Successful content marketing for SaaS requires thoughtful planning and careful execution. In this guide, we’ll lay out an six-step strategy you can use to conduct a winning SaaS marketing campaign. We’ll cover:
- Why content marketing for SaaS companies differs from other industries
- What goes into a winning content marketing for SaaS strategy
- How to identify your target audience
- How to analyze audience pain points for effective marketing and sales
- How to set measurable goals for your content campaigns
- How to set up an efficient content production workflow
- How to distribute content effectively
- How to monitor and manage the results of your campaigns
How Content Marketing for SaaS is Unique
Content marketing for SaaS is different than marketing in other industries in a number of important ways:
- You’re selling both technology and service
- Your marketing must focus on search engine optimization
- Your marketing must educate prospects
- Your sales rely heavily on reviews
- You must address customer risk
- Your marketing strategy must promote repeat business
Although it may seem like the primary focus is on selling the product itself, it is equally important to consider the quality of support that comes with it. While customers are looking for SaaS providers, they will undoubtedly weigh the level of support they will receive as heavily as the product itself. This dual focus poses a challenge for SaaS marketers who must work equally hard to sell the product and assure customers of high-quality support.
In today’s digital age, SaaS buyers are mostly conducting research online and rely on digital resources such as white papers, website reviews, and app marketplaces to discover potential products and services. This makes incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) techniques a critical component of an effective SaaS marketing strategy. By creating SEO content that targets these buyers, SaaS marketers can better ensure their product is found and considered when potential customers are in the market for SaaS solutions.
Components of an Effective SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
A winning content marketing for SaaS strategy starts with marketing research and strategizing, proceeds through content production and concludes with campaign performance tracking. This process can be divided into major steps:
- Target audience identification
- Pain point analysis
- Keyword analysis
- Campaign goal setting and tracking
- Content production
- Content distribution
- [BONUS] Campaign results monitoring and optimization
For each step, following best practices will yield better results. The remainder of this guide will focus on tips for organizing and optimizing each of these steps.
1. Define Your Target Audience
- Is your ideal buyer a business or consumer buyer?
- What is their gender?
- What is age?
- What is their income level?
- What industry are they in?
- What is their title?
- Which other brands do they buy from?
- Which websites do they visit?
- Which social media profiles do they follow?
- Which trade associations do they belong to?
- Which trade shows do they frequent?
If you’re looking to effectively market your product to your target audience, creating a checklist customized for your product and audience can help significantly. One of the most efficient ways to analyze the characteristics of your audience is to utilize analytics tools. Social media platforms, like Facebook, offer analytics services that allow you to review your social media following based on granular categories. This type of detailed analysis can help you understand your target audience even better and identify other prospects who match their characteristics.
Once you’ve established the characteristics of your target audience, you can create a profile of your ideal buyer based on this information. Giving your ideal buyer a name will help put a face on your profile, which can come in handy during brainstorming.
However, there may be instances where you have to cater to more than one target market. Under such circumstances, it’s recommended that you create multiple ideal buyer profiles. But careful not to go overboard and create too many profiles, as this can become confusing and make it challenging to focus your marketing efforts. On average, it’s best to limit this to a handful of profiles at the most.
2. Identify Pain Points
Once you’ve identified your audience, you can proceed to identify the pain points which motivate your audience’s buying behavior. This will help you gear your marketing and sales strategy towards your audience’s needs.
As a business owner or marketer, identifying the pain points of your target audience is crucial in providing solutions that truly resonate and address their needs. One helpful approach to this is by immersing yourself in your market’s experiences and understanding the steps that lead them from initial product interest to the final purchase. A customer journey map is an effective tool that can assist you in accomplishing this task.
Essentially, a customer journey map visually lays out the different stages and touchpoints that your potential customers go through as they move from being a prospect to a loyal customer. By mapping out each step, you can gain insights into your audience’s needs, challenges, emotions, and expectations, which can inform your marketing strategies and messaging. Ultimately, a well-crafted customer journey map can help you create a more focused and effective SaaS sales funnel that optimizes conversions and drives growth for your business.
