SaaS content marketing is a well-known strategy that does not need introduction. Almost every SaaS brand has a website with a blog section. Most of these brands also have a significant social media presence. Creating social media posts and writing blogs is one aspect, but creating content that actively supports business goals is another. Anyone can create content, but only smart marketers can convert their audience into customers with their content. This blog is the perfect guide to help you create the most powerful content marketing campaign for maximum ROI.
What is SaaS content marketing?
SaaS content marketing is a systematic approach to creating and distributing high-quality content to build brand awareness, generate leads, and increase customer retention for SaaS businesses.
For various reasons, content marketing for SaaS is different from content marketing for other industries. SaaS content marketing is more complex due to the following reasons:
- Target audience diversity – SaaS caters to several industries and user types; therefore, content marketing for SaaS requires tailored messaging.
- Long sales cycle – Building relationships in SaaS businesses requires time and patience, thus mandating consistent engagement with potential clients.
- Technical complexity – Explaining intricate software requires clear and accessible content that resonates with users. This means that you have to simplify technical jargon for effective understanding of content.
- Continuous updates – SaaS content requires regular updating in order to reflect product changes for maintaining relevance. This ensures that potential customers have the most accurate information.
All the above reasons require robust content marketing for SaaS companies. Think of the content marketing strategy as a marathon and not a sprint.
Major content formats for SaaS content marketing
Most SaaS brands rely on these popular content formats:
Blogging
Blogging is the most common type of content marketing. This is done through on-site content as well as guest posting. More than 95% of SaaS companies publish blogs dedicated to educating potential customers, establishing brand authority, and improving website ranking on search engines.
Blog posts are the best forms of inbound content that help cultivate brand loyalty and convert prospects. Moreover, a comprehensive blog acts like a link magnet that attracts backlinks to boost website performance on search engines.
Video marketing
Video marketing has emerged as one of the most effective forms of marketing in the SaaS industry. It is known to convert more than 80% of SaaS customers. Videos are the latest rage as they are easier to consume and the easiest way to inform leads about your product and services. Creating video content is also very affordable, given the advanced smartphone features we have today. Plus, videos help develop personalized relations with customers.
Podcasting
Podcasts have become exceedingly popular in the last few years. SaaS podcast channels are great for educating leads because SaaS consumers prefer listening to industry-efficient people to enhance their knowledge. Plus, it is convenient for leads to consume this long-format content while going about their day, like commuting or cooking.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing provides an interactive and dynamic space to connect with your target audience. Engaging visuals, short-form videos, and interactive content work excellently for driving traffic. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter facilitate direct customer interaction, helping you collect useful insights and feedback.
Email marketing
Email marketing is a highly effective channel for nurturing leads and building long-term customer relationships. Targeted email campaigns can deliver valuable content, promote special offers, and inform the audience about new features and product updates. Segmented email lists and personalized emails are great ways to induce customer engagement.
Some other popular inbound marketing methods for SaaS companies are white papers, webinars, case studies, ebooks, templates, etc.
How to build an effective content marketing strategy for SaaS brands?
You need a powerful content marketing strategy to scale your SaaS business. However, there’s more to the story than just crafting relevant and persuasive content. You need a well-thought-out distribution plan to leverage conversions and sales. Before strategizing your content marketing plan, you must identify what content and channels work best for you. Read ahead to discover how to craft a compelling content marketing strategy to convert you into an industry leader!
Understand your target audience
You indeed have a general idea of your target audience. However, you need more than a surface-level understanding of your customers’ needs to scale your SaaS content marketing program. For example, your SaaS product is CRM software, so your target customers will likely be sales managers or business owners. While it is great to identify your ideal customers, you must delve deeper to understand their specific needs and challenges.
Create buyer personas by conducting thorough audience research. This will help you get a grasp on your target audience’s pain points, objectives, budget considerations, and much more. Your B2B buyer persona should sketch the customer’s aspirations, roles, hurdles, preferred content format, and purchasing authority.
B2B marketers must develop multiple buyer personas as there are likely multiple stakeholders in the sales process. While the sales manager you are targeting for your CRM product might use the product, they may not be the final decision-maker. This means it is imperative to develop another persona for the decision-maker and craft a distinct content strategy.
Not feeling like reading? Listen about this topic in Podcast.
It is of utmost importance to understand the needs of your primary user and everyone involved in the buying and decision-making process to generate relevant content that accelerates conversions. Opt for mapping your buyer’s journey as it provides valuable insights into how customers navigate the sales funnel. This data will help you produce persuasive content tailored for each stage of the journey, facilitating conversion and retention.
Determine the goals of your content marketing campaign
While buyer personas help you identify your target audience, it is equally important to understand the purpose behind your content campaign. Figure out your inbound marketing objectives to decide which content types and channels you will use to achieve your business goals.
