SaaS businesses serve their core purpose of resolving real-world problems that their customers face. They inform their potential clients about the products they offer, and how their products will cater to their customers’ needs and add value. To do it effectively, these companies find no other option is as good as SaaS content marketing.
Content is necessary to convert complexity into clarity. It facilitates businesses to stay in touch with their target audience regardless of their location. A SaaS service provider leverages the unmatched benefits of content in several ways, through creating a blog post, engaging videos, or an in-depth product tutorial.
Content marketing brings a multitude of other benefits to SaaS companies as well, apart from educating clients. These benefits mainly include creating brand credibility, trust, and a reliable connection with your audience.
Content marketing helps businesses entice users organically and also guides them during every important step of decision-making. It also helps them retain long-term and loyal subscribers. 76% of marketers firmly believe that content marketing produces leads.
In this blog post, we will discuss in detail the way content marketing boosts the growth of any SaaS business.
What is SaaS Content Marketing?
As an important strategy, SaaS content marketing emphasizes drafting a complete plan to create and distribute content using various platforms. It focuses on crafting relevant, valuable, and consistent content that tantalizes, retains, and engages targeted audiences for a long time. Of course, the major objective is to boost growth for a SaaS business.
SaaS content marketing is completely different from traditional marketing. It emphasizes heavily on creating content that can inform and solve the problems of clients. In other words, it aligns perfectly with the main requirements of SaaS buyers. SaaS content marketing defines the customer journey completely.
From creating brand awareness and decision-making to customer retention, every important stage needs customized content that matches the expectations of both existing and potential clients. High-quality content plays a vital role in boosting the understanding of customers about your offerings. It’s the best way to highlight in terms of the way your product matches into their workflow.
Reasons Why Content Marketing is Important for a SaaS Business
Content marketing is something that you can’t avoid for the sake of the growth and success of your SaaS business. For an adequate growth of your business, you need to put in a continuous effort, whether it’s attracting or retaining customers. Let’s understand some other reasons why content marketing is pivotal to making your business successful;
- Educate your Target Audience
The majority of SaaS products are meant to resolve customer’s issues in innovative ways. Meanwhile, innovation comes with a learning curve. Content marketing comes with numerous tools to inform customers about your products and the way they work for them. Be it guides, tutorials, or FAQs, educational resources are useful to resolve technical barriers to ensure the accessibility and approachability of your products.
- Develop Customer Loyalty
You need to understand that content not only helps you to attract potential customers but also works as a great tool to create value for your existing ones. SaaS businesses of late rely extensively on customer retention as subscriptions play a vital role in increasing revenue. Sharing useful resources such as feature walkthroughs, onboarding guides, advanced use-case content, and more helps you ensure users get a complete understanding.
- Develop Long-Term Reliability
Another advantage of SaaS products is that they are effective in building long-term reliability. It’s related to working with a provider that users get every reason to rely on. Insightful content is helpful to build your credibility and expertise in the market. Most potential customers often prefer to get solutions from brands that they rely on.
- Boost Organic Traffic
Content marketing helps in maximizing search engine visibility as well. SaaS businesses maximize website traffic by performing numerous activities such as addressing user intent, targeting relevant keywords, publishing optimized content, and more. High-quality content boosts SEO rankings and thus maximizes website traffic even without using heavily paid advertising.
- Sustainable Growth
Consistent customer acquisition is something that is pivotal for flourishing SaaS companies. Content marketing generates organic traffic that helps you over time. It’s completely different from ads that stop once your budget is over. Whether it’s a resource page, a well-ranking blog, or a case study, using a variety of content draws visitors to your website. Most of them search for what exactly you provide.
- Drive Customer Retention
Content marketing works effectively to boost customer retention by providing continuous value. Whether it’s product updates, onboarding guides, advanced feature tutorials, or training content, these allow users to use products at full scale. Once customers are highly informed and resolve issues with the help of content, they are likely to stay subscribed and satisfied.
