SaaS Content Marketing: The Definitive Guide (2022)

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your SaaS (Software as a Service) business, sell more, and increase your market share.

But what exactly is content marketing?

Content marketing  is the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and interesting content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — with the goal of eventually driving profitable customer action.

The keyword here is “valuable.” Your content must be valuable to your target audience if you want them to stick around and eventually buy from you.

For instance, HubSpot’s blog attracts millions of monthly readers because they produce high-quality, helpful, educational content that solves its audience’s pain points.

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Given the diversity of SaaS solutions that HubSpot offers, its blog is categorized into segments relevant to specific target audience groups, which helps it attract and retain a clearly-defined audience.

If you want to leverage SaaS content marketing to attract and retain your customers and prospects, a great place to start is by reading this post. You’ll learn:

• What content marketing is and why it’s so important for your SaaS business.
• The different types of content you can create to attract and retain your target audience
• How to create a content marketing strategy that will help you achieve your business goals.
• And much more!

By the end of this post, you’ll have a better understanding of how to use SaaS content marketing to sell more and increase your market share.

So, let’s get started!

How is Content Marketing for SaaS Businesses Different?

The difference between content marketing for a SaaS business and other types of businesses is that the former sells a service, not a product.

Your potential customers don’t just want to know about your features, they want to know how your software will make their lives easier, solve their specific problems, and help them achieve their goals.

This is where valuable, relevant, and interesting content comes in.

If you can produce content that educates your potential customers on how to use your software to solve their specific problems, you’ll be well on your way to attracting and retaining them as customers.

The different types of content you can create for your SaaS business are:

• Blog posts
• Tutorials and how-to guides
• Product demonstration videos
• Customer case studies and testimonials
• Ebooks and whitepapers
• Infographics

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to the types of content you should create. The best way to determine what type of content will work best for your business is to use account-based marketing  to personalize your customer experiences.

For example:

If you’re selling to large enterprise organizations, you’ll need to create content that’s highly technical and informative. This could include blog posts, white papers, ebooks, and infographics.

If you’re selling to small businesses, you’ll need to create content that’s more general and easy to consume. This could include blog posts, social media updates, and video content.

Regardless of your target audience or industry, it’s important to focus on creating high-quality, valuable content  that resonates with your customers and helps them achieve their goals. By doing this, you’ll be able to build stronger relationships with your customers and drive more conversions over time.

Why Use Content Marketing for Your SaaS Business?

Content marketing is a powerful tool that can help you to attract and engage your target audience, generate leads, and boost conversions. When used correctly, content marketing can be an essential part of your SaaS business’s growth strategy.

There are many reasons why you should use content marketing for your SaaS business. Here are just a few:

• It can help you establish thought leadership and credibility within your niche. When you create content that is valuable and interesting, people will look to you for expert advice and help when they need it. This can have a huge impact on the success of your business by helping you to build trust with potential customers and encourage them to choose your product over that of your competitors.
• Your customers are likely to be researching their purchases online before they make a decision, and content marketing can help you to reach them at this stage of their journey. Creating useful articles, guides, and case studies will enable interested prospects to find your business when they are searching for relevant information.
• It can help you nurture your leads and move them further down the sales funnel. By providing helpful resources that address their specific needs and pain points, you can keep your business top-of-mind for potential customers and encourage them to take the next step in the purchase journey.
• Content marketing is a cost-effective way to build brand awareness and attract new customers. By creating valuable content that attracts organic traffic, you will be able to direct potential customers to your website without having to spend money on expensive advertising campaigns. This can help you to cut the costs of growing your SaaS business and improve your ROI.
• If you create high-quality content that is shared by influencers, you will be able to reach a larger audience and boost your business’s visibility. This can lead to improved brand awareness and increased website traffic.
• Content marketing can be used to support other marketing initiatives. For example, you can use blog posts to drive traffic to your website, landing pages to capture leads, and case studies to close deals. By integrating content into your overall marketing strategy, you can maximize its potential impact on your business’s growth.
• With so many SaaS businesses competing for attention online, it’s important to make sure that your company stands out from the crowd. Creating unique and high-quality content can help you differentiate your business from the competition and give potential customers a reason to choose your business over others in the market.

