Developing content for any type of marketing is not easy, and it surely isn’t with SaaS Content marketing. It requires strong determination, and you should be in it for the long run to see the results!
While I have struggled in the past to form a strategy to develop SaaS content, I do not want you to. I gathered my years of experience and met and discussed with experts to form the most definitive SaaS content marketing guide.
There are many people out there who are into developing SaaS-related content, but there are very few who are doing it right. Once you are done reading this guide, you certainly won’t be the latter.
Allow me to explain this further below. Keep reading!
Why SaaS Content Marketing Is Vital? ( Benefits)
SaaS content marketing is a form of communication between a brand, its product, and its efforts to connect these with its current and potential customers.
While direct marketing approaches focus on temporary spikes and are essentially a short form of marketing, SaaS content marketing is an elaborate educating project.
The content gives insights into their product features and services and, at times, is the backbone for SaaS companies to reach their clients. It gains pure organic traffic to educate the audiences and helps gain user trust and commitment.
Our research found that as of 2023, the SaaS market is worth $197 billion! And this is only going to rise, given its rise in popularity.
How does SaaS Content Marketing work?
SaaS content marketing follows a long-term game plan that targets educating customers by building quality content. The way that SaaS content works is by:
- Knowing your product, its features and limitations
- Finding the right audience
- Addressing the current issues
- Generating quality content
- Offering insights on particular products (reviews)
- Giving out free trials and discounts
- Generating potential buyers
- Gaining customer loyalty
Keep reading to find the best way to execute your SaaS Content and drive the maximum business.
11 Steps to craft a strong SaaS content marketing plan
Follow the below steps to build your content with this effective 11-step strategy and guarantee that you are at the top of your SaaS content game.
Don’t skip steps and keep reading until the end, as the last one’s crucial!
1. Know your product and find its possible limitations
Before you start developing content around your product, you must know the complete features, PROs, CONs, and benefits. Basically, understand the products or services you will promote.
While writing about a SaaS product, you must dive deep and also be aware of its limitations and areas where the product might need some improvement. This will add to your work’s honesty and help build a reputation for providing honest reviews.
Finding weaknesses in a product is not bad, as you cannot always speak well of the product and need to show the users the accurate picture of the product while indicating your credibility.
2. Discover your target audience
The content you build needs to have the right type of audience that you target. Aiming for a set of people who are less likely to buy your product doesn’t make sense. You shouldn’t be selling apples in a fish market.
With the audience, you also need to understand a customer’s buying process. Follow the below steps to find the right audience for your content:
- Conduct a market survey where you can reach out to various age groups, professional backgrounds, buying capacities, and locations to find the sweet spot of the audience to target.
- Keep an eye on the online discussion groups related to your product. Many such user spaces have a group of people who are genuinely interested in a SaaS service.
- Get an expert opinion on the market from an industry veteran. Most of the time, the experience can teach you a lot about the target audience.
- If you have a business development team and client managers in your team, you can also evaluate their insights. They are one of the best sources of knowing the market trends and customers.
- Lastly, you can use prime SEO tools to give you an idea of user search intents by analyzing the keywords and your competition.
With step 3 out of the way, you can start forming a strategy to target this set of people for your services. Note that this is not a one-time process, and you must practice this often.
Pro Tip: Don’t make the mistake I made when I analyzed my target audience and didn’t update the data till the time my traffic declined suddenly.
3. Know your audience’s pain points
Finding the audience does only half the job, and you need to further channel your efforts toward their needs and pain points. I find these two ways to be the easiest and most effective to find what people need:
- Refer to online communities via Reddit, Linkedin, Facebook, or Quora. These platforms highlight the significant limitations of a product and are an ideal place to find a “gap” in the market. On the other hand, it also helps you recognize the user-preferred areas that you need to target.
- The second way to best analyze a SaaS service is to be a customer yourself and go through the entire buying process. That includes searching about the product, reading its reviews and alternatives, buying it, and actually using it.
This approach gives you a third-person point of view about the product and makes identifying the pain points easier and at zero cost.
Some of the most common customer pain points:
- Budget related
- Emotional
- Time-related
- Complexity and user interface related
- Integration abilities
- Customer services and support-related
- Price and updates related
4. Build your content
The next crucial step in SaaS content marketing now needs to be CONTENT and the way you deliver it. I have been working with and around content for a few years and can vouch for the importance of well-curated and targeted content.
