Content Marketing Is Hard for SaaS Companies. Here’s How to Do It Right.

B2B SaaS content marketing can be notoriously complex. Your SaaS company’s solutions are built to solve problems for a highly select subset of a professional audience. If you can’t find and reach this audience with your content, creating it feels like a waste of time.

No matter how niche your SaaS solutions are, however, content marketing can and will work for your brand. In a space where it can be especially tough to differentiate and be found by your audience, a well-crafted content strategy can be your key to breaking through. Let’s talk about how.

Major challenges of SaaS marketing

The SaaS industry is a hot place to be, but strategies are under a magnifying glass. Many of the key challenges that characterize B2B marketing more generally are intensified in the SaaS environment:

• Market education: Solutions are often especially complex and innovative, driven by advancements in digital transformation.
• Long sales cycles: Signing up with a SaaS provider is a major investment (financially and operationally), making it a heavily-scrutinized decision.
• Acquisition versus retention: The subscription-based nature of the business model means needing to dually showcase value to new audiences while reinforcing it for existing customers. 
• Steepening competition: New SaaS companies are popping up just about every day. McKinsey has estimated the global SaaS market could be worth $10 trillion by 2030.

How B2B SaaS companies can elevate their content marketing

There are many aspects that go into an effective SaaS marketing strategy built to address the aforementioned barriers, but content can be the underpinning of your growth engine. Follow these key tips for great SaaS content.

Don’t neglect upper and mid-funnel educational content

If you want your SaaS content marketing to make its greatest impact, high-funnel content is even more important than demand generation content.

As a B2B company, 95% of your customers are out-of-market at any time, which means you’re inherently speaking to a small potential audience with conversion-focused content.

When you focus on top-funnel, educational search terms, you can grow your audience by catching them at the beginning of their customer journey. Use your content to answer questions your target audience has about the pain points your SaaS service can solve to start building trust and memorability with this audience, even when they’re out-of-market.

When this audience is in-market, the good will your content has built will pay off. According to Gartner research, brands that audience members are already familiar with are more than twice as likely to win their business.

Embrace the specific with long-tail keywords

In niche industries, long-tail keywords are central to a strong SEO strategy. These lengthier search terms tend to encapsulate more specific levels of user intent, relating to questions and topics that might lead people to your brand or solution.

When well researched and vetted as part of a sound keyword strategy, long-tails can serve to help qualify your audience based on the questions they’re asking in search. However, they inherently tend to have lower search volume. It’s advisable to use a mix of broader upper-funnel keywords with more specific long-tail keywords, prioritizing both audience reach and relevance. This helps with addressing the nuances of market education and the complexity of SaaS sales cycles.

Use content to support customer retention by building community

As customer retention grows harder in B2B SaaS, keeping your existing subscribers around has become as important as attracting new ones.

The reasons why customers churn out of SaaS subscriptions aren’t always dramatic. A 2023 study by Abode and Incisive showed that of the 34% of customers who churned in 2022, 15% left just to get what they perceived as a better experience. 

Keeping your customers means offering them a best-in-class experience long after their initial purchase. Your content can accomplish this by helping you build an active community of your followers online.

Publishing your content is only the beginning – what happens next is even more important. Monitor how your audience interacts with content to identify new opportunities. The more you can engage your existing community of customers with your content, the more likely they are to stick around.

Leverage third-party reviews

According to a survey of over 100 B2B SaaS marketing executives by Wynter, 81% of today’s SaaS buyers consult third-party reviews when vetting software. Over half (54%) of these buyers start their vendor research by consulting these reviews. 

Proactively respond to any reviews you receive. If you receive a positive review, consider asking the reviewer if you can feature them on your site or content. Build case studies explaining why these reviews are helpful examples of what your solution can do. 

When you publish your case study, tag the featured customer to encourage them to share it, then keep a close eye on engagement. Reach out to potential customers who comment on the case study with helpful follow-up content, and you could start the kind of relationship that leads to another sale – and another review.

At TopRank Marketing, we’ve helped many SaaS companies overcome the biggest challenges in content marketing to drive big success. Learn about our services.

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