SaaS businesses face unique challenges when generating demand for their products and services. In many cases, SaaS demand generation can take months, even years, for a new SaaS company to close its first deal. This is primarily because buyers want to research their options online before engaging with a sales rep, making it difficult for SaaS companies to attract these prospects before disappearing into the depths of a competitor's website. The good news is that a solid content strategy for SaaS can help you reach these prospects and convert them into loyal customers. This article will discuss how building a targeted, data-driven content strategy can help your business consistently attract, convert, and retain high-value SaaS customers to drive long-term growth.

Attract, convert, and retain high-value SaaS customers with Trailblazer Marketing's solution, ranked number one on Google and AI search. This valuable tool can help you achieve your objectives by creating a scalable content strategy that drives lasting growth. 

Table of Contents

• What is Different about SaaS Content Marketing?

• How to Build a Powerful Content Strategy for SaaS in 14 Steps

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What is Different about SaaS Content Marketing?

SaaS content marketing is a specialized approach within the marketing field that focuses on creating and distributing content tailored explicitly for Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. The primary objective is to attract, educate, and retain a target audience by providing content that addresses their unique needs and challenges related to software solutions. 

Content Mediums

Common mediums used in SaaS content marketing include:

• Blog posts

• Whitepapers

• Webinars

• Video tutorials

• Case studies

These are all designed to:

• Establish the brand's authority

• Drive user engagement

• Enhance customer loyalty

Content marketing is crucial for SaaS businesses because it offers a sustained and authentic method to connect with potential and existing customers. Unlike transient strategies such as PPC, which generate visibility primarily during active campaigns, content marketing creates lasting assets that continue to:

• Engage

• Educate

• Convert audiences over time

Relatable Value

It helps SaaS businesses explain complex products in relatable terms, highlighting their value propositions. While email marketing and other digital strategies often rely on direct outreach, content marketing attracts audiences organically, positioning the brand as a thought leader and trusted resource. This strategic approach drives user acquisition and enhances user loyalty, making it an indispensable tool in the SaaS marketing toolkit.

Why is Content Marketing for SaaS Companies Different?

Content marketing for SaaS is different from marketing in other industries in several important ways: 

• You’re selling both technology and service. 

• Your marketing must focus on search engine optimization. 

• Your marketing must educate prospects. 

• Your sales rely heavily on reviews. 

• You must address customer risk. 

• Your content marketing strategy must promote repeat business. 

SaaS services require a certain level of commitment, so establishing reputation and trust is essential. B2B transactions often involve more decision-makers and influencers and have longer sales cycles. Digital platforms involve technology, which can be difficult to understand initially, especially when the SaaS is genuinely innovative or unprecedented. For all these reasons and more, you need to think of your SaaS content strategy as a marathon, not a sprint. Here are some key takeaways from Semrush's State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report: 

• 70% of SaaS companies had a somewhat developed or advanced content marketing strategy.

• 97% of SaaS companies found some degree of success in their content marketing efforts. 

• SaaS and IT businesses invested in their content strategies 65% of SaaS and IT businesses spent more than $3,000 on content marketing every month. 

• 75% of them expected to increase their content marketing budgets in 2023.

The Benefits of SaaS Content Marketing

SaaS content marketing offers several advantages. Here are some of the key benefits: 

• Building Trust and Credibility: Quality content establishes a brand as a thought leader. By addressing industry pain points, answering common queries, and offering actionable insights, SaaS companies can build trust among prospects and existing customers. 

• Educating Users: SaaS products often have a learning curve. Effective content marketing provides tutorials, guides, and resources to ensure users make the most of the software. This educational approach leads to better user adoption and product stickiness. 

• Improving SEO and Online Visibility: Quality content helps rank higher on search engines. For SaaS companies, this is essential to capture organic leads, especially when users search for solutions to specific problems that the software addresses. 

• Nurturing Leads and Reducing Churn: SaaS businesses can nurture potential leads by moving them along the sales funnel through content. Moreover, consistently delivering valuable content to existing customers can decrease churn rates by continually adding value to their experience. 

• Cost-effective Customer Acquisition: Content marketing often delivers a higher ROI than traditional advertising methods. By creating valuable content that addresses user needs, SaaS businesses can attract potential customers more effectively and at a lower cost. 