- Portray as a Thought Leadership
Proper content marketing for your SaaS businesses establishes your brand as a thought leadership. For this, you need to share content like research-driven posts, industry insights, opinion pieces, and more.
This content helps businesses as a go-to authority on its horizon. It also works well in luring top-quality leads and earns huge respect from partners, peers, investors, and more.
Most Effective Tips to Create SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
Building an effective SaaS content strategy isn’t just about creating content for the sake of it. It’s about aligning the content you produce with your audience’s needs, your product’s value, and your company’s goals. Let’s describe each actionable step.
- Be Familiar with your Target Audience
Any content marketing can’t be successful unless you are aware of your target audience. The reason is you will create SaaS content not only for any imaginary but real people.
If you want your content to work, you need to be familiar with what your audience does, whether in real situations or on the job.
You need to answer the following important questions;
- What particular tasks do they perform daily?
- What types of questions do they raise in sales?
- What is the campaign about Reddit threads or Slack channels?
You will be able to gather these details by sitting in on demo calls. Besides, you can also read many sales notes and perform research in many relevant communities.
- Set a Clear Goal
It’s necessary to clarify what you wish to achieve before you start the process of creating content. A clear objective is required to make your effort in the right direction. Otherwise, it fails to deliver measurable outcomes. For a large number of SaaS businesses, content marketing strategies fall into the following important categories;
- Traffic generation: It’s the ultimate goal of running a content marketing campaign for most SaaS businesses.
- Lead acquisition: It’s another major objective of many SaaS companies for running content marketing campaigns. They generate leads with the help of gated content, including webinars, whitepapers, email sign-ups, and more.
- Customer onboarding: SaaS companies often need to educate their customers about their products in terms of any new features, or latest upgrades. They do it easily through FAQs, tutorials, guides, and more. These provide a seamless onboarding experience.
- Product expansion: It’s another important objective that involves encouraging existing customers to adopt several latest features or upgrade plans. They can do the same with the help of feature highlight videos, case studies, advanced use-case content, and more.
Once you define your objectives, you will be able to ensure every piece of your content serves its ultimate purpose. And thus it contributes effectively to your overall business objectives.
- Develop a Solid Foundation for your Content Marketing Strategy
It’s pivotal for a SaaS business that their website should include a proper product page and also a lead generation form before they even think about their content marketing strategy. Meanwhile, it’s been observed that the majority of SaaS companies focus on search engine optimization (SEO) primarily and then do the rest of things.
It’s indeed not the right practice. You need to first focus on your product before focusing on any other things. To do it most effectively, you can implement the following vital practices;
Present Messaging Targeting User’s Pain Points
You need to be aware of the way your message solves the problems of users. So, you need to ensure the presentation of your content accordingly to help users understand better in terms of the way your product adds value to users.
Create a Fully Functional Website
It’s advisable to create a fully functional website with the following important features;
- Easy to navigate
- Engage visitors
- Highlight your products with all features
- Improve brand awareness
Create Important Pages
Make sure your website has every important page, including the homepage, product page, and detailed feature pages. These are necessary to describe the things you do actually, for whom, and also reasons why it’s important.
- Consider the Pain Points of your Audience
Understanding the pain points of the audience is quite essential to performing an effective content marketing strategy. SaaS products quite often target various specific user issues. They provide you a complete edge to define content direction properly. Let’s explore various important tips to initiate:
Talk to your Teams
You need to collaborate with your customer success, sales, support teams, and more. These are useful to recognize the most important complaints, questions, and also requests from users.
Overview Data
You need to engross yourself in the product usage reports and also analytics to be aware of where any confusion or issues take place.
Engage your Customers
A large number of interviews and surveys uncover various pain points. The important details you get from these important conversations will assist you in crafting content that speaks of importance to them. Once you create content developed on several specific and real issues, it’s likely to resonate and also deliver real value.
