7 Steps to Create a Winning SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

Building a SaaS content marketing strategy is not the same as doing it for other companies. This complexity makes SaaS marketing both awesome and scary.

• Purchasing SaaS involves a deeper commitment than purchasing DTC products: Your strategy must focus on building trust and reputation.
• Selling SaaS entails a longer sales funnel because of the multiple actors involved: You need suitable content for all stages in the marketing funnel.
• SaaS products are tougher to understand because they’re high-tech: Your content should focus on making your products more approachable and relatable.

So whether you’re using high-quality images, videos, or written content, build a strategy that:

• Educates your audience, helping them understand your product and upgrade their skills.
• Presents your brand as relatable.

This guide will teach you how to do that with actionable steps and success examples. Keep reading below:

1. Define goals and metrics

Having a goal for your SaaS content marketing strategy helps you:

• Define the campaign’s steps
• Find the right metrics
• Focus on the right insights about your potential customers and competition

Here’s what this stage entails:

1. Audit your company, focusing on your history and previous content marketing campaigns.
2. Choose a marketing goal, such as creating awareness or driving sales.
3. Pick the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for that. For example:

• Awareness KPIs: Unique number of visitors, bounce rate, and session duration
• Engagement KPIs: Free trial registration, software demo requests
• Conversion KPIs: Lead conversion rate (LCR), number of uninstalls, customer acquisition costs (CAC)

For example, when Wistia developed their new tool SoapBox, they produced a four-part docu-series to attract people’s attention. The documentary challenged a video production agency to make three ads with very different budgets.

This premise made people and the whole media very curious, getting Wistia a boost in traffic.

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2. Understand your audience

Your target audience dictates the strategies and tools you’ll include in the content marketing strategy. A customer-centric approach is best because you aim to build your reputation and credibility.

You can’t do that by bragging about your SaaS products’ high-tech features. Instead, focus on how those products help solve your customers’ needs.  Another tactic for building credibility is to take all necessary steps to keep your SaaS user data secure. In case you can communicate with users by email, it will be beneficial to employ a DMARC analyzer, which can help your SaaS business to avoid malicious attacks.

So:

1. Build a socio-demographic profile for your audience, considering variables like age, profession, and socio-economic status.
2. Use analytics software or social media listening tool to automatize this process.
3. Tap into these insights to create a persona for each target segment.

3. Identify your customers’ needs

Your SaaS content marketing strategy should focus on solving your customers’ needs, so:

1. Create a customer journey map to understand how your prospects go through the sales funnel from awareness to conversion and loyalty.
2. Identify blockers that can appear through the funnel, such as technical frustrations, learning curves, and customer service issues. Some of these problems can be solved through content, while others cannot. So:
3. Create a list of needs that can be solved through content. Learning, awareness, and engagement pain points will usually be on this list.

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4. Research your competition

Running a competitor’s analysis is essential for an effective SaaS marketing strategy because it helps you:

• Understand why they’re successful
• Find opportunities they’re missing

Focus on:

• Keyword research: See what keywords they’re ranking for and which ones they’re missing. By using Google scraping techniques, you can find potential low-hanging keywords that have a high search intent, enabling you to capitalize on those opportunities. This will help you gain an edge over your competitors, allowing you to capture more market share.
• Backlink research: See which authoritative websites publish their content.
• Site audit: Look at their websites and social media to understand which content ranks best for them.

There are many different ways you can research your competition, however, many IT companies in Los Angeles are considered to be the most credible companies in the industry, so you can start with them first. The tools you can use are:

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Sprout Social
• Buzzsumo

Zapier offers a neat example here because automation platforms aren’t usually that searched for. So Zapier found a way to rank for long-tail keywords by writing helpful content for their audience.

Remember: This helpful, relevant content is more likely to be searched for, shared, and quoted by other authoritative websites.

Even if, at first glance, that content isn’t about them, Zapier finds a way to pitch its products:

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5. Create your strategy

Tap into what you know about your audience and competition to build your strategy.

1. Find a unique angle that sets you apart.
2. Research current trends. Shortlist the ones that fit your audience and brand personas.
3. Write content that ranks for keywords that reflect your prospects’ search intent.
4. Choose specific tactics, such as educational blog posts, relatable TikTok videos, influencer marketing – or all.
5. Transform existing viral video or audio content like YouTube videos or podcast episodes into text format.
6. Strengthen the authority and visibility of the content with link building
7. Pick the right channels that your potential customers are using.

Pro tip: Focus on different keywords and tactics for different stages of the SaaS sales funnel.

For example, in the consideration stage, focus on:

• Images and videos that show how your products work
• Visual UGC with customers’ testimonials
• Ebooks

Slack works with micro- and nano-influencers that use the platform to enhance its visibility and stay top-of-mind.

These creators produce relatable and shareable content on social media, thus reducing ad fatigue:

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Pro tip: Notice how Slack gives a shout-out to this influencer in the TikTok video description.

6. Organize your campaign

Once you have all these strategies and tools, you can organize your campaign:

1. Create a content planning calendar.
2. Build a workflow with responsible people to streamline content creation and editing.
3. Schedule publication to ensure your marketing goals are reached. For example, you may need eight blog posts and four guest posts per month, plus daily social media memes.

Pro tip: Use software that can automatize and streamline this communication within your marketing team. SocialPilot is a good go-to solution for most companies.

7. Monitor and optimize

Keeping track of your campaign results helps you focus on the strategies that work and improve those that don’t.

1. Follow the campaign results based on your KPIs using analytics software.
2. Set up a reporting system to streamline your marketing team’s communication.
3. Set up a review procedure with clear responsibilities for each team member.
4. Identify top-performing content and pour your marketing budget towards them.
5. Create more similar pieces of content.
6. Determine what caused the underperforming content with A/B testing. Sometimes, it can be as simple as a poorly chosen image or a headline.
7. Fix these variables and run the new content.

How to start your SaaS content marketing strategy

A strong SaaS content marketing strategy will help you stand apart in today’s competitive landscape. The process isn’t easy, but our seven steps help you create an effective plan.

Remember to create relevant content that satisfies your customers’ needs, invest in analytics tools, and adapt to changing trends. This will foster lasting relationships with your audience, keep you top-of-mind, and, ultimately, ensure sustainable growth.