Having a content marketing strategy is important not just for enticing and benefiting your customers; but for search engine rankings as well. The more informative and helpful content you publish such as white papers, articles, and/or blogs, the better position you will have in SERPs which eventually helps with better leads.
But, trying to market your content without a strategy can be disastrous. In essence, content strategy is an all-encompassing plan that tells you a lot of things that are important for SEO. It tells you what type of audience to write for, what kind of content to publish, the right format, the right platforms, and the best topics to write about.
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Elements of an Effective SaaS Marketing Strategy:
Knowing Your Audience
Getting to know your audience lies at the heart of any SEO strategy for SaaS companies. You should know what your audience is actively looking for. What information are they seeking? What are their concerns, pain-points, what solutions do they want? What kind of topics do you think will help them? Once you know the answers to these questions, you can draft the most effective content strategy.
Set Specific Goals
The goal of SaaS content marketing is to get your customers to sign-up for your user manual software and become repeat customers. Remember, you are asking them for a payment every month. But, before you can turn them into paying customers, you must help them achieve small goals.
In short, you have to build them up to the point where they willingly want to spend for a paid version of your service. The small goals can be subscribing to the blog, opting for a newsletter, opening an email, or signing up for free trial usage. Be sure that these small goals are measurable and specific.
Choosing the Right Format
B2B content marketing strategies tend to benefit from different content styles - email campaigns, e-books, webinars, infographics, white paper, case studies, and blog posts. You can pick from any of these formats. Just be sure it delivers information in the most readable and effective form.
To figure that out, you need to know your customers’ pain points, what they want, the platforms they are most active at, and the action you want them to take, etc. Since SaaS users are digital, it’s best if you reach them via blogs. Perhaps they could benefit from an ebook they could use as a guide to training their employees. It’s important you pick a format that your target audience prefers the most.
SaaS Content Marketing Strategy:
Creating Solution-oriented Articles for Customers
Every SaaS Document business should keep user intent in mind before drafting their content. No matter whether it’s a lead, a returning customer, or a new customer, it’s important that there’s relevant content for all kinds of customers. Also, different leads can be at different stages of the buying process. Therefore, there should be customer-centric articles for each stage.
Below are the five different stages that you must create your content around:
Phase I - Product awareness
Phase 2 - Lead generation
Phase 3 - Getting leads to sign up for a trial
Phase 4 - Transitioning trial users into paid customers
Phase 5 - Retaining paid customers
Improve on-site SEO
Although content marketing is at the heart of your growth strategy, you must not ignore SEO. search engine optimization helps websites like Google recognize your product/service against relevant keywords. If you want your content to appear against all the relevant searches, you must optimize your content for certain phrases and keywords.
SEO begins with keyword research. During that phase you must:
Take care of user intent: SaaS marketing is cut-throat. That means, you already have many established competitors. If you want to understand what kind of content to create, you should research your competitors. See what kind of keywords they are targeting. Additionally, you can also use Google Adwords to target the right kind of customers and win them by offering whatever is missing in your competitor’s content campaign.
Search Volume Analysis: Search volume essentially means how many times a particular search query appears in a search engine. There’s no point in building your content strategy around search queries and keywords that no one wants is actively looking for on the internet. For this purpose, you can use the Google Keyword Planner tool.
Customer Involvement Marketing Strategy
This part of marketing focuses on retaining customers by informing them of the latest updates and new features. Companies can do that by sending newsletters that talk about the brand new features. It can also talk about the bug fixes and how the features and updates will offer solutions to their previously unsolved problems.
Messaging apps like Twist, Slack, and Basecamp do that by regularly sending their users notifications about everything that’s new. It’s an excellent way for them to retain existing customers and also get them to upgrade to more premium features.
Asking for Free trials
SaaS marketing is tricky because you’re asking for repeat payment for a product a user has not even tried yet. That is why free trials are your best bet in capturing high-converting leads. Free trials give users a test of the waters before they commit to a product. If they like what they see and get, they might always opt for a paid version.
However, you must remind them before the trial period ends to sign-up for the paid version. You can do that by sending reminder emails. You can also send them a discount for their first paid sign-up.
In-app Upgrades of Applications
If you’re a SaaS startup, you can create content around in-app upgrades. It’s a powerful marketing strategy that you can use. Creating in-app upgrades doesn’t always mean that you have to sell those features by asking your customers to upgrade to a new version.
Rather, you can use it as a marketing strategy. If new upgrades fix any of the previous bugs or if it makes a previously difficult job easier, it gives people a reason to stick around with you longer. You must create educational videos and share the details of upgrades via email/blog to inform your users. In-app upgrades introduce new improvements, fix bugs, and enhance overall usage.
Bottom Line
SaaS marketing is quite different from marketing for physical products/services. You’re selling an intangible service; something that a user never has tried before. Therefore, you must be careful and tackle things from a unique perspective. Hopefully, this post gave you some idea on how to go about SaaS content marketing.
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