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From top giants to small companies, everyone uses SaaS as part of their business strategy due to its flexibility, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness.

It is why the SaaS industry has increased by around 500% over the past seven years. Between 2022 and 2023, the SaaS industry expects to witness its fastest yearly expansion, hitting $195.2 billion by the end of this year. Isn’t that enough reason to ensure your SaaS content marketing game is on point?

Here are nine proven steps to help you win the SaaS content marketing game in 2023.

What is SaaS Content Marketing, and why is Content Marketing for SaaS Companies Different?

SaaS content marketing is a process of creating and sharing content that attracts and engages your target audience intending to drive more traffic, increase brand recognition, and ultimately generate more conversions.

It involves offering relevant and valuable content to your target audience, such as blogs, videos, social media posts, and webinars.

Why is SaaS content marketing different from others?

The content marketing approach for SaaS companies is different because of the industry’s unique characteristics.

It is different in 3 ways:

• Long-term marketing strategy:

SaaS content marketing is a whole new ballgame requiring a long-term strategy.

Unlike other businesses, SaaS companies must nurture customer relationships to ensure customer retention and growth. You must maintain a long-term relationship with your customers so they keep coming back and subscribing to your service. Customer retention is key here.

If you cannot retain customers and win, they trust you will find it challenging to sustain in the competitive SaaS industry.

• Spotlight on your potential customers, not your software product:

Your target audience is not directly connected with your product. So you can’t directly showcase your product or service features and get a deal.

As B2B marketers are not looking for one particular product. They are looking for a solution to a major problem as a whole. So you need to understand your target audience’s potential problem and how you can help solve it.

You must offer informative and educational content relevant to their needs and interests to gain their attention and trust.

Remember, your content should position you as a thought leader and expert in your field.

If a B2B company manager searches for the keyword ‘marketing efforts,.’ It doesn’t mean he only looks for marketing efforts. Instead, he is trying to solve a problem and how he can enhance corporate sales and ROI through effective marketing strategies. Hence, content should address these concerns and provide solutions.

• Talk about the pipeline:

As mentioned above, SaaS content marketing is not about pinpointing one problem but looking out for the major one. One of the major concerns for B2B customers is the sales pipeline. They are always looking for ways to optimize their sales process and generate more revenue.

Therefore, as a SaaS content marketer, you must create content that helps your customers optimize their sales pipeline. Share insights, studies, and statistics that show how certain strategies or tools can improve their sales pipeline process.

In doing so, you will establish yourself as a valuable partner to help them grow their business.

Remember, the ultimate goal of content marketing is to build trust and establish a long-term relationship with your customers.

9 Steps to Succeed with Saas Content Marketing

Here are the nine steps to enhance your SaaS content marketing performance:

1. Define your target audience

If your audience is simplified, you will always be clear in your content creation process. Therefore, starting by building a foundation for your content strategy is important.

Before starting your marketing and business plan, you must ensure everything is placed correctly.

Begin by identifying your target audience’s needs and pain points. It will help you create content that resonates with them and addresses their specific challenges.

Secondly, get your product and brand story right so you can create a deep understanding of your product and communicate its correct value to your target audience. Unfortunately, several SaaS companies start with SEO and then focus on the rest, which leads to a scattered approach.

It is important to clearly understand your product and brand value proposition before starting any marketing efforts. When you clearly understand your product, you can easily relate to the core value offered by your company and target the specified audience with the USP.

Thirdly you need to prepare all necessary marketing assets, which include writing blog posts, optimizing the website, a strong content marketing team, and content marketing tools, e.g., SEO tools, Google analytics, and social media management tools.

Finally, defining your content marketing goals will allow you to prepare an outline of your progress and asset realistic goals. Define your goals into two main levels – short-term goals and long-term goals. Short-term goals will help you achieve quick wins and build momentum, while long-term goals will guide your overall content strategy and ensure sustained success.

It is important to regularly measure your performance against these goals and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Remember, a successful SaaS content marketing performance requires ongoing planning, execution, and refinement to drive results.

2. Evaluate your competitors

After defining your audience, you must go the extra mile when researching your competitors.

