Content will always be king, and even more so for businesses selling software solutions over the cloud to differentiate and succeed. 

Whether you are selling your services to other companies or people, SaaS content marketing can build brand awareness, interest, and ultimately trust that brings growth in sales. 

However, despite many SaaS companies having some form of content marketing, not all their blog posts or articles produce the desired results. 

Some may be having trouble getting organic traffic to their posts, while others may have traffic but not an increase in sales. 

Then again, these are all fixable problems. With the right content marketing strategy, SaaS brands have generated an ROI of 448%. 

Here are the 7 proven practices to create a successful SaaS content marketing. 

1. Define your target audience

Every profitable SaaS content marketing starts with defining your target audience. Who is your ideal customer? What are their gender and age? 

Before creating your content, it is vital to develop an ideal customer profile. Knowing who you are speaking to can make a huge difference in building customer-centric content. Pinterest is a great way to target an audience as it makes it easy to target users based on options such as site visitors, uploaded customer list of emails, engagement audience, and act alike audience. Schedule pins in advance can make your reach go higher.

So start characterizing your target audience based on your existing buyers and plan a survey to understand their habits and thoughts better. 

With a well-defined target market, you will know the type of content to post, the social media platforms to share, and how to connect with them through their pain points.  

2. Keyword and content strategy for SEO 

About 83% of successful SaaS company blog traffic comes from organic search, which shows the importance of investing in a proper SEO growth strategy. 

The fundamental of search engine optimization is creating a great user experience. Having a website design that affects SEO positively means engaging potential customers and providing them with valuable and helpful information.

Keyword research allows you to discover the questions customers are asking and create valuable content to reach and answer their intent. 

Targeting the specific keywords related to your product/niche will let you reach targeted users actively searching for your SaaS solution. Targeting the specific keywords (e.g. St. Louis SEO Consultant) related to your product/niche will let you reach targeted users actively searching for services you offer.

Additionally, perform a content analysis to see what results appear for these keywords. Analyze what the top-performing blog posts offer and identify if there are any content gaps to fill, which you can use an SEO article writer to help with. 

Practising SEO copywriting will also let Google better understand what your site and content are about to reach the right audiences. 

3. Conduct a competitive analysis

Competition for your target customer’s attention is fierce. Whether starting a new SaaS blog or revamping your blog, it’s essential to know who your competitors are. 

Start with an analysis of Google search. Research your brand and target keywords to see which competitors are getting traffic. 

Analyze their published content and target keywords they have covered. Look through their products and offerings to better evaluate their sales tactics. 

This research will help you identify their strengths and weaknesses, but more importantly, it will help you develop your unique selling point that will tell your audience why you are the best.  

4. Develop content for each stage of the funnel

From being aware of your brand to becoming a paying customer, your target audiences are at different stages of the customer journey. 

Most SaaS content marketing often focuses on top-of-funnel topics like how-to guides or educational blog posts that answer common questions. 

While posting helpful articles and original research is an excellent tactic for reaching a wide range of potential customers, many blogs fail to uncover pain points or introduce solutions. 

They fail to guide potential leads through the customer journey. This leads your readers to dead ends where they may find solutions through your competitors instead. 

So make sure to create content for the potential customers shopping for solutions.

This means creating bottom-of-funnel content such as product comparison blog posts or case studies showing how your audience can achieve desired results using your SaaS product. 

One surefire way to avoid gaps in your marketing funnel is to consider the next step for your content, such as directing your readers to related content or including a call-to-action for users to move on to the next funnel stage. 

Plus, you can get your users to enter your email nurturing campaign by asking them to download free trials and demos.

Examples? Look what Mustard IT is providing on their blog – content for all stages of the funnel.

5. Create a wide range of content types

Blogs aren’t the only tool for content marketing. Videos, webinars, infographics, podcasts, and so on are various content formats that will allow you to reach a wider audience. 

Take videos, for example. When embedded in your blog post, it can increase time-on-page and boost audience engagement. 

Otherwise, you can start a YouTube channel or create short clips to post on social media, which will let you reach audiences who may prefer video over written content. This can help you sell courses, promote products or grow your audience. 

In other words, adopting different types of content for your SaaS content marketing can make you scale faster as you just repurpose your content. 

But more importantly, it benefits your audience. 

When it comes to buying SaaS, your customers not only consider the product’s efficacy but also the quality of customer support and future updates. 

That’s why a key component you should have in your content marketing is to educate customers on how to use your product to get real value. 

Providing a video tutorial on how to use your software can be more helpful than a step-by-step guide in writing or an e-manual. 

Incorporating user-generated content and customer reviews as part of content marketing can also directly influence your sales and conversion rates.

6. Guest post to build your authority

Part of successful content marketing and SEO for SaaS is building backlinks from high-authority sites. 

A way to achieve this is through guest post outreach. It is one of the ways to boost your SEO and improve search ranking results. 

This approach can also help humanize your SaaS startup to potential audiences, setting you up as an industry leader.

When done right, thought leadership content pieces will also reach target audiences and get them to visit your website. 

All you need to do is send a professional email to people in charge of website content with a clear, enticing proposal. 

7. Measure content marketing ROI

Measuring the impact of your SaaS content marketing can be tricky since customers often make several touchpoints on your website before making a purchase. 

However, using applications like Google Analytics with its embedded analytics capabilities and knowing what key metrics to monitor can quickly help you track and quantify the effectiveness of your SaaS content marketing.

Specifically, here are the content metrics you should track:

  • SEO metrics – Search engine rankings on Google Search Console, tracking domain and page authority using tools like Ahrefs and Moz. 
  • Engagement metrics – Click-through rates, bounce rate, and average time on page can tell you how good your content is in answering your reader’s search intent.  
  • Brand awareness metrics – Social shares such as retweets, impressions on social networks, and backlinks from other websites. 
  • Conversion metrics – Lead/ sales conversion and click-through rates can let you track if your site visitors are moving forward in their buyer journey. 

Knowing the data, you will be able to identify the areas for improvement and determine activities to boost the effectiveness of your content. Particularly useful for your team may be weekly schedule templates to keep an eye on it. You can find some free weekly planner templates here: The Best Weekly Schedule Templates That Will Help You Organize Time.

Conclusion

While content marketing is crucial for SaaS businesses today, it takes proper strategy and time to see exponential success. 

So, why wait? Start adopting these content marketing best practices to build a successful SaaS sales machine today!