Brand awareness and lead generation
Brand awareness and lead generation are usually the top two content marketing goals. Brand awareness brings your SaaS to the forum. Without awareness, no one would know that your product exists. The best content formats for building brand awareness are blogging and video marketing. Use informational keywords to amplify the impact of your blogs and videos.
Conversion
No matter what the goal of your campaign is, you will always want your leads to convert. This is where lead nurturing comes into action. The best content formats that foster lead generation are webinars, eBooks, and quizzes, which can be shared with your leads once they share their email addresses. This will provide valuable information to your leads, and you will get their contact details, which you can use to keep them updated with industry insights and product developments while nurturing your relationship.
Enhanced user experience
Providing a positive customer experience is important to retain existing customers. Content like tutorials and how-to guides are great catalysts to keep customers engaged with easily accessible and up-to-date information. It is always best to diversify your content strategy to maximize ROI.
Develop a content creation process
Content creation always remains a significant challenge for B2B marketers. You need good ideas to create content, but getting daily inspiration is impossible. Still, you must consistently publish high-quality content to keep your audience engaged and search engine rankings high.
These are the basic elements that you require for an effective content creation process:
Build a knowledge base
Your knowledge base refers to resources your writing team can use for information. These include:
- Editorial guidelines
- Templates
- Guideline for creating a blog outline
- Contact details for your team
- Common FAQs
The knowledge base must be managed by a person in charge who regularly spends a few hours updating necessary things.
Hire a writing and editorial team
Hire skilled writers and editors to churn out great content. You can put a well-planned recruitment process to shortlist qualified writers and editors. This recruitment plan must include a writing and editorial test to test the candidate’s caliber on a hands-on basis.
Invest in content management system
You must invest in a few practical content management tools to manage the entire content production process. Some of the best content management tools are:
- Airtable or Trello – Both these tools are excellent content management platforms.
- Slack – This tool helps keep your content team connected for effective collaboration.
- Zapier – This tool facilitates the integration and automation of the entire process.
Keyword research and content creation
Use tools like Ahrefs and Wordstream for keyword research and finalize keyword clusters and related long-tail and short-tail keywords that align with your content creation goals. Now, allocate these keywords to your writers to create engaging and informative content. After the final editing process, publish the content with relevant meta tags, meta descriptions, optimized images, etc., to garner organic traffic to your site.
Craft an Effective SaaS Content Distribution Strategy
Content distribution implies publishing and promoting content across different platforms to reach the right audience efficiently. If you simply post a tutorial on YouTube, it is unlikely to benefit in terms of optimal performance. The content must be strategically distributed to engage leads.
These are three main distribution models commonly used for content marketing for SaaS products:
- Owned distribution – It refers to using channels your business owns, such as email lists. Though time-consuming, this distribution model is great for organic growth.
- Shared/ earned distribution – This involves leveraging third-party platforms to improve visibility, although this channel possesses no control over the content once published.
- Paid distribution – This involves paying for channels, like influencer partnerships, to get quick results but at a potentially higher cost.
Effective content distribution demands an excellent understanding of your target market. Customer research aids in identifying preferred content distribution channels facilitating customized content creation. For instance, adapting a blog post for Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn accordingly can dramatically help improve engagement and ROI.
Evaluate and adapt your strategy
After distributing content to different channels, you must evaluate the effectiveness of your SaaS content marketing strategy. For this, implement certain metrics that will help monitor the performance of your content campaign. Ensure that your chosen metrics align with your content type and related goals. For instance, the best metric to analyze content with the goal of lead generation is to track email list opt-in rates.
The major content metrics that SaaS businesses should track are:
- Click-Through Rate- Also known as CTR, Click-Through Rate assesses content relevance by tracking the number of clicks on CTAs throughout landing pages, Google Ads, and email campaigns.
- Time spent on page – This evaluates how well-engaging your content is by tracking people’s time on your pages. The longer the time spent, the higher the audience’s interest in your content. On the other hand, a high bounce rate would require a thorough website and content audit.
- Web traffic – This metric measures overall content performance on the basis of the number of visitors to your web pages.
- Customer Acquisition Cost – Also referred to as CAC, Customer Acquisition Cost implies evaluating the financial performance of your SaaS content marketing campaign. It compares the marketing cost to the total number of acquired customers.
There are various tools for content marketing analysis, such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, to monitor traffic and bounce rates efficiently. This helps analyze how customers engage with your content and identify areas for improvement. Without proper analytics, you will likely waste resources by working in an unorganized manner.
Bottomline
SaaS content marketing requires adequate focus on your audience and their needs, mapping out the entire buyer’s journey, and providing premium quality informative content. It is crucial to identify the industry challenges while you develop your strategy. Partnering with leading content marketing agencies like Kreativ Street will help you easily sail through the tricky waters of SaaS content marketing, providing amazing lead generation, conversions, and ROI results.
If you want to enhance your SaaS brand’s online visibility, develop large-scale quality content, and grow your business with well-planned and data-driven content marketing, contact our Kreativ Street team today!