But it isn’t directly proportional to the amount of content you produce; you also need to deliver QUALITY and the necessary means to achieve that, plus many other factors that go into it.
Building a Content Toolkit:
Quality content will form a base on which you will build your website with the correct strategy. In my initial days, I improved with the assistance of the tools and assets for writing content. Some of the tools that need to be a part of your kit are:
- A grammar checker tool
- A plagiarism checker
- A graphic generation tool
These are only the basic categories of tools that are essential. There are many advanced content marketing tools that you can bring in enhancement to your content.
Other than that, the basic necessity that you, as a SaaS content marketer, would need is a team. The team should include Content writers, SEOs, graphic designers, and a janitor to be able to handle the operations.
5. Content Types to create
There are major ways to market content, and you need to focus highly on them. While all of them are essential, and you should go through the link provided, for starters, you can focus on:
- Blogs
Blogs must be your primary content source and are why you are reading this guide. Our blog statistics indicate that any business with a dedicated blog can generate 55% more traffic!
These, again, have to be full of quality and relevant to the audience and the service.
- Infographics
These add up to the posted informational content, as visual infographics have a high engagement rate. Including infographics inside your content helps the user easily get information on complex data via visuals.
Pro Tips from our Graphic Designer
- Create a content plan and keep your ideas ready
- Find reliable tools
- Have a set of templates ready for each category of a post
- Case Studies
One of the essentials for SaaS content marketing is building authority over time by reflecting on the products and your thoughts. Users are always seeking reviews and verdicts on SaaS products, and that’s what you should be targeting.
6. Set up your Content Goals
While generating the content, you also need to have a scale to measure your goals and stick to them. These parameters should include critical indicators and targets that you need to achieve.
There should be set goals for the number of content to be generated and updated per month. These goals help you track your progress and give you a clearer idea about key performance analysis — such as engagement, lead conversion rates, clicks per page, free-trial signups, discount code signups, etc.
7. Do your Keyword research properly
To start with the finalized types of content and goals, the first step is to find the keywords relevant to your SaaS product. For this, you can leverage the earlier mentioned SEO tools and strengthen the chances of ranking your content.
This will fulfill the user intent for the correct type of audience for the search engine and know what competitors are doing to rank. Learn how to research keywords using Semrush.
8. Dive deeper into targeted keywords and build authority
Once you start gaining momentum in the above 6 steps and have followed them for some time, you will see significant growth in how users interact with your content. As you keep adding valuable user-focused content, your website’s authority shall rise, too!
When I was at this stage of building my website, I had limited experience of what to do next. Then, I came across Authority Hacker’s brilliant TASS 3.0 course that pulled me out of my dilemma. It gave me the right direction to plan my further course of action and gave me newer ways to produce quality content as well.
Remember, with a higher authority, you also have higher chances to rank your content in less time than others, which is the ultimate goal for a SaaS marketing platform.
9. Form SOPs and best practices to follow
It is essential to document everything — from what works for you to what doesn’t. Per your SaaS product and website, you will have a unique code that works for you. Creating an SOP for this will help you follow a guideline for every future use and ensure appropriate steps are taken.
I support this practice highly, as I multiplied my output when creating templates and SOPs along the way. It has helped me train new people joining the project much more efficiently.
10. Analyze regularly and optimize regularly
I brushed upon this in the “setting up your goals” section, but this process needs to be considered separately, too, as metrics and figures are very important. The reports give real-time insights and help you monitor the performing and weak areas.
Analyzing and optimizing past content frequently should be on your checklist from day one. Without these processes, you will struggle to find the path ahead. Find opportunities timely using these prime SEO analytics tools and work up on both areas
Conduct such reviews weekly, monthly, and annually to have complete control over the quality of the content you publish while driving maximum traffic.
11. Distributing the content
This last step is the key to scaling up your content and business. I created a strategy to distribute the content even before I started writing content. This has given me three-fold benefits, as I had all the necessary distribution channels sorted and only had to implement it.
There are two ways that you can distribute your content:
- In your channels for free
These channels include blogs, mailing lists, websites, and social media you own and are the cost-effective way to distribute content.
