredo and other online marketing agencies is that we work specifically with SaaS businesses and have extensive experience in the field. As you can find out from our blog, we have a deep understanding of the industry and more importantly, we know how a SaaS business works and what it needs exactly to succeed. To prove our words, we have a wide array of success stories that you can have a look at. Some of our clients have increased the number of their monthly leads by 600 % and improved their visitor to lead conversion rate by 494% with our help and precise, targeted and personalized marketing efforts.
- Diverse team of marketing professionals – Our diverse team of marketing professionals that come from all kinds of different backgrounds (psychologists, engineers, economists and MBAs) makes it possible to look at different problems through a variety of different perspectives, which is the number one contributing factor to complex problem solving.
- All your services via one agency – Another important distinction for Incredo is that, just like HubSpot provides all in one automation services to businesses that include everything you will need to track and analyze marketing activities and performance, we provide all in one service solutions (not just marketing!) to our clients. Our marketing department works closely with our in-house team of web developers and designers to provide the best possible solutions to any kind of problems a SaaS business might have in terms of their website, marketing strategy or any related IT stuff. We also perform various forms of integrations and migrations from any platform to any platform, fast and easy. Here is a case study that you can check out where we migrated around 8000 links and 470 pages from HubSpot to WordPress in five days.
- Strategy is the most crucial element – Just like in business, the number one priority to achieving satisfying results is to create a marketing strategy that is aligned with your business goals, perfectly tailored to your buyer personas (if you don’t have them, we will do the research to find out about them together) and their challenges, based on hard data and analytics (not assumptions and gut!) and improved continuously to keep up with the latest, ever shifting trends of the SaaS industry. This is exactly what we do for our SaaS clients. When you have a strategy, you are no longer sailing in the sea without a compass, or driving a sports car with your eyes closed and no destination in mind: you have a goal and you know how to get to it. The only thing left is relentless execution and continuous improvements of the designed route.
- Aligning sales and marketing – One of the most important things for any business trying to increase its ROI with the help of marketing, is the ability to align their marketing and sales teams. One of the biggest advantages of inbound is that it educates potential prospects along the way, making them more qualified and ready for sales purposes (in an ideal scenario, inbound marketing can generate customers even without any sales touches). This will help align your sales and marketing teams much more smoothly and decrease the amount of sales efforts needed to convert leads into customers, which will ultimately results in shorter sales cycles, more monthly subscriptions and faster business growth that is so essential for a SaaS business.
- This is the box:
As you can see, we are not there – There is a reason why there is so much content and talk about innovation and creativity in business: the most successful strategies and approaches to marketing start with teams that like to challenge the current best practices. This isn’t just theory. If you take a look at the most successful companies today, innovation resides at the core of their success. At Incredo, we believe that lack of “outside the box” thinking is one of the main reasons why a lot of companies fail to stand out from the vast sea of competition, both in terms of business objectives and marketing strategies. We highly value creative and innovative solutions, but at the same time, keep our feet on the ground: everything has to be based on data and hard evidence, not just assumptions that something might work.
Book a chat, see for yourself
At Incredo, we understand and believe that marketing a SaaS business means more than posting content online, talking to the public on social media, improving search engine rankings and improving conversions: a SaaS business exists only in the online world, which makes all of the above mentioned much more vital for continued success. Book a chat with us, ask any questions you might have and see for yourself why we are a perfect fit for a SaaS business.
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