What is B2B Inbound Marketing? (+ Tips to Create Your Strategy)

B2B inbound marketing is the process of getting users to come to you, instead of you going to them.

How is this done?

When you’re constantly providing value to your customers through insightful and knowledgeable content, you get their attention. In time, they’ll come and ask for your products. 

Outbound marketing focuses more on approaching who you think is a potential customer, with a demonstration of your product or service. Outbound marketing also tends to focus more on showcasing a solution, instead of educating the customer on their pain points.

Inbound marketing is trickier to get right, but we’re here to make it easier.  

Put simply, inbound marketing asks the audience to take the wheel, while outbound marketing makes the audience a passive listener or passenger in this analogy. 

Think about it, when was the last time you went and bought a product that someone cold-called you about? Probably a long time ago, if ever. Instead, think of the brands you’ve discovered through their blogs and resources, and now you’re a paying customer? 

In this article, we’ll go through what inbound marketing is and how to craft a perfect strategy that will make your resources attract the potential customers your sales team has always wished for.

Get comfortable because we’re heading in for a fun road trip through the B2B marketing world. Let’s go!

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is marketing efforts that make a customer come to your business. Every resource you create supports your inbound marketing strategy, if it makes the potential customer:

• Trust you as an industry expert
• Feel validation about their own pain points and struggles
• Understand and want to pursue the solutions you provide

Eventually, all of this will make the avid consumer of your resources choose you as the solution they want to try out and (hopefully) become a lifelong customer of yours.

Three are three main types of inbound marketing, those are:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
• Content marketing

These types of inbound marketing work by using the following digital marketing channels and tactics to communicate with potential customers and to strengthen your brand positioning:

Each type of inbound marketing will focus on some of these channels and elements, but many types work in conjunction with one another.

By using inbound marketing you’re ensuring the targeted audience sees you as a trustworthy source of information, gets to know your brand, and eventually decides it’s time to talk with your sales team.

Best of all? Because they’re consuming your content, they’re acknowledging there’s a need for it–so you don’t have to convince them that they have a problem worth solving as much as you would with outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing vs Outbound marketing: what’s the difference?

Inbound marketing brings potential customers to you, while outbound marketing sees you reaching out to find potential customers. 

Inbound marketing strategies work like a magnet attracting your customers through high-quality content.

Outbound marketing is like a massive speaker, shouting about your products to people that may or may not be interested. 

Each has a place in the buyer’s journey and largely depends on your industry. However, when it comes to the business to business industry (B2B), people prefer inbound marketing. In fact, businesses that apply inbound marketing strategies see 126% more leads than those that only use outbound marketing. 

Why?

In the B2B world your target audience won’t just click ‘buy’ on the ad you show them. They have to:

• consider your product and your competitor’s
• convince all the stakeholders of it’s worth
• pay a monthly subscription–most of the time–
• risk their company’s outcomes depending on this new product

See why your audience might not want to blindly follow some ads shouting at them that you’re the best at what you do? B2B sales cycles last on average up to four months, that’s the time it takes to win their trust, build up your brand awareness and position yourself as a thought leader.

Source

In the B2B world, content marketing is the king–or queen–of the B2B marketing-activities castle. Content is the main player that will get your users talking about your business.

Let’s explore what you need to do to create the inbound marketing strategy of your dreams! Yes, marketers have these kinds of dreams. 😎

How to create an inbound marketing strategy for B2B in 6 steps 

There are a few steps to follow if you want to create an inbound marketing strategy that’s specially designed for B2B.

Let’s look at what each of these steps are:

Step 1: Establish your goals and know where you stand

Just like a hiker wouldn’t start without a compass, your strategy can’t start without establishing your directional goals.

You need to know exactly what you want your inbound marketing campaign to accomplish. For example, it might be to increase MQLs, increase organic traffic, increase domain authority, drive higher quality leads, or something else.

In terms of B2B-specific goals, you’ll want to be thinking about key performance indicators (KPIs), S.M.A.R.T. goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), ROI and conversions. 

