Strengthen your SaaS brand with stellar content marketing.
When it comes to B2B content marketing, not many people know how to balance a solid strategy that delivers growth and tangible results. This stems from slow returns and misconceived value because some businesses still choose to ignore a key piece of their marketing plan: content.
However, an effective B2B SaaS content marketing strategy can render itself invaluable in the long term by elevating your brand awareness and establishing yourself as an industry thought leader. It’s also important to reaffirm your market positioning by offering helpful, insightful resources to your audiences.
According to Demand Gen Report’s 2020 Content Preferences Study, buyers are not only leaning even harder on content to educate themselves, but they are also demanding and expecting richer content experiences. In fact, 67% say they rely more on content now than ever before, making it a tactic B2B SaaS companies just can’t ignore.
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Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing that focuses on providing the right content to the right customer at the right time. It’s one of the most essential elements of SaaS marketing ––helping customers understand the product. Specifically, content marketing uses a strategic approach for content––including all of your blog posts, emails, eBooks, landing pages, advertisements, and more.
SaaS content marketing is competitive––it’s all about creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to not only attract but also retain a clearly defined audience. Developing a solid positioning and messaging framework will allow you to create solid content and align all efforts across your company.
Your positioning, messaging and content should show them how your product works and how it can solve their problems, then you can guide them towards testing out your tools. Essentially, SaaS content marketing allows you to take a less overtly “sales-y” approach to reach new customers and position your brand as a thought leader in the industry. This way, when a potential customer is ready to invest, your product will be the obvious choice.
Concerned about whether or not your audience will actually read your content? Not only do more B2B buyers read more content now, but 48% of them read 3-5 blog posts or content pieces prior to even talking with a salesperson.
Your content marketing strategy will ultimately depend on your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. This ensures you can deliver your unique selling proposition to the right ICP so you can position and differentiate yourself from other competitors in the industry.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the bread and butter of your content marketing, which is how many of your prospective clients will find you. It’s how you grab the attention of search engines. Think about it –– every time you Google something, millions and millions of results pop up, and yours can too.
If you are interesting and appealing to your audience and are using specific keywords and phrases, you are more likely to rank. Write high-quality and shareable content in searcher’s terms and be sure to choose keywords based on relevance, competition, and the number of searches.
Pro Tip: SEO and blog creation are the top two inbound marketing priorities for marketers. In order to step up your marketing strategy and online presence, focus on publishing regular content aligned directly with SEO research and strategy so you can deliver scalable and long-term results.
For SaaS and B2B companies like Kalungi, your goals should look similar to the four content marketing goals below.
As Mr. Seth Godin says, you have to be remarkable, as high-quality, purposeful content is how you can find your best new prospects. Compelling content not only can showcase your company’s expertise, but it can also attract links, get social media shares, and be a part of conversations.
Your content and brand are how people are going to find you and it’s your job to make sure they can.
Don’t just talk about how your product or service can solve a problem, show your audience how it does. Be sure to highlight the qualities that set your brand apart from your competitors so they will remember you.
An educated customer is a happy customer. Educating prospective customers is one of the most efficient topics of B2B SaaS content marketing. To educate, write valuable content and talk about the benefits of your product or service––help your prospects imagine a life with it and where they can’t live without it.
Part of writing good, compelling, and educating content is to understand your audience, their pain points, and their objections. Start by having your sales team record the questions they hear the most often from their customers––these could be a good starting point for content ideas.
For example, if your customers think your product will be too complicated to use, you can write content that explains and demonstrates how you use it. Your content should be about how implementing your product or service can benefit your audience and prospective customers in the long run.
Pro Tip: Understand the objections that keep your prospective customers from buying in, and then think about creative ways to resolve those objections through content.
Everyone wants to build credibility and trust, and the best way to do that is through content.
When you create valuable, useful, and interesting content, your audience learns they can trust you and they can see that you know your topic. Not only that, but building credibility also allows them to get a sense of your personality and what it would be like to work with you.
Pro Tip: Remember, it’s not the medium that matters...it’s the message. Write about the experience, not just the product and its features. If you have an abundance of valuable content, you are more likely to keep the conversation going.
