Is SEO dead? Should your company be on TikTok? Is it too late to start a podcast? Are we capturing or creating demand?! Can our current content team execute all of this?
The SaaS content marketing landscape evolves faster than perhaps that of any other industry.
From job title changes and social influencers declaring entire channels dead to the terms invented by powerful brands, it’s an exciting, fast-paced space to participate in.
It’s also a full-time job trying to decipher what MEANINGFULLY works in content marketing today.
And perhaps no one is more qualified to help the SaaS world answer these questions than content marketing agencies that work with many of the fastest-growing SaaS companies.
We built the following guide to help you set up a content marketing strategy to grow your company and engage your target audience based on our experiences with our SaaS partners.
Learn how we bring this guide to life for SaaS companies like Gorgias, Metadata, Teamwork, Workvivo, and more with proven SEO and content optimization services. Book a call, today.
Part 1: Content Strategy Research Process
We can’t overstate the need for SaaS marketing departments to accurately target prospects at an account level, also known as Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)
The most successful content marketing teams prioritize ideal customer profiles because it allows them to do the following:
If you’re looking for an effective way to learn or better define your ideal profiles, here are a few places and frameworks to help you.
Choose a select group of your current customers to interview → It’s the most obvious and perhaps the least executed on way to understand why your customers are using your software service and what they specifically are trying to accomplish with it.
Consult with your customer-facing, cross-functional team members → Established companies can draw out useful information from teams like customer success, support, and sales.
Earlier-stage SaaS startups will benefit from conversations with the founder about why the product was built. The product team members are also likely in consistent contact with customers as they iterate and plan for upcoming features.
Pivot your CRM data → Examine your lead and customer details from your CRM software. Look for company size, revenue generated, type of industry, geographic location, behavior on your website, behavior with your product, and roles/job titles.
And take advantage of the following tools to gain a better understanding of where your ICPs spend time, who they’re influenced by, and identify specific companies that match your ICP profiles.
Additional Related Resources:
Using Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) To Improve Your Content Marketing’s Efficacy (Read)
Finding Your ICP to Build Better Content - from the Content That Grows podcast (Listen/Watch)
As you continue gathering ICP and customer data, you’ll uncover the content topics that are most likely to support your overall strategy.
To start, let’s look at an overview of what a mature content marketing program will be targeting topically:
☑️ “Knowledge base” content related to topics that respond directly to your customer’s questions, pain points, goals, and larger Jobs to be Done that are DIRECTLY related to your product
☑️ Content about topics that respond directly to your customers’ questions, pain points, goals, and larger Jobs to be Done that are NOT directly related to your product
☑️ Your sales team content about topics they’ve identified as potentially helpful in enabling them to close more deals
☑️ Your customer success and support teams content about the topics they’ve identified as useful to upselling and/or retaining customers
☑️ BoFu/MoFu content topics (Pricing, comparisons, reviews, product/services lists, etc.)
☑️ Pillar topics surrounding each feature/solution your product offers
☑️ Ample related cluster topics that link to and from each pillar topic with the goal of providing both breadth and depth around a larger theme, comprehensively educating your audience
☑️ Industry-specific ToFu content topics that are tuned into the evergreen discussions being had amongst industry leaders/influencers
☑️ Industry-specific ToFu content topics that are tuned into the trending discussions being had amongst industry leaders/influencers
☑️ Content for topics inspired by/or in response to your competitor’s content (ONLY if it is also relevant to your larger audience
Here is what you’ll need to keep in mind as your choose your topics:
Work backward from your strategy/business goals → If your goal is to grow your podcast viewership, then you’ll want to have a strategy that creates, distributes, & repurposes that podcast content. If you want to shorten the sales cycle, choose content topics with the help of the sales/retention teams and map to product features.
Understand your content program’s maturity status → Early-stage companies should prioritize extreme focus on their goals and channels and exercise patience around influenced revenue/pipeline results. Mature companies benefit from consistent updates to existing content and the resources to produce more high-quality content.
Choose a mix of demand capture and demand generation → Be sure the topics and channels you target represent what your SaaS brand needs now.