• Building a Community: Engaging content can foster a sense of community among users. Forums, comment sections, and feedback loops initiated through content can lead to invaluable user-generated content and insights. 

• Highlighting Product Updates and Features: The SaaS landscape is dynamic, with frequent product updates and new features. Content marketing provides a platform to announce and explain these updates, ensuring users are always in the loop.  

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How to Build a Powerful Content Strategy for SaaS in 14 Steps

Some companies underestimate the importance of other marketing elements and get frustrated when content doesn’t bring the desired results. Content works well when there’s a solid marketing strategy behind it. Before rushing into content creation, you must ensure all your processes, tools, and assets are in place. So, what are the main items you should focus on?

1. Get Your Product and Brand Story Right  

SaaS products are often less straightforward than other categories, requiring a deep understanding of the value proposition and messaging you want to deliver to your audience. Creating content without a solid business and product strategy wastes resources and little-to-zero results. Make sure you have the following elements documented:

• Your overall targeting and segmentation strategy

• Your USP (unique selling proposition), the core value offered by your company

• Your overall messaging and positioning strategy

• Your brand story, the narrative structure highlighting your background and your mission

2. Prepare All Necessary Marketing Assets

Writing blog posts before you have all website pages, forms, and workflows set up will also lead to a waste of resources. Make sure you have the following assets ready:

• An optimized website. Take care of website structure, keyword optimization, UX, page speed, and interlinking.

• A content marketing team. In-house or freelance, you need trained professionals who will take over the copywriting, design, and other areas of content production.

• Content marketing tools. A minimal tech stack can dramatically increase productivity and make your content strategy more data-driven. Start by setting up events in Google Analytics and using SEO tools for keyword and topic research.

3. Define Your Content Marketing Goals

Coming up with specific objectives will allow you to evaluate your progress and set realistic expectations. Consider setting up your goals at two primary levels:  

• The overall content marketing goals, such as the revenue or the number of Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated by content this year. Use multitouch attribution when evaluating your content's impact on the bottom line.

• Set specific metrics for each content you produce, such as organic traffic for a blog post. Setting such intermediary KPIs is essential to better understanding content performance in complex SaaS products. 

Based on our research, the top three content marketing goals for IT/SaaS companies are:

• Brand awareness

• Website traffic

• Lead generation

4. Go the Extra Mile When Researching Your Audience

Audience research is an essential part of building any content marketing strategy. It helps you understand your reader’s:

• Goals

• Challenges

• Questions

• Doubts. 

Customer analysis in the SaaS sector requires more effort and resources, especially in B2B SaaS. Here’s why: The buying process in SaaS usually involves multiple steps and numerous people, from decision-makers to users and influencers. As such, you must understand who and when will interact with your content and how to create an effective conversion workflow. 

Persona Targeting

Imagine you work for an adtech company that has several personas engaging with its content:

• A decision-maker (CMO)

• A user (performance marketing specialist)

• An influencer (CFO)

In that case, you could come up with the following workflow:

• Create a free educational online course on performance marketing to attract users, build trust with them, and showcase the solution

• Expect some of the performance marketing specialists to share their credentials after completing the course and mention the tool to the CMO

• Create a blog post about calculating marketing ROI and add a CTA (call-to-action) leading to a gated template to attract the CMO.

• Produce sales enablement materials (e.g., a case study) and pricing pages to help the CMO convince the CFO that the purchase will create a positive financial impact.

Differentiated Content

There are multiple layers to take into consideration. But once you’ve figured it out, content marketing can become your company's revenue center. ClickUp is a project management tool that targets diverse audience segments, from various teams (e.g., Marketing, DevOps, HR, and so on) to different types of companies (e.g., startups and enterprises). In this case, building differentiated approaches to content is essential. When you land on ClickUp’s blog, you can choose content based on your work type and challenges.

How to Get a Deeper Understanding of Your Audience  

You can use a few techniques to understand your audience better. For example: 

• Interview multiple types of customers, from users to decision-makers. Ask them about their behind-the-scenes process related to consuming content and purchasing.

• Actively participate in online communities in your niche. This could be platforms like GrowthMentor and GrowthHackers, Reddit threads, and LinkedIn groups.

