SEO & Content

11 Steps Guide to Successful SaaS Content Marketing

Sreyashi Chatterjee
|
Nov 16, 2022
11 Steps Guide to Successful SaaS Content Marketing

Contents

Are you planning to go all-in with content marketing for your SaaS business? 

If yes, you are at the right place!

This guide is all about getting started with SaaS content marketing. So, if you wish to know the exact steps to creating a solid content strategy for your SaaS business, hang on a minute!

Let’s start with the basics and dive into building your SaaS content marketing strategy.

What is SaaS content marketing?

SaaS content marketing is a powerful and cost-effective long-term strategy for SaaS businesses to attract their target customers and convert and retain them by consistently crafting and promoting valuable and insightful content. 

If done right, content marketing for SaaS businesses can attract the right customers organically and yield the desired conversion without spending much on advertising. 

Content formats to use in your SaaS content marketing

John loves reading blogs, but Ana likes videos!

So, present your SaaS content in different forms for maximum consumption by your target audience. Here are the three most popular SaaS content formats to attract, engage, and convert leads. Take a look.  

Blog posts

A SaaS content marketing strategy is incomplete without blog posts. Research says that 85% of the largest SaaS companies have a blog and 36% of SaaS companies share blog posts that educate customers. 

Again, you can create and share different blog posts, depending on your content marketing goals. They include,

  • Long-form blog posts that answer most of the reader’s questions.
  • How-to guides that highlight target customers’ pain points and actionable solutions.
  • Checklists to help your target customers perform specific tasks faster and more efficiently.
  • Comparison posts to help buyers make the best decisions.
  • Thought leadership blogs to create more awareness about your product.

E-Books

eBooks (and whitepapers, too!) are excellent for sharing the latest industry reports, market trends, and other valuable insights with your target audience. They are also effective lead magnets (incentives to build your email list). 

Example - eBook used as a lead magnet

Videos

Videos are quite the buzz now. They are the most-used content formats, with 59% of marketers using videos for content marketing.

Using videos in SaaS content marketing can enhance customer engagement, save time, offer better product understanding (with tutorials), boost conversion rates, and build customer loyalty.  

How does Content Marketing help SaaS businesses?

The best decision is to consider content marketing for SaaS companies because it helps them grow exponentially. Research suggests that SaaS companies using content marketing witness 30% higher growth rates and 5-10% better retention rates. 

You can expect a few things when implementing your SaaS content marketing strategy.

High ROI (on a low budget)

Marketing demands a massive budget to achieve a higher ROI. But when it comes to content marketing, things are a tad different. 

According to statistics, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads. To create the best quality SaaS content, you can simply build an internal team or collaborate with a SaaS content marketing agency to meet your content needs.  

Increased brand awareness

With consistent publishing of optimized and quality SaaS blogs, you can increase the odds of ranking higher in Google search results. A higher ranking means a boost in click-through rates and increased visibility. 

Better customer relationships

In SaaS, winning over customers comes before a successful sale. And SaaS content marketing is a powerful tool that helps build customer relationships. 

Once you implement the right SaaS content strategy, it can help you move prospects down the funnel. Moreover, customers who constantly benefit from your blogs are likely to recommend your brand to others. 

11 Steps to Creating your SaaS Content Marketing Strategy 

Impromptu trips are the best. But unplanned content marketing is never a good idea! 

You must have a solid content strategy if you expect your content to drive insane results. 

Before content creation in SaaS, plan a detailed strategy about how to go with the keywords, topics, content creation, and promotion. Then, follow a step-wise process to churn out the best-performing content that ranks well and attracts quality traffic to your website. 

Now, let’s understand what goes into building an effective SaaS content marketing strategy that can help you produce performing content consistently.

1. Define SMART goals

Like a race needs a finish line, your SaaS content marketing strategy needs goals. Without goals, you can’t measure your efforts or determine how well you have performed. So, set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) content marketing goals.

Here are a few examples of what your content marketing for SaaS goals can be.

Brand awareness goals:

  • Boost monthly organic traffic by 35% within three months.
  • Increase Google search rankings for specific keywords within two months.

Customer engagement and conversion goals:

  • Build an email newsletter list of 800+ subscribers within a month.
  • Get 2000+ demo requests or sign-ups within two months.
  • Achieve 7000+ lead magnet (eBook, whitepaper, template) downloads within two months. 

Your content marketing goals can also be directly tied to the revenue. For example, achieving 20+ conversions within two months. Such broad goals can help you set the smaller content goals more accurately, keeping in mind the bottom-line revenue and profit goals. 

With clear SaaS content marketing goals, your next step is to…

2. Define your Target Audience

Content creation in SaaS or any other industry requires first identifying and studying the target audience. Before you build your blogs or ad copies, you must understand your readers or your ideal customers. So, start with creating a buyer’s persona or ideal customer profile.

