Connect with your audience by covering the topics they care about the most.
Plan out a network of interlinked blogs that answer related questions and help each
other rank.
Write and publish content that helps people, and watch your rankings go up!
Find topics and outlines catered to your business.
Storytelling to convey value is an old practice. Today, SaaS businesses simply call it content marketing. SaaS content marketing builds on this basic idea to sell intangible products, which can be harder to market than traditional goods a customer could hold in their hand.
But just brainstorming a bunch of content ideas for SaaS companies is unlikely to produce the kinds of results most modern marketers are looking for. Especially in the highly competitive SaaS landscape, the way to get your story seen by your target audience is to develop and execute an effective SaaS content marketing strategy.
And that’s exactly what we’re going to show you how to do in the rest of this article. Keep reading to get our deep dive on the:
Content marketing for SaaS refers to using written or spoken words in order to try and sell a SaaS product. There are a bunch of different ways people do this, including writing blogs, social media posts, email newsletters, whitepapers, or webinars.
There are a few different types of content strategy that businesses fall into, the three main being:
The third type of strategy is going to be the most effective because good content marketing requires this more holistic approach. Ideally, content marketing is the overall strategy a SaaS company uses to regularly provide high value content in order to interest, convert, and keep their target audience.
So what does a good content strategy need to make this magic happen? B2C and B2B SaaS content marketing
both benefit from the same main approach. Our next section will look at each component in more detail.
The best SaaS content marketing strategies will:
This framework will be the scaffolding you build your content strategy around. You’ll want to ask some specific questions about who your target audience is, what solution your product offers, and why they should pick you over the competition. It’s vital to know what you’re trying to achieve in this step, things like driving website traffic or generating better leads. This needs to happen before you start making a detailed plan on how to carry out your content writing.
Now that you know who you want to reach and why, it’s time to start researching the nitty gritty details. The best way to reach an audience is to find out where and how they are looking for the solutions your product offers. This way you can tailor your content strategy so the words you’re going to write are the most likely to actually be seen by the people they’ll matter to.
A big portion of most audiences will be using search engines to look for answers to their pain points. Search engine optimization and writing content using the language your audience is typing into Google is the best way to make your content count. This is where a marketing platform like DemandJump comes into play, because we show you exactly what questions and keywords your audience is searching for on a given topic. Focusing your content strategy around ranking highly on search engines is a concrete basis for a strategy that will help you achieve your marketing goals and drive the business outcomes you want.
An important element of this type of strategy development will be to decide how much content you need to create to really move the needle and see results. At DemandJump, we’re the first and only marketing company to focus on Pillar-Based Marketing. This strategy is based on the idea that a network of related blogs and longer pieces of content, linking to each other in a strategic way, shows search engines that you are an authority on a topic and should rank highly. Our strategy helps you leverage the high value of your content and make sure your potential customers will actually find it when they go looking.
The last important part of any content strategy is measurable objectives. Each SaaS company will have their own preferred metrics, the important part is that you define what data you will be looking at and what constitutes success. Some examples might be that your business wants to:
The best strategy in the world doesn’t do any good if it doesn’t actually get done. Deciding how to achieve your goals is important, but actually getting content live on your website is the only way this strategy can do anything. This component involves looking at what the strategy says needs to happen, and deciding who’s going to do the work to make it happen. Allocating bandwidth to your marketing department and a set schedule with due dates for individual pieces of content is one possible solution. Hiring outside content writers, like DemandJump offers, is another.
Now that we’ve gone over the basic components, let’s shift focus to the action steps of how to create a content strategy.
Make SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely) goals for your strategy, so you know where you’re trying to go. To do this you need to:
It’s time to make your content calendar, deciding exactly what type and how many pieces of content will be written in a set time period to achieve your objectives. With our Pillar Based Marketing (PBM) approach, this step is easy because we’ve done the work to know how search engines reward content published in a certain way.
Search engine algorithms don’t simply look at individual pieces of content when deciding which websites to show on page one search results. They look at the entire “content ecosystem” of a website to understand that site’s topic authority. So if you have a website focused on selling hats and suddenly publish an article about quantum theory, search engines are less likely to show this article to someone searching for more information on physics. They are going to prioritize a science website that has a long history of publishing articles related to the topic, since it’s more likely that that website will provide useful content for the searcher.
PBM works with this understanding of search algorithms and has developed a specific strategy using 16 pieces of content all around one topic that shows search engines your website is an authority. With DemandJump’s insights, choosing the topics for each article and the specifics like word count and number of keywords to include becomes very intuitive.
Wondering how to write SaaS content? Write for humans first and always! Use search engine data to understand what kinds of things people are searching for around your chosen topic. But don’t write as if your audience is an algorithm or a robot. Well written, clear, informative, and concise content is the aim. Trying to answer the questions real people really care about gives you structure on what topics to write about. Make sure your writers and company stakeholders have a chance to proofread and fine-tune the writing so that it is factually correct, spelling- and grammar-mistake free, and aligns with the overall company voice and style.
Get your great content out into the world. Publish it as landing pages and/or blogs on your website, where it can drive traffic to your product as well as educate your customers. Organic content can do a great job of getting eyeballs, but promoting it on your business’ existing social media or investing in paid advertising can supercharge the effects.
Now that you’ve got the basics, let’s look at a real world example of how the strategy for content creation in SaaS can work following the steps we’ve laid out. We’ll use Subscriptions Are Us, a SaaS company that makes it easy for small businesses to set up subscription boxes, as our hypothetical example.
Subscriptions Are Us is a newer business, and is mostly focused on building brand awareness and free trial memberships. There specific objectives for content marketing are:
With these objectives and the PBM strategy in mind, this business sets out 16 pieces of content they want to write and publish.
Subscriptions Are Us continues creating their roadmap in this way until they have set the titles for all 16 pieces of content in their first pillar.
They assign an in-house writer to produce two pieces of content a week, and finish the plan in 8 weeks.
They publish their content all at once at the end of month two, share each piece on their social media channels, and put paid ads on their top level pieces for added visibility. Subscriptions Are Us track their keyword rankings on search engines for the following two months.
They see great results in their search engine rankings, and exceed their objectives by getting three page 1 results and twenty page 2-4 results. They also double their number of free trial memberships in only 5 months, instead of their projected six month timeline. They had such good results that they begin planning for their next pillar topic, “Subscription Box Management.”
Developing a content strategy and carrying it all the way to the finish line is a lot of work. It can feel hard to justify especially because it takes time to complete and see the results. DemandJump helps make this easier! Our platform shows you the exact content you need to write and the structure that will give it the most SEO juice. And our Pillar-Based Marketing strategy shows results faster than other methods, so you get to see measurable results fast! Try it for free today to see for yourself.