• Build relationships with thought leaders and experts in your sector. This will help you better understand the landscape and access new audiences.

• Collaborate with your Sales, Customer Success, and other customer-facing teams. Do your best to involve them in your overall content marketing processes. Collaborating with other teams was the second-most important factor, leading to success in content marketing for SaaS/IT companies.

5. Become an Expert in Your Field and Know Your Product Inside-Out

Expertise is a foundation for creating successful, customer-focused content that builds audience trust. It’s essential to know your industry thoroughly. Many SaaS products are focused on complex sectors, such as fintech, health tech, or legal tech. Sometimes, content marketers working in such companies must learn a lot from scratch. And yet, it’s key to understanding your customers’ day-to-day goals and challenges. You can familiarize yourself with your industry in the following ways:

• Take part in customer research and sales processes. If you can, join and conduct interviews, participate in demo calls, and analyze customer support requests.

• Subscribe to the newsletters of the most significant niche publications and check their daily or weekly digests. You can also listen to podcasts and watch YouTube shows in your chosen niche.

• Build relationships with your internal subject matter experts, learn from them, and involve them in content creation. These could be anyone from product managers and owners to C-suite executives.

• Communicate with thought leaders and experts in your sector. These people are some of the most important sources of ideas and content for SaaS content marketers.

• Set up Google Alerts for the core topics in your sector. These include digital advertising, Google ads’ and ‘performance marketing’ for ad tech companies.

• Use the Topic Research tool to track trending topics. Next, ensure you and your content team know your company’s product intimately. SaaS solutions tend to be more complicated and require constant training and monitoring of feature updates. This will also help you create product-focused content and integrate your tools into the thought leadership content. 

At the same time, it allows you to align with other teams in your company, including product marketing, brand, and growth. Consider adding the following activities to your routine:

• Regularly explore your product: make sure you understand how the software works and what kind of features it has.

• Join customer calls held by the product owners: It might help you gain insight into how people use your product.

• Follow all product updates and new feature releases: make sure you understand what value they add.

6. Move Away from a Problem-Solution Mentality and Think Big  

Problem-solution thinking refers to content that only centers on the issues your SaaS product solves. This is shortsighted because your readers and potential clients have many connected needs. Creating content with a broader appeal will increase your potential audience a hundredfold. Luke O'Neill, B2B FinTech writer and owner of Genuine Communications, says: SaaS wants to talk about the product, the product, the product. But your ideal buyers aren’t buying widgets; they’re chasing big, scary goals like delivering internal and external projects, getting promoted to a CXO role, being seen as an industry leader, or offering mentorship and guidance to others. 

Empowering Content

Luke O'Neill, B2B FinTech writer and owner of Genuine Communications: An educational approach to SaaS content marketing, can help your users beyond merely solving some of their functional work problems. You can move them closer to becoming industry leaders in their own right and prepare them for promotions. Focusing on empowering your readers, rather than pushing your product, will ultimately help them remember you in the future.

7. Strengthen Your Thought Leadership and Get Creative with Content Ideas

There are numerous ways to position your company as a thought leader in SaaS, where brands often become a primary source of education. Our hypothetical adtech company might share performance marketing content on topics you’d never cover in universities. Our brand has all it takes to play a crucial role in your customers’ lives as long as you commit to delivering high-quality content driven by real-life experiences. HubSpot always promotes aligning your marketing strategy with the needs of your audience and focusing on inbound marketing. 

Thought Leadership

It was an innovative and resonating approach that turned into a significant direction of modern marketing. By doing this, they built a loyal global community beyond their product users. Thought leadership is crucial in building brand awareness and creating communities for SaaS brands. To design an effective SaaS thought leadership strategy, focus on the following:

• Determine your key area of expertise and knowledge. It could be about innovative ways to optimize ad performance for our adtech company.

• Stick to your brand story, the values and beliefs you want to promote, and the belief that there are ways to make digital advertising effective while respecting personal data privacy.

• Identify your company's thought leaders and subject matter experts, such as product owners and performance marketing managers in the adtech company. Thought leadership content can exist in any format, and it’s never too early or too late to start building it.

You could launch a podcast. See Buffer's Breaking Brand podcast series, or access additional audiences by writing expert articles for industry publications.