A buyer persona or ideal customer profile describes a user who will benefit the most from your SaaS product. 

In other words, they will be your ideal buyers. Your ideal customer profile should include the details of a prospect who quickly converts and stays loyal to your brand. You can find these key details from your existing customer profiles or even by digging deeper into your target audience details. 

Here are a few things to find out when chalking out the key buyer persona characteristics.

  • Budget/ income level of company/ user
  • Primary industry the company or user operates in
  • Other SaaS brands used by the company/user
  • Media outlets used by the company/user
  • Questions they ask and search for on social channels
  • Challenges and pain points they are trying to address
  • Content format preferences
  • User motivation to subscribe to a SaaS brand
  • User demographics (location, age, job title, gender, etc.) and psychographics (interests, goals, etc.) 

Once you define the above-mentioned aspects, you are good to go with building your buyer persona. If you have multiple target markets, build multiple profiles. Then use these key characteristics and details during your content brainstorming sessions. 

To focus better and move further in building your SaaS content marketing strategy, you need to find out

  • what your buyer persona(s) wants to read.
  • what expert content can you offer them.

In short, you must find out what content you can uniquely and expertly design and write. But before you do so, there’s something else too…

3. Define your SaaS Content Marketing Metrics

There are so many business growth metrics that it’s pretty easy to get swamped. So, be picky and focus only on tracking the key content metrics based on your SMART goals. Here are a few SaaS content marketing metrics you can track:

  • Organic ranking – How well is your SaaS website’s overall ranking performing on Google? Since search engine rankings impact your brand visibility, keep an eye on it.
  • Website traffic – Track your monthly website traffic and the sources like social media, referrals, organic search, etc. 
  • Lead conversion rate – How many conversions (free trial schedule a demo, sign up, email opt-ins, etc.) are you getting per visit to your SaaS website?

4. Evaluate your Competition

Starting with SaaS content marketing without knowing your competition is like letting your money go down the tubes. 

Remember that the competition prevailing in SaaS content marketing is different. While you may have identified your product competitors, the news is that your content competition might be different from your product competition. 

So, analyzing your competitors’ backlinks is essential. Identify the resources that bring most of their traffic. Then analyze their published content's semantics, like keywords and topics. It will help you understand what subjects they have covered, their strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in their content. 

A quick tip: Monitoring and assessing your SaaS content marketing competition is pretty hard. So, collaborating with the right B2B content marketing agency would be a great idea. 

5. Create a Content Lifecycle Strategy

Goals. Check ✅

Ideal customer profile. Check ✅

Now, we get down to the real SaaS content stuff. In this step, you need to map out the content you will generate. 

When it comes to content marketing for SaaS companies, ensure that your website communicates and converts well. So, it is essential to build a solid foundation to drive quality traffic that leads to high conversion rates. 

Mapping out your content gets easier when you go by your sales funnel. So, think of your content as going through the customer’s journey. Here are the stages of SaaS content marketing aligned with the sales funnel. 

The Discovery Stage 

This is the top-of-the-funnel stage, and it is all about creating content that increases your organic search visibility and brand awareness. 

Your target market desires to learn about a certain topic and get actionable insights to address its issues. So, at this stage, your SaaS content must educate the audience. You can include the following content types in your top-of-the-funnel SaaS content strategy:

  • Thought leadership blog posts
  • Infographics with supportive blogs
  • How-to guides
  • Listicles (trends, examples, tactics, quick tips, etc.)

In the discovery stage of your SaaS content, focus on educating the audience. Optimize the content with the right set of head and long-tail keywords. Use CTAs and links to direct readers to relevant product pages. Last but not least, try answering the questions your audience asks on Google. 

The Consideration Stage

This stage is the middle of the funnel and considers people aware of their challenges and looking for a potential solution. So, in this stage, you can present your SaaS content in the following forms:

  • FAQs
  • Templates
  • Product comparison blogs
  • Checklists
  • Cheat-sheets
  • Promotional blog posts

The content type in the discovery and consideration stages are similar. However, the focus of your content at this stage must be on the following;

  • Guide prospects in the product research phase
  • Make your audience aware of your SaaS product offerings
  • Convert visitors into leads by encouraging them to download free resources, sign up, subscribe to newsletters, etc.

The Conversion Stage

This is the bottom of the sales funnel where your prospect is ready to convert; that is, they are satisfied with the solution and are ready to buy a product like yours. So, offer them the very best to close the sale successfully.

Here, your SaaS content’s purpose is to nudge prospects and get them to sign up for a free trial, schedule a call, request a demo, or get in touch with your sales team. So, the focus of your content must be to demonstrate (with proof) how your product is the best option to solve their problem. Present success stories to show how exactly your SaaS product is ideal for overcoming their specific challenges. Here are a few content types to try out:

  • Use cases
  • Case Studies
  • Features & Integrations landing pages
  • White papers/ eBooks
  • Product comparison pages

Bonus Stage Alert ⚠

Apart from the three stages, I would like to add beyond the funnel stage or The Retention Stage.

