Want to know how to use SaaS content marketing to drive leads and clients?
Today, you learn the exact strategy that will help you grow your business with inbound content.
Want to learn more? Read on! Here’s the ultimate content marketing strategy for SaaS companies.
Contents
Chapter 1: SaaS Content Marketing FundamentalsChapter 2: A Strategy for Fast Growth
Chapter 3: How to Create Engaging Content
Chapter 4: SEO for SaaS
Chapter 5: Promote Your Content
Chapter 6: Get Mentioned in the Media
Chapter 7: Convert Your Site Traffic
Bonus: Amazing SaaS Content Marketing Examples
Chapter 1: SaaS Content Marketing Fundamentals
What is SaaS content marketing? Let’s start with the basics. Content marketing is a marketing strategy that uses content to get people to find your brand, engage, connect, and ultimately buy from you.
By creating your own content, YOU position your business as the thought leader in your space.
When the audience you want to reach finds YOUR content that solves THEIR problems, think they’ll trust you as an authority in your space? They definitely will.
Simple, right?
Well, to use content marketing in the best way, you need to have the right strategy. You can’t just throw spaghetti on the wall and hope it sticks.
Too often, I see SaaS companies using old and outdated tactics and not using their money in the most ROI-friendly way.
To make your content investment count, you need to KNOW it’ll stick.
That’s what you learn today.
Why you should use content marketing to grow your SaaS business
What’s the SaaS marketing strategy that will help you…
- Get 3x more leads compared to traditional marketing programs. Plus, it costs 62% less.
- On average, conversion rates are 6x higher for companies and brands using content marketing than those that aren’t at 2.9% versus 0.5%.
- 9/10 of B2B buyers say that online content has a moderate to major impact on their decision to buy. Approximately 78% of buyers rely on whitepapers to make purchasing decisions.
The answer is simple:
Content marketing. If there’s ONE marketing strategy that will help you become more profitable, it’s content marketing.
That’s because with the right type of content (which we’ll look at more here below), you attract the RIGHT people. They come to you, which means lower lead costs. And as your content marketing scales, so do your profit margins.
With your content, you can:
- Attract qualified leads.
- Move your leads towards the sale. (After all, your content builds a ton of trust.)
- Position your SaaS as the “go-to” in your industry and build brand awareness.
Let me show you what I mean.
If you google “marketplace ideas”, one of my clients pops up on the first page of Google.
This is a search term people use to find out more about what type of marketplace they can build.
My client is a SaaS marketplace builder. Do they drive clients with these types of rankings?
You bet.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is about creating strategic content that educates your clients about the thing you’re selling (just like this blog post you’re reading right now).
Content can also include whitepapers, case studies, social media content… Basically any content you use to reach your clients.
But creating this content isn’t enough.
You ALSO need to get it out there in front of your audience.
There are two ways to do this:
- Getting short-term traffic by sharing it with people in your industry.
- Optimizing your content for search engines to get SEO traffic.
You should create content for all stages of the buyer’s journey. Your clients will find you through search, ads, and your social media pages. This is what the funnel looks like:
With your content, you show how your SaaS helps improve your customer’s life, you address objections, you build your own brand as the “go-to” expert in your niche and you essentially move them closer to the sale.
How to generate SaaS leads with your content marketing
By building up your content marketing, you start generating leads automatically. Instead of having to chase them, they come to you.
For example, take this post.
If I cold pitch a client, I don’t have any brand value in their eyes. They don’t know me or my expertise.
But when a prospective client has read this post, they’re MUCH closer to investing in my services. (See how it shortens my sales cycle monumentally?)
And as your content marketing efforts start taking off, you scale your business.
Think about it:
When you invest a dollar in your content marketing today, it will yield results a year from now (if you do your job right, that is!). And the year after that. And the year after that.
Profit margins go up and up.
It’s like a flywheel spinning (just what Jim Collins talks about).
However, content marketing does take time to build up. Expect it to take at least 3-4 months to build up enough traffic for you to start getting leads.
