Growing your SaaS business organically can be a daunting task, but fear not! There is one crucial factor that can help you achieve this: content marketing. With content marketing, you can establish your business as a thought leader in your industry, while also increasing your sales by attracting people who are interested in your services.
To help you maximize your content marketing efforts, we have prepared a comprehensive ten-step guide that covers everything you need to know. Our guide will teach you how to create a powerful SaaS content strategy that takes into consideration your goals and audience. You’ll also learn how to develop content ideas that resonate with your target market and effectively promote your brand.
So why wait? If you want to put your business in pole position and take it to the next level, this guide is a must-read for you. Get started on your journey towards content marketing success today!
What Is Different about SaaS Content Marketing?
SaaS content marketing can often be complex because:
- SaaS services require a certain level of commitment, so establishing reputation and trust is essential
- B2B transactions often involve more decision-makers and influencers, and often have longer sales cycles
- Digital platforms involve technology, which can be difficult to understand initially—especially when the SaaS is truly innovative or unprecedented
For all these reasons and more, you need to think of your SaaS content strategy as a marathon, not a sprint.
Why is content marketing important for SaaS companies?
Content marketing is increasingly becoming crucial for the growth of companies. This trend applies to SaaS companies as well. They should produce educational content, which is crucial to their audience. The SaaS and tech industries are unique in their nature, with audiences that are always looking to learn and grow professionally. In fact, some people rely mainly on content produced by SaaS companies for knowledge and information.
By producing educational content that helps customers upgrade their skills, businesses can build loyal communities. This strategy can also establish brands as thought leaders and create a reliable revenue stream. A prime example is Kinsta, a premium WordPress hosting provider. They managed to achieve significant growth in website visitors by creating valuable educational content. As of June 2022, they attract over 672,000 monthly organic views. Therefore, businesses can benefit significantly by adopting content marketing techniques.
Kinsta talks about topics that are not directly linked to the company’s hosting services. Instead, it focuses on its customers’ pain points and challenges. Their blog covers broad themes relevant to WordPress developers and website owners, thereby building awareness and trust among these audiences.
How to Create a Powerful SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
Creating a successful and high-performing SaaS content strategy requires a well-thought-out plan, attention to detail, and a clear understanding of your target audience’s needs and preferences. It is vital to ensure that the content you produce for your SaaS business is engaging enough to capture the interest of potential customers and keep them coming back for more.
In order to achieve this, it is important to follow a structured approach and to break down the process into smaller, more manageable steps. By doing so, you can ensure that you have a solid foundation to build upon as you grow your SaaS business. So, sit down, grab a pen and notepad, and let’s dive into the 10 essential steps you must take to develop a winning SaaS content strategy that will take your business to the next level.
1. Start with Building a Foundation for Your Content Strategy
Some companies underestimate the importance of other marketing elements and get frustrated when content doesn’t bring the desired results. In reality, content works well when there’s a solid marketing strategy behind it.
Before rushing into content creation, you need to make sure that you have all your processes, tools, and assets in place.
So, what are the main items you should focus on?
Get your product and brand story right
SaaS products are often less straightforward than other categories, requiring a deep understanding of the value proposition and messaging you want to deliver to your audience.
Creating content without a solid business and product strategy will usually result in wasted resources and little-to-zero results.
Vivek Shankar, Founder of Vivek Shankar Consulting says:
“Many SaaS companies begin with SEO and then focus on the rest, getting it all backward. Your product and sales come first, so get that story in place before doing anything else”.
Vivek Shankar, B2B Fintech Content Writer and founder of Vivek Shankar Consulting
Make sure you have the following elements documented:
- Your overall targeting and segmentation strategy
- Your USP (unique selling proposition)—the core value offered by your company
- Your overall messaging and positioning strategy
- Your brand story—the narrative structure highlighting your background and your mission
Prepare all necessary marketing assets
When it comes to creating blog posts for your website, it’s important to ensure that you have all the necessary assets in place before getting started. Failure to do so can result in a considerable waste of resources. Simply writing blog content without considering the overall structure and optimization of your website is not an effective approach.
