Creating a Killer Content Marketing Strategy for SaaS: The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need

When talking about organic growth, the immediate solutions that come to everyone’s mind are SEO and content marketing. While these approaches were distant in the past, today’s organic presence depends on an inclusive SaaS strategy for advanced content marketing based on relevant search queries and targeting ideal customers’ pain points. That way, SaaS businesses attract the right audience who is interested in their product or service. 

While there are so many aspects to cover before the implementation, from defining the ideal client to using advanced SaaS SEO practices and spotting the relevant content formats – SaaS also requires consistency and focus so you can position your business in a highly competitive market. 

But why is SaaS content marketing different from the usual writing and content creation?

There are several reasons, but here’s what comes to our minds first:

• SaaS providers and potential customers are already technically proficient, and they don’t need awareness stage education most of the time
• SaaS businesses are allowed to use industry jargon to attract the relevant audience
• Most of the keywords are branded and transactional because selling the product is the ultimate goal
• B2B sales cycles can last from a few weeks to a few months
• SaaS often incorporates new and innovative technologies people aren’t even aware of
• Even reputable SaaS companies may have a hard time converting and retaining customers

While content marketing is not the direct answer to the mentioned challenges, having a strong strategy surely positions your business as an authority in the industry. So, here we have an extensive guide to help you build a strategy that aligns with your offer and values and helps you sell to your ideal client.

So, what does it take to establish a strong SaaS content marketing strategy that delivers realistic results?

How Does the Buyer Journey Lead You to an Effective SaaS Content Marketing Strategy?

Creating a killer content marketing strategy requires thinking inside the box first so you can later extend the ideas and look at the content outside that box. 

That means the buyer journey can guide you through the whole strategy, knowing that:

• The awareness stage attracts the largest number of traffic and potential customers to your website
• The consideration stage lowers that number, letting only the relevant audience stay on the website
• The decision stage cuts down the consideration leads who aren’t ready to buy right now or just don’t find your product relevant enough for their needs.
• The advocacy stage encourages the paying customers to become your greatest promotors

Knowing these important aspects, you can easily target relevant topics for each stage. In general, during the awareness stage, you educate potential customers on why they need a SaaS solution like yours or why change the current one into something better. 

The consideration stage explains why they are the ideal customers who will have the most benefits of your product. 

The decision stage content encourages them to make a decision and invest their money in convenient and functional solutions – just like yours. 

The advocacy stage encourages the paying customers to continue with the subscription or even move to a bigger pricing plan depending on their needs. Additionally, you can reach out to them directly and learn more about how they use your product and what improvements they may need.

So, here’s how to begin creating a killer content marketing strategy for SaaS:

Always Know Your Audience and Buyer Personas

A great content strategy doesn’t start with a bunch of blog posts and templates or a few social media posts to test the response. Before diving into those tasks, you must understand who you’re reaching out to.

You first need to understand what you’re selling. If you offer workflow management software, your ideal client is another business with various departments and employees who need to streamline the work process so managers can always have an insight into how things go. 

The buyer persona, on the other hand, is a semi-fictional approximation of the person who reaches out to your business with the intention of purchasing the product or subscribing to a paid plan. 

So, develop detailed buyer personas (yes, you can have more than one) to map the pain points, online behavior, goals, and expectations. That way, you can set some benchmarks and build your content strategy toward those needs and interests. 

Craft Content that Educates, Solves Problems, and Engages

According to recent industry changes and Google updates, quality content that educates, engages, helps resolve problems, and offers value has a huge advantage when it comes to search engine ranking. That means you need to balance between self-promotional articles and put more focus on valuable content that speaks to your audience, like:

• Blog posts to share industry insights practical tips, and answer frequently asked questions
• Ebooks and whitepapers to cover specific SaaS topics, research results, and practical uses to establish your leadership
• Webinars, podcasts, and live sessions to interact with your audience
• Case studies to demonstrate success stories and collaborations while highlighting the benefits of using your SaaS product
• Infographics and visual content to simplify complex data and information
• Landing pages to promote your main offer, generate leads, and kickstart the sales cycle

This way, you cover all the stages from the sales funnel, offering educational content for the potential customers in the awareness stage, persuasive and promotional for those in the consideration stage, direct promotions for the decision stage, and personalized content for loyalty, i.e., advocacy stage. 

Strategically Optimize for Search Engines

SEO is a strategic approach to ensure your content is discoverable by the target audience. It’s not enough to use keywords only; it’s also important to optimize the content structure, on-page elements, off-page efforts, and website performance. 

Stuffing the content with related queries is in the past. Try to detect relevant keywords, search phrases, and even questions to answer to make your site relevant for the specific search terms. 

