With the increasing use of digital media in almost every sphere of business processes, SaaS-based product or service offering is the new in. Content marketing is an important tool to generate new leads, increase awareness about the brand, and convert new customers.
However, despite the many benefits of content marketing, only 11% of SaaS companies use content marketing as part of their strategy. SaaS Content Marketing is a great way to enable your target audience to learn about your product, services, features and even how it adds value to the particular industry or business segment you are targeting.
As the pace of digitalization increases, content marketing for SaaS organizations is a must-have in today's technology-dependent world.
To maximize your conversion rate and ensure that your products or services are known to your target segment, the SaaS content marketing approach is ideal, but it needs a few tricks to stay on top of the game. Let's get started with a few sure-fire ways to succeed in your SaaS content marketing approach -
1. Create content that appeals to your target audience in each stage of their customer journey
Any SaaS content marketing approach aims to generate leads, turn them into prospects, and eventually into contracted customers. However, for this to happen, the content created has to appeal to the audience.
In content marketing, two approaches come into play here -
- Knowing the customer persona
- Creating valuable content for each stage of the customer journey
Let us understand both these approaches.
What Is Customer Persona?
To build an effective SaaS marketing plan, you need to know who the target customer is. Since B2B SaaS marketing could include multiple target audience with different needs and requirements, it is important to know who the customer persona is for every specific offering.
To ensure you build the right customer persona, you should start by focusing on a few key questions -
- The demographic or geography of the customer
- Their needs
- Their key challenges
- Barriers
You may need to answer additional questions when creating the customer persona, so start off and build as you progress.
What Is Customer Journey?
Next, you need to identify which stage the customer is in when they are coming to particular pages on your website or which content they are interacting with. Depending on the segments, you need to build content that helps create awareness, provides a value proposition and gets the right information across to the customer to convert the lead to a customer.
The stages in a customer journey include -
- Awareness: In this stage, the goal is to attract customers to your products or services. Since this is the first stage, the customer needs to be provided with specific, engaging, educational information when they want to know more.
- Lead Generation: In the lead generation stage, the customer has shown interest and requested additional information. This stage's content could include educational content with details on a particular topic, the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of your products and personalized content for your customer persona.
- Trial Sign-Ups: By this stage, you have already built a level of trust with your customers. So once the customer starts the free trial, the content provided has to be helpful and direct, instead of just sales oriented. The objective is to enable customers to get hands-on experience with your SaaS offering and help them if they need any support. Content at this stage could include FAQs, walkthrough videos, etc.
- Conversion To Paid Customer: Once the customer is reaching the end of their trial period, your SaaS content marketing efforts need to be focused on converting the customer. For convincing them to be a paying customer, you could share specialized pricing, discount offers or provide access to additional features at a small price.
- Customer Retention: Every salesperson knows that it is five times more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain an existing one. So at this stage, create content that educates and enables your customers to get the most value from your product or service. These could include personalized guides, helpful tips and more.
Focus On Delivering Value To Your Customers
Once you have identified the target audience, the persona and customer stages, you need to ensure that your content delivers value in each stage and segment. Since SaaS content marketing could cover a range of target personas and customer segments, the ideal suggestion is to use multiple channels and create specific landing pages for each segment.
This way, you can create targeted content and increase the chances of conversion.
Diversify Your Content Offerings
Content marketing is not a standalone activity but one that fits into every aspect of your marketing strategy. From email marketing, social media, blog articles, to a lot more, your content will be the base for all your marketing activities. Instead of just creating content for one particular aspect, think of ways to diversify your content and engage with the prospects in ways they like. For example, your top-performing content can be converted into -
- Blogs: Blogging is still trendy in B2B SaaS marketing, and your content can add huge traffic while helping your website's SEO.
- eBook or Whitepaper: eBook or whitepapers are detailed articles on a specific topic and can help generate leads. eBooks are also preferred by businesses since they offer great value and can be downloaded to be read later on.
- Video content: One-third of all online activity nowadays is video content, and your blogs can be leveraged to create stunning videos that deliver a higher value to the audience. Videos have stronger appeal and impact than plain text and should be a must-have in today's SaaS content marketing strategy.
- Infographics: Visually appealing content with impactful data can help attract the audience; it creates high impact and will lead to conversion if used appropriately.
- Podcast: A huge audience in a particular industry or business line listens to podcasts to update themselves with the latest information and trends. You can use your existing content to create podcasts to demonstrate your credibility and build trust with the audience.
Develop A SaaS Content Marketing Calendar
If you are creating amazing content but not sharing it regularly, you lose out on a huge target segment. Instead of sharing content just once, plan your content calendar to distribute and promote your content. The content calendar could include -
- Social Media Distribution: This planner defines what kind of posts get shared and when. Ensure that you have content that appeals to multiple customer personas and segments every week for higher success.
- Targeted Ads: Targeted ads are extremely effective to drive traffic to your website or particular content asset. Since video ads are getting huge attention these days, you could use video content for your targeted ads while the CTA takes the user to a specific conversion page.
- Content calendar: In addition to distribution, you will only get value if you follow a content calendar. If your video or blogs are a big hit, create a schedule to publish your video, podcast or blog at a particular time to ensure it gets maximum appeal and your fans (returning readers or viewers) know what to expect from you.
Wrapping Up: SaaS content marketing is ideal for business outreach
To conclude, content marketing for SaaS businesses is not very different from traditional methods. Since SaaS offerings focus on delivering customer value with a product that's straightforward, easy to install and use, content marketing is a great strategy to maximize outreach to the target audience. A good SaaS content marketing strategy doesn't just focus on increasing the sales funnel; it also helps the brand carve a space of its own in the industry.
If used effectively, SaaS content marketing can help deliver consistent ROI and ensure that your customers return for more. Ensure you regularly update your content to create impact and deliver value wherever you spot an opportunity.
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