The SaaS Growth Blog

Interested in SaaS Inbound Marketing?

It's not every day that you get the opportunity to hear real industry experience, stories, tips, tools, and tactics from the world's greatest in your profession. Bill Macaitis, we believe, is one of the world's greatest in the SaaS marketing industry.  

Yes. You read that right. It wasn't a typo. Beware of Persona Problems, not personal problems. That is a different article for a different time. This article talks about how important it is to know your customers and how to make it a priority for your marketing team to know your customers, too. More importantly, this article will help you identify hidden issues in your marketing and fix them.  After all, you don't know what you don't know, right?

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply.” 

Steven R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:  Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.  

Good leaders, good marketers, and good business owners … They all know the importance of listening. Listening is key, key to leading, key to marketing, and key to effective anything. (Click to Tweet) The problem is, listening is hard in the world of digital marketing -- AKA Instant Gratification Land.   

Business Owners and CEO’s require instant results from their marketing heads.  That makes listening impossible -- Right?  Well, yes.  If you believe listening is sitting on a patio, with a sweet tea and hours of free time.  And, let’s be honest here, you aren’t the one who needs to learn to listen, the individual running your marketing efforts is.   

Why are business owners and marketing professionals so crazy about HubSpot?

Well, it’s hard to discuss inbound marketing without talking about HubSpot. There’s good reason for that. Founded in 2006, the company pioneered the four step inbound marketing methodology, essentially turning the traditional outbound technique on its head.

One of the best things about the digital marketing giant? They love giving out free resources and certifications that you and your marketing team can actually use. This is especially great for you when you're ready to tap into growth hacking for your business. We’ve compiled a list of our 15 favorite HubSpot links that are 100% free and useful.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, if that tree symbolizes your Conversion Rate Optimization, and there’s no inbound call tracking, then the answer is absolutely not. Tracking leads is the weak link in many websites aimed at turning page views into paying customers. How do you know what your real ROI is if you don’t know which ad or website is bringing in customers? You don’t. That’s a problem. 

Here’s how to solve for your real ROI. (Click to Tweet!)

 Number? Number? Who’s Got Your Number?

Great salespeople know that making a sale is about building a relationship through enjoyable (and educational) conversation.  Great Inbound Marketers, like Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures and Larry Kim of WordStream know there is no difference in growth hacking.  Visits, conversions, and customer success all come from relationships driven by enjoyable, educational conversations.  Their conversations just come to life in the digital world.  These are places like Inbound Marketing Communities, fascinating Twitter accounts like @NikkiElizDemere, and most of all focused, relevant personal blogs like Seth Godin's Blog Typepad. 

The best Growth Hackers know that if they focus on building relationships through their blog everything else will fall in place. (Click to Tweet!)

ROI for internet marketing is notoriously difficult to calculate.

Most SEO companies will offer vague explanations of intangibles, like the customer who sees your ad for three months on Facebook, doesn’t click, but recommends you to a friend who does. Honestly, there are a lot of variables, but when it comes to measuring the real-world success of your internet marketing efforts, it is possible.

Here are the five primary success markers to look for – and why they’ll result in real revenue. 

If you’ve spent one hour or ten hours creating a piece of content, then here’s the Golden Rule: Spend at least that same amount of time promoting it! What’s the point of creating great content if you’re not sure how your audience will find it? This isn’t Field of Dreams here people – if you build it, they will come – but only when you point them in the right direction!

Inbound marketing, the art of helping your ideal customers to find you through content, depends on two primary components:

1. Genuinely useful content
2. Promoting the heck out of it

Sure, it’s more complicated than that, with buyer personas and sales funnels and metrics. But without this foundation, you won’t get very far. Many businesses don’t have a staff writer (which this writer thinks is a shame!) and don’t have much time to create content. If you can create just two original, great pieces of content per month – you can leverage them for more page views and more leads. Here's how.