Most software as a service (SaaS) brands use content as a way to improve their marketing and sales strategies. However, there are a few organizations left on the sidelines that have yet to embrace a good blog-forward marketing strategy designed to achieve their goals. Let’s look at some great content ideas specifically for SaaS brands.
Amazing content provides a number of benefits for companies that design software as a service. First of all, it helps to establish a SaaS company as an industry leader. It also helps to promote trust, educate target consumers, attract organic leads, improve conversions, and increase sales.
This article is intended to help members of the C-suite and industry decision-makers learn just why blogs and their relationship to wider content marketing strategies are so essential to business growth.
How to Do SaaS Content Marketing
Imagine running a robust content marketing strategy, with a minimal investment, that users in significantly more sales. When using a thorough content marketing strategy, with the right tech tools, this can be easily achieved.
First, let’s look at the typical scenario for an internal SaaS company’s marketing team. They likely have 10 to 20 employees (depending on the company’s size), they invest in paying those salaries, provide ongoing costly training, and flip the bill for expensive tech tools. Furthermore, it is virtually unheard of for SaaS companies to hire true marketing experts who master content marketing and technology.
In order to run a thorough content marketing strategy that’s both scalable and affordable, it is wise to partner with an agency capable of writing and marketing your SaaS content. The best growth marketing agencies have true teams of experts and all the necessary tech tools to generate leads, qualify them, and market to them using automated technology that allows the right buyers, to be reached at the right time in the buyer’s journey, with the right content reflecting their stage in their journey to find the right solution to their need.
In order to run a lucrative SaaS marketing strategy, utilizing a CRM with marketing automation technology will be a huge component of your success. Various tools allow a manager to segment their leads according to the buyer persona, and based on the platform, some of these even reveal the lead’s name, their job title, and the company they work for. This is critical information because if you know what their needs are, what their job entails, and what kind of role they report to, you can create content-forward SaaS marketing pieces that speak directly to these types of people. Such content can be automated using a set cadence to reach these individuals, and because the content speaks to their needs, they are more likely to convert.
So instead of having an entire team of people to set up and monitors technology, do consumer research, create content, and email it to the right people while following up on contacts, SaaS companies can partner with an agency and have two or three internal people manage that relationship to get better results, at a fraction of the cost.
Finally, when creating a holistic SaaS content marketing strategy, you need to make sure your tone, look, and messaging are consistent throughout your website. This means the homepage, primary service pages, and blogs must all show relevance. Now only with this keep prospective clients from getting confused, but this is also good for SEO, as Google’s algorithm has AI and machine learning components
How to Write SaaS Blogs
One of the most effective ways to market your SaaS company through blogging is to use pillar pages and blog clusters.
A pillar page is a primary service page that gives readers tons of information that is both practical and educational. It is also a target landing page to rank for organically, with the help of a SaaS business blog. For a SaaS business, this could be a page dedicated to freemium versions. The strategy should be to show prospective buyers what the freemium version offers, and the types of problems it resolves for businesses. All of the main keywords associated with “freemium” services should be represented here, and the page should link to the site’s homepage to help circulate “SEO juice”.
Blog clusters are groups of blogs that, in this case, would each cover a topic associated with freemium versions, yet each would have the following:
- A unique title
- Speak to a specific buyer type / industry
- Be written according to the stage of the “buyer’s journey” the target reader is in.
- Have a goal to either directly convert the reader, or nurture them on to another piece of content reflecting the next stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Each blog would link to another of a similar topic, using an SEO-friendly anchor text, and also link to the pillar page.
As you can see, the linking strategy is a powerful component of the blog cluster strategy, as it allows SEO value to circulate through the site, much like the value a circulatory system provides to the human body. All of these blogs will help with rankings while educating and converting readers into customers. They will also help improve the website’s domain authority, and improve important SEO signals such as bounce rate, dwell time, pages per session, new users, and conversions.
5 Examples How Blog-Fueled Content Marketing Increases Brand Awareness For SaaS Companies
Once a member of the leadership team realizes they need SaaS content marketing solutions, they will naturally want to ensure that the approach includes a brand awareness strategy. That said, make sure the strategy encompasses these five examples, and make sure to use a set of strategic blogs to fuel their awareness:
Social Media
SaaS companies tend to be very active on social media, especially LinkedIn. Start by identifying the best platforms that your target buyers spend time on, then look for the social groups they belong to and join. Start engaging members, share their content, identify industry influencers, and in time they will share your SaaS blog and enhance the reach and awareness your brand holds.
Have Influencers Display Your Blog
Once you have drawn influencers into your niche, get them to display your brand’s blog. The SaaS blog can include the promotion of freemium versions, and a buyer’s guide alongside your company’s mission statement and core values.
Blogging
As mentioned, blogs offer multiple benefits, and one is to enhance brand awareness. The right blogs can rank for branded keywords, and even take readers to a specific content designed to convert leads and spread brand awareness. These blogs can both demonstrate how your products provide the best solutions to your buyer’s needs while educating them about your brand and why it stands out from the competition.
