91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach customers. Why does your company need a SaaS content marketing strategy?
- The average B2B buyer’s journey involves consumption of 13 pieces of content.
- Content marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional outbound methods and generates over three times as much website traffic.
- In one study, 76% of marketers reported that content marketing generates demand and leads. Another 63% of marketers said that content marketing helps to nurture their audience, customers, and leads. 50% said that it helps build loyalty with existing users.
But creating and implementing a great SaaS content marketing strategy takes much more than increasing the volume and velocity of your content production. Cranking out more blogs, case studies, and e-books won’t generate the ROI you’re looking for. Instead, leverage five tips from our experts:
1. Know Everything About Your Target
Before strategizing and writing content, you need to understand who you’re writing for and aim to solve their problems. Your potential customers will grow to love and trust you if you offer actionable advice and suggestions.
Remember: you’re trying to get the attention of stressed executives who are short on time. They want answers and solutions — not marketing fluff.
To really get to the heart of their problems, consider the following:
- Biographical information: What is your ideal consumer’s age, profession, gender, and income level?
- Content: What existing sources do they rely on to keep up with industry trends?
- Issues: What problems do they face with their business and how can you assist?
Then get the process off the ground by building SaaS buyer personas.
2. Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
By now you’ve identified your target consumer, and you understand their common concerns. But before you jump into writing the content you think they’re searching for, be sure to validate your hypothesis.
Tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush give you detailed information on SaaS marketing SEO keywords and phrases — including things like the number of searches per month and related keywords.
If your initial assumptions about search terms and keywords check out, then that’s great. Otherwise, there’s no point producing content that no one’s actively searching for. You’ll need to revise your plan.
Both Ahrefs and SEMrush can suggest tweaks to your approach as well as tangential keywords. Include those in your copy so that your potential customers have the best possible chance of finding you.
3. Understand your Sales Funnel
Putting a SaaS content marketing strategy into action isn’t an exact science but there are best practices you can deploy to get the most out of your efforts. Your approach at the top of the funnel, or the “awareness” stage has to ensure you cut through the noise and establish your authority.
There’s nothing better than potential customers finding you through organic search results. But the effort doesn’t just end there. Yes, they’re now aware of your existence, but does that mean they’ll simply become one of your loyal customers overnight?
Not quite.
To help them move through the funnel, you will need to build relationships with enticing offers every step of the way. People aren’t going to buy something unless they believe it has immense practical value. Your content needs to convey that usefulness. Potential buyers filter out as they move down the funnel, so your content must become more granular, too.
Think about investing in a case study that showcases how your product helped an actual client achieve better business productivity, or host a webinar that aims to address specific questions your potential customers might have.
At the decision and action stage, the key objective of your SaaS content marketing strategy must be to highlight your product and clarify how it’s different – and better! – than the competition’s.
4. Use Pillar Pages to Establish Credibility
A pillar page is a cornerstone piece of content on your site. It addresses all the possible questions your users might have about the topic and goes into a ton of detail. The approach to your pillar page should be a “hub and spoke” model. A central pillar page will serve as the “hub,” covering a broad topic in depth and linking to “spoke” pages that highlight relevant and specific subtopics.
This approach enhances SEO by interlinking related content, boosting the visibility and authority of the main pillar page in search engine results. Investing in pillar pages should help you attract a ton of new traffic as industry publications and other blogs will be more open to linking back to it.
To see how hub and spoke marketing in action, check out our blog on the benefits of working with a cybersecurity marketing agency. Note how it links to other related posts.
Looking for more in-depth information to help you create a SaaS content marketing strategy? Download our free content marketing guide for SaaS today.
5. Amplify and Distribute Your Content
In the vast sea of digital content, where over six million blog posts are published daily, simply writing and publishing is not enough. Although not all these posts are from your direct competitors, each one vies for the same limited attention of your audience. To truly stand out, effective distribution and amplification of your content are crucial.
Understanding the significance of distribution starts with acknowledging that your content won’t automatically get seen—it doesn’t thrive in a vacuum. For SaaS companies, especially, where cutting through the noise is paramount, exploring innovative content distribution strategies can transform passive content into a dynamic tool that pulls in leads and engages viewers.
The approaches and tactics are limitless, but some key distribution tactics should be outlined in your SaaS content marketing strategy for each type of content. Here is a shortlist of ones to consider:
- ‘Pin’ your content to the top of your social media profile feeds, catching the eye of every new visitor.
- Share visually engaging excerpts from your content on social media, like captivating graphs or infographics from a detailed report.
- Post a TL:DR version on forums or subreddits.
- Create a short video about it and post on YouTube.
- Syndicate it via RSS feed onto Medium, Tumblr or others.
Content distribution should never be an afterthought. It requires as much strategy and creativity as content creation itself. Start experimenting with different distribution techniques to discover what works best for your business and audience. The results might just surprise you!
Find Success with a SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing for SaaS is an ever-evolving strategy. New formats, changing search engine algorithms, and greater competition mean you have to stay agile, always metric-minded and primed to pivot. The more iterative your efforts, the better your chance of standing out from the crowd.
Are you looking for a SaaS content marketing agency that knows how to help your company grow by turning words and images into brand awareness and qualified sales leads? Contact us today.
