Software-as-a-solution, otherwise known as SaaS, is the next up-and-coming technological business solution we’ve seen everywhere! With software such as Slack, Hubspot, or Quickbooks being utilized more and more with small business owners, SaaS companies have an excellent opportunity to grow with this new type of market need.
In fact, SaaS spending across companies of all sizes will reach $500 billion by 2023, double its current numbers.
Regardless of if your software business is a better way to track ecommerce trends, a way to increase employee morale, or simply an integration for a current SaaS, companies now need software service assistance at almost every level.
The issue not all small business owners keep in mind is the difference in marketing SaaS solutions.
With at least 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being produced every day, creating an online presence with high-quality content is key to your SaaS growth. Furthermore, SaaS audiences consume content much differently than other audiences.
If you don’t want your content and marketing efforts to go to waste, keep reading and learn how to create a SaaS digital marketing content strategy that keeps your audience flowing down your lead funnels.
Why Content Marketing is Key for SaaS
Marketing SaaS solutions requires thoughtful planning and careful execution. Because you are selling both a technology and a service, your content has to be specific and purposeful based on the intention and funnel level of said content.
A few other reasons content marketing is critical for SaaS are:
Your marketing has to concentrate on SEO
Your marketing must educate prospects in a quick and straightforward way
Your sales rely heavily on reviews
Demonstrations are highly favored
Customer support makes or breaks your sales
Your marketing strategy must promote repeat business
At first, marketing a SaaS might seem similar to marketing a regular product. However, when SaaS customers choose providers, a significant factor they consider is support quality. Meaning SaaS marketing carries the dual responsibility of selling consumers on the product itself and its support.
SaaS buyers research products and services primarily through digital media, making SEO a critical element of effective SaaS digital marketing. These audiences typically find products through digital resources such as white papers, website reviews, and case studies. Your marketing strategy should emphasize education and content that showcases your product and support.
Steps to Build a Content Marketing Strategy
Building a SaaS digital marketing strategy requires a vast amount of research before starting, regardless of the type. This research is to understand your market, gaps, target audiences, pain points, integrations, and more.
Once this research has been completed, you can start putting your SaaS content strategy together.
Define Everything About Your Target Audience
Defining everything you find about your target audience during your research will lay a foundation for your strategy. You can analyze your target audience by creating a checklist of questions to categorize characteristics. For example:
Is your ideal buyer a business or consumer buyer?
What is their gender?
What is their age?
What is their income level?
What industry are they in?
What is their job title?
Which other brands have they considered?
Which websites do they visit?
Which social media platforms do they use?
What type of content do they prefer?
What kind of integration platforms do they use?
Why do they need this type of service?
Having this information will help you when you start creating content and distributing it through specific channels.
Identify Your Customer Pain Points
We recommend building a SaaS product by first identifying the pain points your audience faces and providing a solution to these problems. This sounds straightforward: find a problem, invent an answer. SaaS owners know, however, that the reality is much more complex than these simple words.
Discovering the pain points you want to solve can be difficult if you don’t already know where to start. With this in mind, forums and keyword research tools are often great places to start.
Quora: To use Quora for your analysis, search based on a theme, topic, or keyword related to your audience or pain point you’re researching. Find questions with many answers, as the more active the discussion is, the more likely there is a genuine problem or concern in this area.
Reddit: Regardless of Reddit’s reputation, it is first and foremost a discussion platform. Search for subreddits (forum subpages) your audience uses and learn about their pain points.
Buzzsumo: To use their Buzzsumo, enter a topic, theme, industry, or keyword into the search bar. The results will yield top content and how many times it was shared on social media platforms. Examine the results and research what issues have been prevalent in discussion.
For more tips on identifying and targeting your custom pain points, click here.
Map Out Your Buyer’s Journey
One major step that most SaaS companies fail to do is to map out their buyer’s journey from discovery to loyalty. Knowing how your audience will go from viewer to buyer is key to creating the right content.
A SaaS buyer journey starts at the time a prospective customer first becomes aware of your brand. It includes their pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase experiences and encompasses all aspects of their experience with your brand, including thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
The process of mapping your buyer journey can be broken down into six steps:
Deciding how many and what stages will be involved
Developing a buyer persona
Identifying customer interaction touchpoints
Laying out your customer journey
Marking customer milestones
Flagging events that require action
Once you have all this information identified, you can determine which type of content to make available at each touchpoint, how you will deliver it, and when.
