Over the last two decades or so, SaaS (software as a service) industry has emerged as a dominant force, primarily fueled by the unprecedented rise of internet. Most of the laymen people who are reading this blog post may not be aware that today most of the software and applications that they are using are actually SaaS based. This is in a way serves as an indication about the ferocious competition among the SaaS companies, which are literally trying to outdo each other for acquiring potential customers and retaining existing customers. This insatiable appetite for piling up customer numbers has also increased their reliance on content marketing.
Content marketing has to be an integral part of any successful digital marketing campaign. Therefore, today every top SaaS companies like Salesforce, Hubspot & Zoom are investing great amounts of resources to their content marketing efforts. However, content marketing for SaaS companies is seldom an easy task, especially those with minuscule and stringent budget.
Our latest blog post will strive to focus on these small companies since most often they are unable to do justice to their content marketing campaign. Worse, many of these small companies are often found to be clueless about even the basics of content marketing. Hence this latest blog-post will try to simplify every important step, which will bring the much-needed clarity and help in crafting efficient strategy.
What really is content marketing?
Since we’d mentioned above that many small companies are very much ignorant about content marketing, we thought of coming up with a simple definition.
Content marketing is a content focused marketing approach that is focused on creating and distributing consistently high-quality content that is relevant and informative and is often targeted towards a pre-defined target audience. The ultimate aim of this unique marketing approach is to drive profit and increase the ROI.
If we’ve to define content marketing strictly from the point of view of SaaS industry then it can be defined as a dedicated form of content marketing particularly geared to focus on the needs and unique characteristics of Software-as-a-Service industry. It uses terminologies, pain-points and USPs that are exclusively to software-as-a-Service products and services.
By the way, there are two important take aways from the above definition.
- Creating high-quality content
- Distribution of content
You will come to know why they are important as we progress through this blog post.
Types of SaaS Content
Now that we’ve come to know that high-quality content plays a pivotal and decisive role, let us talk about the specific types of content that Software-as-a-Service companies need to pay attentive focus on. While there are several more type of content, the below mentioned types of content have been found to be more beneficial and useful for SaaS companies.
We’ve briefly covered about such content in the below pointers:
Blog posts:
Writing a comprehensive blog post on a weekly basis about new or existing product or services or an important announcement can greatly help in interacting with your target audience as well as generating leads.
For instance, an online video editing software company can write an informative article about their editing feature; its USP and how it can improve the video quality.
Case studies:
Case studies is another popular form of educational content. SaaS companies mostly use case studies to demonstrate their success stories; how their products or services have solved the pain-points of customers and changed their life for better.
Kindly note that though case studies are treated as a separate category it can also published as a blog post. In fact, most companies often publish their case studies in their official website’s blog section.
Whitepapers:
Whitepapers helps you to dive deep into particular topics related to your products or services or upcoming trend or changes in the industry. Since whitepapers show in-depth knowledge and expertise, it helps in establishing your small company as a leading expertise in your industry.
Tutorials and how to guides:
Tutorials and how to guides aided with great visuals and videos can be a great way to educate your potential as well as existing customers about how your product or service or a particular feature works. This is especially of great help if your product or services has many complex functionalities.
Additionally, tutorials and how to guides can greatly help in establishing relationship with customers. it can help in increasing customer engagement, customer retention, building trust & credibility and much more.
Product Demos:
Create interactive videos showcasing your product’s features and benefits. This is another great way of building relationship with potential as well as existing customers. Kindly note that product demos have to be strictly in an interactive video format.
Companies can upload their product demos on several platforms, like their official YouTube channel, blog section or other social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Webinar:
Webinar is an online session or seminar conducted live over the internet. You can discuss many things in a webinar including industry topics, emerging trends, best practices and answer questions of live audiences. It is another pretty handy way of establishing your company as a ‘thought leader’ or pivotal player in the industry.
Customer testimonials:
Sharing positive feedback from your satisfied customers. Customer testimonials can be presented in a video format or text snippets.
User generated content:
User generated content or UGC is a type of content where you motivate your existing customers to share their positive experiences with your products or services. UGC content is mostly published on social media platforms.
Distribution channel for SaaS content:
While above we’ve already explicitly mentioned about where SaaS companies can distribute and publish their content, we still thought of dedicating a separate section for it. More so because distribution of content plays an important role in amplifying the impact of your content.
In another word, creating high-quality content is immensely important and so is its efficient distribution.
Although distribution platforms or channels can differ a bit depending on the industry or business, they remain more or less for every industry.