First, it helps you understand your target audience’s challenges, goals, doubts, and the solutions that your competitors are offering. This information can help you identify gaps in the market that your product can fill and differentiate your brand from others.

Next, you should analyze your competitors’ content marketing strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. It will give you an understanding of what type of content works for them and what areas they may neglect.

By analyzing your competitors, you can tailor your content marketing efforts to meet the needs of your target audience better and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

3. Learn how to get a deeper understanding of your competitors:

• Technique one: Focus on the terms and keywords your competitors use in their content. It can give you insight into their target audience and the topics they are covering.
• Technique two: Look at the types of content your competitors are producing. Are they creating blog posts, videos, eBooks, or something else? Consider how you can differentiate your content marketing efforts by offering a unique format or style.
• Technique three: Analyze your competitors’ social media accounts to see what type of engagement they receive from their followers. It can give you a better understanding of what resonates with your shared audience.

Remember that evaluating your competitors is an ongoing process.

Continuously monitor their content marketing strategies and adapt to stay ahead of the curve.

By staying up-to-date with your competitors’ tactics, you can continue differentiating your brand and providing unique value to your target audience. In today’s crowded SaaS market, going above and beyond in your research is crucial to stand out and drive results.

4. Identify your strategic goals & pain points

Until now, you must know your target audience and competitors well. Now to become an expert in your field, you need to identify the reasons of your target audience, what motivates them to use your SaaS product, and the pain points they face while using it.

Then, it will help you to tailor your content marketing strategy to address these specific concerns and offer customized solutions.

Identifying your strategic goals is equally important.

For example, are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or improve customer engagement? Understanding your goals will help you create targeted content aligning with your business objectives.

The key to success in SaaS content marketing is to continuously analyze and adapt your strategy based on your target audience, competitors, and internal goals. By doing so, you can create a powerful and effective content marketing plan that drives results for your business.

It requires a solid understanding of your audience, their pain points, and what motivates them to use your product. It also means staying up-to-date with competitors and industry trends and being flexible enough to adapt your strategy.

With these key elements in place, you’ll be well on your way to success in SaaS content marketing.

One recommended way to identify your target group’s pain point is to step into your customers’ shoes and try using your SaaS product.

Create a customer journey map with all your TG’s steps to check out your product. For example, buyers become aware of your product, show interest in your services, and visit your website.

Remember, the customer’s first contact with your brand is crucial. It is where you need to make a lasting impression and showcase the unique value proposition of your SaaS product through your content. To do this effectively, consider using a mix of different content formats such as blog posts, case studies, infographics, webinars, and videos.

5. Search and define keywords

Did you know your potential customers are doing billions of searches every day?

Your target group tends to search using specific keywords each time, looking to solve their problem or pain point.

They may be searching for solutions to their business challenges or seeking ways to guide them.

After they find your brand, they want to know more about your product and how it can solve their problem, and if your content satisfies their needs or fits into the bigger picture of their usage, they will consider purchasing your product.

Hence, Once you find those keywords, move away from a problem-solution mentality and think of the bigger picture.

As mentioned above, when a B2b marketer or a leader is looking for something as a whole, he is not only searching for a particular solution. They have lots of connected needs that should be taken care of. So, align your content with their larger goals and objectives while addressing their pain points.

Your potential clients are not only purchasing a service or product. They are chasing huge realistic goals like growth, scalability, and profitability. Ensure your content speaks to these goals and showcases how your SaaS product can help them achieve them.

Take the example of Flipsnack and how it guides its readers with content. Their blog post goes beyond its solutions, including guides on designing an excellent brochure or magazine.

By doing this, Flipsnack is not only addressing the pain points of its customers but also showcasing how its product can help them achieve their larger goals, such as creating impactful content and boosting engagement. As a result, it helped them get 800,000+ organic traffic/month with 45 million backlinks and a strong DA of 80. Isn’t THAT AMAZING?

So, remember to focus on both the problem and the bigger picture while optimizing your content for keywords.

6. Campaign goal setting and tracking

Once you are all set with keywords and marketing goals, you must consider two of the most important marketing metrics: Customer Acquisition Cost and Lead Conversion Rate.

These two metrics will give you insights into your mSaaS marketing campaigns-

How to calculate CAC AND LCR?