- Be an Expert in your Brand
SaaS content marketers work as product experts and also professional translators. They are aware of the way the product works, where users face issues, and also what they actually care about. It helps them craft content that is useful and quite engaging.
You need to be aware of your SaaS products from the inside;
- It’s crucial to test features and also document several friction points.
- You need to gather support tickets when it comes to uncovering common frustrations.
- Always reach out to your product team with numerous questions.
- Analyze crucial product and sales meetings.
If you seek to work with any professionals to create content, it’s important to ensure they have access to this kind of knowledge.
- Create a Buyer Persona
To make your SaaS content marketing more effective and result-driven, you need to be familiar with your customer’s preferences. To create successful content, you need to be aware of the needs and challenges of your potential customers. So, it’s advisable to do in-depth research work for your buyer persona.
Not to mention that buyer persona is indeed a functional representation of your potential audiences, including demographics like gender, age, preferred social media platforms, income, pain points, and more.
How to Develop a Buyer Persona?
Creating a buyer persona is much more than just demographics. The following are important aspects one should take into account as well.
- You need to find what your target audience is passionate about.
- Find out their preferences related to industry-specific.
- Be aware of various challenges they face and the way your products address the same.
- Know their preferred content formats, whether it’s blogs, social media posts, or video content.
- You need to know who has a major influence on the purchasing decisions of your target customers.
- Strategize Content that Moves Buyers Forward
It’s advisable to make full proof content around two main important areas – first, what your business tries to achieve and second, where you keep buyers in the entire decision process.
You need to select an appropriate content format according to the important stages of their entire journey;
- For the top of the funnel, you need to include a variety of content, including industry reports, blog posts, thought leadership, podcasts, etc.
- For the bottom of the funnel, you can include a variety of templates, feature breakdowns, tool comparisons, and more.
- For the middle of the funnel, you can keep content including product education, workflows, case studies, etc.
- Retention: It should include product use cases, knowledge base, workshops, etc.
After this, you need to consider the big idea that fosters content at every important stage. The most important idea is used across multiple funnel stages and formats, right from blogs to founder posts that promote tools on LinkedIn.
The best way to discover an eye-catching content idea is to collect various questions and also concerns that clients express during the process of sales and conversion. Besides, you also need to analyze various social media trends, check customer support inquiries, and more.
For this, you need to implement many specialized tools that leverage data to discover low-hanging fruit content ideas. It’s advisable to leverage specialized tools like Semrush Content Toolkit, which helps you find specific and many data-backed angles your competitors miss.
You need to insert a high-level topic you would seek to concentrate on. For instance, we put “SaaS sales” here.
After inserting the search term, the result appears as follows;
- Create a Scalable Content Process
Make sure you have a clear process that allows you to grow your content output even without burning out any missing deadlines or your team. Once you increase your publishing volume, you need to use top content to ensure things are well organized and also move forward. That’s the reason why your content operations should be sturdy, simple, and also built to scale.
It’s important to define the following important things;
- Role and ownerships
- Goals
- Metrics
- Workflow
You need to build standard operating procedures (SOPs), templates, checklists, etc., for your content production process. These tend to be processes like keyword research, writing, editing, and more.
- Combine your Product into Content Naturally
Being a SaaS marketer, you need to put a lot of effort into exhibiting the way your products match real-world use cases. For instance, product-based content can help you with this.
This content resolves numerous issues and also teaches important things organically. It also includes your products and acts as a crucial part of the entire solution. It plays a vital role in connecting product features to real workflows such as analyzing website performance and scaling design systems.
It’s advisable to approach by starting to recognize those topics that resonate with your audience where you can integrate your products naturally;
- You need to overview product-related questions raised even during sales conversations.
- You need to handle many real-life challenges rather than writing just generic topics.
- You need to ask users to learn about their requirements directly.
