SaaS Content Marketing: How to Create Strategy That Works
Any SaaS company provides the ability to use certain services for customers over the Internet. These services aim to solve customer’s issues and make life easier
However, there are cases when a target audience can’t understand how your service can help solve their problems.
That’s why your SaaS business needs a powerful content marketing strategy. It would embrace all the potential issues your target audience has and unite them with the service you offer.
In this guide, you will find out how to develop an actionable content marketing strategy for your SaaS blog.
Let’s start.
What Is Content Marketing Strategy
To put it simply, a content marketing strategy is a plan for creating high-quality content that would convert leads into paid customers.
If you think that it is something complicated, you are wrong.
The main idea of a content marketing strategy is to show that your SaaS product can solve the problems. If the content helps understand your audience that your SaaS product solves their issues, they will buy from you.
In the case of Visme, we create tools that help make content visually appealing. In our content marketing strategy, we focus on creating educational content. This content covers ways of solving our audience’s issues by using our services. Therefore, the pieces of content appear for the relevant queries on Google:
If you want to push your SaaS content marketing strategy to the limit, follow these nine steps.
- Set up Your Goals
There is nothing hard in setting content marketing goals for your SaaS blog.
However, if you don’t want to beat your brains with this, you can use the concept of OKRs and SMART criteria.
Your content marketing goals can be different. It all depends on what you want to achieve. However, the practice shows that the majority of SaaS websites follow setting the next goals:
- Increase brand awareness
- Build backlinks
- Get more inbound leads
- Influence your niche
Other than that, a common goal of SaaS websites is growing organic traffic.
“Do you need help with planning and goal setting? You must try ProofHub.”
2. You Should Know Your Target Audience Perfectly
The purpose of the SaaS content marketing strategy is to attract as many people as possible to your website. Afterward, convert them into paid customers.
Sounds quite obvious, agree?
Don’t be hasty in generalization on this occasion. SaaS content marketing strategy can be tricky though.
For instance, your SaaS company offers various design tools and products. You decided to write a piece of content that would cover the aspects of creating maps. You know that your goal is to make people get interested in your interactive map maker tool.
This direction of your topic is good for your target audience. It helps people understand how to create a map. But if you decide to cover the topic on “Top 5 Best Map Creator Tools”, your strategy might begin to show the signs of strain (guess why?).
So, the question is how to understand what content can attract your target audience?
Create a buyer persona for your SaaS business model.
If you don’t know, a buyer persona is a term that is used for describing an ideal customer.
By knowing your buyer persona portrait you can proceed with developing your SaaS content marketing strategy.
3. Brainstorm What Types of Content to Use
When it comes to choosing the type of content to work with, you should focus on one type at the beginner stage of developing a SaaS content marketing strategy.
Therefore, you need to understand what exact type of content would work for attracting your target audience.
For example, your SaaS company offers various SEO tools to optimize websites. Since it is not an “easy-peasy lemon squeezy” to work with SEO tools, you should create educational content.
By publishing educational content you will have an opportunity to talk more about your tools. Teach your target audience to use them.
If written guides touch the basis of using your SEO tools, video content demonstrates step-by-step instruction on this matter. This type of content helps people better understand your service and find out how to utilize it in practice.
Another aspect you should take into account is what type of content you like to create personally. For instance, you like to write blog posts and can’t act on camera for recording video tutorials. Likely, it doesn’t mean that you must forget about producing video content. You can hire a freelancer who could perform this work instead of you. Moreover, there are free online video makers that you can use to create amazing videos to gain more engagement from your content.
Guided by these principles you will choose the correct type of content to build a SaaS content marketing strategy.
4. Explore Top Search Queries on Google
Your SaaS website’s goal is to attract potential leads from two major search engine platforms — Google and YouTube. You are already aware of what target audience you need to attract. You figured out what content types would work for your SaaS content marketing strategy.
But you still don’t know what your target audience searches for across search engine platforms. To be precise, you don’t know what search queries people use to find your SaaS product.
You can detect the queries in two steps.
The first step is the most straightforward one. Think about seed keywords that people might use and unite them with your SaaS service.
Let’s say you offer different tools that help make content more visually appealing. You start brainstorming seed keywords that would be related to your tools. For example, that could be “flowchart maker”, “make an infographic”, “create a presentation” plus more other niche-related keywords.