1. Customer Acquisition Cost= MC / CA

• MC– SaaS content marketing cost
• CA– number of acquired customers

CAC helps you identify effective marketing activities to allocate your budget better.

2. Lead Conversion Rate= C / L

• C– No. of conversions
• L– refers to lead opportunities

It is calculated for various types of opportunities and conversions.

With this, you know how much you need to invest in generating a specific number of conversions and the corresponding amount of revenue.

Also, strengthen your thought leadership and get creative with content ideas to generate more conversation and boost engagement.

SaaS content marketing is not just about addressing pain points and using keywords. It is about understanding your key area and knowledge of expertise.

Be consistent with your brand story and the values you want to promote, and thought leadership is one of the most important elements when building awareness and communities for your SaaS brand.

Keep these three points in mind:

• Know what’s most important to you and what you’re good at. First, listen to the values and beliefs you want to convey with your brand story. Then, determine your key area and expertise, and knowledge. For example, it could be about innovative ways to optimize ad performance for our ad tech company.
• Stick to your brand story: the values and beliefs you want to promote.E.g., believing there are ways to make digital advertising effective while respecting personal data privacy.
• Identify thought leaders and subject matter experts in your company. Thought leadership content can exist in any format, and it’s never too early or too late to start building it. Identify thought leaders and experts in your niche and collaborate with them to create compelling content.

Doing this lets you establish yourself as a subject matter expert and boost engagement with your target audience.

Furthermore, get creative with your content ideas to stand out. It could mean creating videos, infographics, or interactive tools that provide value to your audience.

Remember, the key is consistently delivering high-quality content that resonates with your target audience, positions you as a thought leader, and ultimately drives conversions.

7. Define your sales funnel flow

With the above assets, you can go with your marketing efforts and define different stages of the funnel, including the content you will nurture and what content to serve your audience at each stage.

To serve your audience well with the content at each stage, build authority by diving deeper into content topics and providing valuable insights. Use data and analytics to track the performance of your content and make adjustments as needed to improve your results.

Plan your content accordingly with your sales funnel flow. So you can effectively engage with your audience at every stage of their customer journey and convert them into loyal customers.

For example- You may choose to build traffic and brand awareness as your intention at the awareness level. Depending on your specific strategy, goals, and audience, SaaS content marketing methods for this stage include blog post creation, email marketing, social media, etc.

You may simultaneously scale to new marketplaces and phases of the funnel by improving your current funnels. Otherwise, you may miss out on exploring channels and tactics that can provide great outcomes.

8. Earn your traffic

Nurturing content that attracts no traffic volume wastes time and resources.

First, you must ensure your blogs generate enough website traffic. To do this, ensure that your content is optimized for search engines by implementing the AIDA model can help you build a strong foundation of trust and credibility with your audience.

Earning traffic thru AIDA is much simplified than other tactics. All you need to do is implement these four elements in or stages in your blog:

Attention: Any blog’s beginning or intro section attracts your audience’s attention and helps them understand the topic you are discussing. It is one of the most important parts of any blog. If you fail to attract your audience in the first seven seconds of your blog, you will fail to keep them engaged for the rest of it.

Interest: Once you have gotten their attention, you must build their interest by discussing what they can expect from your blog. It will help set expectations and make them more likely to continue reading.

Desire: In this stage, you need to create a sense of desire in your audience’s mind by highlighting the benefits of your product or services. Be sure to focus on how your solution can solve their problems.

Action: Include a clear call to action directing your audience toward the next step. Whether signing up for a newsletter, downloading an ebook, or scheduling a demo, a clear call-to-action can help convert your readers into leads.

By implementing the AIDA model in your content marketing strategy, you can attract more traffic to your website and increase conversions and sales. Remember, content that does not earn traffic is useless, so optimize every blog post with the AIDA model.

Design your content so that it is easy for customers to move through the funnel from attention to action easily.