How to Create an Effective SaaS Content Marketing Strategy?

As the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry continues to grow, so does the competition for customers. In order to stand out in this competitive landscape, you need to have a strong content marketing strategy.

Your SaaS content marketing strategy should be designed to attract and engage your target audience. It should also be tailored to the unique needs of your business.

Here are a few tips to help you create an effective SaaS content marketing strategy:

1. Identify Your Target Audience and Their Pain Points

The key to SaaS content marketing success is having a good understanding of your target audience’s wants and needs. This means you need to conduct market research using surveys, interviews, and focus groups to get to know your target audience’s needs better.

You should find out:

• Who is your target audience?
• What are their biggest pain points?
• What type of content do they prefer the most?
• Where are they most likely to go for information about relevant SaaS products?
• How do they like to consume that information (e.g., via blogs, social media, infographics, etc.)?

Once you know who your target audience is and what their needs are, you can create buyer personas. This will help you develop targeted content that speaks directly to your audience’s specific needs.

2. Define Strategic Goals and Key Performance Metrics for Your Campaign

The next step is to define your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). This will help you measure the success of your SaaS content marketing strategy.

Some common goals for SaaS content marketing campaigns include:

• Generating leads
• Nurturing prospects
• Building brand awareness
• Increasing web traffic
• Engaging customers

To make sure your goals are achievable, you need to set KPIs.

For example, if your goal is to increase web traffic, your KPIs could be the number of page views or unique visitors you need to get in a month. Similarly, if your goal is to generate leads, your KPIs could be the number of leads generated or the conversion rate.

3. Analyze Your Competition

You can learn a lot from your competition. A good place to start is by conducting a content audit. This involves going through all of your competitor’s content and identifying what’s working well and what’s not.

You should also look at how often they’re publishing content and what types of content they’re using. For example, are they writing in-depth blog posts, or are they using a mix of blog posts, infographics, and videos?

Once you have a good understanding of your competition’s content marketing strategy, you can start to develop your own strategy.

4. Conduct Keyword Research and Analysis

The next step is to conduct keyword research and analysis to understand your target audience’s search behavior and analyze what opportunities may exist for you.

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner and Semrush to find keywords that have a relatively high search volume and medium-to-low competition (which means they are easier to rank for).

You should also look at the SERPs (search engine results pages) to see what types of content are ranking for your target keywords. This will give you an idea of the type of content you need to create in order to rank on the first page.

For example:

If you’re selling an accounting software  solution, it’s best to look for types of content ranking for terms like “accounting software,” “accounting software for small business,” and other related terms.

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As you can see in the above screenshot, most ranking articles other than landing pages are listicles on the top accounting software solutions in the market. It’s best to have an influential business accounting professional write a sponsored listicle for you and place your SaaS product on the top of their list (#1).

5. Conduct a Content Audit

A content audit is an inventory of the content you currently have on your website and other channels (e.g., social media, email, etc.). This will help you take stock of what you already have, identify gaps in your content, and determine what type of content you should create to attract and retain your target audience.

Once you’ve conducted a content audit, you can start brainstorming ideas for the different types of content you can create to educate your potential customers on how to use your software to solve their specific problems.

For example, if you sell call center security software, you could create educational blog posts on how to use call center software, the benefits of using one, and the pricing of call center software .

These articles would be a valuable piece of content for business owners who are looking for information on how to improve their call center security.

You can also create a comparison post on CloudTalk vs. Aircall or any other call center software to help business owners make an informed decision on which software is best for their needs. This type of content will be best for users in the decision-making stage of the buyer’s journey.

By providing helpful, relevant, and interesting content for every stage of the buyer’s journey, you’ll be able to attract and retain your target audience, and sell more of your software.