This can be a longer or a shorter cycle, depending on factors like:
- If you already have a converting sales funnel.
- Your industry and competition.
- How much work you’ve already done on your content marketing.
Here’s the thing:
To get to the point where you’re getting leads from your content, you need the right content and the right strategy. That’s what we’ll look at next.
Chapter 2: A Content Strategy for Fast Growth
What’s the strategy you need to get the best content marketing results?
Look:
The strategy is simple. But it isn’t easy.
There are three steps you need to take:
#1: What are your clients interested in?
First, you need to know what content your customers want.
The best way to figure it out?
By doing some keyword research.
You can use a tool like Google Keyword Planner (which I prefer because it’s Google’s own tool).
Or you can use SEMRush, Ahrefs, or another paid content marketing SaaS tool.
Want a shortcut?
Use Google Keyword Planner to search for a business in your niche that you know is doing well.
Look at what keywords come up.
Now you have somewhere to start.
To figure out what keywords to use, look at things like commercial bid (the amount other businesses are willing to spend on ads for that keyword).
The higher the bid, the better. This means that your keyword is a good COMMERCIAL keyword (it drives buyers).
In fact, look at that metric before you check the number of searches a keyword gets.
Yup, it’s WAY more important than your searches.
At the end of the day, you’d rather have 100 buyers on your site instead of 10,000 random people who’re never going to buy.
#2: What type of content should you create?
Let’s pause right here and look at what type of content you should create (you need to know this for the final step of your strategy).
Here’s a summary of different types of content you can create:
Blog articles: Blog articles are the thing that will drive most organic traffic for you. The keywords you found in the previous step are basically your blog posts topics for the next 12 months.
Whitepapers: Your whitepapers are guides about problems your prospective customers are trying to solve. It’s a way to build your expertise fast and move people to the next step in your sales cycle. So if you’re a marketing automation SaaS, your whitepaper could be about something like how to choose the right marketing automation tool or how to automate your marketing.
Case studies: Case studies are a way for you to show just how powerful your SaaS is by highlighting a customer result and telling a story. As you might know, social proof sells. And that’s exactly what case studies help you do.
Social media posts: Social media posts help engage your audience. You’re not going to be all over the place, but instead, focus on the one or two best platforms for your business (for example, LinkedIn and Twitter).
#3: Your content calendar
Once you have found 12 keywords in step #1, you can use them for your content calendar.
The strategy I recommend for most Software as a Service businesses is to create one extremely high-quality piece of blog content every month.
On top of that, you might do social media posts and videos, as well as whitepapers and case studies.
But what is a “high-quality” piece of blog content?
Easy: A blog post that’s at least 2,000 words long (but often, even longer).
The reason? First, your blog posts aren’t just random content.
They’re attracting the RIGHT clients to your site. And they’re priming them for the sale.
That’s very hard to do with a shorter piece of content. You simply can’t answer enough objections and build up enough expertise with 500-1,000 words.
Second, long-form content like this performs better in search. 1,800-2,400 words seem to be the perfect length. That means: More traffic for you!
Later in this guide, we’ll get to how you can use your content in the best way possible and convert them into clients fast.
But first:
Let’s take a look at what it takes to create content your audience loves (and that positions your SaaS business as the go-to expert in your niche).
Chapter 3: How to Create Engaging Content
Now you know what content marketing is and what your strategy should look like.
But what about the actual content? This is how to create content people love to share.
Content that is perceived as high-value
First things first:
Your content can be made 10x more valuable by positioning it in the right way.
You see, we humans perceive things differently.
A Chanel bag is perceived as much more valuable than a quality bag you get from a high-street shop.
It’s the same with content. Some content is perceived as more valuable than other content.
In fact, there’s a whole book you can read on this subject: “Contagious” by Jonah Berger.
There are a few things going on here:
Usefulness. First, how useful is the content? This goes back to what we talked about content length. People will usually think that a longer post is more useful.