- Be Aware of your Content Promotion and Distribution Strategy
You need to determine the methods you will adopt to share your content across different channels. It’s indeed highly important to reach as many target customers as possible.
You need to know that SaaS customers leverage numerous channels even during their decision-making process completely, whether it’s industry-specific websites, search engines, social media, and more.
So, your effort should be in each of these important touchpoints. Let’s explore the way you can adopt several things to maximize your reach.
- Repurpose Multiple Platforms
You need to adapt numerous content pieces into complete formats that work on various channels. For instance, you can repurpose your podcast episode into your LinkedIn carousel.
- Use both Organic and Paid Channels
It’s advisable to improve the reach of top content with the help of paid channels to maximize their reach. Approximately 63% of businesses leverage these channels to boost content distribution. For instance, you can use high-intent content including reports, or case studies.
- Contact Partners and Influencers for Distribution
You can get the idea to collaborate with individuals who your audience knows well and that rely on to reach them authentically as well.
Types of Content Your SaaS Content Marketing Should Include
As we already mentioned about the type of content your SaaS content marketing strategy should include. We will explore some of the top content in your content marketing strategy to increase impact and also conversions;
- Pillar Pages and Blog Posts
Pillar pages and blog posts are essential for any SaaS content marketing strategy. These are the most useful resources that are useful to address various industry challenges, inform your audience, and also position your brand as an authority on your horizon.
For instance, when you create a pillar page such as “A Thorough Guide to Communicate and Collaborate Remote Team”. This page serves as a central bug, which links to many related blogs. This approach is useful to improve your SEO rankings but also boost consistent traffic and churn out quality leads with time.
- Testimonials and Case Studies
You need to understand that real-world success stories are necessary to build trust and reliability. Case studies and testimonials reflect the way your SaaS products help customers get outcomes. It’s advisable to reflect on certain specific challenges, outcomes your customers experience, and the solutions your product offers.
For instance, a case study like “How a Company Minimizes Cost Over 40% with SalesForce”.It reflects the value to prospects in a credible and relatable way.
- FAQs and Product Tutorials
Users always need to have an in-depth understanding of your SaaS products before they trust it. You can help them by providing complete walkthroughs, tutorials, knowledge-base articles, and more. These are necessary to minimize function and thus boost usability.
This content is helpful when it comes to guiding users at every step and thus helps them navigate your product with higher confidence. For instance, a video tutorial on “Ways to Create Automated Workflows”. It simplifies complex features and thus encourages users to get the most out of your solution. 90% of marketers say video marketing delivers a positive ROI, and 87% report that it directly drives sales.
- Onboarding Guides
SaaS customers don’t just wish to have a product but also to get a smooth experience. Onboarding guides allow users to start effectively and fast, which minimizes churn and boosts satisfaction.
Be it whitepapers, eBooks, or webinars, many advanced resources ensure existing users are engaged and thus prompt them to get more features or also upgrade their plans. For instance, an onboarding guide “Getting Started Salesforce can Help Users Get Immediate Value”.
- Webinar and Explainer Videos
Interactive content and visual formats such as explainers and webinar videos are robust tools for engaging your customers. With webinars, you will grab opportunities to present your products live, answer audience questions, highlight their features, and more in real time.
These foster both connection and trust. On the other hand, explainer videos are visually appealing and coincide and make them convenient for users to grab your value propositions fast. For instance, a two-minute video reflects in terms of the way your SaaS improves project management, which leaves a long-lasting impression.
- Whitepaper and eBooks
Whether it’s eBooks or Whitepapers, they are perfect lead magnets and also authority builders. These are long-form content assets that delve into technical insights, industry trends, strategic advice, and more.
They are highly effective for B2B SaaS brands seeking decision-makers and thus hold their position as experts. You can offer these important assets in exchange for user emails to maximize your mailing list and nurture leads with the help of targeted campaigns.