Instead, it’s vital to have a well-optimized website that is structured in a logical and user-friendly way, utilizing appropriate keywords, and with a focus on excellent user experience.
Additionally, it’s crucial to have a team in place that is skilled in content marketing, including copywriting and design. Whether in-house or freelance, these professionals will be a vital component of your content production strategy.
Finally, utilizing content marketing tools is essential for a data-driven approach to your content. By starting with events in Google Analytics and using SEO tools for keyword and topic research, you can dramatically increase your productivity and improve your overall content strategy.
Define your content marketing goals
Coming up with specific objectives will allow you to evaluate your progress and set realistic expectations.
Consider setting up your goals at two main levels:
- The overall content marketing goals—e.g., the revenue or the number of Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated by content this year. Make sure to use multitouch attribution when evaluating your content’s impact on the bottom line.
- Specific metrics for each content piece you produce—e.g., organic traffic for a blog post. Setting such intermediary KPIs is essential to better understand content performance when it comes to complex SaaS products.
2. Go the Extra Mile When Researching Your Audience
In this article, we learn that audience research is an essential component in building a successful content marketing strategy. This type of research provides valuable insight into the goals, challenges, questions, and doubts that readers may have.
However, performing customer analysis in the SaaS sector requires even more thorough effort and resources, particularly in B2B SaaS. This is because the buying process in SaaS involves multiple stages and numerous decision-makers and influencers.
Therefore, it is vital to understand who will interact with your content and how to create an effective conversion workflow. One example that the article provides is a workflow for an adtech company that targets various personas.
The workflow includes creating a free educational course for users, creating a blog post to attract decision-makers, and producing sales enablement materials for influencers. Ultimately, content marketing can turn into a revenue center for businesses if executed correctly.
Finally, the article provides a real-life example in ClickUp, a project management tool that targets diverse audience segments.
In this case, building differentiated approaches to content is essential. For example, when you land on ClickUp’s blog, you can choose content based on the type of work you do and the kind of challenges you have.
How to Get a Deeper Understanding of Your Audience
It can be challenging understanding your audience fully, but there are plenty of techniques that you can use to delve deeper. One of the most effective strategies is to conduct interviews with different types of customers, from users to decision-makers. During these interviews, ensure that you ask them about their behind-the-scenes process regarding consuming content and making purchases.
Another tactic is to actively participate in online communities and platforms that are related to your niche. These could be places like GrowthMentor or GrowthHackers, as well as spaces on Reddit, LinkedIn, and other forums. By joining these platforms, you can gain insights into the latest industry trends and connect with like-minded individuals who could become valuable contacts.
Building relationships with thought leaders and experts in your industry is also a powerful approach. This can give you a better understanding of the landscape and provide you with access to new audiences.
Finally, it is wise to collaborate with other teams, such as Sales or Customer Success. Getting them involved in your content marketing processes could significantly enhance your outcomes. In fact, collaborating with other teams was the second-most important factor leading to success in content marketing for SaaS/IT companies.
3. Become an Expert in Your Field and Know Your Product Inside-Out
Expertise is one of the foundations of creating successful, customer-focused content which builds audience trust.
It’s therefore important to know your industry thoroughly.
Many SaaS products are focused on difficult sectors, such as fintech, healthtech, or legaltech. Sometimes, it means that content marketers working in such companies have to learn a lot from scratch. And yet, it’s key to understanding your customers’ day-to-day goals and challenges.
You can familiarize yourself with your industry in the following ways:
- Take part in customer research and sales processes. If you can, join and conduct interviews, participate in demo calls and analyze customer support requests.
- Subscribe to the newsletters of the biggest niche publications and check their daily or weekly digests. You can also listen to podcasts and watch YouTube shows in your chosen niche.
- Build relationships with your internal subject matter experts, learn from them, and involve them in content creation. These could be anyone from product managers and owners to the C-suite executives.
- Communicate with thought leaders and experts in your sector. These people are some of the most important sources of ideas and content for SaaS content marketers.
- Set up Google Alerts for the core topics in your sector. For example, ‘digital advertising’, Google ads’ and ‘performance marketing’ for our adtech company.
