Content Marketing for SaaS: A Complete Guide

Selling both technology and service as a single entity is a demanding pursuit. With SaaS, your sales might just depend extensively on your content marketing.

Most SaaS companies that make use of content marketing as their chief marketing tool have exhibited up to 30% higher growth and 10% higher retention.

Thus it is safe to say that content marketing is an indispensable tool for SaaS.

But that is exactly where the challenge begins. SaaS rests in a world of technical know-how which makes creating engaging content for SaaS highly challenging. Now, combine engaging content with unique and the whole ordeal of content marketing for SaaS becomes even more difficult.

What, then, could be the way of upgrading your SaaS content marketing game?

Let’s find out.

1. Find Out the Right Strategic Goals

Any strategy is incomplete without a set goal. For any business, goals are the gold needed to realize the success of their campaigns. When we say goals, we do not hint towards a metric. A goal defines the expected yield of a content marketing strategy.

For instance, your company may want to scale brand recognition for the leads at the awareness stage of the sales funnel, or your company may wish to attain leads consistently every month.

Typically, the content marketing strategy for SaaS should be oriented towards progressive growth. This implies that even on the same monthly investment, the outcome should be higher every month.

Always remember that the goals you set must be measurable and smart. This is essential for easy evaluation. These goals must align with the overall business objective and should contribute to it in every way.

2. Chose Apt KPIs

As we already mentioned, measurability is crucial in understanding how far along you are in achieving your goals.

For SaaS content marketing, some key performance metrics that you can track are:

• Unique page visits – To understand the number of new people visiting your page during a stipulated time, you must track the unique page visits.
• Time spent on page – This metric tells you if your content is keeping the reader hooked or not. If someone spends enough time on your page, they might just sign up for a subscription or fill up a form.
• Cost of new visitors – This metric helps you place your expenses against your traffic on the content page.
• Average lifetime value – With the help of this KPI, you can gain an insight into the number of website visitors who actually spend on buying your company’s offerings. From this, you can learn more about the choice of keyword, sales funnel, and list building.
• Cost of new subscribers – If the cost spent per gain of new subscribers is high, then your content strategy is not fine enough.
• The number of sign-ups per unique visitor – The people who sign up for SaaS are counted within this metric. If the sign-ups are sizable yet the average lifetime value for visitors is low, then that implies the SaaS is not meeting the expectation of the visitors even though the content is persuasive enough.

The above-given list is not exhaustive. There are many more metrics that you can set to track the success of your content marketing campaign. The key idea is to align these metrics with your goals and business objectives.

While some metrics give you the meat for lead generation and conversion optimization, others act as a support system. Nonetheless, their importance cannot be dismissed.

3. Have a Defined Funnel

Any foolproof content marketing strategy must take into account three main strategic goals related to funnels:

• Put the funnel and the lead in the same place
• Enlarge the funnel size
• Progress the leads across the funnel

Here, it is essential to understand how the journey of a lead pans out through distinct stages. To be more defined, we suggest that you use data to create the sales funnel model.

The data-based funnel can be pitched against traditional sales funnel models to map out the potential brand identity. You can always opt for personalization to create your SaaS sales funnel. You can also optimize the existing sales funnel and use that to obtain good results.

The most beneficial endeavor could be to increase the scope of the sales funnel to more markets and further stages.

4. Searching For The Target Audience

Often companies go wrong with setting the right audience base for their SaaS content strategy. At times because they select too narrow an audience or too broad.

Yet, once the right audience base is identified, the following step is to conduct the right research to generate content that the audience finds relatable.

One way to do this is by looking for the right keywords. Try to find out where most of your target audience is hanging out and the prospective questions they are asking.

By understanding the type of queries your leads are looking for, their social media preferences, networks and groups actively used by them, channels viewed by them, and blogs read by them, you can form an opinion about them.

While you cannot be omnipresent on all social platforms, you can still keep track of platforms used by your target audience. Here, you may find an opportunity to place your content such that more traffic is drawn to it.

5. Understand The Competition

Conducting foolproof competitor research differentiates your content marketing strategy. The more in-depth the research, the easier it is for you to analyze the content gap.

Within SaaS, you would find a plethora of competitors with a well-structured content marketing strategy. To excel and differentiate yourself from your direct competition, carry out in-depth research by analyzing keywords within their content.

You can also take a look at the topics they cover/write about. By doing so, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of their content and formulate your own depending on the same.

But, do not go about the competitor analysis blindly. It is possible that many of your competitors do not have a decent content marketing strategy.

But once you get a grip on what the competition is doing, you can construct your strategy without sweating about it.

6. Your Keyword Strategy Counts

With keywords, both the quality and the quantity matter. Overstuffing your content with primary and secondary keywords does not guarantee your articles better ranking. It is commonplace knowledge that the influx of traffic on a website depends highly on the quality and volume of keywords employed. Not just that, low quality caused by keyword overstuffing can repel your readers.

To up your keyword strategy game, use tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner, KeywordTool.io, SEMrush, etc.

Through these tools, you can discover the frequency with which a search is initiated, keyword variation, and keyword usage by the competition.

Your keyword selection should resonate with your content strategy goals. It is important to be mindful about where your content will go. For instance, if the content lands at a platform where most of the traffic is constant, keyword usage may not help.

While the main goal behind your content marketing strategy is to generate leads for eventual conversion, we recommend you not to soft sell.

The bottom line is that your campaign goal should be placed on the highest pedestal. With the whereabouts of your goal in mind, levy focus on creating keywords that can potentially rank you well while maintaining the quality of the content.

7. Come up with a list building strategy

As one of the essential elements of your content marketing strategy, list-building is something you should be mindful of.

Under this, the core idea is to create a lead magnet. From e-books to videos, a plethora of content forms can be used as a lead magnet.

The idea is to get a sign-up by attracting the leads through these. From hereon, getting the convert is a separate game waiting to be played.

8. Come up with an outreach strategy

Go beyond the basics to form a good outreach strategy. You need not restrict yourself to one platform or one type of promotion.

For instance, you can take the help of influencers for a robust outreach. For this, you can explore the idea of influencer marketing to forge associations with individuals who best resonate with the essence of your SaaS brand.

If your content gets featured in other publications or on pages of influencers, you can twist the opportunity by having rock-solid target resources in mind.

9. Your content cycle matters

With no content cycle, your workflow would perish. In such cases, the content turnaround time increases unnecessarily.

After a good audience identification, keyword research, and problem identification, follow the below cycle to produce hassle-free content for SaaS:

• Create a content outline
• Back your content with research while creating.
• Publish and promote your content
• Track the KPIs
• Audit your content on a fixed basis.

To make things easier, use a calendar to post content consistently. And to go a mile further, organize your workflow using tools such as Trello.

Get your SaaS on

Every step in the way you set your content marketing strategy for SaaS, right from defining the goals to content posting and success tracking, matters.

If you happen to follow what we just preached, you might just land yourself a boom in sales.