Content marketing is a powerful marketing strategy used by businesses to attract, engage, and retain audiences by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media.
94% of businesses today use content as part of their marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, attract relevant traffic, boost conversions and establish themselves as a thought leader in the industry.
SaaS content marketing is no different. But what is SaaS anyway?
SaaS(Software as a Service) is a business model in which you deliver applications over the internet in the form of service. Customers use a cloud-based app to avail these services instead of installing or maintaining the software.
Apart from the fact that Saas business doesn’t have a physical product, they don’t differ from other businesses in any way.
So just like any other companies, SaaS companies, too, are using content as a primary means to connect with customers, delight them and finally convert them into users.
But unlike any other business, content marketing for SaaS companies is much more crucial.
In the following section, we’ll understand why content marketing is important for SaaS businesses and how to leverage it for the best results.
So let’s get started.
SaaS Content Marketing – Why does it Matter?
With a staggering growth rate of 18% per year, the SaaS market is one of the fastest-growing segments in the IT industry.
But here’s the thing.
The SaaS industry is constantly changing. It has no physical presence, and it’s something that makes no sense to an average person.
According to Mike Sonders, there’s only a relatively small number of visitors who learn about SaaS business and then type the business URL for more information.
So rather than direct traffic, it’s the organic traffic that’s actually the biggest source of traffic driving new leads to these businesses.
To add to that, Animalz published a report showing that 83% of SaaS company blog traffic comes from SEO.
The claim was later echoed by SEMrush when they published their content report Get Your Content a Standing Ovation saying that they use SEO as their most efficient content marketing tactics.
Now you must be thinking, why are we discussing SEO here? That’s because both SEO and content marketing are interlinked.
Both need one another to deliver effective results. Google ranks your website in search results based on the content you publish.
And all content needs to be optimized for search engines to increase its chance of being found by target audiences.
This means that by publishing high-quality and well-optimized content on your SaaS website, you can easily attract relevant leads to your business and boost your conversions.
So it’s no coincidence that 98% of top-performing SaaS companies have a blog.
But having a blog on your SaaS website isn’t enough. You also need a proper content marketing strategy to drive the results you want.
So let’s look at some of the most effective ways to leverage SaaS content marketing for better results.
How to Leverage SaaS Content Marketing?
It’s a no-brainer that the most effective way to leverage SaaS content marketing is to publish high-quality content on your blog.
But what type of high-quality content can help you achieve your goals? Here are a few effective content types you can create for your SaaS business.
1. Create Educational Content
The SaaS business model has been around for almost two decades.
But compared to the retail and heavy manufacturing businesses, it’s still in its infancy.
So it needs to be nurtured, and users need to be familiarized with it. And one way of doing that is to create high-quality educational content that helps you create awareness about your business.
Educational content is evergreen and can help you attract interested prospects to your website. Such content can help you drive 14% more traffic as compared to PR/news-focused blogs.
Your educational content can be in different forms.
You can create detailed guides, walkthroughs, webinars, product videos, or anything that helps you simplify information for your users.
Popular SaaS brand HubSpot has been doing this for years to drive more traffic, increase its sales and boost its conversions.
2. Leverage Email Marketing
Email marketing is by far one of the most effective ways to distribute content to your current customers.
It’s a direct form of marketing in which you can use content to educate your subscribers about your SaaS business and convince them to take action.
This can be to make a purchase, book a demo, sign up for a trial, or register for an event.
The reason why email marketing works so well is that anyone who submits their email address is genuinely interested in your business.
So by using relevant and high-quality content in your email marketing strategy, you can easily convert your subscribers into customers and turn one-time buyers into repeat customers.
But make sure to choose the right email marketing service before you get started.
The best email marketing services make it easy to create professional-looking emails, build up-to-date email lists and create a seamless email marketing workflow making your efforts even more successful.
3. Publish Use-Case Guides
Another brilliant SaaS content marketing strategy is to publish use-case guides for your users.
Although use-case guides are more effective than sales collaterals and brochures, it has been vastly under-leveraged by marketers.
But what exactly is a use-case guide?
Use-case guides are case studies that analyze how a specific user used your product to achieve a certain result.
Such guides work because they are real-life stories of people who have actually achieved results using your product.
The best thing is that these examples are backed by data and your readers can easily connect with these stories.
These studies are both problem-centric and solution-centric. So you can use them to show your users how a problem can be solved and add social proof to validate your point.
Nothing is trusted more than factual claims and statistics.
Use-case studies are all about it. So you can easily use them to position your brand as an authoritative one.
4. Create Social Proof Through Reviews and Testimonials
Unless you have recurring customers, it’s more likely that the prospective lead has no experience with your business.
So they look for social proof to understand what existing users have to say about your business. The best way to do that is to look for customer reviews and testimonials on your website.
Reviews and testimonials play a huge part in influencing the shopper’s buying decision.
And not just that.
They also give your users a reason to trust your brand. 83% of people trust reviews over advertising and promotional content.
It doesn’t always have to be positive reviews.
You’ll be surprised to know that 82% of users specifically seek out negative customer reviews. This is probably to understand the downside of the product or service.
So don’t think about how many positive reviews you have.
What’s more important is to have more reviews and testimonials on your website.
If you’re not sure how to generate reviews from your users, you can try offering incentives in exchange for a review.
For example, fashion brand Shein has a wonderful policy to encourage people to submit a review.
They offer 50 points to anyone whose review is recognized as a great review.
Popular Saas Content Marketing Examples
Let’s now look at some of the popular SaaS businesses that are leveraging content to achieve their goals.
1. Kinsta
Kinsta is a popular SaaS brand that sells WordPress hosting and is extremely popular. According to SimilarWeb, much of their traffic comes from their in-depth blog posts.
They publish detailed content related to web hosting, WordPress, and web design and rank extremely well for many of them.
The secret behind Kinsta’s success is its well-optimized and in-depth blog posts.
Their success story is quite an inspiration for marketers willing to achieve similar results with their content strategy.
2. Hubspot
Hubspot is another brilliant example that’s leveraging content in its marketing strategy.
As of now, it caters to marketers, salespeople, and the customer service team with its blog content and successfully generates over 40 million visitors to its site per month.
In doing so, it creates well-researched and in-depth guides, free courses, blogs, eBooks, case studies, etc., to educate, delight, engage and convert its users.
Over to You
So that’s about SaaS content marketing.
Using content marketing for your SaaS business isn’t as tough as you think if you start with the right approach.
And now that you’ve learned about it you can start creating amazing content for your SaaS business and get ready to bombard your blog with some massive organic traffic.