Sometimes what you’re looking for is right in front of you – like all the pieces you need to create engaging SaaS marketing content.
But you aren’t sure where to start.
It’s pretty simple.
Captivate users over and over again with the same content; just repurpose it.
In this article, you’ll learn how easy it is to turn consumer interactions with your product into meaningful insights that allow you to create content that engages with SaaS users across various channels.
Why Content Marketing in SaaS is Crucial
Content marketing is crucial for product-led companies to attract loyal consumers in an increasingly competitive online environment. Software features alone aren’t enough to stand out.
SaaS content marketing efforts help users realize their products’ value and encourage subscription renewal. Doing so decreases churn and increases monthly recurring revenue.
A SaaS content marketing strategy releases free quality content to drive organic traffic, build brand awareness, and attract demo sign-ups and free trials.
Unlike top-down sales, SaaS companies don’t depend on one-time sales from Facebook or Google ads. Instead, attracting loyal consumers is the primary goal, making quality content marketing a more cost-effective marketing technique. The customer acquisition cost of SaaS companies from content marketing is about 15% lower than that of paid ads.
What Makes Content Marketing in SaaS Different?
In the world of SaaS, content marketing plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining loyal customers. However, what sets SaaS content marketing apart from other industries?
Firstly, SaaS companies need to go beyond simply showcasing their software features. In an increasingly competitive online environment, features alone are not enough to stand out. Instead, SaaS content marketing efforts should focus on helping users realize the value of their products. By highlighting the benefits and outcomes that users can achieve, SaaS companies can effectively communicate the value proposition of their software.
Secondly, SaaS content marketing is essential for encouraging subscription renewals and reducing churn. Unlike traditional software products, SaaS relies on recurring revenue from subscriptions. Therefore, it is crucial for SaaS companies to continuously engage and educate their users through content marketing. By providing valuable and relevant content, SaaS companies can increase user satisfaction and encourage them to continue their subscription.
How to Leverage a SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
To effectively leverage your SaaS content marketing strategy, consider the following steps:
- Understand your target market: Conduct thorough research to identify your target audience's pain points, needs, and preferences. This will help you create content that resonates with your audience.
- Define your goals: Clearly define your content marketing goals, whether it's increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, or generating leads. Having clear objectives will guide your content creation and distribution strategies.
- Create valuable content: Develop high-quality content that provides value to your audience. This can include blog posts, ebooks, videos, webinars, and more. Focus on addressing your audience's pain points and providing actionable solutions.
- Optimize for search engines: Implement SEO strategies to ensure your content ranks well in search engine results. This will help drive organic traffic to your website and increase your visibility.
- Promote your content: Use various channels to distribute and promote your content, including social media, email marketing, and partnerships with influencers or industry publications. This will help you reach a wider audience and increase your content's visibility.
- Measure and analyze: Track the performance of your content marketing efforts using analytics tools. This will allow you to identify what is working and what needs improvement, enabling you to refine your strategy over time.
- Engage with your audience: Encourage user engagement by responding to comments, questions, and feedback. This will help build a sense of community and strengthen your relationship with your audience.
- Leverage customer success stories: Showcase the success stories of your customers to demonstrate the value and impact of your software. This can be done through case studies, testimonials, or user-generated content.
- Continuously iterate and improve: Content marketing is an ongoing process. Regularly review and analyze your content performance, make adjustments based on feedback and data, and continuously improve your strategy.
By following these steps and tailoring them to your specific company and target market, you can build a successful SaaS content marketing strategy that drives growth and supports your product-led approach.
Building a Content Marketing Strategy for SaaS Success
A well-executed SaaS content marketing strategy is crucial for achieving success in today's competitive landscape. Here's why:
- Establishing Authority: By consistently creating valuable and informative content, you position your SaaS company as an authority in your industry. This helps build trust with your target audience and establishes your brand as a go-to resource.
- Driving Traffic: Content marketing is a powerful tool for driving organic traffic to your website. By optimizing your content for relevant keywords and sharing it across various channels, you can attract a steady stream of qualified leads to your site.
- Educating Prospects: Content allows you to educate your prospects about the unique value and benefits of your SaaS product. By addressing their pain points and providing solutions, you can nurture them through the buyer's journey and increase conversion rates.
- Supporting Product-Led Growth: A strong content marketing strategy is essential for supporting product-led growth. By aligning your content with your product and focusing on user adoption, you can drive usage and encourage customers to upgrade or refer your product to others.
- Building a Community: Content marketing provides an opportunity to engage with your audience and build a community around your SaaS product. By encouraging comments, social sharing, and user-generated content, you can foster a sense of belonging and loyalty among your customers.
To learn more about how to build and improve your SaaS content marketing strategy, check out our Ultimate SaaS Content Marketing Guide for Product-Led Growth. Additionally, our Pair Content & Product In Your SaaS Content Strategy: 5 Ways article offers valuable insights and examples to help you refine your approach.