I see this ALL the time. People say, “Wow, your content is awesome.” Guess why? Because it’s long-form and positioned to feel valuable. (And it is. As you’ve seen so far, I spill the beans.)
Stories. Are you telling a story or just asserting facts? Stories make all the difference.
For example, I’ll tell you a story right now.
One of my favorite stories about the power of storytelling?
Save the Children was looking to increase donations.
They tested two different campaigns.
In one, they used facts about children in need of help. In the other, they told a story and shared the facts.
The result? It’s pretty startling…
Those who read the story donated about 2X more.
Emotions. Emotions get us moving and make your content so much better.
And with emotions, I don’t mean telling your life story. But more like coming across as a person (and yes, you can do this even if your niche is dry. I’ve worked with clients in the engineering and construction industries, so I know what I’m talking about.)
You can also include a bit of humor or maybe talk about a big problem in your industry to build up emotion.
Specificity. And finally, make your content specific. Stick to your niche because that’s what’s valuable to your audience.
Content design
Another great way to create engaging content?
Create better content design.
You see, the better designed your post is, the more valuable it seems.
So if you include high-quality screenshots and other visuals, good. That makes your post look and feel top-notch.
SaaS content writing tips
But besides positioning your content for success and creating a great blog design, you’ll also want to focus on your copy.
You see, that’s what gets people reading, learning all about you, and buying from you.
And to get people reading, I recommend:
Intros that pull people in
You might know that every newspaper article includes a lead, a short intro that summarizes what the news piece is about. Like this one in the New York Times…
That’s what your article should include, too, by talking about your reader’s problem (pain) and goal (dream) in the introduction. That way, you pull people in.
Write like you talk
The best way to make your copy personal and fun? It’s to write like you talk. You might need to edit your content for clarity, but basically it should sound like a human wrote it, not a machine (no matter which industry you’re in).
Conclusion
And the best way to end your post is to quickly summarize the benefit of your post and ask a question to keep the engagement going.
Chapter 4: SEO for SaaS
So we’ve looked at your content strategy and your content. You know what content to create to attract high-quality leads and clients.
Now, it’s time to take a look at how to organically drive traffic to your website.
That is:
How to use search engines (like Google) to get ‘automated’ traffic (=your clients) to your content. Here’s how.
Use the right keywords
One of the biggest mistakes I see SaaS business owners make when it comes to their SEO traffic strategy?
Thinking that their priority is to get as much traffic as possible.
It’s not. It’s to get as much targeted traffic as possible.
In Chapter 2, we already looked at what types of content keywords you’ll want to focus on.
The main thing is:
Go for what your buyers search for, not the biggest keywords in your niche.
On-page optimization
The next step to your SEO strategy is optimizing your content for search engines.
What this means is that you optimize each page for ONE keyword.
The most effective ways to do it?
- Include your keyword once in the title and four times throughout your text.
- Include it in your meta description (use Yoast to add a meta description).
- Include it in an image alt tag.
Backlink building
The third part of your SaaS SEO content strategy is to build backlinks to your website.
With the steps above, you’ll already get some traffic.
But backlinks will increase that growth many times over.
Backlinks are essentially links from external pages pointing back to your website and content.
They’re a way for Google (and other search engines) to figure out if your content is any good.
And to get backlinks, check out the strategies in Chapter 6. These will help you get started.
Chapter 5: Promote Your Content
We’ve already covered a lot… But there’s even more you need to know.
You see, when you’re done creating your content, you can’t just sit back and think, “That was it.”
That’s because with the millions of posts that are created every day, you need to do some work to get it in front of your audience.
Your SEO work will help. But SEO takes time to build up.
In the meantime, focus on promoting your content on platforms like LinkedIn, Quora, YouTube, and Pinterest. Here’s how.
If you’re a B2B SaaS business, your audience is probably on LinkedIn.
With my own clients, I’ll often repurpose our content into shorter LinkedIn posts and articles.
These work great for driving back traffic to your website.
