Mapping the Customer Pain Points to SaaS Product Features Using Content Marketing

SaaS products are created to ease daily tasks, target specific customer pain points, and optimize the way some process goes. However, having such a product is not enough since you have to market it to the target customers and make them aware of it. 

Direct and paid promotion is a fine approach, but does it tell enough about how your product eases lives and solves problems? Can you really reach out to the right audience that way? The truth is you need to embrace various content formats and distribution channels until you find the right businesses or individuals who may need your SaaS product. 

The process involves traditional advertising but also different content marketing approaches, understanding how your buyers behave, and optimizing the website content accordingly. Through all that time, you need to explore the various distribution channels you can use to deliver your campaigns. 

So, let’s get the challenges clear here:

Why is SaaS Content Marketing Unique?

The traditional marketing approach teaches us that we can place the customers based on their awareness stage in funnels and predict their behavior. However, the SaaS buyer cycles are long and unpredictable, and buyers take complex paths until they find what they’re looking for. 

Still, you can make the website journey easier for them, understanding the customer pain points in SaaS without limiting yourself to the SaaS content marketing funnel and other theoretical approximations. To craft an effective SaaS content strategy means you understand the exceptions from the ideal behavior. 

For example, not every potential buyer will land on your awareness blog post and then navigate through calls-to-action and find the sales page. Some of them, even completely unaware of your existence, will first see your pricing plans page and then explore the product.

Others may start by checking the company’s background and brand, while some potential customers will find you through social media, videos, or brand mentions. And yes, it’s as complex as it sounds, and the content marketing for SaaS companies makes the whole thing much easier. 

Remember, potential customers will again take unpredictable paths, but you know how to detect their pain points and lead them to the product features they need. 

How to Identify Customer Pain Points in SaaS?

The best way to understand your customers is to listen to their voice. The least you can do is to create an ideal client profile and build the buyer persona based on that. Surely, you can create more than one buyer persona based on the ideal client profile specifications so you can segment the audience and target them accordingly. 

When it comes to potential customers’ pain points, you must understand the challenges and frustrations they may have.

That can be:

• Customers aren’t aware a product like yours exists, which may solve plenty of problems for them
• SaaS products can be pretty expensive for small companies and startups
• Some SaaS products require technical proficiency to set up and use
• Not every SaaS product is flexible enough to meet specific customer pain points and needs
• Customers may be unaware that SaaS providers take enough care of security
• They want more flexible pricing instead of long-term contracts
• Fear of losing data when switching products
• Fear of performance issues, especially with newer products on the market

By addressing all the worries you identify using content marketing, you can educate the customers and appear more trustworthy. 

In order to listen to their voices, you need to:

• Analyze people’s behavior on dedicated forums, threads, and social media
• Leverage customer feedback tools
• Be available for direct communication through various channels 
• Analyze the competitors and their customers
• Research the industry you cover and spot the most common pain points and worries

Remember, addressing the pain points in order to create a SaaS content marketing strategy is not a simple and straightforward process. 

You’ll have to spend plenty of time researching, reading blogs and articles, even comments and testimonials, and connect the common (and even uncommon) customer pain points with the unique features your SaaS product has.

How to Map Customer Pain Points to SaaS Product Features

SaaS product features are designed to solve customer pain points. In general, you can use two main approaches in mapping them together to make your marketing strategy and content distribution more effective: 

1. Understand the problems and challenges and highlight why it’s important to resolve them. This is a customer-centric approach because you’re focused on what they get, not what you offer. 
2. Highlight the specific features that solve the problem. This is a more product-focused approach, as you identify the exact features your customers may need to solve problems. 

While both approaches are valid, the first one fits the idea of a B2B SaaS content marketing strategy.

Why?

Potential customers appreciate when you make them feel important. That way, they know you understand them without feeling like another target for your sales team. Your SaaS content strategy can help match the right people with the best SaaS product features so they can experience the benefits the right way.

Here is an example of how these approaches work. First, we’ll see how to show an understanding of specific pain points:

Customer pain point: Sales representatives spend too much time on manual tasks, like creating reports or working on complex data entry tasks. 

Benefits of resolving this pain point: Sales representatives can be more focused on selling products and services. 

Product feature: Automation CRM software features that optimize repetitive tasks like data entry and reports. 

Content marketing approach: Spotting the struggle and addressing it in a blog post. Leading the prospect to the product feature pages. Video demonstration on how the product resolves the issue or a limited trial to test it. 

