Content marketing can improve lead generation, boost sales, increase awareness and increase conversion rates for your company. Proper planning is necessary for successful content marketing for SaaS companies because it needs a unique approach, different from other companies.

This guide discusses how to approach SaaS content marketing, so you can get to planning and experience the benefits.

Why SaaS Content Marketing is Different

SaaS is an industry that relies heavily on the value of its software. Your audience has to understand why they should buy from you and not from a competitor. When designing a content marketing strategy for your SaaS company, it’s good to know that it’s different in various ways:

• You aim to sell both the technology and service you provide
• The focus of your marketing is search engine optimization (SEO)
• Customer reviews will significantly influence the number of sales you make
• The marketing strategy you design must generate repeat business
• You aim to educate potential customers
• Your marketing strategy must address customer risk

Besides the product you sell, your customers must be sure of the support you provide. They want quality support in case of any trouble with the software. As a result, content marketing strategies for SaaS promote both the product and the support customers will get.

While creating marketing content for your SaaS company, it’s good to remember that potential buyers research the internet for products and services. They check white papers, product reviews, and various app marketplaces.

Your overall SaaS marketing strategy should prioritize search engine optimization to provide higher chances of winning customers from these platforms.

What Goes into an Effective SaaS Content Marketing Strategy?

Effective SaaS content marketing requires a plan with the right goals, reach, and channels for reaching your audience. The content marketing plan for SaaS should also address content creation and tracking of the results after initiating the campaign.

Content Marketing SaaS Effectiveness

Steps for effective content marketing for SaaS strategy:

• Define Your Target Audience
• Identify Pain Points
• Identify Keywords
• Define Your Campaign Goals and Metrics
• Create Your Content Production Procedures
• Outline Your Distribution Strategy
• Monitor Your Results and Make Adjustments

To succeed, you have to employ SaaS content marketing best practices. Let’s examine the steps individually.

Define Your Target Audience

Your goal with most SaaS content marketing campaigns is to reach out to new prospects and convert them into customers. Understanding your audience will enable the creation of a tailor-made campaign. You’ll find it easy to connect with your audience.

Some factors to look at when defining your audience include:

• Whether it’s an individual or business
• Their age
• The social media profiles they interact with or follow
• The amount of income they earn
• The industry they operate in
• The specific websites they visit most times
• The other brands they purchase from

The elements may vary depending on your product. Once you know the characteristics of your customer, it’s time to create a profile. The aim is to personify this imaginary character before creating SaaS marketing content for real-world characters. Your profile characteristics should be close to the real-life customer.

The good thing is that social media platforms have analytics tools that enable you to see the characteristics of your followers. You will understand your followers’ details, which can guide you in finding more prospects.

If your product can serve more than one target market, you can create multiple distinct profiles. Don’t create too many profiles because they can make you lose focus. You want to work with the least number of profiles to manage your marketing campaign easily.

Identify Pain Points

Identifying pain points aims to create a marketing strategy tailored to their needs. This comes after defining your audience because you want to understand what drives their purchasing decisions.

Develop a customer journey map to understand how your customers move from prospects to actual buyers. The journey map will outline the steps followed by your customers as they travel through the sales funnel. Typical steps include:

• Learning about your brand and the products you offer
• Checking out your website for more details
• Getting interested in your product. They may register for a free trial or demo
• Become a long-term freemium user or subscribe to a plan
• Actively adopt the product
• Adopting new features to have more extensive usage of the product. They can even purchase supporting products and services
• Reporting any issues involved in product usage
• Renewing a subscription or letting it lapse

Every step may come with challenges that may affect their decision concerning retention. Some pitfalls they could encounter include:

• Poor experience when they are trying the demo or free trial
• Problems when trying to navigate your website
• Failure to establish how your product serves their needs
• Challenges when trying to renew their plan
• Poor customer service
• Disliking the overall customer experience
• Challenges when paying to sign up for a plan

As you create your SaaS marketing content, ensure it addresses pain points that can guide them to seek a solution provided by your product or similar product. The most important part of the consumer journey is signing up for the first time, so ensure you create compelling content.

Various elements can determine the pain points you will address, and they include:

• Emotional pain points - being frustrated by the current product’s user experience
• Financial pain points - using an expensive product or earning low-income/revenue
• Time management pain points - an inefficient website leading to time wastage
• Labor pain points - using a SaaS product that requires excessive work
• Customer service pain points - if the current provider has poor customer service
• Learning curve pain points - poor training support making it challenging to learn how to use a new SaaS product
• Technical pain points - a SaaS tool that is not compatible with other existing tools

Understand that your industry and audience can determine the pain points you address. This means some industries may have unique pain points that need to be addressed. Include the pain points in the content marketing plan to ensure that potential customers can analyze how beneficial your product will be to them.