For example, one of my clients saw an uptick in their traffic and conversions (getting leads to contact them) after we consistently posted quality content on LinkedIn.
The best part?
It doesn’t have to take a ton of your time.
By posting LinkedIn posts your audience is interested in and creating videos for your platform, you can quickly create an engaged audience and drive them back to your site content.
Quora
Quora is another great way to engage your audience.
On Quora, find threads that talk about your topic.
Now, create an in-depth answer (about 300 words should do). Don’t include promotional content.
Instead, tell a story and use your own experience to show people how you help.
The best part? Your Quora answers can start ranking in Google, which drives long-term traffic to you and your SaaS business.
Pinterest is a search engine, just like Google. The people using Pinterest save content that will help them make their lives better in some way.
For example, this could be a post about: how to build a business, how to become better at your job, and how to be productive.
In my experience, Pinterest is a “dumb Google.” It’s so much easier to build up traffic there than on Google so if your audience is on Pinterest- use it!
YouTube
Another search engine? YouTube. And because video is so engaging (for example, marketers who use video grow their revenue 49% faster than non-video users), YouTube is a great place to promote your business.
Want to make it as simple as possible? Repurpose your old content into YouTube videos.
Chapter 6: Get Mentioned in the Media
You know how some SaaS businesses seem to pop up just about everywhere and you have no clue how they make it happen? Here’s what you need to know about pitching the media:
Guest post to get traction
One of the best ways to quickly get exposure, credibility, and get your content in front of new audiences is to guest post.
Either, you can pitch guest posts to bigger publications in your industry, like Fast Company or Forbes.
Additionally, you can publish guest posts in more niche publications in your industry.
Here’s a simple script you can use:
Subject: Guest post idea for [publication]
Hi [name of editor],
I’m a [short description of what you do/what your SaaS does] at [your site URL]. [Relate to an article they’ve published and show that you’ve done your research and actually read the publication.]
I’d love to write a guest post for you and I have 3 ideas that I think your readers would love:
1. [Example title #1]
[Explain your idea.]
2. [Example title #2]
[Explain your idea.]
3. [Example title #3]
[Explain your idea.]
Here are a few samples of guest posts I’ve written before:
- [Link to post #1]
- [Link to post #2]
- Link to post #3]
Please let me know which idea you think your readers would enjoy the most and I’d be happy to send over a complete article along with a bio and photo.
[Your name]
Podcast and attract a highly engaged audience
One of the BEST ways to get a loyal audience right now?
Podcasting.
You see, if people listen to you for an hour, think they’ll want to buy from you? You bet.
But which types of podcasts should you choose?
For example, if you’re a productivity SaaS and your main buyers are CEOs at startups, you’d focus on podcasts for startups. Or if they’re mainly HR reps, you focus on podcasts for HR professionals or more general office productivity-related podcasts.
Here’s a script for pitching podcasts:
Subject: Podcast idea idea for [podcast]
Hi [name of podcaster],
I’m a [short description of what you do/what your SaaS does] at [your site URL]. [Relate to a podcast they’ve published and show that you’ve done your research and actually listened to the podcast.]
I’d love to become a guest on your podcast and I have 3 ideas that I think your listeners would love:
1. [Example #1]
[Explain your idea.]
2. [Example #2]
[Explain your idea.]
3. [Example #3]
[Explain your idea.]
Please let me know which idea you think your listeners would enjoy the most and I’d be happy to set up an interview.
[Your name]
HARO
Finally, a simple way to get some traction for your SaaS is to pitch HARO (Help a Reporter Out) requests.
HARO requests are requests by journalists who are looking for story sources:
With them, you can get excellent features, like the one I got in this DreamHost article:
Chapter 7: Convert Your Site Traffic
Listen:
By now, you know how to create content to get high-quality clients. And you know how to promote your content and get traffic.
But there’s one more thing left to do… Convert your traffic!
You see, when you come to a new site and you know nothing about the business, what do you do?