8. Build Authority by Diving Deeper into Content Topics  

For content to perform superlatively, you need to build what’s known as topical authority. In other words, content marketing does best when it dives deep into areas of expertise. So, rather than chasing after thousands of unrelated keywords (and creating shallow content), it’s better to find several core topics and divert further into them. It’s then a good idea to start your content planning process by examining those topics and then proceed to select the right sets of keywords. By doing so, you can better understand all the subtopics and questions that contribute to it. Each topic would usually have several related and semantically related keywords.

Content Mapping

The following example shows how an adtech company can generate numerous content ideas based on one topic, Digital Advertising, by using the Semrush Topic Research tool. Here’s the workflow:

• Type the phrase digital advertising into the topic research bar. In the example, we have selected the Mind Map format to see a list of topics. 

• Select the advertising budget topic. 

• Use the questions and headlines and the phrase advertising budget to help address the talking points for your next piece of content. 

• Once we have our talking points and questions, we can rank for more related keywords that form part of the topic.

9. Build an Effective Marketing Content Funnel

As we’ve covered, SaaS products are highly considered, especially in B2B scenarios. Before winning a customer, there are many decision-makers to please. That makes it key to create content that satisfies customer needs across all the touch points along the customer journey. You can do this by producing content for each funnel stage. A basic funnel is an inverted pyramid with stages of:

• Awareness

• Interest

• Consideration

• Conversion

Here’s a simple content marketing funnel and customer journey, along with some examples from SaaS and online service brands:

Awareness

A potential customer is aware they have a problem to solve, but they are not sure what solutions are available. A marketer needs to improve their in-house research capacity, and they begin to look for solutions online. They search for how to conduct online market research and discover a range of help guides from different SaaS providers. In the example, we see guides from Momentive (Survey Monkey) and Hotjar, which offer services in this niche.

Interest

After reading the content, a potential customer discovers several solutions on the market and starts to read about their options online. In this funnel stage, the potential customer starts following brands and asking questions. Returning to the digital publishing platform Flipsnack, the brand has created top-quality interest/engagement-level content.

Consideration

In this stage of the content funnel, the potential customer knows what category of solution they need but not which brand. They might watch webinars, download guides, read reviews, or sign up to your mailing list for more information.

Conversion

Here, your customers are looking for details related to your deals, pricing, specific use cases, and anything else to help them make their final decision.  Email lead nurture flows can be highly effective if you have built a mailing list. Once you have a mailing list, you must nurture your users with valuable content. While you can talk about your product, offers, and referral programs, you should still give your audience a lot more value than I expect from them. People will stay reading, subscribed, and happy if your emails are:

• Useful

• Practical

• Insightful

• Refreshing

10. Design Lead-Nurturing Content Workflows

Once you’ve considered the buyer’s journey and content funnel, the next step is to connect content to build conversion paths. That is, designing ways for your customers to move through the funnel from awareness to conversion. Here’s how:

Turn to Analytics

You’ll be able to see which content is most successful:

• Which content is being clicked on the most? If How-to guides perform well on social media, it could be an area to concentrate on. 

• Which content brings you the most organic traffic? If you know specific topics outperform others, you know where to invest your resources.

• Which keywords are ranking for? Keywords can give you many clues as to what content to create next and for whom.

• Which content is encouraging newsletter sign-ups? And so on.

Make sure to track where people tend to go after reading blogs. You can run experiments by adding different call-to-action buttons (CTAs). This will help you understand which types of content to create, which types of CTAs to use, and how to move your leads through the funnel.  

Check Out the Competition

Your competition holds clues as to what works and what doesn’t. Perform a keyword gap analysis and see what they are ranking for and where you are lagging. But also take your snooping further. Download their guides, experience their email flows, read their content, and see what they do on social media. While you can’t see too far under the hood, you can surmise what works for them and which topics your potential clients might be interested in.

Work on Lead Nurture

Lead nurturing involves taking the lead and giving them value through content interspersed with easy ways to become customers. This is especially important for companies that focus more on the sales process and less on self-service. 