- Email Newsletters
Email is another useful channel that the majority of SaaS companies leverage. Perfectly designed email newsletters let you keep users engaged, informed, and loyal. You need to share blog highlights, updates, customer success stories, new feature launches, curated industry news, and more.
Newsletters are useful to maintain daily contact with customers and prospects, which maximize brand recall. It also ensures in-depth product usage. It’s advisable to segment your email list completely to send personalized content and maximize open rates and conversions.
Challenges in SaaS Content Marketing
Even though SaaS content marketing offers a lot of benefits, it also comes with a myriad of challenges. Whether it’s fierce competition, limited resources, or offering a return on investment (ROI), many challenges SaaS businesses come across. Let’s discuss every challenge in-depth.
- Resource Limitations
One of the major challenges that a SaaS company faces is resource limitation. They often work either with limited teams or budgets. Whether it’s personnel, lack of time, or funding, resource constraints often make it tough to produce top-quality and consistent content.
Pro Tips:
It’s advisable to often emphasize evergreen and high-value content that provides long-term outcomes and thus can be rephrased across numerous formats. For instance, you can make a comprehensive guide such as “Explore an Ultimate Tips on SaaS Marketing Handbook”.
You can repurpose it either as infographics, blog series, social media posts, email campaigns, and more. Always focus on creating content that delivers high value and ROI while requiring minimum updates.
- Product Complexity
SaaS products are highly complex and more technical. It needs an in-depth explanation to communicate its value more effectively. It makes content creation specifically quite challenging. Marketers need to maintain a perfect balance between informing customers and keeping content highly engaging.
Pro Tips:
Make sure your content simplifies various technical concepts even for those of non-technical users while offering enough depth for tech-savvy stakeholders and decision-makers. Your content tends to be either too convoluted or generic without close collaboration between product teams and marketing.
- Face the Crowded Market
SaaS is one of the competitive industries with several brands looking for the same audience. So, it’s advisable to avoid generic topics to stand out from the competition rather than diving into niche topics or also those of many underserved areas.
Pro Tips:
You need to emphasize crafting content that handles the unique challenges of competitors. For instance, if the majority of your competitors create content on “CRM Software Benefits”, you need to try something different and craft content on a slightly different topic. The best way to do it is to pick topics like “Ways How SaaS CRMs Boosts Sales for Startups”.
- Audience Segmentation
Right from CEOs to procurement managers, SaaS products cater to the needs of multiple personalities. You need to take into account that every segment has unique content preferences, levels of technical understanding, and pain points.
Pro Tips:
Crafting tailored content for multiple personas is indeed resource-intensive and needs complete buyer journey mapping. Marketers must do segmentation properly to avoid any risk of irrelevant or too broad content. It not only weakens its overall impact but also reduces the engagement rates as well.
- Content ROI attribution
Most SaaS marketers often face problems like determining the overall impact of content marketing. To avoid the challenge, you can leverage the potential advantage of tools such as HubSpot, Google Analytics, SEMrush, and others. You can integrate your CRM to track in terms of the way content contributes to generating traffic, lead, and revenue.
Pro Tips:
You can also use several metrics like conversion rates, traffic growth, customer acquisition costs, etc. to draw a clear picture between content and your business success. For instance, you can keep an eye on the way a gated ebook brings in leads that convert into customers and offer a clear reflection of ROI.
SaaS companies need to address these challenges better with a data-driven and strategic mindset to avoid these challenges. They can drive their content marketing effort to boost business growth.
- Keep Up With The Evolving Feature
A large number of SaaS companies upgrade their products frequently to keep up with the expectations of their target audience. The continuous emergence reflects that content published previously tends to be outdated fast.
Pro Tips:
A marketing team needs to keep themselves updated with product development to ensure feature-specific content, including help guides, blog posts, tutorials, and more. These reflect the most current information.
Failing to do the same causes several issues like misinformation, user confusion, loss of credibility, and more. It maximizes the maintenance stress for marketers who audit and update content assets continuously.