If the content you’re reading is engaging, you might read a few more blog posts, maybe check out the About page and read a bit about the business.
But chances are low that you’ll take out your wallet and say, “I’m ready to buy.”
EVEN if you need that service.
That’s because there’s just not enough trust built up just yet.
So, what you as the business and website owner want to do is to add your site visitors to your audience so that you can build that relationship with them and eventually convert them into customers.
You do this by asking them to join your email list.
Alternatively, for your SaaS, you might ask them to sign up for a free trial (but note that it’s a bigger ask and not as easy to say “yes” to when people are just getting familiar with your business).
And how do you do it? Here’s the strategy for that.
#1: Create a lead magnet
A lead magnet is essentially a curiosity-evoking PDF.
Your PDF is strategically positioned to get your ideal clients to your email list.
It doesn’t need to be long, 5-6 pages will do. What’s more important is that you use the right topic and give VALUE in those pages.
For example, your PDF can be a:
- Report.
- Strategy overview.
- Data.
Here’s the PDF I use on my site:
When creating YOUR PDF, think about why your audience buys from you. What will make them trust you even more?
For example, if your SaaS is a marketing automation SaaS, that thing could be an overview of how companies can use your SaaS to improve their marketing.
#2: Use opt-in forms
To get your SaaS in front of your audience, you need to use opt-in forms.
These are forms on your website, which your visitors must fill out to get your PDF delivered straight to their inboxes.
I use LeadPages to create popup boxes.
#3: Create a highly engaged email audience
And once people have signed up for your newsletters, it’s time to engage them.
You do this with your newsletters.
I usually recommend my clients to do the following:
#1: Create a welcome sequence
First, start by creating a welcome sequence.
This is an email series of about 4-5 emails that are sent out on an automated basis after someone signs up to your email list.
With your emails, you engage your email audience and can even make a few sales.
After all, someone who has just signed up for your email list is a very interested prospect. THIS is the time to show them why they should listen to you.
#2: Send out regular emails… And make them good.
Once you have a list of subscribers, you don’t just leave them cold until you want to sell something.
Nope. Instead, you should consistently send valuable content. This means at least once a week, but I would go as far as saying you might even email your list a few times a week. As long as your emails are valuable, people will want to read them.
Apart from these email sequences, you can have automated sequences to optimize conversions, upsells, and reduce churn.
Bonus: Examples of SaaS Companies Doing Content Marketing in the Right Way
Want a few different examples of what SaaS content marketing can look like for SaaS businesses? I’ve put together some examples of some of my current and past clients and what the results can look like. Here are SaaS companies with great content:
Kreezalid
One of my clients, Kreezalid, is a SaaS website marketplace builder. Marketplaces can easily set up their own websites in a matter of minutes. When we started working together, Kreezalid had already a good amount of traffic from their blog posts. However, they wanted to expand in key markets like the US. Together, we put together a list of topics we wanted to cover and started to create content about them. This content includes:
How to market a marketplace website.
Which business model marketplaces should choose.
And various marketplace business ideas.
As of right now, Kreezalid’s US traffic is steadily growing every month.
GetMinute
GetMinute is a meeting app for companies. With our content marketing strategy, traffic grew to over 20,000 monthly website visitors. And the traffic was targeted, from blog posts like…
How to manage meetings.
How to create effective meeting action items.
How to hold fun and engaging meetings.
Thanks to these blog posts, GetMinute gets over 20,000 monthly blog visitors.
HermesThemes
HermesThemes is not strictly speaking a SaaS, but a WordPress theme developer for hotels, B&Bs, and resorts. My content ranks 3+ years after we developed the content. The content is targeted and helps business owners…
Start a bed and breakfast.
Instagram marketing for hotels.
These and other blog posts rank on the first page of Google 3+ years after they were created.
Want to get started?
There you have it. Now you know what it takes to create a SaaS content marketing strategy that works in 2020. What it comes down to is creating high-quality content that is positioned for your audience and promoting that content.
With the right content, you WILL increase your leads and profitability.
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