Content marketing for SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) can be challenging. However, you can still get great results with the right approach.
You’ll need thoughtful planning to spell out simple steps that you and your team can follow.
In this post, I will show you eight easy steps that you can use to improve your own SaaS content marketing efforts.
Simple SaaS Content Marketing Hacks
Develop Buyer Persona
As one of the most basic mantras of content marketing, start by developing buyer personas for your most important target audiences.
For SaaS content marketing, this is the first and most important step. If you’re not writing for the right audiences (and you need to be really precise), then everything else will be wrong.
Depending on the type business you’re in, you’ll not only have a different target audience. You’ll also find huge differences in terms of products and services.
The most obvious split is between B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business).
But it goes much deeper than that – perhaps company size, role in the purchase process, and even seniority will all influence how you build a persona for B2B.
And for B2C, you may have buyer, influencer, and other types to target in various ways.
In each case, you need to create ideal personas for each target audience. For example, if you selling to consumers, you’ll need to understand their:
- Challenges (pain points)
- Interests and needs
- Demographics
- Age, gender, etc.
- Income
I can’t stress enough how crucial it is for you to understand your audience before deciding on what to write and how to address them.
Even some small behavioral traits matter, for example, if they spend a great deal of time on smartphones, your best channel is likely to be an SMS campaign.
Define Your Content Marketing Goals
You can only achieve success if you know how to measure the performance of your ads, posts, etc. in advance.
If you’re just starting out in SaaS content marketing, you probably want to drive traffic to your or your company’s website.
To achieve that end, you will need to define goals and develop some metrics that indicate whether or not you succeeded. For example, you may want to:
- Track the number of backlinks pointing at your website
- Analyze your keywords
- Increase the authority of your domain
- Keep tabs on total number of signups
- Build features to drive customer retention and/or word-of-mouth
Success is often a matter of great strategy and time. You should choose KPIs based on the results you want to achieve. If you want to be first on Google, your most important KPI will be your domain’s search engine rankings.
Identify the Topics
It’s always a challenge to come up with the right topics for your business. The situation is even harder when you include the available types of content.
For example, someone developing affiliate marketing content ideas may go with “How to” articles rather than eBooks.
Deciding on the topics is a bit different. It has to do with the following questions:
- Who is your audience?
- What is the type of your company or brand?
Since your SaaS business can go in different directions in terms of marketing, it’s wise to resolve these initial questions before deciding on topics.
Your content will also depend on the type of SaaS product you want to promote. It may be a CRM (customer relationship management) software, an ERP (enterprise resource planning) package, accounting application, project management platform, etc.
Start by focusing on what your product is all about and how it can fix problems for your readers.
For example, if you’re selling a project management platform, your topics could be:
- Time management
- Work-related stress
- Tips for project managers
Search Keywords
Defining the right keywords is one of the most important things you can do to improve your organic performance and overall online visibility.
Whenever your potential client has a problem, he or she will try to find a solution by searching online.
Your job is to research your market and identify popular keywords that relate to your business.
This is only the beginning. You need to track keywords in terms of their position within your customer journey.
When considering good keywords, always take a moment to consider search intent. It’s common knowledge in the SEO industry that keyword research holds the key to organic traffic upside.
The idea behind search intent is to pinpoint the critical needs of your clients. Your audience faces a number of challenges. Based on those challenges and how good you are at identifying them, you’ll be able to create relevant content.
You’ll find plenty of options available in the keyword research tool space.
Analyze Your Competition
Always pay close attention to what your competitors are doing. The SaaS space is still relatively new compared to older, more established offerings.
Why should you analyze the competition in your niche? Here are three strong reasons to add it to your list:
- Adopt things that are producing results for other companies
- Avoid the mistakes that they made
- Find fillable gaps in the market
Take a look at what some of the biggest names in your niche are doing when it comes to content production. Try to compare the type of content they produce with their brand identity. If you’re in a similar business or have similar products, you might as well try doing the same.
Always try to be as good as or better than your competitors. You don’t want to produce content of lesser quality. Remember, as the saying goes, content is king. Aim to get it right from the start.
And as a piece of the competitive review, always be sure to read their customer reviews to find out what their clients like or dislike about them. You can learn a lot because it’s the best insight into the quality of their content, products, and services.
Develop a Publishing Schedule
After you have defined the type of content, you should decide on the frequency of scheduling, i.e. how often you will publish your content.
First, create a publishing plan. Think about questions like:
- How many blog posts is enough on a weekly basis?
- Should I create an eBook every month?
These and similar questions will determine your publishing habits.
An optimal publishing frequency is between 3-and-4 times a week. Of course, if you’re just starting out and short on time, it’s fine to do less.
Usually, new businesses start with one blog post a week. This is your chance to investigate the market and figure out what bottom, middle, and top of the funnel content are.
Whatever you decide, you should always prioritize top-quality content. It’s better to publish less content than to put out anything that may reflect negatively on you and your brand.
Monitor Your Results
If you want to show steady progress, you absolutely must monitor your performance proactively. Track KPIs early and often.
After you’ve set your goals and overall strategy, you need a system that will track the results. Most business owners like to track results on a regular schedule, perhaps weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly results.
You can use analytics software tools and create customized dashboards that show the desired KPIs. This is the easiest way for your team to understand what the numbers mean quickly.
In the beginning, it’s crucial to track traffic and your website authority. Some of the key indicators are:
- Growth in number of backlinks
- Number of keywords ranking, and where they rank
- Domain authority
- Overall organic traffic
- Number of leads on social media
Once you get the hang of it, you’ll start using more sophisticated metrics in terms of engagement. This will all help you figure out what’s working and where you still have room to improve.
After that, you can focus on measuring the growth of free trials and customer retention rate. Every segment needs to be analyzed for the purposes of optimization. Diagnosing the problem in your system is the most important step when it comes to business growth.
Write for Each Stage of the Funnel
Last but not least: write the right types of content for each stage along the buyer’s journey.
It doesn’t matter how good your content is if you’re showing it to the wrong person. Your writers need to be trained to write for all of the various stages.
In classical marketing theory, there are three basic stages:
- Awareness: The reader is becoming aware of its problem
- Consideration: He considers solutions for the problem
- Decision: After the analysis, he decides on which solution is right for him
Your content funnel needs to address the needs of your customer at each step of their journey. Luckily, these types can be distributed across the funnel.
For the first stage, you need content that attracts attention and raises awareness. This could be videos, infographics, or blog posts.
Formats such as eBooks, detailed guides, webinars, courses, and white papers tend to go over well during the consideration stage.
To convert clients, you’ll also need content that can sell. These are testimonials (it can be text or video), case studies with data, statistics, etc.
You can also use customer stories and short comparisons between your offering and those of your competitors.
Conclusion: You Can Succeed at SaaS Content Marketing
So there you have it. If you follow these steps, chances are your SaaS content marketing will have an advantage on the market.
Always start by developing buyer personas as soon as possible, regardless of which type of marketing we’re talking about.
After that, sett your goals and measure them from day one. Choose the right topics, and write for each stage of the buyer’s journey. If you follow the process, good things will come.
Stay safe and good luck with developing your SaaS content marketing strategy!
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Nina Petrov
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