- Becoming aware of your brand and product
- Visiting your website
- Developing an interest in your product which leads to a free trial registration or demo request
- Conversion to a long-term freemium user or paying customer
- Active adoption of your product
- Expanded use of your product by the adoption of new features or supporting products or services
- Escalation of customer service issues
- The decision to renew a subscription or license (retention) or let it lapse (churn)
At each step in this process, your customer can encounter pitfalls which impede their forward progress towards retention. Examples include:
- Failing to recognize a connection between what your brand offers and their needs
- Difficulty navigating your website
- A poor experience during a free trial or demo
- Problems with your payment process
- Technical frustrations during product onboarding
- Inactive usage of your product
- Poor customer service experience
- Problems with your renewal process
For SaaS marketing, the most critical part of the customer journey is their initial contact with your brand and website. Your marketing outreach must address the pain points which led them to seek out a solution such as that offered by your brand or competing brands.
Pain points will vary by industry, audience, and other variables, but some common ones include:
- Financial pain points, such as low revenue or high expenses
- Labor pain points, such as excessive work required to use a current SaaS product
- Emotional pain points, such as frustration with the user experience of a current product
- Time management pain points, such as wasted time due to inefficiency
- Learning curve pain points, such as difficulty learning how to use a SaaS solution due to poor training support
- Technical pain points, such as the inability to integrate a SaaS solution with the desired app
- Customer service pain points with present SaaS providers or past providers
It is crucial for any business to understand their audience’s pain points and tailor their marketing and sales strategies accordingly. By developing variations on general pain point categories that are specific to your industry and audience, you can make your message more relatable and resonate more with potential customers.
To differentiate yourself even further, you may want to identify special categories of pain points that are unique to your audience or industry. These could be specific challenges that your customers are facing that are not commonly discussed or recognized. By incorporating these into your marketing and sales material, you can better address your customers’ needs and build stronger relationships.
Remember, your customers are looking for solutions to their problems, not just products or services to buy. By understanding their pain points and addressing them directly, you can stand out from the competition and establish yourself as a trusted advisor.
3. Identify Keywords
At each stage of your customer’s journey, they may use specific keywords to search for the information they need. For example:
- Before becoming aware of your brand, they may search for information on “how to” solve a problem related to their pain points
- After discovering your brand, they may search for reviews
- After they begin using your product, they may search for information on how to complete the set-up process
- As they actively adopt your product, they may search for tips on how to use specific features of your app
- When they encounter customer service issues, they may search for solutions
- When considering renewal, they may search for instructions on how to renew
By identifying keyword terms typical of each stage of your customer’s journey, you can develop content to address their needs at each point. This can promote more effective marketing and sales as well as higher customer satisfaction and retention.
For efficient keyword research, it’s important to use the right tools. Here’s a quick rundown on some of the most important ones:
- Google Keyword Planner: A fundamental tool that allows you to generate related phrases from a target phrase, identify how much traffic a phrase is generating, and evaluate phrases in terms of competition and cost.
- Ahrefs: A user-friendly tool that allows you to audit your site’s SEO performance, study competitors, and see what’s trending with your audience and industry, plus features to support link-building strategies.
- SEMrush: An all-in-one tool for marketing professionals with functionality similar to Ahrefs, plus advanced features such as the ability to audit competitor performance and backlink profiles.
- Moz: A competitor of Ahrefs and SEMrush which offers marketing professionals an all-in-one SEO toolkit for advanced keyword research, site audits, rank tracking, and backlink analysis, plus strong support through online tutorials.
- BuzzSumo: A social media analytics tool that allows you to identify trending topics, popular formats, competitor content strategies, and market influencers.
Use these tools to develop a list of keywords to guide content development. For best results, work with a marketing agency experienced with the use of these tools.
4. Define Your Campaign Goals and Metrics
Developing measurable goals for your content campaigns is a critical step before using your keywords to create content. This is because you need to align your campaigns with your marketing objectives to be able to evaluate campaign performance effectively. This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in; they are essential to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.
Some of the standard KPIs you should consider when creating content for any industry include the number of unique visitors, session duration and bounce rate. However, if you are in the SaaS industry, some additional marketing metrics must be considered. These metrics are crucial in evaluating your content’s performance.
By paying attention to these SaaS-specific marketing metrics in addition to the standard KPIs, you can ensure your SaaS content marketing campaigns are producing the desired results.
Free trial registrations can be segregated to identify requests from specific pages on your site, such as your blog or resource guides.
Software demo requests can be segregated similarly.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC), measures how your marketing costs compare to the number of customers you acquire for your expenditures.