While this will evolve, we generally see early-stage companies build BoFu and MoFu content and focus on sales enablement and retention to start. They still distribute and create demand-generation content but try to ensure they’re able to capture their demand first.
As your program matures and your capture program is established, you can shift a higher percentage of your content topics into ToFu and demand generation.
Prioritize content topics that map to the product → When you’re able to include your product in your content marketing efforts, you’re creating opportunities to showcase the value/utility of your tool. You don’t need to hard-sell anyone with your content, but teams who creatively find ways to include the product in their content do better at generating influenced or assisted conversions. [Learn more and see some examples]
Offer breadth and depth when choosing a topic/theme for your content → Whether you’re clustering your content for SEO rankings or you’re simply creating a useful hub of related content topics for your audience to navigate through, you and your users will benefit from thoroughly covering topics.
Here are some great pragmatic ways to find the topics you should be prioritizing:
Additional Related Resources:
How to Choose Content Marketing Topics That Will Grow People’s Interest in Your SaaS Company (Read)
Building Content Pillars That Reward Your Readers and Showcase Your Authority (READ)
Strategies for Identifying Content Topics & Search Intent (Listen/Watch)
The best SaaS content marketing strategies include distribution plans. This includes identifying the team role or roles responsible for ensuring distribution for each piece of content is carried out and evaluated.
Let’s begin by looking at the most popular options that SaaS companies are taking advantage of, today:
As of writing this, we can say that many SaaS companies use LinkedIn, Twitter, Email, and SEO as their primary means of distribution. Most of these channels will accommodate written, video, and podcast content well - making them a good base to start testing on.
When you’re selecting the right distribution channels for your content marketing strategy, here is what you’ll need to consider:
The bandwidth your team has for distribution → Different channels require more time, effort, and coordination. For your team’s sake, choosing the right channels is better than being on ALL the channels. If you’re just starting to dabble with consistent distribution, choose two channels to focus on well.
Where does your target audience spend their time → Find evidence that your audience uses the distribution channel you’re on. You might assume they’re on LinkedIn only to discover that no individual associated with your ABM list has ever been active on that channel.
Is your goal to expand your reach, speak to your owned audience, or both → Some channels help teams expand their reach, either algorithmically or because they’re someone else’s channels. Other channels (like Email) are great at serving your most enthusiastic audience with your announcements, messaging, and content.
How do people find your product, service, or industry → If people tend to search for your products and feature solutions via search engines (you can verify with keyword research tools and by asking your customers), you’ll benefit from prioritizing SEO. Do they spend a significant amount of time on a social network where it’s normal to come across work-related topics?
Where and what are your team members most excited about distributing → The least conventional, data-driven answer, but never underestimate the power of team buy-in for distributing and hyping your content.
What media types will you be creating → Depending on your bandwidth, resources, known search intent of certain topics, and team preferences, you might decide to produce written, video, or audio content. Each has a unique function and channels they perform best on.
How strong is your brand and influence → If your organic influence is relatively small or limited, you’ll likely be making incremental growth on any channel you choose. If you’re struggling to gain ground, achieve added traction via co-marketing and paid channel opportunities.
Additional Related Resources:
Content Distribution: Unlocking More Value From Your Content (Watch/Listen)
How To Create a Never-Ending Supply of LinkedIn Posts By Repurposing Blogs [+ Examples] (Read)
Breaking Down a Single Blog into 30+ Twitter Posts in < 30 Minutes For Content Distribution (Read)
As you understand your topics, media types, team bandwidth, and your established goals for your content marketing program this quarter, half, or year, you can now begin to build a content marketing plan.
A marketing plan is different from a strategy in that the plan is more focused on exactly how much your team will do and by when.
For example:
Your strategy might include using a podcast to discuss a particular topic or topics.
Your plan would lay out the implementation plan:
Pro Tip: If you are not starting with a new content program, take this time to prioritize content updates as part of your overall strategy & plan.
By reducing the number of new posts created, you’ll ensure your existing content is always updated and your team has the bandwidth to address these often forgotten assets.
By doing this, you’ll see the exponential growth benefits often associated with the top content programs.
