How to Effectively Manage SaaS Content Marketing

SaaS content marketing is one of the most powerful tools a software-as-a-service company can use to attract, educate, and convert customers. When done well, your company can base its entire marketing plan around content. Whether you’re trying to build an audience or close sales, this approach can help you achieve your goals.

Here are a few tips and best practices for using SaaS content marketing to grow your software business.

Why SaaS Content Marketing Works

One of the most essential elements of SaaS marketing is helping customers understand the product.

You must show customers how the software solves their problems as well as help them understand how to use the tool. Education and information are essential for getting customers interested in software, which is why content is such a great tool for marketing SaaS products.

Through SaaS content marketing, you can effectively educate customers on how your product works, show them how it can solve their problems, and guide them toward testing out your tools.

Start With Your Customer’s Buyer’s Journey

To build an effective SaaS content marketing plan, start by looking at your customer’s buyer’s journey. Outline each major milestone that customers go through from the time they become aware of you to when they convert.

In SaaS marketing, that funnel often includes the following phases.

• Awareness
• Lead Generation
• Trial Sign-Ups
• Conversion to Paid Customers
• Customer Retention

Once you outline the unique purchase funnel customers go through, you can start to see how you can use content to guide them through each phase of the buyer’s journey.

(Check out our post on facebook ads marketing examples of an example of a SaaS company producing content at scale.)

Create Content for Each Phase of the Buyer’s Journey

The goal of your SaaS content marketing strategy is to provide valuable information throughout the entire sales funnel. You need to help customers get what they need at each stage. So don’t skip steps in your content strategy.

Many SaaS marketers incorrectly focus on content creation as merely an awareness and traffic tool. But content shouldn’t only be used at the beginning of the process. It should be used throughout the entire marketing funnel.

Top–of–funnel content brings people into the funnel, but it doesn’t move people through the process. Companies need to use a full-funnel strategy to execute a successful SaaS content marketing plan effectively.Companies need a full-funnel strategy to execute a successful SaaS content marketing plan.

You might be wondering whether your target audience really spends time reading content from the brands they’re considering buying from.But considering that 47% of B2B buyers read 3-5 blog posts or content pieces before speaking with a salesperson, there’s a very strong chance that they do.

Here is an example of how content marketing for software companies can work. This is how a SaaS company could use every touch point to develop their content marketing strategy.

• Awareness: Create content that targets top keywords related to the industry and promote engaging, entertaining, and educational content to attract attention. The goal of this SaaS content marketing step is to help people discover that your software could solve their problems.
• Lead Generation: Once customers are aware that your software exists and that it can help them, the goal is to get them to engage with your brand more and earn their trust in your tool. Use MOFu marketing strategies at this time. Generate leads by providing free, gated, high-value content, and nurture leads using email drip campaigns.
• Trial Sign-Ups: In the next stage, the goal is to get users to try the software and help them decide if it is right for them. Offer free trials in this bottom-funnel content.
• Conversion to Paid Customers: Once customers are using your free trial product, convince them to convert. Deliver content that focuses on helping them find and use the move valuable tools within the software.
• Customer Retention: The customer journey isn’t complete after the purchase. To retain customers, you must help them be successful using your product. You need to continue creating content that educates them about the features of your tools and provide guides on how to get the most out of your software.

One of the best SaaS marketing examples could be an online fitness app that needs to raise awareness that their product works better than a traditional gym. They could offer free subscription levels where users can access limited videos, and then charge to upgrade to get the full library and advanced features like meal tracking. Finally, the fitness company could work on retaining customers when they want to give up on their weight loss goals by sending out inspirational and motivational content.

Each piece of content in the buying cycle supports the next. If one step is missing, then the whole process is likely to collapse.

Related: Check out these content marketing automation strategies to automate your process.

Develop Customer-Focused Content Ideas

To develop content that guides customers through the buying decision process, focus on the problems and needs of customers at each phase. Create a visual chart that your content team can fill out to address concerns at each part of the process.

As you flesh out each idea, include the following information:

• Step in the buying process
• Target audience
• Platform for content
• Concern or problem addressed

For example, an A/B testing software company might develop ideas to encourage free trial sign-ups targeting middle managers of large enterprises. They will create video guides walking users through their systems. This addresses the concern of managers that the software will be clunky and hard for lower-level employees to use.

You can use tools to guide your content ideation process. Alexa offers multiple tools that are helpful for researching SaaS content marketing ideas.

Use Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool to identify top search terms. Enter a term related to your industry to discover other phrases you can target in your strategy.

Use Alexa’s Competitor Keyword Matrix to identify keywords your competitors are using. Find even more keywords to target in your content using this report that shows the tops terms your competitors are receiving traffic for.

Use the buyer keywords filter to find conversion-focused terms. The Competitor Keyword Matrix has a filter that shows only terms that have purchase intent. Use this filter to find buying keywords to target in your bottom-of-funnel content. In the Keyword Difficulty tool, you can filter to show only results that contain a certain phrase. If you already know buyer keywords for your site, you can filter for those keywords and related ones using this option.

Use Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool to learn about your audience and research competitor content. Enter your site or one of your competitors to create a report of websites that your target audience also uses. This information helps you gain insight into your audience’s interests. You can see what other sites, tools, and topics interest them, which can guide your content strategy. You can also discover and identify competitors that exist in your industry, which allows you to research the content they produce.

Assign Goals to Your Content Strategies

As you create content to address different problems and challenges within your customer journey, make sure each SaaS content marketing piece has measurable goals you can use to track the success of each piece.

• Use traffic and click-based goals for top-funnel content.
• Use engagement and lead generation goals for mid-funnel content.
• Use sales goals for bottom-funnel content.

To attach numbers to each piece of content you create, consider working backward through the sales funnel. If it takes 10 leads to generate a $10,000 sale, and 1,000 website visitors to generate a lead, then you can report that each lead is worth $1,000, and each website visitor is worth $10. This data can help your team set traffic and lead generation goals to move customers deeper into the funnel.

Get the Most Out of Your Content

One of the many benefits of content marketing is that it can be used to drive the rest of your SaaS promotional strategy. You can repurpose content you create and reuse it in other areas of your marketing strategy.

• Use the content you publish on your blog in email blasts and share it on your social media channels.
• As you create your content, develop influencer marketing strategies to drive links and qualified traffic to your brand.
• Repurpose your content to expand upon ideas and connect with leads through other platforms such as in-person conferences, podcasts, and videos.

Once you start using SaaS content marketing, you can tie it into many parts of your sales and advertising efforts.

Improve Your SaaS Content Marketing With the Right Tools

As you develop a SaaS content marketing plan, use the tools and best practices mentioned in this post to create a full-cycle strategy that helps customers from start to finish. For help with getting marketing intelligence, insights, and data to drive your content strategy, get in touch with Green Digital Agency to help set you up.

The plan includes all of the tools and reports mentioned in this post along with dozens of other keyword, competitor, and industry analysis tools. Successful content marketing requires planning and careful execution to do it right. With the right strategies, analytics, and tools, you can knock your content goals out of the park.