SaaS content marketing doesn’t end with conversion. It also focuses on retaining customers or building brand loyalty. Once you have converted your prospects, your work is to turn them into brand evangelists. 

At this stage, your content’s focus should be to ensure that users continue paying or upgrading their plans while referring your brand to others. Here are a few content types to help retain users.

  • Exclusive content like industry trend reports, research, and analysis content
  • Insider tactics, quick tips & tricks via newsletters or email drip campaigns
  • Personalized product and support services
  • Insightful and in-depth knowledge repository to enable self-service (Example – An updated support center covering customer service queries extensively)

6. Perform Keyword Research

The core of your SaaS content marketing strategy is keyword research, especially when your goal is to ace organic search.

There are many great tools to help you with keyword research. Semrush, Ahrefs, and Keysearch are excellent tools to start your SEO journey. 

However, SEO isn’t limited to getting the right keywords only. Several other technicalities require your attention. So, the best way to excel in SEO is to build an internal SEO team or collaborate with a SaaS SEO agency like TripleDart to take care of all your SEO needs. This will help you to get the right direction for your SEO content and find topics that make sense for your target audience. 

7. SaaS Content Production

Once you have your keywords list ready, and you know your audience’s pain points, you’re set for the content production process. Here are a few steps to start with content production. 

  • Search for topics relevant to your target audience
  • Create a content calendar (include topics, keywords, wireframe, references, etc.)
  • Hire content specialists
  • Create and edit content
  • Schedule content publishing.

Following a proper content creation process for SaaS helps you streamline everything. Also, creating documents for each stage helps your content team to produce effective content.

8. Earn your Traffic

Creating content that makes sense to no one is a waste of resources. You must generate sufficient organic traffic to your blog posts and websites. 

Here are a few tactics for organic search that you can start working on from the day you start creating your SaaS content marketing strategy. These tactics will help you generate traffic and boost conversions.

  • Internal and external linking – Embedding your content links together and getting links from reputable sources will help you boost your search rankings. 
  • Technical SEO – Website structure, navigation, optimization, and meta information – everything impacts your content ranking. 
  • Long-form content – Google loves long, in-depth content that covers a topic extensively. So, create long and insightful content to improve search rankings.  
  • Content optimization – If the traffic for specific blog posts drops after a while, update it to attract the desired traffic.

9. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Being consistent with blogs can drive traffic, but not everyone landing on a blog post will sign up for your SaaS product. Sure, readers will get awareness about your product. 

What can help you here is Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO to help increase conversions of your blog posts. For SaaS companies, consider creating templates, free courses, eBooks, etc. and link your blog CTA to these free resources. 

The goal of CRO is to make a reader sign up for the free resources directly from the blog post. And when the CTAs in blogs are directed toward free resources, it can help you boost conversion rates and generate more leads. 

10. SaaS Content Distribution

One essential aspect of content marketing for SaaS is its distribution and promotion. Creating content isn’t enough. It is equally important to make some noise about your content in the right places. 

You can plan your distribution strategy even before your content strategy. Once your content is ready, you can get them live on the right channels. 

SaaS companies heavily rely on SEO to go from zero to one because people first look up anything and everything in Google and other search engines. 

Besides, be selective about your social media channels for SaaS content distribution. Not every channel drives the result you desire. Try LinkedIn, create informational content for Twitter, reels for Instagram, or tutorials for YouTube to stand out in the social channels. 

11. Track & Adjust

Track your SaaS content marketing metrics and ensure that your marketing efforts deliver results. Monitor the performance of all your content marketing campaigns to understand where you can improve. 

Use analytical tools and reporting to see what’s working and what’s not. Further, work on improving your efforts to drive better results. 

Multiply Growth with SaaS Content Marketing

Planning to get started with SaaS content marketing is the first step… 

And then, it’s a long journey to reach the peak. 

Content marketing for SaaS is no magic that can give you instant results. It takes time to get meaningful results. But once you get results, know that you’ve built a solid foundation for business growth. 

However, consistently producing great content is imperative. So, if content isn’t your strength, join forces with an SEO content agency like TripleDart. The platform can take care of your content and SEO needs – from strategy to results. 

Learn more about TripleDart here!

Sreyashi Chatterjee
Head of Content @ TripleDart. Curious about anything SaaS marketing.
Sreyashi Chatterjee

Sreyashi Chatterjee

Head of Content @ TripleDart. Curious about anything SaaS marketing.

We'd Love to Work with You!

Join 70+ successful B2B SaaS companies on the path to achieving T2D3 with our SaaS marketing services.