Content marketing plays a key role when it comes to organically growing your SaaS business. This is because a good SaaS content marketing strategy helps you establish yourself as a thought leader and increase sales by attracting potential customers interested in the kind of product or service you provide.
Follow this five-step guide to get the best out of the content on your website and grow your SaaS business organically. Here you will learn how to devise and implement a good SaaS content strategy and develop new and compelling content ideas tailored to your audience’s needs.
What Is SaaS Content Marketing?
Before diving into any step-by-step guide on creating a good content marketing strategy, we must first understand what exactly SaaS content marketing is.
When implemented in SaaS businesses, content marketing is defined as a long-term marketing strategy that SaaS businesses use to attract, convert, and retain a target audience by consistently generating and sharing unique, relevant, and beneficial content.
If we were to get more specific and thorough with the definition of SaaS content marketing, it would be something along the lines of this:
1. SaaS content marketing is a long-term strategy
Content marketing focuses on your potential customers—not the product or service you provide. So, your ultimate main objective shouldn’t be to aggressively advertise your products but rather to build a solid long-term relationship with your target customers. And good relationships require time and effort.
The increased organic traffic on your site is a good indication that your content marketing efforts are working. However, even with a good strategy, you will likely have to wait a few months to see actual results.
2. SaaS content marketing should appeal to a target audience
SaaS content marketing isn’t about attracting just anyone and everyone to your site. An effective SaaS content marketing strategy is one where you create content for only a specific target audience—not for everyone.
The content on your site should appeal to people interested in a product or service like the one you provide. Digressing from your site’s “main point” will only negatively affect the traffic.
3. SaaS content marketing must be consistent
Content marketing isn’t a strategy you implement one time and be done with it. Consistency is vital to achieving positive results with your content marketing.
A common mistake companies make is putting a hold on posting new content until they get a positive ROI on previously posted content. SaaS companies are in part successful because customers can always rely on them being consistent; that’s why you must keep sharing new and beneficial content even if you haven’t gotten a positive ROI yet.
How Can Content Marketing Help Your Business?
Content marketing can be advantageous to your SaaS company in different ways. Below you will find several positive outcomes you can expect when you start implementing SaaS content marketing:
1. Increased brand awareness and authority
Constantly posting high-quality blog posts will increase your odds of ranking on the top of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The detailed, high-quality content you post will help you establish yourself as an authority on a certain domain as search engines will see your content as the most relevant one to the topic—thus ranking your site higher. The higher you rank, the more your click-through rates (CTRs) and visibility will increase.
2. Higher ROI (without a massive budget)
Studies show that businesses receive three times more leads and invest less money when they opt for content marketing instead of traditional marketing. High-quality content doesn’t have to cost you a fortune. You can either have an in-house team member complete the task or sign up with an agency.
3. A powerful connection with your customers
Another way to use content marketing is to build solid customer relationships. Customers that are constantly exposed to the content you produce will get used to it and trust it, thus relying on you and treating your site as an authority.
When you win the trust of your customers not only will they keep purchasing your products, but will also most likely recommend your products to other people.
Examples of SaaS content marketing
The best place to look for excellent examples of SaaS content marketing is on the leading SaaS companies’ websites or social media pages, e.g., BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, etc.
One thing all successful SaaS companies have in common is regularly posting high-quality, beneficial content to educate their target audience and attract more customers via search engines.
A great example is HubSpot. This brand uses detailed blog posts, reports, and free certification courses to attract new users to its SaaS product.
How To Create a Powerful SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
It is important to remember that in order to use content marketing to grow your SaaS business, you can’t just focus on the content you create. The content only works when you have a good marketing strategy in play.
Before starting with content creation, you need to get your processes, tools, and assets in place—prepare a game plan, if you will.
So, how do you create a powerful SaaS content marketing strategy step-by-step?
1. Define your content marketing goals
You start by setting a few realistic goals or objectives you can work towards and using them to measure your progress.
Consider setting up two types of goals:
- Your overall content marketing goals—this can be the revenue of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) generated by content in a year. Don’t forget to use multi-touch attribution when assessing your content’s impact on the bottom line.
- Specific metrics for each content piece you publish—it can be the organic traffic for a blog post.
Generally, most SaaS companies have these three content marketing goals:
- Brand awareness
- Lead generation
- Website traffic
2. Target your audience
Defining your target audience is the first step to having a focused marketing campaign. Start by creating a checklist with a few characteristics like age, gender, profession, income, etc., based on your product.
A shortcut to this is using analytics tools to review your social media following. Different online platforms (e.g., Facebook) offer analytics services that allow you to see the characteristics of your followers in multiple categories. You can also use this analysis to discover other social media prospects who match your target audience.
Once you pinpoint all the main characteristics of your target audience, you can use this data to create a profile of your ideal buyer to help focus marketing efforts.
3. Create content that is product-focused and ranks well in search engines
Once you have defined your content marketing goals and target audience, it is time to tackle the content creation process. There are a few things to keep in mind when creating content, like:
- Proper use and placement of keywords is crucial
- Internal and external linking can build authority and help with ranking
- Search engine optimization (SEO) will help your website rank higher
4. Become an authority on a niche topic by diving deeper into the content
If you want your content to perform well, you need to establish yourself as an authority in specific topics, i.e., become a topical authority. Your content has a better chance of performing well if you dive deeper into the subject.
So, instead of using multiple unrelated keywords to produce shallow content, opt for a few more specific ones and elaborate on them.
5. Create a lead funnel to move prospects through the sales process
The strategies for creating a SaaS sales funnel vary depending on the stage of the business. Building a marketing funnel before a sales funnel is crucial for creating optimal conditions and setting the sales team up for success.
Creating high-quality content for each stage of the buyer’s journey is vital to ensure a successful inbound sales strategy. Your buyer’s journey has three phases:
- The top of the funnel (TOFU): At this point, the buyer is in the awareness stage and gathering information.
- The middle of the funnel (MOFU): At this stage, the buyer evaluates specific solutions and compares them to competitors.
- The bottom of the funnel (BOFU): The buyer is making a purchase decision at this stage.
To successfully evaluate the effectiveness of the sales funnel, you must track specific metrics like revenue growth, churn rate, customer lifetime value, and acquisition cost.
Conclusion
SaaS content marketing is vital for promoting and growing SaaS businesses. It involves creating and distributing useful and relevant content to attract, retain, and engage a specific target audience. A successful SaaS content marketing strategy includes:
- Long-term planning, relationship-building, and consistency
- Targeting specific audiences
- Creating product-focused content that ranks well in search engines
- Building topical authority
- Creating a lead funnel to move prospects through the sales process
- Tracking revenue growth, churn rate, customer lifetime value, and acquisition cost to evaluate the strategy’s effectiveness.