Online Reputation Management
Even the best companies on the planet will have a few bad reviews, whether they have a small number of jaded consumers or their competitors are trying to ruin their reputation. While running a blog-forward brand awareness strategy for SaaS companies, you will want to identify any bad reviews against the organization and write positive technical articles to help push the bad blogs down into the SERPs where they are not as likely to be discovered. Marketing your SaaS content means you will want to push forward a brand awareness campaign that educates readers, leads to more downloads and sales, and one that also pushes bad reviews far down Google’s search results.
Promote Webinars with Free Trials
Another way content marketing can increase brand awareness is to write compelling articles that promote free webinars. The strategy is to get as many people as possible to sign up and join the webinar. Be sure to keep these as industry-focused as possible. For example, one week you can run a webinar for people in the medical field, and the week after hold a webinar for people in education. The goal will be to have them invest in the SaaS tool after the webinar concludes, whether this means they book a private meeting with a rep, or make a direct purchase. One can increase the number of attendees by holding a raffle in which the winner gets one year’s use of the tool for free, as well as give all attendees the option to download and try the freemium tool. Not only will a webinar help you achieve your goals, but it will also promote your brand across multiple fields.
7 Examples of Brilliant SaaS Content Marketing
Keep in mind that a SaaS blog and other forms of content can all play pivotal roles in creating a much bigger, precise strategy. Here are seven examples of verbal SaaS marketing strategies that, if run together, will help you hit your goals.
SaaS Website Content
Keep in mind that SaaS website content must be buttoned up and reveal a uniformed, consistent look and message throughout the site. From the homepage to the “about” page, and from every main service page to the “contact us” page, the site must have content designed to convert leads, increase downloads and sales, and educate organizations about the company and its SaaS products. Remember that every blog will link to a primary website page, so when creating this content it must, from a technical standpoint, work well with blog content, while supporting an SEO-friendly environment with content your target audience will love.
Titles, Tags, and Meta Descriptions
These are all components of a strong SaaS content marketing strategy. Make sure each page has a title using the main keyword reflected on the page. The H1 and H2 tags on the content also need to use these keywords, including longtail forms that have contextual meaning that link from the main topic, to the intended user audience. Meta descriptions should accurately reflect the content on the page while giving searchers an incentive to click on the link as it appears in Google’s search engine.
Off-Site Content and Backlinks
In order to rank the right blog and other forms of content for the target user audience, it is important to build a strong backlink portfolio. This will involve writing unique blogs and articles, and having them published on a referring domain with a link pointed back to the SaaS website content. This strategy will improve the site’s domain authority, improve rankings, and increase the number of web visitors.
Get Mentioned in Reputable Directories
SaaS companies should form relationships with respected industry directories that will provide a link to their business, as well as customer reviews. Often SaaS companies will produce blogs for these directories with a link that shoots back to their site. The content contributions allow the directory to grow while opening up an entirely new window of exposure for the SaaS company and its content.
Create Vlogs and Educational Videos
Not all content is textual. People tend to be more visual anyway, so be sure to create a few short vlogs (video blogs) that span several topics. These should be educational, informative, promote the brand, and show target buyers just how the SaaS tools will help them achieve their organizational goals.
Create a Content Funnel Designed to Generate Leads, Nurture, and Convert
When writing a Saas driven blog, be sure to assign it to a target buyer persona, as a specific stage in their buyer’s journey. Make sure thee blogs are part of a sequence that takes leads through the complete SaaS buyer’s journey which includes the following steps:
- Awareness
- Lead Generation
- Trial Sign-Ups
- Conversion to Paid Customers
- Customer Retention
Every blog should give readers the option to convert to the next stage or pay for the service, right on the spot, and this means the SaaS website content these blogs link to needs to motivate people to take the desired action that makes sense, considering the last point of content they just consumed.
Use Blog-Friendly Technology that Makes Sense Based for Your Sales Cycle
When it comes to SaaS solutions, the sales cycle is usually longer and the price point is higher. Usually, this is due to the fact that management teams must present the SaaS solutions to their internal leadership, go through demos and premium versions, meet with members of the C Suite to go over budget and needs, and compare the tool to competitor solutions. An advanced CRM like HubSpot is ideal, as it allows a small team to manage content marketing strategies, segment leads, and automate the right content using a precise cadence. Conversion rates and users almost always improve significantly when robust CRM tools are used to promote and manage Saas marketing strategies.
Blog Content is the Fuel for Any SaaS Marketing Solution
Making a connection with target customers in the world of SaaS requires a crystal clear demonstration of how tools can help organizations find the best solutions to their needs. This means a verbal Saas marketing strategy needs to touch every buyer cohort, at each stage in the buyer’s journey, while promoting brand awareness and educating readers on value. Blogs are the foundation.
The right content marketing approach will utilize a number of blogging buckets that range from SEO value to inbound marketing tactics, and from online reputation management to increasing online visibility. Follow these content ideas that all play directly into a SaaS blog, and you will be on the right path to achieve your acquisition and revenue goals.