4 Best Practices for Effective Content Marketing
Let’s get acquainted with how online content has adapted in the past few years and what that means for different businesses.
To stand out and sustain user engagement in an erratic online environment that is constantly evolving, consider the following:
1. Show More, Show Off Less
Blog posts promote thought leadership and deeper trends rather than talk about how great you’re product is. Slack is a great example. The company engages its audience beyond saying, “Hey, check out our newest and latest feature on Slack.”
Webinars, e-books, and blog links on Slack’s homepage are examples of content marketing that appeal to users because they help solve problems.
2. Keep Loyal Consumers Around
Appreciate the users you first targeted when creating content. They’re the ones who hold the key to sharing your information with others if it resonates with them.
3. Inspire Different Perspectives
Highlighting a product or its features doesn’t always have to be clear-cut. Let consumers create their own experience with the product, which can create magic.
4. Captivate, Don’t Sell
Find unique ways to incorporate your product’s core features into a story that creates an opportunity for new and existing users to engage.
Think critically about the effects your content will have on users and give yourself the ability to distinguish when content will increase engagement and when it won’t. Set achievable goals based on the tips above in the early stages of brainstorming ideas.
5 Strategies for Crafting Engaging SaaS Content Users Will Love
Producing content is crucial for SaaS companies that operate on recurring revenue generated from paid subscriptions. Content marketing keeps users engaged, lowering churn and increasing monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
Nearly 55% of B2B content marketers find creating valuable content a consistent challenge. Here are five pointers for creating attention-grabbing blogs, videos, and social media.
1. Turn User Activity Into Engaging Content
Be mindful of the information you have at hand.
Start by understanding how content today creates open discussions with its audience — it allows users to talk about how they experience your product, what pain points it relieves for them, and how it can continue to be improved.
Learn how to transform consumer data into valuable content with tips to help your business achieve the same:
- Focus on where and when your users use your product the most.
- Show off the best practices of the product and highlight unique features.
- Clearly communicate the purpose of your product.
- Show how consumers use your product in specific moments to establish branding.
- Be traditional and use case studies to show how to engage with your service or product.
In a vast changing online environment, B2B and SaaS businesses are adapting their content to fit the trends they analyze from user engagement.
Part of the analysis is being aware of insights that will establish a solid foundation for quality content creation that excites existing users and helps reach new potential customers.
How consumers interact with types of content is ever-changing, so it's vital to understand the process of transforming product trends into content that resonates with your audience.
2. Think Differently About User Behavior
Sometimes, we’re stuck in a cycle of doing the same thing or repeating the same patterns that we forget to think differently. To optimize content based on user behavior, consider the different avenues that could lead to unexpected results.
Figuring out how to get users to interact with existing content to encourage insights can be a tough challenge.
When people come across an error in their product, their instinct is to fix it. What if you shift your thinking and utilize the mistake to your advantage instead?
Figma, for example, created a template for product meetings to help organize information their whole team can access with a button that counts each click. It turns out the button was a bug, and instead of taking it out, the team used the button to vote on projects or like what teammates input in the template.
Due to its popularity, Figma wrote a blog post about this button voting feature that resonated with many readers. Users liked the idea of being more interactive during team meetings, but it also allowed team members to be more encouraging of each other.
Instead of seeking a solution, the problem became a helpful feature and a great example of how user behavior can transform into optimized content.
There are several ways user behavior can initiate effective forms of content, try:
- A blog post in emails
- In-app messages
- YouTube videos
ProductLed, for example, releases weekly videos about product-led growth on its YouTube channel.
Think of these as different tools that can highlight features of your product. It creates an opportunity for users to integrate the information you provide while they use your product.
Remember that clear communication can nudge your users to understand different ways to use your product by using a variety of these methods.
3. Gather Information for Infinite Ideas
Finding valuable insights starts with looking at the data you have. Looking past what is in front of you is easy, but you might just discover what you need.
Start with your database, and analyze how users interact with your product or service. Once you understand your users well, expand your search by looking at second-party data.
Deep dive into different community forums, comments on blog posts, or other places that mention your product.
For example, ProductLed receives feedback from people watching their YouTube videos.
Once you’ve completed your search, take the feedback and analyze it in a helpful way for your Product or Marketing team. Start planning a content calendar with all the major highlights from your analysis.
Think of the process as a never-ending cycle regarding uncovering and using information.
4. Turn User Insights Into Engaging Content
Customer feedback, user forums, and SaaS comparison sites are valuable user insights for SaaS companies. The following strategies help you dig deeper into easily accessible and sometimes overlooked information that uncovers endless content ideas.
Strategy #1: Gather Customer Feedback
Conduct user interviews about what customers say about your content — what they liked, what product features resonated with them etc. Categorize your feedback to determine what you can talk about in your next blog post. What you uncover can be added to the first and second-party data to further the cycle.
Strategy #2: Use Forums
Public conversations are a great way to find out what users are saying about your product — what they like, issues that deter them from the product, and, most importantly, they provide insight into what content to create. Looking at different forums can improve your product overall and help you discover something unique users enjoy about your product.