If you have a list of target seed keywords, you can move to the second step. You should explore all possible keyword opportunities further.
For your information, focus on exploring the queries that are in the form of questions. You can use the Keywords Explorer tool from Ahrefs.
Your attention should be riveted on the “Questions” report. This report suggests phrases in the interrogative form that people use on Google. Review this report and adjust your SaaS content marketing plan to these phrase suggestions.
5. Prioritize Topics in Your Content
A wrong content marketing strategy leads to getting traffic that has no potential value to your SaaS business. It means that people that come to your website are not interested in your service. While your priority should be getting targeted traffic.
How to prioritize content topics to get leads that would convert into paid customers?
Try to review the topics from a “business value” perspective. Hence, split them into the following groups:
- “3” — your service has a direct relation to the problem and can solve it
- “2” — your service works great in solving the problem but the problem can stay unsolved
- “1” — there is no need in using your service to solve the problem
- “0” — your service has nothing in common with the existing problem
Keep using this scale and prioritize topics correctly.
6. Don’t Forget About Mastering a Content Calendar
If you get started to publish content you should take care of mastering a content calendar. The biggest challenge that you will face is constantly generating high-quality content and following a publishing schedule.
In other words, you must be sure that your content is interesting for your target audience and it brings targeted traffic.
There is no certain rule to follow creating your content calendar. It is completely up to you. You can publish up to 2–3 posts in a week or set a monthly goal in terms of the number of publications.
Anyway, this process takes lots of time and effort. Therefore, you can hire a freelancer who would work with your SaaS content publications while you do other marketing stuff.
7. Promote Your Content
Even if you create the best quality and the most useful content, it doesn’t mean that your target audience will see it. Content can’t reach a wide audience without your help. Without a promotion from your end.
How to promote content to tell more people about your SaaS service?
First of all, you need to figure out what content already works great in terms of the buzz it creates on the web and social channels. For this, you can use the so-called “Sherlock Homeboy” technique. This technique helps identify metrics that will tell you which blog post, video, white paper, report, or other content asset was successful.
After, try to promote those posts that are less popular on your blog. You can do this in three ways:
- Outreach
A powerful boost for your blog posts can give blogger outreach. However, if you reach out to the right people. In this very case, you should reach out to influencers in the niche you revolve.
It will give you many benefits like social shares, tweets, likes, and opportunities to build business cooperation. Plus, content promotion outreach can be used for building backlinks to push your posts higher in the SERP.
How to make the influencers reply to your pitch?
You can feature some of the influencers you are interested in the most in your content. Later on, reach out to these influencers and let them know about this mention.
Another way to fall under influencers’ notice is by presenting a case study run by you. Make sure they have never heard about this research and the stats you are going to suggest would impress them.
- Send the newsletter
It is strictly important to build your email list and grow it steadily. The more subscribers you have, the more recognition your content can get through sending the newsletter.
- Paid ads
If you want your content to get in front of a large audience in a blink of an eye, you should use paid advertisement. Paid ads have two downsides — it costs your money and the results start to fade away once you stop paying. Overall, this way of content promotion works great.
8. Don’t Forget to Update Your Content From Time to Time
It is pretty cool if you can write “evergreen” content. But most of the time any blog post becomes outdated and needs some updating.
Breath a new life in your content by repurposing it into other types of content. For example, you can split a comprehensive guide into a few separate posts. Or you can repurpose a blog post into a video uploaded on your YouTube channel.
Your content must not see any stagnation. Hence, revise it and update it if necessary.
9. Always Track the Performance of Your SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
Keep in mind that if you want to see positive progress in your content marketing strategy, you must track the performance of each post you publish.
Use Google Analytics for this purpose. It suggests different reports where you can see the statistics around traffic and other useful metrics available.
Talking about the analysis of your video content on YouTube, you can review the YouTube Analytics channel. It illustrates the level of engagement, reach, audience, and general overview of the channel performance.
If you are obsessed with the keywords, you can track them as well. Rank Tracker tool from Ahrefs can help you with this.
Moreover, you should not just keep an eye on tracking the performance of your content but on controlling your brand online as well. Content must go in line with your entire brand positioning creating a single complete marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Building a SaaS content marketing strategy is a complicated process that includes different stages. If one is missed or done wrong, the strategy will fail.
Likely, by following the tips you found in this post, you will be able to create an outstanding SaaS content marketing strategy that would work perfectly.
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