Remember, SEO requires:

• A complete SEO audit that covers the overall content quality and technical SEO challenges
• Brainstorming new ideas for each type of content on your website
• Strategically incorporating off-site channels to establish brand authority
• Optimizing for mobile-first indexing
• Covering relevant topics for each stage of the buyer journey

Modern SEO requires following the established practices but also adding a creative twist to make the content relevant and valuable to the target audience.

Content Promotion Across Multiple Channels

Publishing content on your website is not enough to get your SaaS product out of the shadows. Depending on your target audience’s online behavior and habits, you have a chance to leverage multiple promotion channels, including:

• Social media shares on your Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or X/Twitter profiles so you can engage with your audience
• Email marketing for the leads so they can access exclusive content that is not available on the website
• Paid advertising so you can target specific audiences more aggressively, addressing relevant problems and solutions
• Industry publications on relevant websites
• Guest blogging on high-authority and relevant blogs to build credibility

Repurposing the Existing Content

Your existing content is a goldmine for extended reach and a more creative approach to SaaS content marketing strategy.

Let’s say you have a long-form blog post that covers many important aspects of using your SaaS product, highlighting its unique features. You can use parts of that blog post to create shorter social media posts or record a video explaining how your product works. 

Additionally, you can use it as inspiration for exceptional visual content you can share on your LinkedIn pages or even Instagram and Facebook to encourage the target audience to take further action, sign up for a demo, or use the free trial you offer before committing to larger pricing plans.

Understand Your Product Completely

Knowing what your SaaS product is capable of can be a great way to keep an ongoing list of content ideas and fill up the content calendar with relevant activities. 

Being an expert in your SaaS offer satisfies the EEAT requirements, so you also increase the chances of being easily discoverable for plenty of relevant queries. 

But what exactly does it mean to be a SaaS expert for your content marketing strategy?

First, you need to know how your product works. What are the best features that make it functional? What makes it different from the competitors’ products? How does your SaaS product compare to similar solutions available on the market? 

Second, think about the features and how they ease your customers’ lives. What unique features do you want to highlight? Use it as inspiration to create an extended list of content ideas so you can establish a strong content marketing strategy that drives conversions and growth.

Create Topic Clusters to Build Industry Authority

Topical authority is a must for SaaS businesses. It goes above and beyond the well-known SEO content writing tasks, letting you dive into your expertise areas. 

Many SaaS businesses try to rank for an extensive list of keywords that may or may not be related. Instead, try to think about topics. Once you have the core topic ideas, perform keyword research to extend them. That way, you will better understand the content planning and content opportunities that strengthen your online presence. 

For example, let’s take the workflow management tool. 

The goal: Promoting your SaaS product as the ultimate solution for productivity and procrastination challenges in businesses.

Initial topic ideas:

1. Why do I need a workflow management tool?

a) Risks of managing the team with no tool at all

b) Why does poor workflow management lead to bad results?

c) How do you choose the right workflow management tool?

2. How do you deal with team procrastination effectively?

a) X Reasons why your team procrastinates at work?

b) Common ways to address productivity issues at work.

c) How does a workflow management tool remove team procrastination?

3. What is a productivity management tool?

a) What type of workflow management tool is best for startups?

b) What productivity management tool should enterprise-level companies choose?

c) How do productivity tools help manage the team better?

You get the idea!

Each topic can cover various search queries and terms, so make sure your content is extra valuable for potential buyers. 

Repeat the clustering for each stage of the funnel. Leverage the flywheel model, too, so you can extend the topic list and build a strong content marketing foundation to stay ahead of your competitors.

Track, Analyze, Improve, and Grow

Setting relevant metrics and key performance indicators for your content strategy lets you understand what content attracts an audience and what pages encourage conversions. 

By leveraging analytics tools, you can track the SEO performance, discover more keywords and content opportunities, and extend the topical map for your website. Tracking the content performance shows you if you’re on the right path or if you need to improve the current strategy.

If you don’t track the progress, you’re missing great growth opportunities. So, use the preferred tools to measure the progress and adapt the content marketing strategy accordingly. 

Don’t Miss on the New Trends

Some trends are temporary, but others create new practices to be embraced. Currently, voice search optimization, AI tools, search generative experience, and sustainable content production are huge things in the SaaS industry.

Still, these content trends may change, so keep track of what’s happening. Using outdated content marketing tactics will hold you back from growth, and you surely don’t want that for your SaaS product.

Conclusion

Content marketing can be the driving force for ongoing SaaS growth. It attracts, converts, and lets your business extend to new heights. You only need to identify your product’s strongest features and turn them into content ideas that attract an audience and encourage customer engagement. 

That way, you can win the competitive world of SaaS, becoming discoverable and relevant on search engines or the whole online space in general.