Content is everything. It’s a way to rank higher on search engines, build brand identity, connect with users, etc.
In short, you are nothing without relevant and engaging content today. Content marketing is your sole anchor here, especially if you are a SaaS brand lapping to find your space in the ever-competitive industry.
SaaS is one of the busiest industries today. As you can see below, around 15,000 SaaS companies were present in the US only in 2021.
Content marketing is what can help you build a unique SaaS brand image and target relevant accounts despite all the competition.
But, your simple content marketing strategies like random blogs and a few social media posts here and there–will not grow your SaaS business in 2022.
You need powerful content marketing strategies to beat the online competition in 2022. With this thought, let’s explore this comprehensive guide to discuss SaaS content marketing tips that can drive maximum ROI in 2022. So, let’s begin the journey!
10 SaaS Content Marketing Tips That Drive Higher Results in 2022
Content marketing is a favorite marketing technique for B2B marketers in 2022. According to a CMI report, 46% of B2B users are increasing their content marketing budget this year.
So, you can expect some great content in 2022. If you don’t want to lose your ordinary content in the ocean of extraordinary content, you need to instantly follow these dynamic SaaS content marketing tips—
Tip 1. Just blogging is not sufficient
Blogs are the most overused content strategy. Every small and big company has used blogs to target keywords. Every website on the internet has a blog section for information today. There are simply too many blogs out there.
Therefore, Google is bored of blogs, your readers are bored of blogs, and even blogs are bored now.
Does that mean blogs are dead?
No, blogs are not dead by any means. It’s just that a simple blog section on your software website is not sufficient anymore.
You need more informative and engaging content on your website than blogs to attract readers and search engines. Importantly, you need to create a proper pillar topics list based on your user’s pain points and targeted keywords to generate higher ROI.
In addition, one blog category on your side will not engage users in your services. You need to provide a complete resource section to your users to find the latest updates about your products, industry news, blogs and other information.
For example, Active Campaign has created a dedicated resource section on its website. They provide information about the company events, product updates, community, blogs, and so much more.
With this, they can target different keywords on the site. Plus, they can provide various information to their users present in different sales cycle stages.
So, the SaaS content marketing tip is to not just write blogs on your website but instead provide a full content resource gallery to your readers. This will also make you win brownie points in the eyes of search engines,
Tip 2. Repurpose your tech documents
Have you hired a professional content marketing agency or a technical writer to create a user manual for your product? If so, that user manual is a gold mine to attract more readers.
You can repurpose your technical documentation into simple how-to guides and publish it on your company website. This will save you money and help you target relevant users and keywords.
However, ensure to simplify the language of your user manual before turning it into small how-to guides. That’s because technical documentation is created with deep technical language and references, which might bore your potential buyers.
Therefore, just simplify the context of your technical documentation, and you have multiple small content pieces ready to publish on your site or guest blog on other popular websites.
Tip 3. Leverage your or others’ data
Generating high-quality backlinks is an important aspect of content marketing. Today, companies use different strategies to generate backlinks like guest blogging, partnering with other brands, etc.
But, in this SaaS content marketing tips guide, we are about to share a trick that can get you backlinks with minimal effort. Drum rolls, please!
Data is what can get you a high DA website. How?
All you have to do is conduct research and prepare a benchmark report in your industry. This way, when other people write about your business sector, they can link your report as a reference. It is a simple way to make other people backlink to your website without any effort.
But, conducting original research on a topic is an expensive and technical process. So, not everyone can leverage data to generate backlinks?
Well, that’s not true. If you don’t have any original data in your hands, you can leverage research conducted by other brands and create a comprehensive guide for users.
Not getting it?
Look at this UnboundB2B blog on “Account-based marketing statistics”—
They have not conducted any research on account-based marketing statistics here. They have simply combined different ABM statistics researched by different websites and companies. And compiled in a comprehensive guide.
This blog helps readers to find different ABM statistics in one place, and they can even link back this blog to their article to give references.
So, you can either conduct research or use research conducted by other brands to generate backlinks without any stress.
Tip 4. Write comparative content
Customers are busy people. They don’t have time to compare different products and find the right solution for themselves.
Here, you can make things easier for your potential customers and create comprehensive competitive content comparing your brand with other brands available in the market. This will help consumers understand why your software solution is better than your competitor’s.
Comparative content is quite common among SaaS products. For instance, look at a blog published by Wondershare on “Best video editing tools”.
The brand has presented its video editing software as the best while comparing it with other software. This type of content marketing helps win the customers’ trust and establish your brand as an expert in the market.
Besides this, you can register your product with third-party review sites where they will automatically compare your brand with your competitors. It will be an unbiased comparison, which strongly impacts your reader’s minds. Common SaaS product review portals are TrustRadius, Capterra, G2, etc.
Tip 5. Focus on promoting your content
One of the biggest mistakes that most content creators make is they spend most of the time creating content and then distributing or promoting it. People, content creation is important. But, the right distribution and promotion of your content are even more important.
Have you seen an ordinary-looking blog article trending on the first page?
Always!
This is the magic of marketing and promoting your content on the right platforms. So yes, even if you have written a simple-looking content piece, you can still drive maximum value from it with proper marketing.
SaaS companies have many avenues to promote their content. However, simply re-sharing your blog or e-book on your social media handles is not what we refer to. Instead, we meant you have to think out of the box to create buzz around your content.
Let’s not scratch your head.
Let us share an example with you. Have you hired a freelance writer or have an in-house writers team to write content for you? If so, you can leverage their network to promote your content.