Strategy #3: Use SaaS Comparison Sites
These are important for your company’s growth, reputation, and brand. Through these sites, you can find areas where your competitors' users complain or want to see more features in a product. Use this to your advantage, and pivot your content to reflect your product’s features that fill the gap of what your competitors are missing.
5. Consider the Different Ways to Deliver Content
Once you’ve gathered enough data to create new content, you can start thinking about how it can target a specific subset of potential customers.
And then comes the best part:
With great ideas, you’re ready to repurpose them for fresh, new content that maximizes the value of the original information.
Repurposing content is a method to get content to users in various forms and get the most bang for your buck.
If you spend a lot of time on a long-form piece, repurpose it by cutting the content up into smaller chunks for several platforms. For example, LinkedIn is popular among B2B SaaS users, so use it to your advantage.
Consider the different ways to deliver content effectively. Ask yourself:
- If you’re writing a long-form piece, can you use the highlights in an email?
- If you’re recording an event, can you use 30 seconds of it on social media?
- If you’re recording a video, can it be turned into a blog post?
These questions prompt you to think critically about using your content to achieve the most impact on your audience.
Here’s an example…
The world’s top product-led experts share their knowledge yearly at the ProductLed Summit. Later, their video presentations are repurposed and shared on ProductLed’s blog.
Senior Director of Product at Fanatics Betting & Gaming, Rob Brazer, presented about increasing product engagement.
This video content was repurposed into the blog “How to Measure and Use Product Engagement Score (PES) to Increase Engagement.”
FAQs About SaaS Content Marketing
How does content marketing benefit SaaS companies?
Content marketing benefits SaaS companies because it’s a great way to bring attention to your product and stand out in a competitive online environment where branding and positioning are more important to consumers than just feature differentiation. Content marketing also helps companies with SaaS products attract loyal consumers that maintain recurring revenue with their ongoing user subscriptions.
How do you write B2B SaaS content?
B2B SaaS content should nurture qualified leads into demo sign-ups and trial subscriptions. Map out your content to each phase of the user funnel and repurpose existing content into new blog posts, videos, social media, etc., that attract different user segments. SEO is also crucial for writing effective B2B SaaS content – Google drives up to 77% of visitor traffic for SaaS companies.
What type of content is best for SaaS marketing?
Consumer-centric content is best for SaaS marketing. Consider what topics attract your target audience as you repurpose old pieces of content or create new blogs, videos, or podcasts. Maybe your SaaS marketing content showcases how your software helps a user solve a specific problem, explains how user-friendly your product is, or answers a common FAQ your customer success team received.
How would you measure engagement for the content you generate for a SaaS product?
Bounce rate, demos booked, new leads, trail email sign-ups, and scroll time are ways to measure your SaaS product’s content engagement. First, define the goal of each piece of content, like reducing drop-off, for example, and then choose the best measurement engagement metric.
What content will make your company standout?
Be mindful of the information in front of you. Use trends, online information, and user behaviors to create pieces of content that will continue to engage your new and existing audience.
Looking To Scale Your Self-Serve Revenue, Faster? Join ProductLed Academy.
It’s not easy for SaaS companies to stand out with all the content online. Content teams spend much more time and effort creating content that resonates with target audiences to keep up with competitors.
If you’re either stuck and need help creating content and with other aspects of your SaaS strategy - we have a solution for you!
We’ve coached and mentored thousands of SaaS business owners just like you. ProductLed Academy is a 12-month coaching program, where you'll work directly with me (Wes Bush) to master each of the nine components of a successful product-led business (we spend around six weeks on each of these topics):
- Vision: What is your company really good at?
- User: Who do you serve best?
- Model: How do you create a ton of value for your users to win?
- Offer: Have you crafted an irresistible free offer for your ideal users?
- Experience: Have you created an effortless path to value for your users?
- Pricing: Is it easy for users to upgrade without talking to anyone?
- Data: Do you know where users are getting stuck in your product?
- Process: Do you have a growth process that enables your team to build out experiments, prioritize the high-impact ones, and launch the ones that are easiest?
- Team: Is your team full of A players capable of taking you to the next level?
While you can have one or more of these dialed in perfectly, if you’re missing one of these key players, you’re going to have a hard time with growth.
Apart from focusing on those key areas of your strategy, ProductLed Academy comes with:
- Weekly 60-minute group coaching call with Wes Bush, where you'll go through each of the components of the ProductLed Method (including pricing) to master a self-serve model.
- Weekly non-negotiable tasks to keep you accountable.
- Access to an exclusive ProductLed Founder Community so you can meet other ambitious founders and receive support 24/7.
- Access to the ProductLed Vault, where you'll gain access to all of our programs (including ProductLed Acquisition and Accelerator), templates, and frameworks.
If you're ready to break through to the next level and master product-led growth, be sure to check out ProductLed Academy.
