Top 8 Tips for Hiring SaaS Bloggers

The importance of high-quality and compelling content in SaaS is inexplicable. A good quality content piece is a prerequisite for lead generation, sales, and everything you need to succeed in the SaaS business. However, not every SaaS CEO can curate detailed and compelling content for businesses. This is why SaaS owners usually hire SaaS bloggers or content writers to take over the job. But, finding and hiring SaaS bloggers and content writers is like finding a needle in a haystack! 

If you are looking to hire a SaaS blogger or content writer anytime soon, check out these practical tips to spot the best talent and hire them for your business. We will also walk through the requirements you should consider while hiring a SaaS blogger and content writer, which will make the onboarding process easier and streamlined.

1. Provide Vertical Specialization as a Requirement

Since you are hiring a content writer for your SaaS business, you need to ensure they know and understand your business well. They should have explicit knowledge of the industry and the target audiences. Apart from your website, you need to ensure that they know more about the industry in general by researching your competitors. 

Starting from the size of the industry to the latest trends ongoing in the industry. They should have a prominent knowledge about everything. They should also know about your SaaS product to its core. When they know your product, only then can they analyze the possible pain points, challenges, or questions that your potential customers may have, which they will solve through the content. 

They should also be very fluent with the technical terms and jargon since you do not really want some rookie writing professional software blogs which are not well versed with the terms. However, this doesn’t mean that they will overload the reader with only the jargon. The sole purpose of the content is to solve customer queries and educate them about the product in the simplest language possible. 

Additionally, they should also know what type of content works best for similar businesses. With their experience working with similar companies, you can easily use the right content tricks and strategies to amplify your content marketing game. 

However, often SaaS companies tend to leave out writers with good experience just for the sake of the budget. Sure, you may have a specific budget, but if you want quality content for your business, you need to invest in good content writers with decent rates. If you hire low-quality content writers, you will invest in useless content pieces that nobody searches for on the internet. 

Thus, while hiring a SaaS blogger or content writer, ensure to find relevant experience in their portfolio within your industry.

2. Ask for Proof of Experiences and Recommendation

When you consider an experienced content writer for your business, it should not be limited to specific pointers in their resume. Utilizing resume parsing software can help in efficiently extracting relevant experiences and skills from a writer’s resume, ensuring you don’t overlook key qualifications, but when you only consider their resume as the ultimate hiring factor, you may come across writers who create terrible content. You need to ask for proof of their experiences, such as testimonials or reviews!

Some of the let downs you may experience with a lousy content writer includes,

• Chunky paragraphs with no breaks, bullet points, images. Your customers will not spend time reading the huge paragraphs. Instead, focus on smaller ones with more subheadings and listicles to make the reading and navigation easier.
• Often you may find your writer linking to your competitors, attaching links to the wrong words, or even stuffing links throughout the content. This is a strict no-no FOR your SEO!
• Keywords in the content are a necessity but never make the mistake of stuffing them in the content. There are tons of content writers that keep stuffing hundreds of keywords in the content. Such content has zero to fewer chances of being ranked by the google algorithm.
• Since you are creating the content for your customers, you need to ensure that they are meaningful. Simply using fluff words or sentences may increase the stipulated word count, but if the reader cannot decipher the content well, the efforts are in vain.

So how do you find the best content writer for your business that stands up to your expectations? Here are a few effective ways:

• Chase up references: Ask the writer for links to content which they have written for other businesses. Next, find out time to connect to those businesses and ask about their experience with the writer. This way, you can have more confidence in working with someone knowing that they have already benefited similar people.

• Search for LinkedIn Recommendations: LinkedIn is the hub for finding the best talents across any profession. While searching for potential content writers, look through their profiles to find any recommendations by other businesses who have enjoyed working with them. This will also help in validating everything they wrote in their resume or CV.

The search may take slightly longer than usual, but you are not compromising on the quality. The deeper you search about the content writer with adequate time and effort, the better results you will gain from your content marketing strategy in the long run.

3. Pay Attention to How They Communicate

The next important tip for hiring SaaS bloggers and content writers is to analyze their communication skills. Often content writers take up work and have no communication whatsoever during the duration. Sure, they may arrive with the work within the deadline, but the communication between the work will help you stay updated.

Communicating well is highly important, especially when writing blog posts, landing pages, and other briefs that contain lead magnets since in case they go wrong somewhere, you’ll have to pay them again to get everything redone. 

Here are some red flags in their communication you should observe:

• Taking too long to respond
• Forgetting about essential details in the brief
• Not asking enough questions 
• Communicating in English filled with grammatical errors
• Ignoring any separate specifications mentioned 
• Not accounting or acknowledging their mistakes
• Not being respectful during the conversation

Hiring a content writer for your content marketing strategy is a long-term journey. You should ensure that you invest in someone you can easily communicate with and who works best as per your requirements. 

Use the above checklist every time you hire a content writer since this can prevent you from spending hundreds or even thousands on useless content!

4. Test Their Marketing Knowledge

What makes a SaaS content writer or blogger different from others? Their marketing knowledge!

Even if marketing is not their ultimate forte, being completely naive about it can make your job way tougher!

A good SaaS blogger or content writer should have deep knowledge and expertise of different marketing strategies since, ultimately, their content will be used to sell the software. If they do not create stellar content from the marketing perspective, there is no way the content can help in your marketing strategies. 