Once you know what you want to accomplish, you’ll need to measure where you’re currently at, and understand where your competition is, which you can do using B2B marketing benchmarks.

Knowing the starting point and the desired finish line will help you see where you need to make improvements and reverse engineer how to get there.

Additionally, this will not only help you map your strategy, but it will tell you more or less how long it will take to get to your goals. Checking historical data and knowing how long it takes to see ‘X’ amount of improvement on ‘Y’ are, will help you see the wider picture and benchmark progress.

Step 2: Build user personas

Source

User personas are the archetypal, fictional construct of your ideal customers. Their behaviors, backgrounds, and characteristics are mapped out so you can fictionally understand how future customers will act with your product or brand, including business traits, demographic information, and knowledge gaps 

Why do we need them? Building your user personas will help you understand who your target buyers are and what they might be needing or looking for–what their search intent is!

Buyer personas can be created through research, surveys, and interviews. This information will be essential to know what type of content buyers are looking for and which channels you’ll find them on. It’s advisable to give your target user persona humanizing features—like a name, location, gender, or image—in order to help your marketing team visualize them as a real person rather than a data point. 

Keywords, for example, are essentially words and phrases which are commonly used by your target buyer persona. There will likely be different personas for different offers, in which case you might have multiple target buying personas.

Step 3: Create high-quality content–inside and out

Content is key. If you’re not solving the questions that your users have, or you’re saying what everyone else is saying, chances are potential customers won’t see you as a thought leader.

There are multiple ways and channels to achieve this. B2B content goes beyond classic blog posts, spanning videos, podcasts, newsletters, webinars, and gated content.

Whatever the medium, don’t be afraid to ‘spill the beans.‘ The more honest and willing you are to provide real value to your visitors and users. the more they’ll trust you and the more willing they’ll be to check out your product or service.

For example, Jake wrote a SaaS SEO guide with an Actionable Guide to Building a Growth-Driven Strategy. He didn’t hold back in this article and is sharing a ton of industry secrets most agencies probably wouldn’t want to let go of—yet, here we are, letting go and hoping people thank us for it!

Source

High-quality content doesn’t just mean that it’s valuable and insightful, it also means that it is presented beautifully and provides a fantastic UX experience–up to 88% of consumers are less likely to return to a site with bad UX. 

There are millions of apps out there (think Piktochart, for example) that will help you add high-quality and professional images, presentations, and infographics to your content.

Seize these types of tools to make your users want to read or consume your content because they are finding it easy on the eyes, and informative.

Step 4: Use SEO to increase visibility

Search engine optimization (SEO) is taking into account–and improving–all the parameters and elements that make your content discoverable and rankable by search engines. There are multiple ways to do this, with some of the top options being: 

• Content hubs to boost the visibility and authority of your key pages
• A content strategy to optimize existing content and develop compelling new content 
• Glossary pages to increase your page’s credibility 
• Keyword research to make sure you’re gearing your content towards your target buyer persona 

Paying attention to your technical SEO–we’ve got a technical SEO guide just for you–means you’re making sure your content is being taken into account by search engine crawlers. 

Additionally, you ensure that you’re giving it a chance with a quick load speed–a site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds–being indexed properly. You’re also making it readable wherever your audience is–consumers spend 3.8 trillion hours on mobile devices!

Not too convinced about the importance of SEO? Check these stats:

• SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media
• 92% of global traffic comes from Google search
• 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine
• 0.16% of the most searched keywords are responsible for 60.67% of all searches
• Each day there are an estimated 3.5 billion searches on Google

• Each day there are an estimated 3.5 billion searches on Google

Another thing that’s super important in an SEO strategy for inbound marketing is back-linking. Back-linking is when one website links to another website, signaling its trustworthiness and expertise.

Link-building is not easy, but with the right tried and tested link-building tactics for B2B SaaS brands you can outrank your competition.