- Keep track of the trending topics using the Topic Research tool.
To find the recently trending topics in Topic Research, type in your main topic, wait for the tool to generate a list of subtopics, and select the ‘trending topics first’ tab
Next, you need to make sure you and your content team are intimately familiar with your company’s product. SaaS solutions tend to be more complicated and thereby require constant training and monitoring of features updates.
Deanna Berger, Senior Editor at Esper, recommends:
“Understand your software well enough to explain it to someone else succinctly and not in technical jargon. What is it used for, what problem does it solve, and how would an average person understand its core benefit?”
This will also help you effectively create product-focused content and integrate your tools into the thought leadership content. At the same time, it allows you to align with other teams in your company, including product marketing, brand, and growth.
Consider adding the following activities to your routine:
- Regularly explore your product: make sure you understand how the software works and what kind of features it has
- Join customer calls held by the product owners: It might help you gain insight into how people use your product
- Follow all product updates and new feature releases: make sure you understand what value they add
4. Move Away from “Problem-Solution” Mentality and Think Big
As a SaaS company, it is understandable to focus on the problems your product solves – after all, that is its main function. However, this approach may be shortsighted as your potential clients have various other needs that are interconnected.
By creating content that has a broader appeal, you can expand your potential audience by a hundredfold. Industry expert, Luke O’Neill – a B2B FinTech writer and the owner of Genuine Communications – has highlighted the importance of focusing on the bigger picture. He notes that even though your clients may be seeking solutions to their immediate problems, their ultimate objectives are much grander, such as project delivery, CXO promotions, industry leadership, or mentorship.
Therefore, it is crucial to take an educational approach to your SaaS content marketing. This approach will help your users in other aspects beyond functional problem-solving, such as leadership development and career advancement, and ultimately help them remember your brand in the future. One SaaS brand that has succeeded in incorporating this approach is mentioned below.
How Flipsnack Guides Its Audience with Content
Digital publishing platform Flipsnack has used its position to guide its clients on how they can ditch paper printing of brochures and pamphlets for more environmentally-friendly online options.
Its blog content goes way beyond its solution though, including marketing, digital publishing, and business sections. Further, its content is highly practical, interactive, and engaging.
As a result, it receives an enormous amount of average monthly views:
As of June 2022, according to a Semrush analysis, it receives nearly 850,000 organic visitors a month, has generated more than 45 million backlinks and has an impressive authority score of 80.
That being said, talking about your product is also perfectly fine when it organically fits the context. Remember, however, that your ultimate goal is to help users find the best solution to their problems.
So, when deciding to mention your tool, make sure it truly adds value.
You should also avoid positioning your product as the only solution to a problem. Instead, suggest it as one of the ways to tackle it and provide alternative routes.
Masooma Memon, freelance SaaS writer says:
“While it’s okay to talk about your product, it’s not okay to position it as the only solution that your target audience has. That would be being dishonest to your audience. Which is why I recommend taking the following narrative arc for your product-led content: share 2-3 possible solutions to the problem, share their shortcomings, and finally position your tool as the best solution. The aim is to make a convincing case for your tool. Don’t forget, be clear about who you’re the best tool for (the specific audience that is).”
5. Strengthen Your Thought Leadership and Get Creative with Content Ideas
There are numerous ways to position your company as a thought leader in SaaS, where brands often become a main source of education.
For example, our hypothetical adtech company might be sharing performance marketing content on topics you’d never cover in universities.
Therefore, your brand has all that it takes to play a crucial role in your customers’ lives, as long as you commit to delivering high-quality content driven by real-life experiences.
HubSpot, for example, always promoted the concept of aligning your marketing strategy with the needs of your audience and focusing on inbound marketing.
It was an innovative and resonating approach that turned into a major direction of modern marketing:
By doing this, they managed to build a loyal global community going far beyond their product users.
Thought leadership plays a crucial role in building brand awareness and creating communities for SaaS brands. To design an effective SaaS thought leadership strategy, focus on the following:
- Determine your key area and expertise and knowledge. For example, it could be about innovative ways to optimize ad performance for our adtech company.