Lead conversion rate (LCR) measures how many conversions you get per visit to your site, opt-in to your email list, or register for a trial or demo.
CAC and LCR use specific equations:
Customer Acquisition Cost
The formula for CAC can be expressed as:
CAC = MC / CA
Marketing cost and customer acquisition are two crucial aspects of any business. In order to make the most of your marketing investment, it’s important to understand the relationship between the two. Simply put, you can calculate your customer acquisition cost (CAC) by dividing your total marketing costs (MC) for a given period by the number of customers acquired (CA) during that time.
This metric can provide valuable insights into your marketing performance, allowing you to identify which campaigns or channels are most effective at driving customer acquisition. By segregating your spending by variables such as cost per campaign or per marketing channel, you can uncover further opportunities to optimize your marketing investment.
For example, you might discover that developing a particular content piece generates more customer acquisitions than promoting your content on a particular social platform. Armed with this knowledge, you can make informed decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts and maximize your return on investment.
Lead Conversion Rate
The formula for LCR can be expressed as:
LCR = C / L
Where C represents the number of conversions and L represents lead opportunities, yielding a percentage rate.
This can be calculated for different types of conversions and opportunities. For example, you might define a conversion as a free trial registration and an opportunity as a visit to your website and then calculate LCR based on how many free trial registrations you get per visit. You could narrow this down to visits to a particular page on your site if you wanted to track the effectiveness of a sales page, for instance.
When you know your conversion rate as well as the traffic volume you’re getting, you know how much you need to invest to generate a specific number of conversions and the corresponding amount of revenue. You can also identify which content is generating the highest conversion rates and focus your investment on promoting it.
5. Create Your Content Production Procedures
Once you know what keywords you need to target and what measurable goals you’re aiming for, you can begin producing keyword-oriented content to achieve your goals. To facilitate content creation, set up a step-by-step production process and procedures. Steps in the content production process include:
- Research topics related to your target audience, customer journey, and keywords
- Create a content planning calendar
- Recruit content creation talent
- Content creation and editing
- Publication scheduling
For each step in this process, create and document standard operating procedures. To optimize your procedures, use a project management platform to communicate with your content creation team.
When conducting research, don’t neglect the use of voice search as a research tool. This can sometimes speed up your research process.
When creating your content calendar, use your audience analysis and list of keyword targets to plan and prioritize your content creation sequence. To attract a wider audience, develop a mix of content for different media, including short-form blogs, long-form blogs, how-to guides, e-books, images and videos. Avoid scheduling content too far in advance, so that you can be agile in making adjustments to recent developments in your market.
When recruiting talent, you will get the most leverage if you can recruit freelancers who are thought leaders in your industry. Look for authors of content on topics related to yours.
When creating content, set a goal for each piece, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads or educating your target audience. Draw from your research into audience pain points to ensure that your content addresses your market’s needs.
When scheduling content, set a regular, sustainable publication schedule. Estimate how much content you need to create per month to meet your marketing goals and how much you can afford to create with your budget and staff resources.
6. Outline Your Distribution Strategy
Your distribution strategy defines where and how frequently you will publish and promote your content. Your strategy should address issues such as:
- Where will you publish your on-site content? Will you index it on your blog, in a resource guide section or elsewhere?
- Will all of your content be publicly available, or will some be gated for premium users only?
- What third-party sites will you use to distribute your content through guest blogging or partnerships?
- Which social media profiles will you use to distribute and promote content?
Monitor Your Results and Make necessary Adjustments
It is of utmost importance to monitor the progress of your marketing campaigns in order to ensure that your investments are yielding the desired results. To achieve this, it is necessary to set up a reporting system that tracks the key performance indicators that you established for your campaign goals. One effective way to do this is by utilizing analytics software that offers a customizable dashboard for tracking your KPIs, enabling you to generate detailed reports on campaign performance.
As you review the results, it is vital to identify the pieces of content that are generating the best outcomes and allocate your resources to promote them. You can use them as templates to replicate your success with other content and ultimately increase the overall effectiveness of your campaign. Moreover, if you find that certain pieces of content are not performing as well as you would like, consider doing split-testing to determine how small modifications can enhance their performance. By using this approach, you will have the ability to make better-informed adjustments and ensure achieving your desired outcomes in the long run.