SaaS Content Marketing: What, Why, And How

When it comes to growing your SaaS business organically, content marketing is the thing you should consider. It establishes your brand as a unique and a lot of time, the best in the market.

People nowadays don’t really trust faceless companies, so that’s why it’s your opportunity to build trust for your customers by creating actually valuable content.

This post will help you to create a solid content strategy and write actually valuable content that can help you attract customers that stay!

Why Content Marketing?

The tech world changes fast, and people who use your SaaS always want to learn new things. Some people even rely on info from these tech companies to stay up-to-date!

If you make helpful content that teaches people new skills, it's a great way to:

1. Build a community of fans who trust you.

2. Make your company a respected leader in the tech world.

3. Keep making money in the long run.

Let’s take a look at a real-world example, lemlist, I absolutely love lemlist, no I don’t really love the tool, even though I actually like the tool as well. The thing that I really like about lemlist is the company itself.

But why?

Because they always try their hardest to educate people every single piece of knowledge they have.

Recently, I took the Personal Branding School course by lemlist and it was my one and only favorite course on the topic.

The amount of resources they provided such as a complete personal brand workspace in Notion, and some other really awesome resources.

And without promoting their products!

Which again makes me love lemlist as a company, that’s the biggest thing for them, because now they just not only have a customer, but a fan!

What Is Different about SaaS Content Marketing?

SaaS content marketing can often be complex because

1. People need to trust your software before they pay for it, so a good reputation is key.

2. Businesses often have multiple people who decide on buying software, and it takes longer to make a sale.

3. New and innovative software can be hard to understand at first.

For all these reasons and more, you need to think of your SaaS content strategy as a marathon, not a sprint.

How SaaS Content Marketing Performs?

Here are some findings and key takeaways from Semrush's State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report:

• Most SaaS companies are using content marketing (70%) and finding success with it (97%). This means creating informative content is a popular strategy for SaaS companies, and it seems to be working for them!

• Many SaaS companies invest in content marketing (65% spend over $3,000 per month). They're putting their money where their mouth is!

• Even more investment is expected in the future (75% plan to increase budgets). They see the value of content marketing and plan to do even more of it.

How To Craft A Powerful Content Marketing Strategy?

To create valuable and effective content, you first have to craft a content strategy.

Now, let’s explore the steps you need to take to craft a successful, high-performing SaaS content strategy.

#1 Foundation For Your Content Strategy

Some companies underestimate the importance of other marketing elements and get frustrated when content doesn’t bring the desired results. In reality, content works well when there’s a solid marketing strategy behind it.

Before rushing into content creation, you need to make sure that you have all your processes, tools, and assets in place.

So, what are the main items you should focus on?

Make sure you have the following elements documented somewhere:

• Your overall targeting and segmentation strategy

• Your USP (unique selling proposition)—the core value offered by your company

• Your overall messaging and positioning strategy

• Your brand story—the narrative structure highlighting your background and your mission

Writing blog posts before you have all website pages, forms, and workflows set up will also lead to a waste of resources. Make sure you have the following assets ready:

• An optimized website. Take care of such things as the website structure, keyword optimization, UX, page speed, and interlinking.

• A content marketing team. In-house or freelance, you need to have trained professionals who will take over the copywriting, design, and other areas of content production.

• Content marketing tools. Start with setting up events in Google Analytics and using SEO tools for keyword and topic research.

#2 Audience Research

Audience research is an essential part of building any content marketing strategy. It helps you understand your reader’s goals, challenges, questions, and doubts.

However, customer analysis in the SaaS sector requires even more effort and resources, especially when it comes to B2B SaaS.

For example, let’s imagine you work for an AdTech company that has several personas engaging with its content: a decision-maker (CMO), a user (performance marketing specialist), and an influencer (CFO).

In that case, you could come up with the following workflow:

1. Create a free educational online course on performance marketing to attract users, build trust with them and showcase the solution

2. Expect some of the performance marketing specialists to share their credentials after completing the course and mention the tool to the CMO

3. Create a blog post about calculating marketing ROI and add a CTA (call-to-action) leading to a gated template to attract the CMO

4. Produce sales enablement materials (e.g., a case study) and pricing pages to help the CMO convince the CFO that the purchase will create a positive financial impact

#3 Don’t Promote Your Product

Yeah, you heard it right, the main purpose of content marketing is not to sell, but to build trust and a relationship.

You don’t wanna create content that only talks about your product and only promotes it. You wanna create content that revolves around the consumer, not your product.

If we look back at the lemlist example, this is a thing I noticed, the company behind lemlist, lempire also has a product called Taplio which is a LinkedIn AI tool.

Their course was about personal branding and LinkedIn, but the amount of time they actually promoted Taplio was none. They just mentioned Taplio at the very start and never used it throughout the course.

#4 Run Complete Funnel Campaigns

Remember what we discussed earlier? SaaS products, especially for businesses (B2B), are considered very carefully before a purchase is made.

This means there are usually several people involved in the decision-making process. It's not like buying a candy bar where you just grab it off the shelf – multiple people in a company need to be convinced that your software is the right choice for them.

So, your funnel should be complete and have different steps, the most important and basic steps are:

• Awareness: Your customers are aware of the problems they have, but not the solutions available, your task is to make them aware of the solutions.

• Interest: Now the customers are aware of the solutions available in the market, now they are trying to investigate different brands and options, now is the time for you to spark interest in your solution.

• Consideration: Now the customers will start to consider your brand, so the best type of content to create at this stage of the funnel will be lead magnets, and gated content. But the thing to make sure is that the gated content is actually valuable, they don’t intend to enter their personal information for low-quality content.

• Conversion: Here your customers are looking for details related to your deals, pricing, specific use cases—and anything else that will help them make their final decision. While you can certainly talk about your product, offers and referral programs, you should still give a lot more value to your audience than you are expecting to receive from them.

So that’s all for this issue, I would just say:

If you are considering doing content marketing, then knowing all these tips will greatly help you craft an awesome content marketing strategy.

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