SaaS content marketing involves a slightly different approach than typical marketing strategies. Here are the steps you need to follow.
Content marketing has become a critical component of an overall marketing strategy, especially for SaaS companies. According to HubSpot, approximately 64% of marketers put effort and time into SEO. While that’s a good percentage, what’s surprising is that the other 36% don’t – especially, considering that SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic compared to organic social media. SaaS content marketing strategies require a different approach than marketing for other industries.
SaaS companies face unique challenges. They need to sell both a product (technology) and a service (support). To accomplish this, they heavily rely on a prominent online presence and a good reputation to gain visibility. To really shine and thrive in search results though, careful thought into SEO and its execution are required to succeed. In a nutshell, content marketing is a huge value for SaaS companies. To gain from it, businesses need to carefully cultivate a good SEO strategy. They’ll also need to publish interesting and valuable content.
Not sure how to get started? These essential content marketing tips offer a good jumping point.
1. Identify your audience and their pain points
As with other marketing strategies, knowing your target audience is the cornerstone to a focused SaaS content marketing campaign. To help determine who you should target, it’s a good idea to consider the following questions:
- Are you pursuing B2C or B2B audiences?
- What are your target audience’s general gender and age?
- What is the income level of your ideal customers?
- If pursuing B2B customers, what industry and title (role) should you be trying to reach?
- Who are potential competitors your audience will purchase from?
- Are there any trade associations or trade shows your customers are linked to?
- What types of websites do they visit? What about a social media following?
After you identify attributes of the ideal targeted audience, you can use these data points to help create a profile of your ideal customer.
Once identifying the right audience and buyer personas materialize, you can then turn an eye toward honing in on their pain points. What are they looking to do and, as a provider, how can you help them? To effectively accomplish this, you’ll need to understand their problems and take a proverbial walk in their shoes:
- Does the customer have any financial pain points?
- Is internal labor a problem where technology could offset the burden?
- Is the potential customer experiencing time management, productivity, and inefficiency issues that SaaS could solve?
Once customer needs are understood, you can turn an eye towards developing your written content. This, along with supporting visuals, will equip you to explain to buyers why your SaaS technology and services are a good solution.
2. Research keywords for different stages of the customer journey
Buyers of SaaS products and services do so primarily through digital channels. This makes SEO a vital component of successful SaaS content marketing. Your buyers will tend to find potential solutions through online resources, such as online reviews, white papers, and app marketplaces. As a part of the goal to optimize SEO, you’ll want to identify the right keywords and phrases. Doing so can help you to steer buyers towards key points in their customer journey, such as learning more, finding a solution, installing your SaaS products, using the software, getting support, or renewing services.
You can use keyword tools to help you identify the right ones to use for each customer journey segment. Popular options include Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Clearscope, SEMrush, Moz, and BuzzSumo. Once keywords are determined, you can begin to produce keyword-oriented content to attract buyers.
3. Create content for each stage of the customer journey
Identifying the right keywords takes some work, but it doesn’t end there. Generating content also includes creating different types of content that will appeal to buyers at different places in their journey. Your goal is to speak to potential customers. This helps them to:
- Become aware of your solution.
- Consider a purchase.
- Make a decision to buy.
For each stage of the journey, you have other tasks to complete as well. This includes setting a content calendar and recruiting talent to write specific types of content. Then comes creating and editing content. Reaching publication takes time, and many SaaS providers find partnering with a managed service provider helps ease their own pain points. A good provider that specializes in all things related to content marketing can greatly simplify your entire content production process.
4. Set up goals and KPIs
Using content marketing best practices means you want to set goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Investing in these enables you to align your future campaigns based on your findings. KPIs to track include the number of unique visitors, session duration, bounce rates, and what pages they visit. These are standard KPIs.
For SaaS content, you’ll also want to look at additional metrics:
- Registrations for free trial offers.
- Downloads of whitepapers.
- Software demo requests.
- Customer acquisition costs (CAC).
- Lead conversion rates (LCR).
To succeed with a SaaS content marketing strategy, it’s important to track and measure the above to determine if your content has met your objectives and performed well. Remember, KPIs are not just about sales, but about customer satisfaction, retention, and perception of your brand.
5. Analyze and improve
Consistent analysis and improvement will ensure content flow continues to perform well and meet your business objectives. If content is not meeting expectations, change course. Give readers better content to digest. Good search results are centered around text:
- Does text communicate complex SaaS information with simplicity?
- Is the content helping you connect with customers and helping build stronger relationships?
- Has previously published content built brand awareness in a crowded industry field?
- Does content effectively showcase the unique value of your brand’s product and service?
- Have you used the right distribution channels to showcase content?
Examine KPIs and other metrics to see what your potential customers seek and then strive to give them more. Automating the process as much as possible saves both resources and money. You’ll find more time to focus on building long-term customer relationships through the development of your product and support.
Get help with SaaS content marketing
It can be difficult to strategize in order to take advantage of all the benefits of content marketing. At Tempesta Media, we understand the primary challenges SaaS companies face. To help you execute content marketing best practices, we offer a variety of content marketing solutions. We can help you to succeed with SEO, along with other important components of your content marketing strategy.
To learn more about Tempesta Media’s managed services, contact us.