SEO can make or break your effort, which means doing it alone can be harder than it needs to be. If you’re looking for help from SEO experts that focus on SaaS and B2B don’t hesitate to check Skale, a B2B SEO Agency that’s proven time and time again to be one of the best ones out there.

Step 5: Budget to make the most out of your investment

Having a winning marketing strategy can be relatively easy. However, having a winning strategy that fits your marketing budget can be tricky.

In B2B marketing, you’ll have to consider the costs of the following channels:

• Content marketing
• Paid advertising
• Social media
• Email marketing
• SMS marketing

Once again, by understanding your goals, you’ll be able to know where more of your budget should go, and where it shouldn’t.

B2B marketing differs from B2C marketing:

Source

Additionally, return on investment is not always easy to calculate in B2B marketing.This is due to the fact that since the sales cycle is longer and you rely more on inbound marketing, it’s not always as easy to say ‘they clicked on this blog and so they became customers.‘ 

In reality, a lot of the effort of inbound marketing will take weeks, even months, to show results and as such is harder to measure compared to B2C.

Now, we’d like to mention PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing. It’s a type of internet marketing where advertisers pay a small fee every time one of their ads is clicked. It’s a way of buying visits to your site, while also driving organic site visits. 

There are multiple benefits to PPC: 

1. Provides instant traffic to your site 
2. Your ad will be displayed on the first SERP
3. Optimized PPC can be extremely cost-effective
4. It’s possible to run several ad campaigns for each keyword
5. Should result in higher CTR (click-through-rate) and conversions

Step 6: Measure, adjust, and repeat

Once you have your winning inbound marketing strategy that fits your goals, and your budget, you’ll want to measure it constantly.

Marketing is not rigid. It will change with new trends, customers, and new insights. The best thing you can do is to constantly look at the main metrics that will indicate what needs to be changed–and change it quickly.

Here are 11 crucial SaaS marketing metrics you should be considering:

1. Customer acquisition cost: LTV:CAC ratio
2. Activations
3. Signup to paid conversion (12-month period)
4. Churn rate
5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
6. Retention
7. Annual contract value
8. Marketing sourced revenue (MSR)
9. Top of the funnel leads generated by source: organic traffic
10. Number of active trials
11. Lead velocity rate (LVR)

Once you measure and adjust, you’ll repeat this process for as long as you want your marketing campaign to run. Psst! It should be evergreen!

Following these steps will ensure that you’ve covered every base needed to create an effective B2B inbound marketing strategy. All there is now to do is execute the plan, and keep going.

Why is B2B inbound marketing important?

B2B inbound marketing is important because it’s what’s going to attract the right leads to you.

It doesn’t only attract new, potential customers, but it keeps your readers and current users happy, which can turn them into ambassadors for your brand and increase CLTV and other essential metrics.

This accepted idea that instead of the typical sales funnel, where strangers enter at the top, become prospects and then customers, is now being challenged by the marketing flywheel.

In the sales funnel, the marketing team focuses on bringing in new leads, and the sales team focuses on converting them from leads into customers. In the funnel, there are four stages:

• Awareness: users are aware of their problem and become aware of the potential solution 
• Investigation: users do research to find out more about their problem and the solutions available
• Decision: once they’ve done the research, they are ready to take action
• Action: the users finally take action and become a customer

Now, on the other side we have the colorful wheel. In this wheel the stages start, but they never really stop. In the funnel, it would be hard to consider getting the customer once again. In the flywheel, it’s a cycle and customers or first time users are inside and don’t leave, they also encourage new customers to enter—turning your B2B SaaS into a product-led growth machine.

The stages in the marketing flywheel are as follows:

• Attract: by providing valuable and educational content, you establish trust in the company and gain visibility
• Engage: once in the flywheel, the content will focus more on providing specific solutions to the audience’s pain points, needs and goals–building even more trust
• Delight: once the first-time user has become a customer you keep on delighting them with your content. You offer them help and support so they can truly succeed with your product or service. These delighted customers contribute towards attracting new customers, making your product growth less reliant on marketing efforts and more reliant on happy users.