Here’s an example of highlighting a product feature that solves or contributes to problem-solving:

Customer pain point: Marketing efforts don’t result in lead generation.

Product feature that helps with the pain point: An automation marketing platform that generates leads through various channels by sending them scheduled messages or social interactions. 

Content marketing approach: Embracing various content formats that explain how a specific product feature resolves the issue.

We must note that one content marketing strategy doesn’t apply to every SaaS product, even to almost the same ones. The goal is to be aware of the features that resolve most customer pain points and address them properly.

Remember:

• If something works for your competitors, it doesn’t mean it will work for you the same way
• You may offer more unique features, but you must showcase them through content
• You can always find a specific target audience that needs your product

It’s all about understanding the pain points your potential customers have and strategically addressing them as part of your overall marketing strategy.

How Content Helps With Customer Problems?

Content marketing for SaaS addresses the pain points at every stage of the customer journey. So, let’s see how it’s done:

Awareness Stage

Customers are becoming aware (but not completely) of their problems but don’t actively look for solutions. At this stage, blog posts, articles, infographics, and educational analyses educate them on the problems while introducing your product or service. 

Consideration Stage

Customers are actively researching solutions. You can help them choose you with case studies, whitepapers, and webinars so they can get more information about the value of your SaaS product.

Decision Stage (Purchase Stage)

Customers are ready to make a decision. They compare features, read the testimonials, and even sign up for a demo or trial. 

Surely, you can target the customer pain points through all stages using additional content formats like eBooks, videos, podcasts, email marketing, social media posts, interactive content, and online courses. 

But your efforts don’t stop there. 

Once you serve the content for every stage, you need to analyze a few more things, like:

• What kind of content does your target audience prefer?
• What content formats do they find most helpful?
• What channels do they prefer most?

For example, if you try to target customers on Facebook but with no results, maybe you should focus more on, let’s say, X/Twitter, which indeed brings leads. 

Or, if your target audience enjoys webinars but absolutely avoids podcasts, then save your time and money and schedule another interesting webinar for them. 

The best way to target their pain points using content marketing is through channels where they can hear you, see you, and communicate with you. 

Content Mapping: Pain Points to Product Features

The process of mapping the identified pain points to specific product features builds a bridge between the existing problems and offering solutions. By providing this connection, you directly demonstrate how your SaaS product resolves specific challenges your target audience has. 

It’s best to use real-life examples to show how your SaaS product relieves the pains the potential customers have. The best way to do that is to create a list with all the features your product has. Let’s say you offer a tool for team management in large companies.

Some of the features can be:

• Scheduling meetings in a calendar
• Scheduling company events
• Managing the sick days for every employee
• Managing the vacation days for every employee
• Paternal leaves for the employees
• Launching internal job positions 
• Opening new positions with specific job descriptions
• Educational programs and courses

Based on that, who is the target customer? Probably, that would be some team manager, department manager, HR specialist, or even the whole management team and C-suite roles. 

Once you have the list of potential buyers, their pains, and product features, think about it this way?

Who benefits most from an automated meeting scheduler? Surely, that would be the team leaders. Who needs to manage the company events? Yes, the employees in the corporate communications department? Who should have an insight into sick days or parental leaves? The HR positions, and sometimes team leaders. 

So, you get the idea. It’s not only to list the features but also to understand what challenges it resolves and who benefits most. 

The pain points in SaaS marketing can be addressed through various content formats and distribution channels. That way, you match the whole sales cycle with the right information the potential buyer needs from you. 

Best Content Marketing Practices for Mapping Pain Points to SaaS Features

When creating content, you must keep these practices in mind:

• Your content must be educational and informative so the customers can understand what benefits they get
• Be relevant to your target audience
• Be clear and concise so they can understand what you’re trying to tell them
• Use visuals to enhance the overall customer experience and build a trustworthy brand around your name

By following these best practices, you can create content that will help you attract potential customers and grow your SaaS business.

The Final Thought on Customer Pain Points in SaaS

Every SaaS product requires a different approach in content marketing because no matter how similar services are, each one is different. Hiring a SaaS content marketing agency can be one step closer to accomplishing your goals. Also, an in-house team can execute a great content marketing strategy. 

It’s up to you to analyze your company’s capacities and decide what’s the best way to map the audience’s pain points to specific product features and make your company a thought leader in the industry.