Blog section:
Since blog section is a part of your official website, it naturally serves as a viable platform to share valuable information about your company, new product launch, new features so and so forth.
Social media:
Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn are teeming with billions of users. More importantly, these are also places where your target audience is likely to reside.
Emails:
Email marketing is one of the important parts of digital marketing. It still serves high ROI for brands and companies and hence it is an important distribution channel. Companies can use email marketing for sending newsletters with curated content, informing about new product launch and other big announcements.
Content syndication:
Content syndication means distributing and submitting content to websites and blogs that are exclusive dedicated towards covering specific SaaS business or industry.
Tips for Content Marketing for SaaS companies
Now we finally come to some tips and tricks that can help in running an effective campaign. The likelihood of achieving good lead numbers and other desired results will certainly increase if you diligently follow these tips and tricks.
In the ensuing and subsequent section, we’ve also shared list of tools that will help in running effective and impactful campaign.
Understand pain-points & USP:
To increase engagement with your target customers, your content need to especially amplify two things. First is the pain-points of your target customers and second is all the unique features of your products and services. These need to be highlighted across all your content on social media, blog posts, product demos and pretty much everywhere.
Therefore, list out all the pain-points of your customers followed by unique features of your products/services that seeks to solve these pain-points.
In a nutshell, your content marketing campaign needs to be customer-centric and should greatly focus on how your product or service will improve their lives.
Competitor analysis:
Spent some healthy amount of time in studying how your nearest competitors are using content marketing strategy. This will give much needed clarity on how should you go about in creating a successful strategy.
You need to focus on several important things while doing competitor analysis.
- What are the main topics & themes they are covering.
- What type of content they use (blog posts, product demos, white papers, UGC content etc.).
- Where do they distribute their content (e.g. blog posts, social media & paid ads).
- The overall quality of the content. Does it really resonate with target customers.
- Do they use lots paid promotion to promote their products (e.g. Google ads, Facebook ads & LinkedIn ads).
- How often they publish new content across different platforms.
know your content generating capacity:
Try to figure it out how much content your company can produce per week or month. Being a small company with limited budget, you should be as realistic as possible in setting your content goal. Nonetheless, if you can hire a dedicated content writer or at least a freelancer it will help immensely in scaling your content.
Remember generating consistent content is key to any successful content marketing strategy.
Understand the essence of high-quality content:
The importance of high-quality content cannot be more overstated. However, many are still clueless about what really goes into making a high-quality content.
As far as SaaS companies are concerned, highlighting pain-points of your customers and USP’s of your products is surely an important aspect of top-notch content. Something that we’ve already mentioned in one of the above points. But there is more to a top-notch content.
Here are all the things that goes into making a high-quality content:
- Use simple language
- Proper structuring of content (heading, subheading & bullet points)
- Conciseness (avoid unnecessary fat or fluff in the content)
- Utilize images, videos & infographics to increase engagement
- Use data & statistics wherever possible (don’t forget to cite the source)
Focus on SEO:
All the content you will be preparing for your blog or other third party industry specific websites has to be SEO optimized. Remember without SEO your blog posts and articles won’t generate any organic traffic from Google, which in-turn will have negative impact on your lead generation and overall ROI. Therefore, brush up your SEO knowledge if you know too little about it.
Kindly note that keyword research is an important part of SEO. Hence do thorough keyword before writing your blog posts, how-to-guides & tutorials and articles.
Create a solid social media strategy:
Avoid random and impulsive postings on social media as it is a self-defeated strategy. If you’re really serious about increasing brand awareness and leads from social media then you need to have a solid social media strategy.
Here is what goes into making a strong social media strategy
- Consistent posting
- Create high quality social media posts (use high quality images and videos)
- Choose social media platforms that is best suitable for your SaaS business (you don’t have to be present on all social media platforms)
- Create posts that offers value to your users
- Don’t over-promote your brand
- Do a thorough competitor analysis
Tools for Creating High-Quality Content
Content marketing for SaaS companies will become much easier and fruitful if they have necessary tools at their disposal. The great thing is that many of these tools offer a free version, while barring few tools most of the tools’ paid plan are not all that expensive.
- Canva (for designing graphics and images)
- Grammarly (helps in checking punction &
- Runway AI, Luma AI & Stability AI (generate high-quality videos)
- Buffer & Sprout social (for scheduling social media post)
- Semrush & Ahrefs (popular SEO tools)
- BuzzSumo (content research & helps in finding trending topics)
- Mailchimp (email marketing tool)
- Hootsuite (social media management tool)