- Stick to your brand story: the values and beliefs you want to promote. E.g., believing that there are ways to make digital advertising effective while respecting personal data privacy
- Identify thought leaders and subject matter experts in your company. E.g., Product owners and performance marketing managers in the adtech company.
Thought leadership content can exist in any format, and it’s never too early or too late to start building it.
For example, you could launch a podcast—See the Breaking Brand podcast series from Buffer as an example—or access additional audiences by writing expert articles for industry publications
There are numerous ways to find inspiration for your thought leadership content:
- Use data from your product: Internal data could be used to point out usage trends, ad management strategies (in the case of our example), and more.
- Survey your users: Your customers, if they are willing to share, have a wealth of insights and data that lend themselves to thought leadership content
- Work with the SMEs: Subject matter experts, whether in-house or external, can bring a new layer of insight to your content. Have a copywriter work with an SME for the best results.
- Collaborate with brands and influencers: Working with other players on the market can shift your perspective and bring a lot of interesting ideas to the table
- Carry out research: Working with a market research agency can really lift your content with original data and facts. Your company can even position itself as an industry leader and go-to source for journalists and other experts.
6. Build Authority by Diving Deeper into Content Topics
For content to perform superlatively, you need to build what’s known as topical authority. In other words, content marketing does best when it dives deep into areas of expertise.
So, rather than chasing after thousands of unrelated keywords (and creating shallow content), it’s better to find several core topics and diver further and further into them.
It’s then a good idea to start your content planning process by examining those topics and then proceed to select the right sets of keywords.
By doing so, you can get a better understanding of all the subtopics and questions that contribute to it. Besides, each topic would usually have a number of related and semantically related keywords.
7. Build an Effective Marketing Content Funnel
Expertise is one of the foundations of creating successful, customer-focused content which builds audience trust.
It’s therefore important to know your industry thoroughly.
Many SaaS products are focused on difficult sectors, such as fintech, healthtech, or legaltech. Sometimes, it means that content marketers working in such companies have to learn a lot from scratch. And yet, it’s key to understanding your customers’ day-to-day goals and challenges.
You can familiarize yourself with your industry in the following ways:
- Take part in customer research and sales processes. If you can, join and conduct interviews, participate in demo calls and analyze customer support requests.
- Subscribe to the newsletters of the biggest niche publications and check their daily or weekly digests. You can also listen to podcasts and watch YouTube shows in your chosen niche.
- Build relationships with your internal subject matter experts, learn from them, and involve them in content creation. These could be anyone from product managers and owners to the C-suite executives.
- Communicate with thought leaders and experts in your sector. These people are some of the most important sources of ideas and content for SaaS content marketers.
- Set up Google Alerts for the core topics in your sector. For example, ‘digital advertising’, Google ads’ and ‘performance marketing’ for our adtech company.
- Keep track of the trending topics using the Topic Research tool.
Awareness
A potential customer is aware they have a problem to solve, but they are not sure what solutions are available.
For example, a marketer needs to improve their in-house research capacity and they begin to look for solutions online.
They search for how to conduct online market research and discover a range of help guides from different SaaS providers.
In the example below we see guides from Momentive (Survey Monkey) and Hotjar, two companies that offer services in this niche.
In the Momentive blog, we see how its own tool is put to use, through different topical survey reports:
On Hotjar, we see content related more closely to customer questions and challenges. Here they share different types of customer feedback questions and product-related questions to ask.
We also see a more bottom of the funnel (conversion level) content piece in the Introduction to Hotjar:
Interest
After reading through the content, a potential customer discovers there are a number of solutions on the market and they start to read about their options online.
In this stage of the funnel, the potential customer starts following brands and asking questions.
Going back to the digital publishing platform Flipsnack, the brand has created some top-quality interest/engagement-level content.
In the example blog below, you can see how it uses its own tool to add interactivity and interest for the audience. This is a clever and non-salesy way to showcase its value proposition.
How to start a digital magazine is full of advice and practical tips for marketers wanting to follow in Flipsnack’s footsteps. This brings potential clients back to explore more content and increases the chances they’ll sign up for the SaaS product itself.