11. Focus on Quality, Not Quantity When Creating Content  

The top two strategies helping to generate organic traffic for our survey respondents working in IT are posting more often (48%) and improving the quality of content (46%). How can you create high-quality, optimized content? It needs to do several things: How can you create high-quality, optimized content at scale? First, establish a quality control process for your content. It needs to do several things:

• It should provide useful, practical, and original information. At the same time, it needs to be relevant to the audience's intent.

• It should also be authentic. Content based on your expertise will always be better than content outside my experience.

• Content should also be fully comprehensive. Ensure you cover all potential questions and subtopics related to the main topic of the content piece.

• Content should offer a great user experience. Written content, for example, should be pitched to the audience's level of understanding, include visuals, have short, easy-to-read sentences, and help the user scan with headings.

Content Audits

You must also assess what’s working well and what’s not continually. As such, content audits are crucial to improving your SaaS content. According to our research, 59% of companies that succeed in content marketing run content audits 2+ times a year.

12. Work Out Your Promotion and Distribution Strategy  

Building a smart content distribution strategy is as important as the content you are producing in the first place. You must consider how content will be promoted before the creation process occurs. There are three primary methods of distributing content:  

• Owned channels. Owned channels belong to your business (podcast, blog, mailing list, social media). These are your own to post on, as you will. 

• Earned and shared channels. These channels are owned by third parties, such as friendly blogs, news websites, forums (such as this dedicated SaaS Reddit page), and even review sites. These sites are free to post on, but the content won’t belong to you afterward.

• Paid channels. These platforms or influencers will promote your product for a fee. The top three SaaS content distribution channels, according to our research, are a mix of owned and paid channels: organic social media (71% of responses), email marketing (50%), and social media ads (49%). 

The key point to note is that each channel and platform within those groups has its own guidelines and best practices for sharing content. That means content needs to be adapted for wherever it is placed. Get it right, and your content will get a lot of impressions. Get it wrong, and it will go unnoticed. Content for Instagram Reels won’t work well on LinkedIn. Long-form blog posts don’t perform as well as newsletters. Facebook posts will get truncated on Twitter.

13. Monitor Key Content Marketing Metrics and Measure Performance

Some key performance indicators (KPIs) are standard for content marketing in any industry, such as:

• The number of unique website visitors

• Session duration

• Bounce rate

These KPIs are also relevant to the SaaS industry, but a few marketing metrics are crucial for SaaS.

Metrics Beyond Traffic

While paid and organic traffic are foundational metrics, it's only the tip of the iceberg. Engagement metrics, such as time spent on page, scroll depth, and social shares, offer insights into how captivating and valuable your audience finds your content. Looking at lead quality, such as lead-to-customer conversion rates, can indicate how well your content resonates with your target audience. Free trial registrations can be segregated to identify requests from specific pages on your site, such as your blog or resource guides.

Performance Metrics

Software demo requests can be segregated similarly. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures how your marketing costs compare to the number of customers you acquire for your expenditures. Lead conversion rate (LCR), which measures how many conversions you get per visit to your site, opt-ins to your email list, or registrations for a trial or demo.

Attribution Models

Understanding which content pieces drive conversions is invaluable in the complex web of digital touchpoints. This is where attribution models are critical. Linear attribution gives equal credit to every touchpoint, while time decay models value more recent interactions. Choosing the right model for your SaaS business can offer insights into which content pieces are most influential in your conversion funnel. Advanced models also consider multi-device journeys, factoring in how content consumed on mobile influences decisions made on desktop.

Attribution Modeling

Leveraging the right attribution model can help you make informed decisions about content investments and ensure resources are allocated to the most impactful content pieces. Monitoring your campaign's performance is essential to ensuring that your content marketing efforts achieve the desired results. You can do this by setting up a reporting system that tracks the key performance indicators you established when setting your campaign goals. Include that KPI in your campaign results tracking to increase free software trial registrations. Use an analytics software tool with a dashboard to create customized displays and reports tracking your desired KPIs. 

Optimization Strategy

Establish a regular review procedure to monitor your campaign's metrics and overall performance. If you find that your results aren’t achieving your goals, take the opportunity to make adjustments. Identify which content pieces generate the best results, and focus your marketing budget on promoting them. Use them as templates to replicate your success with other content. Split testing can improve the performance of underperforming pieces by testing how changes affect performance. A small change, such as a different headline, slant, or image, generates better search results.

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