SaaS content marketing is a popular growth tactic, costing less but generating more leads. It has no competition for brand growth and will continue to thrive.
Marketers utilized the information but often failed. Consequently, we have abundant low-quality content lacking a solid strategy. This causes companies to abandon content and prioritize measurable marketing strategies. However, there is a better approach.
Today, we’ll briefly show you how to set up an SaaS content marketing strategy, similar to how we do things at Chanty. Many of these elements will apply if you’re in a different field, so if you want to learn how to create and distribute better content, let’s dive in.
Define Your Target Audience
If you’re writing for everyone, you’re writing for no one. There is no company out there whose target audience is every human being. Focus on the kind of audience who buys your products and who is interested in what you have to say.
If you’re serious about your marketing efforts, you probably have at least one buyer persona developed, and you should write for them. However, in reality, it often happens that your visitors want to read something completely different from what you imagined.
If you already have an established blog presence, take a deep dive into your analytics to learn about your readers. A simple tool such as Google Analytics will tell you about your readers:
- Age
- Country
- Gender
- Most popular pages
- Pages with the most clicks
- Pages that have the longest sessions
Use these insights to create content that your readers want to consume and not the kind of content you think they would love to read.
Do Extensive Keyword Research
You probably already know a little bit about SEO. One of the main goals of SaaS content marketing is to increase your organic traffic and pull as much traffic from search engines as possible.
Without a strategy, random visitors won’t engage with your content or become customers.
Keyword research is crucial for a successful content strategy. Find keywords your audience searches for to boost traffic and conversions. Use tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs, and don’t overlook Google Keyword Planner and insights from Google Search Console.
How To Do keyword Research In Ahrefs
So, your ideal keywords have the following:
- High search volume (lots of people search for them every month)
- Low keyword difficulty (it is not difficult to rank on page 1 of search results for this keyword)
- High intent (the visitor is likely to search for this keyword when they want a solution for their problem, so they will purchase from you)
This is the ideal case, but more often than not, you’re going to get two out of three. You’ll find that there aren’t too many keywords out there with high volume and low difficulty, and when you do find them, they won’t be too relevant for your target audience. So what’s a marketer to do?
First, don’t neglect these opportunities. If you find a keyword with plenty of potential (high volume + low difficulty), write some really good content around it, as long as it’s related to your industry and niche. Those visitors may not convert immediately, but any opportunity to get traffic is a good one.
Identify high-intent keywords for a good content match. People actively seeking a solution will use these keywords. For example, “b2b marketing” is exploratory, while “email automation in B2B marketing” is specific.
Sure, the first term gets more search volume, but the second search term is more likely to turn from a visitor into a customer – if you sell email automation software, of course.
How many keywords should you select for your SaaS content marketing strategy?
The truth is, you need key keywords for high conversions and traffic. Determine the keyword before writing each piece of content. Ideally, have a keyword for every page on your website, but there’s no fixed number.
Assign Duties
Once you have a solid idea about your target audience and you’ve found your most lucrative keywords, it’s time to determine who does each part of the job. An SaaS strategy is much more complex than one writer churning out all the content and doing the promotion on social media.
To start, find a content marketing manager/strategist. They handle keyword research, content ideas, competition analysis, and the content calendar. They may or may not be a writer, as strategists may lack writing skills and writers often lack a broader perspective.
Having an SEO manager is beneficial for improving website SEO, analyzing competition, and finding link building opportunities. They help maximize content potential by building links.
Optionally, you can hire an outreach manager.
If you have an SaaS content marketing plan with guest posting, this person finds websites for guest posts. To enhance your content efforts, you need a dedicated person for outreach. Our success with guest blogging is due to having someone solely focused on outreach at Chanty.
Finally, not all of these are necessary to create a content strategy and execute it. However, having a trio of content marketers + SEO manager + outreach manager is enough to get excellent results in a very short time, without resorting to hiring a marketing agency.
If your startup is low on funds, hire a skilled content strategist who can write with a basic setup. Remember to consider the necessary tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Buzzsumo, Buffer or Quuu for social scheduling, Hunter.io and LinkedIn Premium for contact research, and other SaaS tools. Be cautious with your choices as the monthly subscriptions can be expensive, and you may realize later that some tools are unnecessary.
Establish Promotion Strategies
There’s a lot of noise out there and there are hundreds of thousands of blog posts published every day. If you want to make an impact and not just write another meaningless blog, you have to go beyond hitting the “publish” button.
The first thing you can do is set up a social media promotion strategy. This is the lowest-hanging fruit, so tick it off early. Put your new piece of content in a social media scheduling tool such as Quuu and make sure you cover all your social media profiles.
Second, keep the link handy in discussions about your product or when a potential customer is looking for a solution to their pain point. This could be on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, on forums. Use every opportunity to drive new readers to the piece of content, without being overly promotional or spammy.
Third, include your new piece of content in your newsletter. If you don’t have one already, now is a good time to create it. You can send out a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter with your most important updates and include a link to your latest piece of content to get a few extra clicks.
Fourth and perhaps most important, build links to your new piece of content. First, build internal links and make sure to link to your new post from other, older pieces of content on your website. Then move on to building the more important external links.
Which of the Following Transforms Marketing Strategies Into Real Values for Consumers?
To summarize, search for niche websites that allow guest posts. Pitch them with your preferred topics and include a link to your content. Follow each website’s guidelines regarding links in your post.
To create a strong content strategy, repurpose successful articles into videos for your website or YouTube channel. This boosts views and offers a high ROI.
Analyze and Improve
You cannot improve what you don’t measure. To have a fully functioning SaaS content strategy, you need to measure how your content is performing. If something is not working, it’s best to ditch it and move on to a new strategy quickly to save time and money.
There are countless ways to measure how your content is performing. First, you can take a look at your analytics to see your page views, average session length, and bounce rates. If your main aim is conversions, you should track how many conversions you get from a specific piece of content.
In regards to SEO, you want to know how many links you get from each blog or piece of content you post. The best way to do this is by using a tool such as Ahrefs, which indexes new links daily. It will also tell you how you’re performing in terms of keywords and your positions in search engine results for those keywords.
To look at the bigger picture, always keep an eye out for your most important metrics.
For Chanty, there’s three of them:
- The number of monthly website visitors
- Domain authority/domain rating
- Conversion rate (visitor turned into free/paid user)
You can track your monthly visitors with Google Analytics and get weekly updates to monitor progress. Use MOZbar for domain authority and Ahrefs for domain rating. Conversions can also be tracked in Google Analytics. Aim to increase all three values over time.
Except for conversions, these are the metrics you want to keep in mind when researching your competition and when looking for places to pitch guest posts.
Document Everything
To create a successful SAAS strategy, it’s crucial to document it. Include roles, procedures, and every content creation and promotion step.
Reduced version: Checking tasks will be easier. New team members can quickly catch up by using the documentation. It will also shorten onboarding time for replacements.
Wrapping Up
Coming up with a great SaaS content marketing strategy and having positive ROI from content is a long-term game. These are some of the basic elements of a SAAS strategy, but yours may be slightly different.
Whichever way that you build your strategy, focus on one goal: creating actionable content that your visitors will enjoy reading. Once you’ve hit the mark with the quality of your content, focus on consistency and results are sure to come in rapidly.