Consideration
In this stage of the content funnel, the potential customer knows what category of solution they need, but not which brand. They might watch webinars, download guides, read reviews, or sign up to your mailing list for more information.
For example, Wistia’s amazing Low views, High impact series, is smart on many levels. As a video creation SaaS, it needs to overcome a big objection at the consideration stage: Viral videos are super hard to make.
This series not only shares client success stories, humanizing the brand, but it goes to show that video content can be successful even when it doesn’t get millions of views.
Lead magnets like case studies and ebooks might also fall into this funnel stage. These are content assets that sit behind an email gateway.
Protip: Gated content has to be valuable. People don’t tend to give away their personal details unless they are very keen to learn something new. Be sure to deliver on what the content promises or you will lose trust, rather than gain it.
Conversion
Here your customers are looking for details related to your deals, pricing, specific use cases—and anything else that will help them make their final decision.
Check out how Zendesk combines web copy, white papers and case studies to share tangible results. This can help a range of decision-makers understand how the service could apply to them before any sales calls are made.
Email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to nurture relationships with your subscribers and keep them engaged with your brand. By building a mailing list, you have the opportunity to communicate with your audience in a personalized and targeted way, providing them with valuable content that will keep them subscribed and happy.
While it’s important to talk about your product, offers and referral programs, the key is to give more value to your audience than you expect to receive from them. This means creating emails that are useful, practical, insightful, or refreshing. We love the way that Canva, an online design SaaS platform, has brought out the creativity of its email subscribers with a competition that has generated tons of amazing user-generated content on social media.
By showcasing the platform in a non-promotional way, Canva has been able to entice users to return to the platform over and over again. So, if you’re looking to build a successful email marketing campaign, focus on providing value and engaging your subscribers in unique and creative ways.
8. Design Lead-Nurturing Content Workflows
Once you’ve considered the buyer’s journey and content funnel, the next step is to connect content to build conversion paths.
That is, designing ways for your customers to move through the funnel, from awareness through to conversion.
Here’s how:
1. First, turn to analytics
Here you’ll be able to see which content is most successful. For example:
- Which content is being clicked on the most? If How-to guides are performing well on social media, it could be an area to concentrate on, for example.
- Which content brings you the most organic traffic? If you know certain topics outperform others, you know where to invest your resources.
- Which keywords are you ranking for? Keywords can give you lots of clues as to what content to create next, and for whom.
- Which content is encouraging newsletter sign-ups? And so on.
Make sure to track where people tend to go after reading blogs. You can run experiments by adding different call-to-action buttons (CTAs). This will help you understand which types of content to create, which types of CTAs to use, and how to move your leads down through the funnel.
2. Check out the competition
Your competition holds clues as to what works and what doesn’t. Perform a keyword gap analysis, and see what they are ranking for and where you are lagging behind.
But also take your snooping further. Download their guides, experience their email flows, read their content, and see what they do on social media.
While you can’t see too far under the hood, you will be able to surmise what is working for them and which topics your potential clients might be interested in.
3. Work on lead nurture
Lead nurturing is the process of taking a lead and giving them value through content, interspersed with easy ways to become a customer.
This is especially important for companies that focus more on the sales process and less on self-service.
But how does it work?
For a start, sending all the leads that just downloaded an ebook directly to Sales won’t be very successful. Instead, you should have a lead scoring system that will only direct to Sales those users that are definitely interested.
To nurture them to that point, you need to have special tools and content. For example, you could use an email automation tool and various types of content that would move them down the funnel.
It might look something like this:
- Customers download an ebook, providing contact information
- They open the first email and click on a link, growing their lead score
- They register for a webinar and explore sales pages, increasing their lead score
- Once they reach a certain score, their details are automatically passed to the sales team, who can then initiate a conversation about your solutions.
9. Focus on Quality, Not Quantity When Creating Content
The top two strategies helping to generate organic traffic for our survey respondents working in IT are posting more often (48%) and improving the quality of content (46%).
So how can you create high-quality, optimized content? It needs to do a number of things:
So how can you create high-quality, optimized content at scale?
