Content Marketing for SaaS Startups: A to Z Guide

Are you aware of the exit strategy? No, it’s not about selling your company. 

It’s about going public with your SaaS product. But, before you do that. It is essential to know what’s working in the market today given the ‘metaverse’ is just around the corner. Technology is evolving and so are we. 

So, what marketing strategy can help you achieve that perfect exit? 

On average, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, but generates 3x more leads. 

Content marketing in B2B is different from B2C. Here is how:

• You sell both products and service
• Your marketing must educate prospects
• You meet your customers’ risks
• You have SEO-focused marketing
• Your sales team depends on reviews
• Your marketing strategy gets you repeat customers

But the funda to generate leads and capture demand for your product, service or solution lies in a demand-generation driven approach. Generating a good demand empowers you to create more customer-centric content while content marketing enables you to capture the customer’s attention at all stages of the funnel.

Yes, you create content that aligns with the traditional marketing funnel – articles and assets for TOFU (top-of-the-funnel), MOFU (middle-of-the-funnel), and BOFU (bottom-of-the-funnel) goals. 

Wondering, how to create a marketing strategy for these 3 funnels? Here is the roadmap for you:

1. Identify the right target audience
2. Customer’s pain points analysis
3. Keyword analysis
4. Marketing campaign goal setting 
5. Content production
6. Content distribution strategy
7. Campaign result monitoring 

For each step, following strategies and tactics will help produce the best results. Let’s discuss them one by one:

1. Build a buyer persona

You can identify your right customers by creating a checklist of questions to categorize the characteristics of each buyer. Here is the best example:

• What is the age and gender of your buyer?
• What industry do they belong to?
• Which social media profile do they follow?
• What are their job titles and income level?
• Which brands do they transact with?
• What websites do they regularly visit?

Of course, this checklist can be customized to your product and audience. For instance, Facebook offers analytical services that help you find characteristics of your following in categories in detail. 

This information comes in handy to create your buyer persona. In case, you have more than one target market, create multiple buyer personas. However, it is best to focus on a few to fructify your marketing efforts.

2. Know your customer’s pain points

Usually, pain points vary by audience, industry, and other variables. But, some common ones are these:

• High expenses and low revenue
• The annoying user experience of the current product
• Difficulty learning how to use a SaaS solution due to not enough technical support
• Inability to integrate a SaaS solution with the desired app
• Ample work is needed to use an existing SaaS product

While creating a content strategy for your marketing and sales material, add these customer pain areas to be more accurate. 

3. Keyword analysis

At each stage of the customer journey, you require a different set of keywords to address their needs well. For example:

• When the customer is not aware of your brand, they may search for ‘how to solve…’ as per their product issues.
• Upon your product discovery, they may search for reviews.
• Once they start using your product, they search for tips and tactics on how to use certain features of your application.
• When faced with customer service issues, they may search for solutions.

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, and BuzzSumo to guide your content development.

Well, I am currently using the first two and they are full of insights and data that help me create a solid keyword strategy not just for my website but for client’s projects as well. 

4. Marketing campaign goal setting

Before you hire an expert B2B content writer to develop content, it is best to first develop measurable goals for your content marketing campaign. A few marketing metrics that are highly relevant to the SaaS industry consist of the following: 

• Free trial registrations and software demo requests. This can be categorized to find out where the requests are coming from – blog, resources guides, product page, or contact page.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) measures how your marketing campaign costs as compared to the number of customers you get for your expenditures. 
• Lead Conversion Rate (LCR) measures how many conversions you get per visit to your website, registration for a trial, or subscribing to your email list. 

5. Content production

So, you know your marketing goals before jumping on to creating keyword-oriented content. Here is what goes into content production. 

Let’s check out the steps:

1. Do extensive research and keep in mind your buyer persona, competitors, trends, SERP, keywords, and customer journey
2. Create a content marketing calendar (short-form blogs, long-form blogs, how-to guides, whitepapers, eBooks, infographics, scripts for videos)
3. Hire a content marketing freelancer
4. Content creation, editing, and posting
5. Schedule your content as per your publication schedule and budget too

Ideally, I’d recommend you use a project management tool like Jira or Asana to optimize your content marketing process. 

Now, if you don’t know where you’re headed, how would you reach the destination? So, make sure to set a goal for each content piece. For instance, you’d want to have an objective of increasing brand awareness, generating leads via blog signups, educating the target audience about your product, and finally converting leads into customers.

6. Content distribution strategy

Your content distribution entails where and when you will publish your content. It must address these critical facets:

• Where are you going to post your on-site content? Will it be on your blog or resources section? 
• Will all your content be available publicly or will you gate some for premium users? Some, for instance, eBooks, whitepapers, tutorials, courses, etc.
• What third-party sites will you use to distribute your content? For instance, guest blogging and PR sites.
• Which social media profiles will you use to distribute your content?

The underrated hack to save time on distribution is the effective use of a marketing automation platform. You can easily upload your content on your website and social media profiles using Marketo or HubSpot. Both tools have result-driven features that will change your marketing game – helping you multiply revenue by saving time, money, and resources.

7. Campaign result monitoring

Do you know how your content is performing? Well, if you’re not tracking and measuring, you won’t be able to track how close you are to your goals. Following are some analytics and performance tracking tools:

• Google Analytics: Get valuable insights on website performance, bounce rate, and session time. 
• Leadfeeder: Tracks your website and lets you know when someone on the list of buyers visits it and what pages they go to.
• Clarabridge: AI-powered social media listening suite for B2B brands.

Final Thoughts

To supplement your SaaS growth, you need data. By analyzing conversion and engagement rates, you can adapt to changing customer preferences and capture emerging demands too. Through all stages of funnels, your content must help solve a user’s problem, become better at its job, and ultimately achieve its business goals. 

Content marketing is a long-term game and if you can stay patient and disciplined throughout the buyer journey, you reap magnificent results. Having a sales team working tirelessly towards selling the product or service could be of great value. They usually have qualitative insights into which topic picks customers’ interests thus such customer segments are most likely to convert.  

To get started, take a few minutes to fill out the contact form for a discovery call. Let’s get on a call and discuss the content strategy for your project.