You can learn more about content decay and how to find updatable content in these resources:
What Is Content Decay? How To Identify & Fix To Unlock Organic Growth (Read)
How to identify content update opportunities to smash your next quarterly goals plan (Read)
We recommend including integration into your overall content marketing plan.
This is an important part of many successful marketing strategies. It gives your audience multiple unique experiences on any given page about related topics and allows them to consume the information via their preferred learning style.
In our case study with the Visible marketing team, they used SEO-focused content as a base for their content strategy. It delivers consistent organic traffic and predictable trials for their services each month.
And while their written content is very high quality, they also use that SEO-focused content to embed their related webinars and podcasts on those posts.
The results of this integrated content approach:
Read the Case Study: How Ten Speed Grew Visible's Traffic by 313% and 3x'd Revenue with SEO and Content Marketing
It’s important to note that the metrics or goals you need to use will vary based on:
- Your company and product-type
- Your role and who you’re reporting to
- The tech stack you have available to you
- How your leadership interprets different metrics
What we can do is help you understand commonly useful metrics for most SaaS teams and a broad understanding of setting the appropriate goals.
For goal setting, SaaS teams should consider the following:
Goals should support the alignment of channels and departments in such a way that it encourages teams to get creative and work together to hit the established business goals of the company. E.g. What content can be built to support sales to close the deal with prospects?
When it comes to setting realistic goals, SaaS teams will benefit from having the following things:
This information gives you the ability to aim at a goal and assess what type of lift would be needed to hit that goal given previous performance data.
It also helps you identify unrealistic goals that have no alignment with previous performance.
Metrics every content team will find valuable:
The first three bullets will help your content team understand if their content is reaching and resonating with a growing audience.
The last four help determine if they’re playing a role in eventual $$$ coming into the company.
Additional Related Resources:
Blogs and Conversions: Setting Yourself up for Success (Watch/Listen)
How to Set Goals for SEO-Focused Content [+Content Goals Calculator] (Read)
Traffic is growing, but WHO is looking at your content? (Read)
Part 2: Content Creation and Strategy Execution for SaaS Companies
The central part of any good SaaS content strategy is:
A workflow that gives your marketing team the ability to achieve your desired level of content quality AND that has been created in such a way that it provides you the opportunity to scale with your team/goals.
Successful SaaS marketing teams use a base workflow to create content. You should feel free to iterate on this:
Any team, whether you’re a content team of 1 + an outside content agency or a team of 50 can execute on the above workflow. You’ll simply need to assign multiple parts of that workflow to the same role or roles and adjust timelines to be realistic.
The following elements are critical when building your own workflow:
Bandwidth must be optimized → For the workflow to work smoothly, we need to remove potential hurdles or bottlenecks. This will keep any one team member from feeling overwhelmed/stressed and ensures that one team member isn’t consistently holding up someone else from working.
Roles, deadlines, & priorities need to be clearly defined → There should be no question about who is responsible for each step, when that step needs to be completed, and which content takes priority over others.
Consider hiring a content production manager and operations manager → One manages writers, creators, and editors and manages editorial standards) and the other oversees team capacity, sets overarching deadlines, and moves resources based on what’s needed and available.
Build flexibility into the timelines → Things happen. An executive will make an impromptu request, a current event will spur a new content requirement, people are out sick/on vacation, or another piece of content requires an abnormal amount of attention to complete by one teammate. Build flexibility within your timelines so the team isn’t immediately behind if one unexpected thing happens.
Understand abilities & the roles impacted for different content objectives → Different types of content, e.g., blogs, landing pages, videos, and infographics, require different timespans and needed roles to complete. The same goes for types of production, aka creating new content vs. updating old content.
Additional Related Resources:
Leveling up Your SaaS Content From Good to Great (Watch/Listen)
Creating a Content Workflow That Promotes Quality and Scalability for Your SEO Growth (Read)
What is Great Content? [+ How Marketers Create It, Consistently] (Read)
Every new piece of content should be built with a distribution plan in mind. This is the crucial step with which your ideas and unique perspectives make it in front of your target audiences.
And while we already listed the different distribution channels that are available to SaaS teams, it’s important to note that there is skilled work to be done in order to make distribution most effective.