The ultimate goal of B2B SaaS inbound marketing is to generate leads, so it’s likely going to be the objective for a lot of your B2B SaaS content. Generate leads through content by adding CTAs and forms within each of your blogs and landing pages.
Good lead generation starts with a solid SaaS content marketing strategy. Be sure to add tracking links so you can easily measure as well.
In order to meet your content marketing goals, you need to have a solid content marketing strategy.
Your B2B SaaS content marketing strategy boils down to figuring out what content will help your target audience and inspire them to take actions that boost your business.
A solid content calendar can do wonders for growing your blog and website, as long as it also includes producing top-quality content, and distributing it successfully.
Whether you’re writing up a case study, creating an eBook, drafting up a whitepaper, sending out a survey, or writing a how-to guide, etc., make sure it has a purpose for your audience and aligns with your strategy. And don’t underestimate it –good nurture sequences can also go a long way.
Learn how to create a content marketing strategy here.
When planning and writing content, you should always target a specific stage of the buyer’s journey. The following is how much of your strategy you should pour into each stage of the funnel to ensure you aren’t dumping all of your eggs in one basket.
It all begins with brand awareness. This allows you to become a resource and thought leader in your industry. In this stage, your audience simply becomes aware of your business. They aren’t necessarily ready to buy in yet or join your email list or newsletter, but because of the valuable content you created, they now know who you are.
In the awareness stage, you are educating your audience, creating brand awareness, and building trust and credibility. So many marketers stop there, but there is much more to the journey in order to drive business and profit.
Once people become aware of your business, they typically need to take time to consider, which is where you can create some nurturing and thought leadership content to get them to consider buying from you.
SaaS content marketing is a great way to move your audience through the consideration stage. In this stage, you want to continue to build credibility and trust through blogs, eBooks, and webinars and provide a little more direct value than you would in the awareness stage.
Pro Tip: If you can stay in contact with your prospective clients during the consideration phase, you’ll have a better chance of converting those people to paying customers.
Now that your customers have not only become aware of your business, but they trust you and are considering buying in, it’s time for them to make the decision. They are either going to become a paying customer or not. This is your chance to deliver content that converts such as webinars, guides, and blogs.
How do you hold onto customers who are paying? You need to create content that keeps them happy. Reach out to them via email or social media to see how they are liking the platform and if they have any challenges or areas that could be improved. You can also create user guides or one-pagers to add more value to their experience with your service.
When it comes to your B2B SaaS content strategy, governing your team is crucial. Follow RACI to move through your strategy and hold people accountable so you can minimize bottlenecks and keep the ball rolling––nothing is worse than sitting on a finished piece of content for weeks because team members were not aligned.
Once you have determined who is accountable for which position on your team, you can ensure efficiency and consistency as you move through your strategy and publish content.
When it comes to your B2B SaaS content marketing plan, start by identifying your ideal audience (or ICP) so you can create highly actionable, engaging, and valuable content and move them through the customer journey and drive sales.
While a lot of your content will be fueled by campaigns and your overall marketing strategy, there may be a time that you need to think of more ideas. If you’re stuck on what to write about, below are some questions you can ask to spark some ideas for valuable SaaS marketing content.
When it comes to B2B SaaS content marketing, start by identifying your ideal audience so you can create highly actionable, engaging and valuable content and move them through the customer journey and drive profit.
Pro Tip: As a basis for all of your content, make sure you answer a common customer question: “What’s in it for me?”. In other words, always be customer-focused.
Last but not least, I’ll leave you with some tips for creating a solid piece of SaaS content because whether you’re writing a blog, whitepaper, eBook, or landing page, there is a certain science to creating SaaS content that engages your audience and converts them into a paying customer.
SaaS content marketing is one of the most powerful tools your team can leverage in order to attract, educate and convert customers. While it may take time to see returns on content strategy, that doesn’t mean it’s not working––patience is critical here.
The nature of search engine optimization and garnering market share through content marketing and thought leadership takes long-term, consistent work in order to establish a solid positioning. Don’t give up at the start. As long as you continue to publish good SEO content that speaks to your audience and follows your strategy, you’re bound to see results.
Keep up the good work and see you on the internet :)d nurtu
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