Identify Keywords

Customers use keywords to search for businesses online. This happens at every stage of the customer journey. They’ll use keywords when:

• Searching for “how to” about a problem with their pain points. They may not have discovered your brand yet
• Checking out reviews after discovering your brand
• Seeking information on how to get started or complete the setup process once they decide to use your product
• Searching for tips on using specific features of your product
• Searching for solutions to problems, especially if they experience customer service issues
• Looking for information on how to renew a particular plan

You must identify typical keyword terms used at every stage during the customer journey. They will help you generate content that addresses customer needs at every step. Since customers want software that can care for their needs, you position yourself to gain more conversions. The customers will be more satisfied, leading to a higher retention rate.

Various content marketing SaaS tools can help you identify the specific keywords in your industry. Some of them include the following:

Google Keyword Planner

A vital tool for SaaS marketers as it helps find out what words people are searching for that are related to your business, traffic volume, and other essential information. You’ll know the best topics to write about and the type of language to use.

SEMrush

This all-in-one search engine optimization tool helps you determine how well your website is ranked in Google’s search results. It also allows you to see what keywords people use to find your site and where they’re coming from (such as YouTube or Facebook). You’ll also see the keywords competitors are ranking for, plus information about backlinks, traffic, e.t.c.

Ahrefs

It is an excellent tool that helps you find, track and manage your backlinks. You can use it to research your competitors’ backlinks, find new and relevant keywords for your site, and see what people are linking to on your site.

Moz

This tool tells you how well your site ranks in search engines and gives you a score. It allows for keyword research and site audits, making you understand what you can improve to rank higher. Moz also provides backlink analysis.

BuzzSummo

When marketing on social media, BuzzSummo will help you identify trending topics, market influencers, and the topics competitors write about.

Using these tools, you can identify relevant keywords that will improve the quality of the content you write.

Define Your Campaign Goals and Metrics

When creating your content marketing strategy, figure out what you want to accomplish. It will help you measure the success of your content marketing efforts. Without this information, it’s difficult to determine what is working and what isn’t, so you won’t be able to tweak or improve your content.

Your goals can be tied to business growth and revenue generation. You can also consider improving your customer experience, increasing customer retention, or ensuring customers get the most value from your product.

While key performance indicators (KPIs) like bounce rate and session duration applies to content marketing across all industries, some are unique to SaaS content marketing. SaaS marketing metrics include:

• Free trial registrations- You can identify their source and know the amount coming from your blog, social media posts, or resource guides
• Software demo requests- You can also identify the source of these requests
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)- measures how much you spend on your marketing efforts in relation to the number of customers you acquire
• Lead conversion rate (LCR)- measures the number of conversions per website visit, registration to use the demo or free trial, or sign-up to your email list

Create Your Content Production Procedures

You need a plan to help you organize and manage the content creation process. Since you already know the keywords to target and the goals to look for, it’s time to create content. Here are some defined steps to streamline the content production process:

• Research the internet for topics around your keywords and target audience
• Create a calendar for content creation
• Get a content creation team
• Create content and edit
• Schedule content publication

Research

Conduct exhaustive research without underestimating any keywords. Remember you want to create content that will boost your brand’s visibility. The voice search tool can make the research process faster.

Content Creation Calendar

The keywords you identified should help you prioritize content creation. You know the sequence of your audience’s content. Create long and short-form content, and incorporate graphics. Don’t schedule content far in advance because you’ll want to write about any industry developments.

Team Recruitment

Ensure you work with a reliable team. The best approach is to get thought leaders in your industry because they understand the topics better. You can work with freelancers for flexibility.

Content Creation

Know the purpose of every piece your team creates, whether you aim for brand awareness, lead generation, or generally educating the audience. The identified pain points should guide you in creating content that addresses the audience’s needs.

Publication Scheduling

How much content does your audience need per month? The best way is to analyze your capacity and then set a regular schedule that you can sustain. Look at the goals you want to achieve, your budget, and your resources.

Outline Your Distribution Strategy

The content distribution strategy establishes how you will share the content. It also outlines the platforms on which the content will be available and the mode of promoting it. Some issues to address in the distribution strategy:

• Where will you publish the content? Think of areas like your blog, resource guide, social media, etc.
• Will you grant free access to all content, or will some only be available to premium users?
• Do you have company social media profiles to distribute the content?
• Have you identified third-party sites for guest blogging and partnerships?