First, establish a quality control process for your content. It needs to do a number of things:
- It should provide useful, practical, and original information. At the same time, it needs to be relevant to the intent of the audience.
- It should also be authentic. Content that’s based on your expertise will always be better than content outside your experience.
- Content should also be fully comprehensive. Make sure you cover all potential questions and subtopics related to the main topic of the content piece.
- Finally, content should offer a great user experience. Written content, for example, should be pitched to the level of understanding of the audience, and should include visuals, have short, easy-to-read sentences, and help the user scan with headings.
To streamline this process and create more unique, engaging content faster, use AI writing tools like ContentShake.
The tool will suggest content ideas, create article outlines, and help you assemble high-quality blog posts with data-driven suggestions.You can then use it to improve each article’s readability, tone of voice, and SEO, and post them directly to your WordPress site.
You also need to continually assess what’s working well, and what’s not.
As such, content audits are crucial to improving your SaaS content.
10. Work Out Your Promotion and Distribution Strategy
Building a smart content distribution strategy is as important as the content you are producing in the first place. You need to consider how content will be promoted before the creation process takes place.
There are three primary methods of distributing content:
- Owned channels
Owned channels are the channels that belong to your business (e.g. podcast, blog, mailing list, social media, etc.). These are your own to post on as you will.
- Earned and shared channels
These channels are owned by third parties, such as friendly blogs, news websites, forums (such as this dedicated SaaS Reddit page), and even review sites. These sites are free to post on, but the content won’t belong to you afterward.
- Paid channels
These platforms or influencers will promote your product for a fee.
The top three SaaS content distribution channels, according to our research, are a mix of owned and paid channels:
- Organic social media (71% of responses)
- Email marketing (50%)
- Social media ads (49%)
The key thing to note is that each channel and platform within those groups has its own guidelines and best practices for sharing content. That means content needs to be adapted for everywhere you want to place it.
Get it right, and your content will get a lot of impressions; get it wrong, and it will go unnoticed.
For example, content for Instagram Reels won’t work well on LinkedIn, long-form blog posts don’t perform well as newsletters, Facebook posts will get truncated on Twitter, etc.
Here Are Some Examples of Great Content Distribution:
Typeform, one of the top SaaS interactive form builder brands, has recently been focusing on creating live video content on LinkedIn. While their video views are in the hundreds, this strategy has helped them gain a decent following of nearly 50,000 people on the platform.
On the other hand, Canva has been crushing it on Instagram with over a million followers. The brand takes a careful and calculated approach to video content creation, curating stories and categorizing them based on design challenges, Canva Live, Q&A, and more.
They also pay special attention to videos and Reels and ensure that they are created to meet the specific format requirements of each platform. For B2C and B2B SaaS brands, creating content for channels like Quora, Reddit, Product Hunt, and other industry-focused sites can also be highly effective.
However, it is important to follow the relevant etiquette and guidelines based on each platform – Reddit, for example, has many subreddits, each with its own set of rules for posting.
A great example of a brand that performs well on Quora is Cloud Daily, supported by SaaStr. With over 20 posts per week, the platform has generated over 380,000 followers.
Conclusion: Succeeding in SaaS Content Marketing
Content marketing is a crucial part of any successful SaaS company’s strategy, and achieving success requires a strategic and thoughtful approach. In order to effectively engage with your audience, it’s important to focus on their unique needs and tailor your content accordingly. This means generating high-quality, educational content that speaks to their pain points and positions you as a thought leader in the industry.
But content marketing for SaaS companies doesn’t stop at simply creating content. It’s also important to map out the entire customer journey, understanding where your audience is in the buying cycle and providing them with the right information at the right time. This can be especially challenging in the SaaS industry given the inherent complexity of the solutions and the longer buying cycles involved.
Furthermore, it’s essential to consider the biggest industry challenges that SaaS companies face when building out your content strategy. This includes the need for ongoing education around your solution and its benefits, and understanding how to effectively communicate the value proposition to potential customers. By taking a strategic approach to content marketing and keeping these industry challenges in mind, SaaS companies can set themselves up for long-term success.
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