Perform Keyword and SEO Research
SEO is one of the most important investments your company should be funding when marketing SaaS solutions. To begin the keyword research process, you’ll want to pull together any information on your target customers and create a list of some search terms they use.
We recommend breaking them down into these four categories:
Solutions: If your product provides multiple solutions, think about terms that relate to your product from a solution perspective. Examples include increasing traffic, reducing risk, website security, accounting automation, etc.
Features: Break down your components into searchable terms. Examples include API integration, onboarding support, lead filtering, etc.
Integrations: Many SaaS products integrate with other platforms and tools. This can be useful considering other companies have search volume for their brand name, which you can leverage within your SEO efforts. Examples include HubSpot, QuickBooks, SalesForce, Wix, etc.
Industries/Audiences: Whether you serve one specific industry or a multitude of different ones, writing down how they search for SaaS solutions will vary based on audiences.
From here, you can start to determine the type of keywords and content topics to create and utilize on your website.
Determine Important Dates
Before you can create any type of plan, you first need to gather essential dates, holidays, events, campaigns, and so on, to create a calendar your SaaS digital marketing strategy can be planned around.
Examples of these dates include:
Holidays such as Easter or Chinese New Year, down to niche holidays related to your brand or product like Safer Internet Day.
Launch events with new products, upgrades, integrations, and so on.
Campaigns include co-branding opportunities, webinars, or other events where long-term content is needed (emails, social posts, etc.).
Important brand or staff days such as birthdays, anniversaries, announcements, et al.
Once these days have been mapped out on your strategy, you can start to plan the type of content for each event. For example, if your company is hosting a webinar, we suggest creating a drip campaign that will notify your email list a few weeks before, days before, and send a thank you for attending. If you are creating a blog post to summarize your webinar, that will also be added to your content calendar.
Create Your Content Calendar
Once you have all your dates and keywords determined, you will be able to start creating a content calendar. The three types of content platforms you will be focusing on are website, social, and email.
Determining how often you’ll be posting will be based on your staff and data capabilities, but we suggest the following as a minimum per platform:
Website:
Blogs: 4x per month
White Papers: 1x per month
Case Studies: 1x per month
FAQ: Update every few months
Social Media:
Facebook: 4x per week
Instagram: 5x per week
Twitter: 2x per day
LinkedIn: 4x per week
TikTok: 2x per day
Pinterest: 2x per day
YouTube: 1x per month
Email:
Newsletters: 1x per month
Announcements: 1x per month
Drip segments: No more than 1x per week
Your strategy should be at least 12 months, but your content calendar will only be about one or two months at a time. This is because social media trends are constantly changing, and it’s hard to determine the best type of content more than 60 days in advance.
Take into consideration your goals and funnels as well. For example, if that month’s goal is to build up customer loyalty, your content will want to focus heavily on your audience pain points, current customers, and support.
Create Your Content and Get Start
Every content strategy should include a plan on how you are going to engage with your audience. It’s not enough these days to just post and vanish, users want to feel connected to your brand through conversation and support.
The best way to do this is by engaging with your audience on social media platforms and with personalized content.
The third way to do this is through storytelling.
Storytelling is essential for SaaS digital marketing solutions because your product is one that needs more explaining than most. In today’s fast-paced world, visual storytelling has become a vital element of every marketing thrust in today's fast-paced world. With 91% of consumers preferring interactive and visual content over its long-form, text-centric counterpart, people are looking to consume content quickly and more efficiently.
Visual stories cut straight to the heart of the matter. When done right, storytelling design allows you to hone your message, making it clear, concise, and approachable by using visuals to drive the message home.
Analyze Your Results
Once your content strategy has been up and running for at least 90 days, you can start looking at your analytics and insights to understand your efforts better. From here, you will be able to determine what works, what hasn’t worked, which keywords to focus on, what platforms give you the best leads, and more.
If your strategy needs to be adjusted due to your last three months of analytics, that is fine. Strategies are often changed multiple times throughout the campaign after results are researched.
Also, make sure to speak frequently to your customer service and sales departments. Since they talk with your customers on a daily basis, they will be able to let you know what type of content you can create that better answers their questions.
Key Takeaways
Content marketing is a continuous journey that will evolve just like your SaaS products do. With a solid content strategy, you’ll be able to create and distribute content that drives real growth and nurtures loyal customers.
If creating landing pages, illustrations, logos, and other graphic design elements is not your strong point, let us help! We offer unlimited graphic design packages on a subscription basis, so you only pay for the time you need. Give us a call and let's discuss your branding goals and how Unli by Zoek can help take your SaaS content to the next level.