How the world’s biggest SaaS companies leverage inbound to dominate a market
Do you bring in 10,000+ people/month to your website from inbound (blog or home page), but your scared of investing in new media channels?
Do you feel like your missing out on a big channel?
You might be stuck in what I call the “inbound marketing comfort zone of death”.
Let me explain why it is so deadly…
Why inbound ONLY marketing will kill your SaaS
Most SaaS companies do pretty well with inbound… some even bring in hundreds of thousands of website visitors per month.
If all you do is inbound, you’re probably thinking:
- All our website traffic is organic, so we don’t have to pay for it (besides the cost of our content marketing team)
- Thousands of people find us by them self without us having to pay to try and get them to our website (so we don’t waste lots of money on ads)
Both of these things are great… if you want to keep costs low and are happy with the number of people who convert from your inbound traffic into leads.
But what if you want to dominate a market, convert a much larger % of your inbound traffic into leads and scale quickly?
Inbound ONLY marketing will kill your growth.
Why?
Because you could be growing A LOT faster by leveraging your #1 inbound marketing asset (ie: your website traffic).
Let’s say you have 100,000 unique website visitors per month.
- 2% convert to trials or demos.
- 20% convert from trial/demo to paid customer.
- 400 new paid customers per month.
In the scenario above you have 3 key audiences:
Audience #1: 100,000 Website Visitors
Audience #2: 2,000 Trials or Demos
Audience #3: 400 Paid Customers
What if you could take your largest audience (ie: your website visitors) and double the number that convert into a trial/demo for your SaaS?
I’m going to show you a proven method you can use to leverage your inbound traffic (all the hard work you’ve done over the years to grow your SaaS to where it is today) to get more of your website visitors signing up for a trial/demo of your software.
How to leverage inbound to grow your SaaS faster
You might be one of those SaaS companies who just does inbound + retargeting.
But did you know that… most SaaS companies GROSSLY under utilize retargeting.
For example, most SaaS companies spend years developing their inbound content strategy and thousands of hours writing inbound content, then they just go and use Facebook custom audiences and pixels.
They call that retargeting. It works but it’s a tear drop in the ocean.
The next level is Facebook + AdWords so you can also follow people around the web. This is decent, but still grossly under utilizing retargeting.
At this point every SaaS company knows retargeting works.
For most SaaS companies, it’s the one guaranteed profit campaign they can always count on.
So then why does everyone stop at one or two ad networks??
Maybe they just don’t know other spots that exist???
Well today, you have a plan to turn more of your inbound website traffic into leads for your SaaS (and I’m giving you the whole plan for free)…
Full SaaS Inbound Traffic Retargeting Plan
Google Display ads
Google Gmail ads
YouTube ads
Facebook ads
Twitter ads
Taboola ads
Yahoo Gemini ads
AOL ONE ads
Retargeting across ad networks is the first step. But if you want to get more granular with it, then pictured above is a “Pixel Funnel Retargeting” campaign for a SaaS company.
This is an advanced tracking and optimization technique used to:
- Customize messages based on a customer’s stage in the relationship with your brand
- Help customer’s get to the next step in your customer journey
- Squeeze unseen profit from your funnel
Most people don’t know this, but this is the advanced stuff that silicon valley guys are doing enabling hyper-growth companies like AirBNB, Uber and Dropbox.
It makes them seem like they are in more places than they actually are.
Combine that with the TOFU-MOFU-BOFU model that works because it is proven to convert traffic into leads, and you have a massive hit.
How to use TOFU-MOFU-BOFU to retarget inbound traffic into leads
A common question I get after telling people where to run ads is…
Where should I send people after they click on my ad? To a blog post, opt-in page or trial/demo page?
The simple answer is… TOFU-MOFU-BOFU.
Because we are specifically talking about inbound traffic in this article, your website visitors already know who you are so you might be tempted to just send people straight to a page with a trial or demo of your software.
That might work for you if you have a low <$50/mo ARPU (average-revenue-per-user) and low-touch sales process with no sales team.
But if your selling a high ARPU >$50/mo SaaS product, I personally prefer to acquire, filter and qualify every lead with TOFU-MOFU-BOFU.
If you don’t know what TOFU-MOFU-BOFU is, read this article.
If I was just getting started with paid ads and had a SaaS business with significant inbound traffic, this is what I would do:
Step 1) Open a Google AdWords account, Facebook Ads account, Twitter Ads account, Taboola Ad account, Yahoo Gemini Ad account and AOL ONE Ad account
Step 2) Place all the tracking pixels from the ad networks on every page of my website
Step 3) Setup 3 TOFU ads, 3 MOFU ads and 3 BOFU ads to split test on all the ad networks
Step 4) Target all my website visitors to my TOFU opt-in page (excluding those who have hit my TOFU thank you page) with the 3 TOFU ads
Step 5) Target all my TOFU thank you page visitors to my MOFU opt-in page (excluding those who have hit my MOFU thank you page) with the 3 MOFU ads
Step 6) Target all my MOFU thank you page visitors to my BOFU opt-in page (excluding those who have hit my BOFU thank you page) with my 3 BOFU ads
Step 7) Create a lookalike audience to find new customers who are similar to my website visitors (and take them through step 3–6 above)
If this all seems too overwhelming, start with 1 ad network at a time and build up. Start with GDN (the biggest ad network in the world) with ads going to your TOFU. Once that ad network meets your target CPA, then expand to the next ad network, and so on.
The beauty of this strategy is you are using what you know already works (ie: retargeting) and is cheaper than targeting cold traffic to reach people you’ve already invested to attract to your website via inbound marketing.
Now you are just using paid ads to guide them through your proven, inbound sales funnel across the whole web.
HubSpot, one of the kings of SaaS inbound marketing have been using this strategy for years to generate 60,000+ leads per month.
NOTE: Some ad networks won’t let you exclude website audiences from your targeting. To do it with GDN, you should create all your audience “buckets” (eg: TOFU thank you page, MOFU thank you page, etc) inside Google Analytics Audience Builder, then setup your targeting inside GDN.
Case Study: Optimizely
When Optimizly was looking for a granular yet simple way to remarket visitors at specific points in their sales funnel, this is the campaign they ran.
The results:
- Cost-per-click (CPC) 59% lower than in Optimizely’s non-remarketed campaigns
- 8.1% of ad spend generated more than 13% of all clicks
- Successfully moved leads through the funnel
- Customers loved the ingenuity and creativity that went into personalizing the advertising experience
Optimizely’s case study can be found here.
Conclusion
The secret to large SaaS companies market dominance is largely due to extensive retargeting.
You gotta leverage your inbound traffic by thinking bigger with your retargeting. Not bigger in terms of less qualified people, mass pixeling or higher banner ad frequency.
Bigger in terms of blanketing the web.
When you leverage your inbound traffic and are everywhere it creates a whole new effect that makes small budgets work like big budgets.
What You Should Do Now
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