SaaS content marketing appears at first glances like a jungle with countless paths and directions. Where do you begin? What creative approach should you take? Choosing a strategy when there are so many options can be challenging.
SaaS content marketing is highly cost-effective, but to meet your marketing goals you will need a strategy. In order to help you create the best content marketing strategy, we have created this SaaS content marketing guide. Let’s get started.
SaaS Content Marketing Guide: Things to Know Before Getting Started
SaaS content marketing strategy should include the steps required to attract, convert, close, and delight your customers. Developing a content marketing toolkit will be useful to map out the creative direction; these tools should include blogging, forms, calls-to-action, landing pages, and email marketing.
However, before we jump into the actual guide on SaaS content marketing, let’s take a look at these 5 key points.
Time is Your Enemy
When we discuss time, we are referring to the calculation of customer churn rate, which could be analyzed over a week, month, quarter, or year, and should be robust regardless of the chosen time period. Nobody wants to make changes that could lead to wildly inaccurate calculations, like changing from the monthly to the quarterly timeframe.
Watch Your Competitors
It only takes a little bit of online exploration to discover how social media can provide an abundance of marketing knowledge and opportunity. Take the time to discover what your competitors are blogging about and look at their social media profiles. What topics do they cover? Learn their posts, including which topics engage the most response and which posts leave more questions than answers. This exploration can give a few signposts into the type of content that should be created.
Perform a Google Advanced Search
When it comes to blogging and content marketing, Google search can be helpful since it gives you the opportunity to expand your research. When searching on Google, use advanced features to narrow your search and eliminate irrelevant information in order to find the exact content you need. Just head over to Google’s advanced search page and you’ll see the page below.
By doing this basic keyword research, you’ll be able to identify what content topics have the most search volume and what to target. Since SEO is an integral part of almost every SaaS marketing campaign, this keyword research needs to be taken seriously.
Conduct a Competitive Gap Analysis
The gap analysis compares the present performance with the expected or desired performance. Essentially, a gap analysis compares the current state and the potential state. A successful website gap analysis identifies how your website stacks up to your competitors (both industry-specific and those above you), and how you might boost your position.
An analytical gap analysis is a critical part of every business, as it allows companies to compare their current performance with their future output, or where they aspire to be. It’s all about observing the extent of the gap and learning strategies to reduce the difference to make the company more competitive and stronger.
Market leaders can conduct competitive gap research to evaluate their goods and services, determine how successful their profits are, and correct any shortcomings while building on strengths. In the first phase, we must identify what the gaps are, and any potential gaps. Businesses may find that a near review reveals the causes or explanations of why a product or service is not performing as well as it could. In addition to researching the existing market, it may also be beneficial to predict what will become popular and to attract sales. The key is knowing when a need exists and providing it with better products or services. Once the study of competitive gaps has been carried out, it’s time to act. Through strategic thinking and increased efforts, the sales teams can have productive conversations to cross any gaps.
Moreover, targeted marketing campaigns can target any region of vulnerability. If those responsible for decision-making studies come up with unsatisfactory results, they will immediately address the issue. The outcome is that the success of a product becomes clearer, as is what is working and what isn’t.
Develop a Budget-based Strategic Plan
To ensure your executives are bringing diverse insight to your marketing strategies. They should be well versed in how strategy and financial forecasting affect business policies and how their role in the company affects their success. Annual budgets cover a 12-month period. However, many businesses take time to break even and start making money. The annual plan may not be useful in such cases. Here, it would be better to think long-term instead of annually.
Remember that it is wise to keep an eye on the financial health of your company. The ability to keep track of your money, manage them, and send and receive invoices will help you avoid accounting errors. Besides, measuring the success or failure of a budget lets you know how effective or ineffective it has been. Identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential for measurement. Be realistic with your goals and remember that the economic and competitive environment is always changing.
SaaS Content Marketing Hacks
Now, as we already covered the key points of the SaaS content marketing strategy, let’s continue to the top 5 SaaS content marketing hacks and start applying them.
Content Sourcing with HARO
A very popular online service used by journalists to gather feedback from the public is HARO, otherwise known as helping a reporter out. The HARO database provides journalists with powerful sources for forthcoming stories and daily opportunities for sources to secure valuable media coverage.
Every day, HARO emails this information to its subscribers. The emails contain relevant questions from experts about current topics. Specifically, the requests will state the topic, the requirements to be considered for inclusion, the submission deadline, and an anonymous email address where you can pitch your expertise to contribute insight and commentary.
The Power of Backlinks
Blogs and bloggers provide a never-ending supply of relevant content to search for. Bloggers are always searching for new stories, topics, or angles to cover. Get in touch with industry experts to receive reviews. Join technology and software groups on LinkedIn and Facebook and discover more relevant communities. Contribute to smaller websites as a guest blogger. It is a very effective way to get backlinks as well as increase your digital footprint.
Outreach Growth Hacks
It’s everyone’s dream and goal to grow their business, but sometimes it’s not easy to come up with ideas to take it to the next level. Need some tips for growing fast? Learn from others’ experiences. The successful growth hacking examples of businesses using low-cost promotion techniques to drive amazing growth are below to inspire you. Even though every business is unique, these growth hack ideas can help your company expand its customer base and generate more revenue.
1. AirBnB
The AirBnB growth hacks case study is quite interesting.
Airbnb provided its users with the option to list their property on Craigslist. Their listing would appear on both sites if they agreed. If someone clicks on the Craigslist listing, they are linked back to the original post on Airbnb.
Moreover, Airbnb combed Craigslist posts for potential users, contacting them. When they were looking to rent out their place, they would receive an email with the offer to list it on Airbnb as well.
Basically, they hacked Craigslist from within. Sort of like a spy or a parasite.
2. Dropbox
Dropbox relied on incentives to grow its word-of-mouth advertising.
By giving each user 500MB extra space for every friend they recommended, they gained access to users through their friends. Moreover, it was not a one-time deal; customers were entitled to an additional 16Gb of free space, so they kept inviting new people to the program.
Rather than offering a ‘sign-up’ gift, the company used every user as a potential advertiser. As a result, they became well known in a relatively short period of time. Really the definition of effective growth hacking, isn’t it?
3. Spotify
By integrating with Facebook, Spotify enabled its users to automatically share what they were listening to on their profiles.
Users can even log in directly with their Facebook accounts. Spotify generated a large amount of brand awareness through this integration.
Fixing Broken Links
Broken links, also known as dead links or link rot, are links on a web page that are no longer accessible or cannot be found by users. Dead links negatively affect Google search results more than overall SEO. Nonetheless, you still have a responsibility to fix broken links. Failing to do so may indicate that your site has been abandoned. As you seek to grow your business, you don’t want your site to appear abandoned or neglected. Keep in mind that Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines consider dead links when ranking a website. Thus, if you are concerned about the quality of your website, be sure to fix broken links as soon as you notice them.
Provide SaaS Content Marketing Services
Content marketing for SaaS companies is one of the most powerful methods of attracting, educating, and converting customers. When successfully implemented, a company’s entire marketing plan can be adapted to a given context. A marketing approach like this can help you reach your goals, no matter whether you want to increase your audience or make a sale.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing for SaaS is quite an adventure, but if you have the right guide and the right tools, it’s well worth the journey. Hope this article helped. Stay tuned with us for more SaaS content!