You can ask your content writers, graphic designers and editors who have contributed to creating a magnificent piece of content to share your articles on social media. Since these people have worked to create content, they will not mind sharing. On the contrary, it will only enrich their portfolio.
For example, Sumeet Anand is a SaaS writer for popular brands. His work is featured on platforms like CoSchedule and Search Engine Watch. He often shares his content created for these top SaaS brands on his LinkedIn profile. It helps to build his work portfolio and promote the content of different products. This is a win-win situation for everyone.
Tip 6. Segment your keywords
Keywords!
You cannot simply have a content marketing strategy without proper keywords. You need relevant, high conversion and trending keywords to make your product shine on search engines.
But, this doesn’t mean you should target every keyword that your keyword analyzer shows you. Today, if you search for relevant keywords on Google Keywords Planner, you will find a series of keywords trending in your industry.
But, not all those keywords are beneficial for you. Only a handful of keywords are useful for your business.
Therefore, you should spend some time segmenting your keywords before writing content targeting them. The keyword segmentation process is quite similar to lead scoring. For example, the way you pre sets some rules to segment your leads into marketing qualified, and sales qualified groups; you have to follow the same process to segment your keywords.
You have to set some ground rules, and based on them; you can segment your keywords into different groups. For example, you can segment keywords based on their volume, relevancy, competition, etc.
Tip 7. Know your customers’ pain points
Like a hundred times, you must have heard that you should always target your customers’ pain points while writing your content. But, how to know what is bothering your customers?
We all don’t have a dedicated sales and customer support team to analyze individual customers’ problems and create solutions for them. Most software companies are in the startup stage. They don’t even have adequate funds to run their day to day operations. So, they don’t even talk about spending money on customer data.
But that doesn’t mean low budgeted SaaS companies can not gather relevant information about their customers. Thanks to open forums like Quora and Reddit, you can now easily understand your customers’ pain points.
In fact, you can even interact with your customers on these forums to further dwell on their problems.
Besides this, you can use social media groups to know what your potential customers want. You can also use DM to directly knock on your customers’ doorsteps to know them and create solutions to solve their problems.
Tip 8. Target a specific stage in the buyer’s journey
This is not only a SaaS content marketing tip. Anyone who wants to generate maximum ROI from content marketing should use this tip.
While planning and writing content, always target a specific stage of the buyer’s journey. To nurture your potential customers, you should map your content focused on every funnel stage.
In your content marketing plan, you should mostly focus on the awareness stage and least on the retention stage.
Awareness
Dedicate 50% of your content to the awareness stage because everything begins with brand awareness. This helps you become a thought leader in your industry and make more people aware of your business.
You can educate your audience and build trust and credibility in this stage. Blogs, web content, and case studies are useful resources to aware your audience.
Consideration
Consideration is the stage when people think about your brand. Thus, you can produce 30% of consideration content to nurture your leads.
SaaS content marketers can move the audience through the consideration stage using eBooks, webinars and other direct value providing content. This is a crucial stage because the chances of lead turning into paying customers are brighter after this.
Decision
Once your leads are done considering your product, it’s time to decide. They will either become your customers or drop from your sales funnel. So, you should create 15% decision-making content to help your customers, like guides, comparisons, reviews, testimonials, etc.
Retention
You need to focus 5% of your content creation efforts on retaining your existing customers. Connect with them via emails or social media to know how they like your platform and if they have any problems or want you to improve anything in your solution.
For customer retention, user guides and demo videos are helpful.
Tip 9. Target a problem, not a solution
As a SaaS content creator, your main target should always be stimulating pains, not providing solutions. The reason?
When do you go to Google?
Obviously, when you have a problem and want to find a solution. So, search for a problem online and get solutions as results.
That means your content should be 80% about a problem and 20% about your solution. This will help search engines to recognize your content and index under the right key phrases.
For example, Sendible is a SaaS company that provides social media automation solutions to marketing agencies and businesses. So, when they publish blog post topics like “Social Media Management Tips”, it helps to reach out to users who are struggling to manage their social media.
Targeting pain points will land SaaS businesses directly on their potential clients’ search results.
Tip 10. Slowly build your content flow
Usually, a movie lasts for 2 hours or more. But one could tell an entire movie’s story in a line or even a few words.
Let’s take an example of a classic rom-com—Notebook. It is a love story of a rich girl and a poor boy in a nutshell.
But it is 2 hours and 4 minutes long story including family drama, endless romantic scenes and a swooning ending. It is just a rich girl and poor boy love story, but it holds viewers’ attention for two hours.
Do you know how?
Because the story unfolds slowly yet smartly. And you have to do the same with your SaaS content.
You can conclude your article in the introduction or lay your points smartly and walk your readers through a 2000 word long article.
You should scheme your content in a way that keeps on getting interesting towards the end. Give your readers humor, curiosity and something to think about like a Hollywood movie.
You have to hire a professional writer who understands your business and audience to create a copy to decrease the bounce rate and improve your lead conversion in the process.
Bonus SaaS Content Marketing Tip
On the parting note, we would like to repeat a common but extremely important content marketing tip—be consistent.
No matter which business niche you target, consistent content marketing is important to drive maximum ROI. Imagine you are creating how-to guides; you can not stop after publishing one or two guides.
You have to share at least 3-4 guides to capture users’ interest. Plus, search engines love consistency.
So, be consistent with your SaaS content marketing and keep on exploring innovative ideas and experiment with new content marketing strategies to grow in 2022.
If you need any help with your SaaS content marketing services, the Marveta team is always here to help you out. Just call or message us anytime.