Not every channel will accommodate a direct 1:1 translation of your core content asset in a way that allows you to simply copy and paste the exact material, upload the same video, or send out the link on another platform. You’ll likely need to modify or repurpose that content in a way that makes it most effective.
Instead, you’ll need to do one of the following:
Examples:
Your team might build a blog post with a keyword target for distribution by a search engine. However, if you were hoping to distribute that information on Twitter, you’d likely need to break that blog post down into its most distilled sections of value.
If you’ve created a podcast meant to be watched on YouTube, you’d likely need to break it into bite-sized clips to distribute it effectively on a channel like LinkedIn.
Here are some effective ways we see SaaS content marketing teams distribute & repurpose their messaging:
Pro Tip:
Some content repurposing efforts are substantial in their demands on a content team such as creating a webinar based on a series of blog posts.
In this regard, the actual repurposing workflow will look more like that of creating a new piece of content than simply having the social media team modify copywriting structure for a specific social network.
Additional Related Resources:
Content Repurposing to Distribute Your Best Content Forever (Watch/Listen)
Who Is Responsible for Content Distribution? (Watch/Listen)
Yes, You Should Be Repurposing Content [+ 7 Examples To Get Started & Expand Your Reach] (Read)
Your ability to manage up to the C-Suite plays a significant role in the ultimate success of your content marketing strategy.
After all, it’s these folks that’ll demand business-related success, approve the plan and budget needs, and assess the progress of your efforts to deliver on the intended goals.
To ensure alignment with leadership, marketing leaders should focus on these 4 core areas:
1. Communicating the overall strategy - Communicating the overall strategy is a skill that requires you to address what content’s role is going to be in driving business results, why it is worth pursuing right now, and how you plan to measure impact and efficacy.
You have to take the lead, but the goal is to make this a collaborative process that includes leadership input, not something created in a silo.
2. Setting and managing expectations - For smaller SaaS companies, this is an important time to take advantage of the fact that you likely have a close relationship with your executives.
Work hand-in-hand to connect the executive’s larger visions for the company with your expertise surrounding the marketing field. And it’s okay to talk through parts of the strategy as you’re creating it, like content opportunities that might not result in revenue within the first 12 months, but you strongly believe will create significant compounding returns within 18-24 months.
Additionally, leverage your learnings from the goal-setting section above to manage the expectations around metrics and the value your content team brings to the company. The more you can communicate along the way to share both the ups and downs, the better you can manage expectations and work through issues together.
3. Securing additional budget and/or resources - Don’t be afraid to talk about the numbers when it comes time to ask about needing more budget or resources.
Remember, it’s your job to communicate what the dollars spent are going to return in gains to the company. Even if the dollars spent can’t be attributed to the exact dollars returned, perhaps it’s about reducing workloads and maintaining employee satisfaction, or it’s about supporting the performance of a cross-functional team or a test the executive themselves proposed.
Regardless, securing additional resources should tie back to the larger mission of the executive team and the company.
4. Communicating progress - Choose to report on things that’ll interest the C-suite from their perspective.
That “time on page” metric for your one blog post might be interesting to your editors, writers, and content strategist, but it does very little in the way of explaining value or ROI to the executive team.
In simplifying your reporting with the C-suite, discussing impression growth and reach, conversion growth, pipeline and revenue growth, relevant qualitative data, etc. will communicate the value and trajectory of impact resulting from content initiatives.
Recommended Reading: 7 Key Elements of Scaling a SaaS Content Marketing Program
This guide should help you establish a comprehensive content strategy and plan for the coming quarters.
By starting with an ICP-centric approach toward research, you’ll ensure that you’re picking the right topics and combination of marketing channels to influence qualified pipeline and grow brand affinity.
From there it’s about setting the right goals, executing on the plan with workflows that support the bandwidth of your team, and keeping your leadership well-informed on your progress.
…and you’ll find that when you start building your strategy around a solid foundation, you’re less inclined to worry about the newest tactics and flashiest marketing terms.
Learn how we bring this guide to life for SaaS companies like Gorgias, Metadata, Teamwork, Workvivo, and more with proven SEO and content optimization services. Book a call, today.
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Helping SaaS companies with content optimization services since 2020.