As you can see, the main difference between these two models is that the funnel focuses on attracting new customers, while the flywheel focuses on keeping these customers—which also, in turn, brings new customers.

B2B inbound marketing is not only for the first stages of acquiring new customers but it will also help you keep them happier for longer—increasing CLTV and ARPA. This is essential in B2B, a marked difference from B2C where  one purchase is often all that’s needed from the customer, and no repeat business is sought after.

Now that you know how to craft your own strategy, and you know why it’s important, let’s look at some tips for you to make the most out of your B2B inbound marketing.

Four B2B inbound marketing strategy tips for 2024

Once you’ve created your strategy, you can’t just go for a margarita and look longingly at sunsets for the rest of your days. Getting the B2B inbound marketing strategy is only half of the equation.

From now on, you’ll need to continue on this life-long process of constantly improving and checking your content to make sure you’re delivering great value every time. It’s a process, and it won’t happen overnight.

Keep up to date with SEO guidelines and changes

SEO is constantly evolving. As people’s interests change and search engines become smarter the algorithms will keep updating and modifying and you need to be on top of it. Understand what Google is doing, but also all the other search engines–yes, YouTube counts as a search engine.

Keep up with content trends and technology

A few years ago people would have said that virtual reality is just a thing for video games. However, now that the metaverse is quickly becoming a reality and might become our second home, you need to be aware of the constant changes going on around you.

Ask yourself important questions, such as:

• Do I need to start paying more attention to voice technology?
• Should I start thinking about metaverse marketing and content?
• Is augmented and virtual reality something I should consider too?

Ride out that innovation wave and give your team time to be innovative. Perhaps there’s a bandwagon to be built, rather than just hopping on the back of another one.

Consider all content channels and platforms

Maybe you think TikTok is only for Gen-Z influencers and cute cat videos. Maybe you think Instagram is only for selling but not really for educating. Maybe you think Twitter is only for political fights.

If you do think like this, you’re running the risk of missing out on potentially huge digital real estate. Maybe your stakeholders are hanging out on Instagram or Twitter for finding new blogs, newsletters, or webinars. Maybe your blog should be just as important as the 10-min live Q&A that you do on TikTok.

It’s very possible that those other channels are what’s going to attract a younger generation of future stakeholders that might be emailing you sometime soon to know more about your brand and product.

Consider mobile friendliness and accessibility

You need to consider two key aspects:

• Mobile-friendly content: there’s mobile-device supremacy going on. In 2020, 68.1% of all website visits came from mobile devices,  showing an increase from 63.3% in 2019. Ensuring your content and website is properly seen from all mobile devices is crucial.
• Accessible content: creating accessible content means you’re taking into consideration that not all internet-users are equally able, and you’re making sure you’re including everyone.
• Don’t be afraid of asking: asking what your current visitors and customers think about your content, or allowing them to say what they would like to see more of is a great idea to provide them with what they ask–no guessing game, just honest feedback.

There are many ways in which you can learn what your users think of your brand, content, and what they would like to see:

• In-app surveys
• On-page surveys
• Email surveys
• Social media and other platform comment sections

Remember that inbound marketing is about being user-centric, so put them where they deserve to be, at the center of your strategy!

B2B inbound marketing strategy is not a trend but the future of B2B marketing

Your B2B inbound marketing campaign can truly make or break your business. However, there’s one simple thing to keep in mind: bring real value to your users.

Inbound marketing is not just about having X amount of pieces on your blog, or making them look nice, and have all the keywords in. No.

It’s about showing your users and visitors that you see them and hear them. That you understand who they are and what they’re struggling with. Ultimately, you care about them and you need to put effort into providing them value first before annoyingly shouting for them to give you money for your products or services. Invest in your strategy, both with your people and with your budget. 

Thankfully, you can always come back here to be reminded of the things you need to coordinate to make the most out of your inbound marketing strategy.

We hope this has been a useful ride through the inbound marketing world, and now you can take the wheel and make yours an resounding success!

B2B Inbound Marketing FAQ