6. Plan Your Content Calendar for Each Stage of the Sales Funnel

As mentioned above, your SaaS marketing content must be laser-focused on topics that are relevant to your target customers at each stage of the sales funnel for the best results.

Here are a few tactics and content types you can use to plan your content calendar during each stage of the buyer’s journey:

Awareness Goal: To generate web traffic and brand awareness

Tactics: Blog posts, SaaS product reviews, curated lists of SaaS solutions in your niche, email marketing, social media, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing

Evaluation Goal: To generate leads

Tactics: Case studies, your SaaS product comparison with other related SaaS solutions, email list building, newsletters, social media, free ebook downloads, webinars, videos

Purchase Goal: To convert leads into customers (subscribers of your SaaS product)

Tactics: Newsletters, free demos and trials, SaaS product comparison guides, account-based marketing

Retention Goal: To retain customers (subscribers), upsell, increase advocacy

Tactics: SaaS product updates, tutorials, training videos, special days discount offers on upgrading to higher-value plans, personalized emails, account-based marketing

7. Create Engaging Content

Once you know which types of content to create and which tactics to use to engage and retain your prospects, it’s time to start creating and publishing content.

When creating your content, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity. This means publishing fewer pieces of content that are comprehensive, well-researched, and engaging, rather than publishing a large volume of low-quality content.

This will help you establish your authority as a thought leader in the SaaS space, attract more traffic to your website, and convert more leads into long-term customers.

Here are a few tips to create engaging content:

• Your headline is the first thing your reader will see, so it’s important to make it catchy and relevant to the rest of your article.
• Subheadings are a great way to break up your content and make it easier to read. Use them liberally throughout your article.
• Use short sentences and paragraphs to make your content more scannable.
• Use images, infographics, and videos to break up your text and add visual interest to your post.
• Ensure that you provide enough information to engage your readers while still being short enough to hold their attention.
• Include a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your content to invite readers to take the next step in the buyer’s journey. This could be signing up for your email list, downloading a whitepaper or ebook, or scheduling a demo of your software.

One SaaS business using content marketing successfully is Ahrefs, which offers top-notch SEO tools and resources in the industry.

Along with writing well-researched blog posts with actionable tips and steps to follow in the SEO industry, Ahrefs also frequently produces quick videos to cover key topics and give actionable advice to both beginners and experts.

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8. Set a Content Distribution Strategy in Place

Once you’ve created your content, it’s important to have a strategy in place for distributing and promoting it. This will help you reach more of your target audience, gain more exposure for your brand, and ultimately convert more leads into customers.

Here are a few tactics you can use to distribute your content:

• Publish your content on your website and blog.
• Share your content on social media, using hashtags, influencers, and relevant communities to reach a wider audience.
• Send your content out via email, using relevant subject lines and calls-to-action (CTAs) to encourage click-throughs.
• Work with relevant industry influencers and bloggers to have your content featured on their sites, or reach out to publications in your niche to see if they would be interested in covering your content.
• Host a webinar or live stream about the topic of your content to attract a larger audience and generate leads.

9. Monitor Results and Optimize Your Campaign Accordingly

After you’ve published your content and started promoting it, it’s important to monitor the results to see how well it’s performing. This can help you identify areas for improvement and optimize your content marketing strategy accordingly.

Here are a few metrics to measure with each piece of content:

• Traffic: How many people are viewing your content, and where are they coming from?
• Engagement: How long are people spending on your content, and how many social shares or comments is it receiving?
• Conversions: How many leads or sales are you generating from your content?

In order to measure and optimize these key metrics, make sure that you have Google Analytics set up on your website, and also track social media engagement using tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite.

Wrapping Up

That’s everything you need to know about using SaaS content marketing to attract and engage prospects and sell your software more.

Next, you should focus on consistently producing high-quality content and you’ll be well on your way to driving more traffic, leads, and sales for your business.

If you have any questions or need help getting started, please feel free to send us a message. Thanks for reading!