9.SaaS content production

Most SaaS content marketing teams neglect the importance of consistent content production, which can ultimately hurt their performance. Involve these six steps in your content production process so you never lag:

• The search for topics relevant to the target audience and customer journey stages: Build a list of trending topics relevant to your target audience at every stage of their customer journey. It will ensure that your content remains valuable and engaging throughout their interaction with your brand.
• Assigning responsibilities: Assign specific roles and responsibilities to team members involved in the content production process, from ideation to publication. It helps ensure everyone is clear on their tasks and can collaborate efficiently.
• Content creation: With your topics identified, it’s time to start creating valuable and engaging content. Remember always to keep your target audience in mind and focus on solving their problems through your content.
• Review and editing: Before publishing any content, ensure it goes through a thorough review and editing process. It will help ensure your content is error-free, accurate, and follows the brand’s tone and voice guidelines.
• Content publications scheduling: Now, your blogs must be ready to publish. Schedule them for the appropriate dates and times, keeping your target audience’s behavior on different channels in mind. It will maximize your reach and engagement with your audience.
• Design lead-nurturing content workflows: Finally, creating a lead-nurturing content workflow is essential so the audience can be guided through the sales funnel effectively. It includes creating content that addresses their pain points and offers solutions and includes calls-to-action (CTAs) that encourage them to take the next step toward conversion. Make sure to track the performance of your content using relevant metrics and make adjustments as needed to improve your results.

10.SaaS content distribution, Monitor results & adjust them

SaaS content marketing is useless without a well-set distribution strategy. You need to know how frequently you will publish your content and how you will promote it.

Below are listed a few aspects of content distribution that you need to consider:

• Work Out Your Promotion and Distribution Strategy:

Know where you will place your content blog, user guides, etc. Understand the availability of your content: publicly available or gated for premium users only. How to structure websites to distribute content and how many of them you need. Connect with social media groups and profiles where you will distribute and promote content (both owned and third-party)

• Focus is quality, not quantity, when creating content:

Quality is king! According to research done in a content marketing survey, 55% of the audience voted for quality content as one of the important factors leading to success in SaaS content marketing performance. Therefore, you should create high-quality content that delivers value to your target audience. It includes researching and using data-driven insights to create relevant, informative, and engaging content.

SaaS is a competitive industry with so much to offer it can be overwhelming for potential customers. That’s why it’s important to focus on quality content that truly stands out from the rest.

By investing time and resources into creating thoughtful and well-researched content, you can establish your brand as a thought leader in the industry and earn the trust of your target audience.

However, we understand you don’t have much time to focus on each abovementioned point to enhance your SaaS content marketing performance. But don’t worry. We will handle this for you at Betterzila.

Leave your SaaS content marketing worries behind with Betterzila!

Betterzila is your all in one Link Building & Performance SEO solution for B2B SaaS and E-Commerce brands.

We handle all your SEO and link-building hectic work so you can focus on other business-related activities.

Our team of experts will help you create high-quality content that resonates with your target audience, distribute it across relevant social media groups and profiles, and drive traffic to your website through effective link-building techniques.

Our approach is simple – we focus on quality over quantity. We use data-driven insights and research to create informative, engaging, and relevant content for your target audience. Every SaaS business is unique, so we tailor our services to meet your needs and goals.

Our top three features are:

• SEO Consultancy
• SEO Management
• Link Building

And as a B2B marketer, you must know how difficult and time-consuming it can be to manage SEO and link building for your SaaS business.

But with Betterzila, you can now leave these worries behind! Our team of experts is well-equipped with the latest industry trends and techniques to ensure that your SaaS content marketing performance is always at its peak.

We understand the importance of staying ahead in today’s competitive market and thus constantly work towards improving our strategies to ensure maximum ROI for our clients.

So, whether you’re struggling to create engaging content or need help with effective link-building techniques, Betterzila has got you covered. Choose us for all your SEO needs!

The Takeaway

Till now, you must be aware of how important it is to focus on your target audience and their desires, from providing top-notch high-quality content to outlining the entire customer journey.

However, there are more challenges! The SaaS industry is full of complexity, a longer & tiring purchase cycle, and a need for quality education through content strategy.

The Betterzila content marketing team makes each step easier by creating data-driven, relevant content that speaks to your target audience while managing your SaaS business’s SEO and link-building aspects.

With our top-notch services, you can focus on what you do best while we care for your digital marketing needs. So, choose Betterzila as your SEO partner and watch your SaaS business soar to new heights! Then, get in touch right away and increase your MRR!