As we have always preached before, the key to a successful content marketing strategy is creating content as per different stages of the sales funnel and the buyer’s journey. This means your content writer should have a thorough understanding of creating content based on different stages, whether it is about guiding the prospects to move further in the funnel or giving the final push of content to make the final purchase. They should know the ultimate aim or goal of creating each content. 

They should know why an educational blog should be at the top of the funnel, whereas a case study should be at the bottom of the funnel. This way, they can place the right type of CTAs in suitable spaces for a result-driven outcome. 

Also, hiring a SaaS content writer or blogger with thorough marketing knowledge saves you from the time and effort of explaining everything to them. They will be able to understand your requirements and the strategies with less effort from your end. 

Here are a few vital questions you can consider asking them during the hiring process to test their knowledge in marketing:

• Any strategies and techniques that can help your business grow
• How do the strategies and techniques help in the long term and short term growth of the business
• How does each content work for different stages of the funnel
• Their process of creating effective CTAs
• How can they persuade potential customers into purchasing your product via content
• Do they carry out enough research while creating the content

It is never your job to teach a SaaS writer about marketing since if they claim themselves to be a SaaS writer, they should already know every nitty-gritty about SaaS marketing too!

5. Check if They are Results-driven Person

Like any other marketing strategy for SaaS, you need to monitor the performance of the content you publish on the website. However, this should be the prerogative of the writer too. 

The content writer should also ask for the results and the metrics to understand whether the content they create worked for the business or not. Just submitting content and never following up after it never helps the writer to grow. They wouldn’t get better at their job, and you will be left with useless content constantly being published on your website. 

This is why you should look for result-driven content writers who are willing to improve every day. They should ask whether they are using the right CTAs and if the CTAs have worked for the business or not. 

They should also be interested in knowing more about the marketing strategies you use in the business to align the content accordingly. To sum up, their journey to creating content for a SaaS business should not end with just publishing the content, but they should also enquire about the metrics and strive to improve it even further.

6. Check if They Can Connect with Your Audience

The content writer you hire will be writing for your potential customers. You need to understand whether they can connect with your audience well. This is apparently one of the most vital points you should look for in a content writer. 

If they cannot use the right words in the content that resonates with your audience, you will experience low engagement and click-through rates, resulting in zero to negligible sales. 

To be successful at your content marketing strategy, you need to ensure that the content resonates with the readers. This is more than important in SaaS since SaaS products are intangible. The content is the only way to demonstrate the products to your customers and persuade them to buy them. 

The writer should be capable of spotting the right pain points and leveraging them into the content to make readers interested in the product and buy it. They should use relatable scenarios and humor in the content which your customers can relate to. This is how they can catch the reader’s attention, make them stick till the end of the content and finally click on the CTA to make the purchase!

7. Establish a Pricing Model for SaaS Bloggers or Content Writers

After all this while, you may be wondering, how much should you spend for a good content writer for your business? Well, your budget depends on many factors, including the size of your business, your marketing strategies, audience base, the number of content you would need per month, and many more. 

Before understanding how much you need to spend on a content writer, let’s understand the pricing models usually followed by content writers:

• Package with a certain number of deliverables: Here, you and the writer both agree on a specific number of blogs, case studies, or other forms of content along with adequate research and other specifications within a particular amount which will be paid at the end of each month. 
• Dollar per word: Here, the writer charges a price for each word in the content. They create a separate invoice with the total number of words written in each content throughout the month.
• Retainer model: Here, you get a specific amount of hours from the writer each month, which you use for your content marketing requirements. It is one of the most secure deals on the writer’s end since the company usually makes the payments in advance.

Now, considering your budget, you need to settle for a pricing model for your content writer. Remember. The more you invest in good quality and experienced content writers, the higher your ROI from your content marketing efforts.

8. Choosing between Freelancers and Inbound Marketing Agencies

Lastly, when hiring a SaaS blogger and content writer, you will stumble upon the final two options – Freelancers vs. Inbound Marketing Agencies.

Freelancers tend to be more flexible and affordable only when you end up on the good ones. There are countless lousy freelancers revolving on the marketplaces who are highly unreliable, unscalable, and hold no accountability for the content they create.

On the other hand, an inbound marketing agency is always very organized, scalable, and more efficient than freelancers. Even though they may charge a bit more than freelancers and may not have the same flexibility, they are still worth every penny.

You need to understand that the content writer you will invest in today should be agile and scalable since content marketing is a long-term journey. They need to adapt to the larger requirements of content with any changes whatsoever. 

Thus, for a SaaS company, the ideal choice is an inbound marketing agency instead of freelancers. With an inbound marketing agency, you get a team of experienced writers who will handle your content requirements. They can be easily scaled when your business grows over time. They also have their own set of editors and proofreaders. Hence, you can directly post the content you get from them since the content will be well-edited and proofread beforehand. If you are eventually looking for long-term growth and benefit, an inbound marketing agency is the right way to go!

Conclusion

Hiring SaaS bloggers and content writers can be tedious, especially when you are filled with so many competent options. You need to spend an adequate amount of time and effort in finding the best talents for your company. However, before you give up on the strenuous struggles, let us assure you that once you settle with the right content writer, there is no going back! The best SaaS writer will be able to handle all your content requirements and ensure that the metrics improve every day from their content. Thus, kickstart your search for the best SaaS writer and witness your content marketing efforts coming to fruition over time.