How a Professional Content Marketing Company helps
You can get the maximum benefits of content marketing for your SaaS business only when you share meaningful content. And this is something that only a professional content marketing company performs better. Let’s understand how these professionals help your business flourish;
- Ensure a Seamless Workflow
A genuine content marketing company works with a fully defined workflow that not only ensures consistency but also removes various bottlenecks. They often leverage top-rated collaboration and project management tools to streamline their tasks.
They have a team of content experts who specialize in scheduling content in advance and thus keep every stakeholder on the same page. It causes a fully predictable and smooth workflow that minimizes any delay and also on-time delivery of quality content.
- Create SEO-Based Content
Content marketing serves numerous purposes – improving ranking in search engines is one of those. And the good thing about a professional content marketing company is they are aware of how to achieve this goal. Be it competitive analysis, in-depth keyword research, or SEO audits, they do everything to craft content that aligns perfectly with what users search for.
They optimize meta tags, implement long-tail keywords, structure content for readability, and more to ensure every important piece of content contributes to boosting visibility and also organic traffic. They are indeed versed in Google’s algorithms and adopt changes in their content marketing strategies accordingly.
- Proper Content Planning
Rather than creating content randomly, content experts chalk out complete strategic content calendars according to seasonal brands, business objectives, customer journey mapping, and more. They divide content into multiple categories such as consideration, awareness, decision to guide prospects, etc. with the help of a sales funnel.
A well-structured content planning gives them a complete surety that content is fully relevant and aligned with marketing objectives. Their every post serves a distinct purpose, be it videos, blogs, email campaigns, or white papers.
- Ensure Content Aligns Perfectly With Data-Driven Insights
Another major advantage of working with a professional content marketing company is that they work with a data-driven approach. They leverage Google Analytics, SEMrush, and many other similar tools to gather details of user behavior, determine performance, optimize future content, etc.
Whether it’s experimentation with publishing frequency, changing content formats, or refreshing old articles, every decision they make is based on data, rather than any guesswork.
- Sales And Marketing Alignment
Apart from engaging customers, content should be capable of generating sales and thus driving revenue as well. Professional content experts should have an in-depth understanding of the importance of aligning content perfectly with sales objectives.
They collaborate with their sales teams to know customer’s pain points, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and objections. The information is necessary to create content that ensures conversions and lead nurturing. It yields a completely unified approach where marketing boosts leads that are convenient to sales teams for conversion.
- Produce Scalable Content
With the growth of your business, your content efforts should also be maximized. Meanwhile, scaling content production is something that is quite challenging even without compromising the quality. A content writing company has a team of talented designers, writers, strategists, and video editors who create a variety of content types. Whether you require daily social media posts, weekly blogs, or monthly whitepapers, professional content experts ensure a higher consistency in terms of branding, tone, and value. Besides, they also leverage repurpose strategies and then turn a single whitepaper into infographics, blogs, social posts, and more.
- Track Performance
The most important thing you need to keep in mind is that content marketing is an ongoing effort and requires continuous refinement. You need to understand that content experts don’t only publish content and then forget about the same. They track its overall performance by considering numerous factors such as bounce rate, time on page, page views, conversion rate, and more.
They produce regular reports mainly to reflect in terms of what works and also what’s not. Based on these important details, they update CTAs, modify headlines, test multiple content formats, refresh outdated information, and more.
Wrap Up
You can make content marketing effective for your SaaS business growth by doing several things. These include addressing them at every step of their journey, understanding your audience’s requirements, delivering value through quality resources, and more. It helps you turn content into a complete differentiator for your SaaS business as well.
You need to understand that success doesn’t come overnight. So, it’s advisable to have enough patience with a robust content market plan, consistent implementation, and the best mindset. Get in touch with the right content marketing services provider to keep your SaaS business in the right direction.