You can get a marketing automation tool to assist with uploading content to your website. Many of the tools can be synchronized with your social media profiles. It will help eliminate the need for manual content uploading to various platforms.

Monitor Your Results and Make Adjustments

The only way to know if your marketing campaign achieves the desired outcome is to monitor your results. Your results should align with the key performance indicators (KPIs) identified when setting your goals. Develop a reporting system to track the KPIs. For instance, if the campaign’s goal is to get people to renew their subscriptions, have it included in the campaign results tracking.

You can use analytics software that displays the results. Good software has a dashboard for display, and you can get results in graphics in forms of, for example, percentages or charts. You can set up a standard period for the review of the KPIs.

You can constantly adjust when your campaign does not achieve the set goals. For underperforming pieces, apply split testing to see if the results change with the adjustments you make to the content. Some adjustments include adding images and videos, tweaking the headline, and even changing the font. These changes can bring a massive improvement to the results.

You can look at the topics and content pieces that produce the most desired results and focus your efforts on promoting them. This can also help your approach to creating other content.

How to Generate Content Ideas

Identifying your audience is the most important place to start for your SaaS content marketing. What does their job entail? What do they struggle with? What are their most significant pain points? How can you solve their problems? Once you know this information, developing content ideas that resonate with them will be much easier.

If your audience is made up of busy professionals, they probably don’t want long-form blog posts because they don’t have too much time at their disposal. They will need quick tips and tricks that they can reference when they need to, so keep the content short.

Other areas to look for ideas include:

• Look at your competitors: What are they doing? What are their most successful posts? If you can, copy them.
• Do a survey: Ask your customers what kind of content they’d like to see from you, and then make it happen. This is also a great way to get feedback on your product’s work.
• Talk about the benefits of using your product.

Create SaaS Content that Engages and Converts

Creating SaaS content requires a good plan to ensure it is engaging. To make sure your content converts, consider the following:

• Create content that helps solve problems (address pain points)
• Use visuals and videos to tell stories and increase engagement
• Optimize for search engines. SEO improves organic traffic
• Be consistent in sharing content
• Add some CTAs

Become an Expert in Your Field and Know Your Product Inside-Out

For customers to trust you, the content you generate must show that you are an expert in your field. And because many SaaS products deal with complex sectors, you must understand your industry thoroughly. It’s the only way to know the challenges and needs of your customers.

• Take the following steps to understand your industry:
• Listen to leading podcasts in your industry and subscribe to newsletters for information
• Build relationships with experts to learn from them while involving them in content creation.
• Keep in constant communication with thought leaders in your industry. They can help generate ideas for content creation.
• Participate in customer research processes, including interviews, demo calls, or handling customer support requests.
• Be up-to-date with industry trends and happenings

Build Authority by Diving Deeper into Content Topics

Writing content to cover areas of expertise can boost the performance of your SaaS marketing campaign. Find core topics in your industry and compose detailed content about them. It will do better than shallow content with many unrelated keywords.

Before you can start creating content, ensure you have topics that will make you communicate as an expert, then find the right keywords for them. Every expert topic has semantically related keywords, making your content look genuine.

Build an Effective Marketing Content Funnel

SaaS content must satisfy the customer at every stage of the customer journey. Creating content for every funnel stage can help achieve this. The steps in the funnel include awareness, consideration, decision-making, retention, and advocacy.

Awareness Stage

50% of your content should focus on creating awareness about your product. Customers know they have a problem but don’t know how to solve it. Your content should be focused on how you will help them solve.

Consideration Stage

This stage focuses on why the audience needs to consider your brand. It can take up 30% of your content. The customer will have multiple questions, so make sure your content answers them satisfactorily.

Decision Stage

Since the customer is aware of your brand and how it can help them, you have to make them understand why they need to sign up for your product now rather than later. Emphasize the benefits and the effect of delaying the sign-up. This content can occupy 15% of the overall content volume.

Retention and Advocacy

Give your customers quality service to ensure they remain loyal to your brand. Emphasize customer service and overall support of the program. Your customers want to be supported whenever they face a problem.

Focus on Quality, not Quantity, when Creating Content

Quality SaaS marketing content can help drive traffic and increase conversion rate. Here are a few ways to ensure the content provides value to your audience.

• Publish authentic content covering your area of expertise
• Ensure it is valid and practical and has relevance to the audience’s intent
• Create comprehensive content to cover all related topics and potential questions

Provide an excellent user experience, ensuring your content has short, easy-to-read sentences and incorporates images and other graphics

Bottom-line

SaaS businesses have a unique opportunity in the digital realm to reach new customers on relevant sites with conversational and value-driven content. If you follow the content marketing best practices for SaaS companies, you will reap better results.