Updated September 2020: If you want to thrive in the competitive B2B SaaS market, you need a strong content strategy for SaaS that gets the attention of your customers and prospects. It’s essential that you have a robust amount of valuable content that helps move your audience through the buyer’s journey.
However, to effectively gain awareness and drive new leads, you need more than just content—you’ve got to have a solid strategy behind your content. Over half of B2B marketers aren’t clear on what a content strategy should contain, and just 44% consider their strategy effective.
In this article, you’ll get a step-by-step guide on how to improve your content strategy for SaaS so you can grab the attention of your customers and prospects. Let’s jump in:
Step 1: Know your competition well
There’s so much content on the web that your potential SaaS customers are overwhelmed. If you’re going to get their attention, you’ll need a content strategy for SaaS that includes lots of high-value content to catch their eye. How do you create intentional content that drives leads?
Research your SaaS competitors and see what kind of content they’re producing. What topics do they write about? What pain points do they address? Does the content resonate with your target audience?
Figure out the gaps that your competitors aren’t covering. If you can give readers exactly what they’re looking for AND no one else is providing that information, you’ll stand out immediately.
Step 2: Get inside your SaaS customer’s head
Collect the data you need to gain a deep understanding of your target audience by conducting some customer research: send out a questionnaire to your current SaaS customers or prospects. Ideally, you’ll interview 5 to 10 of them to get valuable insights about their problems and goals.
By uncovering what topics resonate with your customers, you can lock down the best keywords to use in your SEO practices, and determine what subjects you might want to cover when you’re creating content.
Part of developing a great content strategy for SaaS includes producing content for customers who’ve already purchased your products or services. Think about what information they’d find valuable and whether it would allow your company to expand your relationship with them.
Step 3: Make a plan for your content
Using your research, identify key content themes for your SaaS content strategy and decide how often you want to create content. It’s important to stay consistent, from your choice of writing tone and style to the amount of content you produce and when you publish it.
Every piece of content you create for SaaS should relate to a business objective, such as increasing traffic to your website, generating leads through content downloads or getting prospects to sign up for a free trial of your software. Ultimately, the end goal is often to drive revenue for your company.
To give yourself the best chance of achieving your objectives, you should brainstorm each piece of content with the end goal at the forefront. Craft specific content for each stage of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration and decision).
Another way to supercharge your content strategy for SaaS is to create pillar posts that link out to other SaaS blog posts you’ve written on another aspect of the same topic. This helps strengthen your search engine rankings.
Explore 5 impactful content strategies for SaaS customer marketing.
Step 4: Create relevant, effective content
A crucial part of a content strategy for SaaS involves developing various types of content, such as blog posts, case studies, ebooks, white papers, videos, webinars and podcasts. While you don’t have to tackle all of these, it’s important to have a few in your marketing toolkit.
With the customer research and keywords you uncovered in Step 2, you can create your content with optimization in mind. The keywords you discovered will translate directly into optimizing your content for powerful SEO.
Each piece of content should end with a call to action to guide your audience where you want them to go next. When crafting a call to action, remember that you’re creating a journey for the reader. The place that you send them to has to be relevant and helpful.
You don’t have to start from scratch every time you produce content. You can repurpose your existing content to improve it and help you get more mileage from it. With 50% of companies’ content going unused, this is a wise strategy to implement in your SaaS business.
Step 5: Figure out how to efficiently distribute your content
When developing a content strategy for SaaS, you need to figure out the best plan of attack for distributing your content. This can be done, in part, by analyzing your existing data closely. You need to know which channels of communication (website, blog, social media, etc.) have been most effective for reaching your target audience, and which content is performing best of all.
Once you’ve identified your benchmarks, set goals for each metric you want to track. The metrics you focus on should help you gather insights that tie back to the larger business goals you initially identified for the content.
Step 6: Measure your content performance
Evaluation is an essential part of a content strategy for SaaS. By monitoring the performance of your content, you’ll find out important information about your customers and prospects. Your audience might not always tell you directly what they like and don’t like, but their behavior and content consumption online certainly will.
Learn more about how to measure content performance.
Boost the performance of your content
You know that your content needs to perform so you can meet your goals, but what exactly should you optimize? Download our Content Optimization Checklist to find out.