- Paid channels
These include the paid means that you can use to distribute your content. Some of these tactics include:
- Email Marketing
- Brand collaborations
- Social media
- Paid ads
Steps Not To Take For SaaS Content Marketing
Now that you’ve learned the best practices to follow, let me also mention some of the DON’Ts you need to keep an eye on while developing the content for your SaaS.
1. Not having a strategy
Luckily, you are not among the people making this mistake. You know how to go about the content-building process now and avoid the biggest mistake – not to have a strategy planned out.
Without a strategy, you’re just an unarmed soldier on a battlefield. Inconsistent content publishing, poor quality of keyword selection, and not analyzing the results result from poor content strategies and can hamper your overall SaaS content.
2. Disregarding SEO
An equally crucial mistake to avoid is to neglect SEO. As a SaaS content marketer, you have to keep SEO as a priority, as without it, it is impossible to rank your content on Google and thus won’t be able to reach your intended audience.
3. Not identifying your target audience
Imagine crafting beautiful pieces of content and having no one to read to. Again, this is one of the basic mistakes beginners can make while developing their SaaS content.
I have seen people completely neglecting the audience that needs to be targeted and have only focused on generating content. Trust me, they have never fared well as what they delivered was either read by the wrong people or none at all.
4. Not following the Google guidelines
Any SaaS content marketing eventually depends on how Google reads and ranks its content. Google has around 200 ranking factors and a content guideline based on which it evaluates a piece of content.
Every new update that comes needs to be understood and rigorously followed to stay relevant to the search engine and above your competition.
5. Not updating your content regularly
Staying on top of the quality and updating the content regularly shows results. In the software world, there are new updates that roll out every single day. Keeping track of these updates is not easy, and you need to always look out for changes you can make to your content and help keep it relevant and up-to-date.
6. Building poor backlinks
I will confess that I made this mistake in the initial days of my journey for a different project I worked on. I never realized the importance of a backlink until I faced a significant downfall.
Every new content should be treated as a baby and given the required backlink nutrition. One of the best practices you can follow is to keep new content linked with your old, performing, and authority pages that can support the fresh new piece.
7. Expecting immediate results
SaaS content marketing is not a PPC or performance marketing measure where you get immediate results for the time and money invested. It is a progressive action step that eventually builds up and gives you a big-picture benefit.
And hence, expecting immediate results from these practices is a mistake you don’t want to make. Have patience!
Benefits – SaaS Content Marketing
SaaS content marketing has many upsides; one of the major ones is its ROI. Check some more benefits of SaaS content marketing I have elaborated below:
- Generating leads
Consistently building quality content increases potential buyers’ chances of becoming first-time customers. It increases your brand reach and awareness, contributing to your product’s overall brand image apart from the website.
- Building a loyal user community
You get loyal customers who trust you for the credibility of your content on any product. This provides a golden opportunity to gain honest reader insights and keeps you on your toes to always perform well.
This community is also your source of offline marketing and brings in people to your product and website.
- ROI
Marketing with the help of content is one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing. Our other research on content marketing revealed that 44% of buyers usually consume up to five pieces of content before completing an action! That’s a big number and is efficient to acquire using the right tactics!
- Improves SEO and Authority
As you keep building content with the right set of strategies, and when Google starts noticing your efforts and the value of content, you automatically build up your online authority. This authority improves your SEO and makes it easier for you to rank your content and, over time, does not require a level of effort compared to the beginning stage.
Future of SaaS Content Marketing – What Next?
With the advent of the recent Artificial Intelligence progress across sectors. There has been a wave of AI tools that have aided the entire SaaS content creation process. Creating content, outlines, reports, and analytics has become a matter of a few clicks
Though flagged as a concerning issue, AI would not replace humans as it vividly lacks ethics, consistency, and relevancy and misses out on the flow of information. So that should not be a worry for you.
Key takeaways to succeed at SaaS Content Marketing
A lot goes into researching, generating, developing, and updating the content, and you should be at your best level from day one. You will surely succeed with an accurate strategy, content marketing tools, the right audience, keyword research, quality content, analysis, and adherence to set guidelines and processes.
Set out on our journey of SaaS content marketing, knowing that you now know a powerful strategy and all the necessary tools and ways to implement it.
As you succeed, you will find many other ways that work and those that don’t. Comment below and let us know about your SaaS content marketing findings!
Happy marketing!
