How to Win at SaaS Content Marketing: 9 Steps [+ VIDEO]

SaaS content marketing is all about carving an authoritative niche for your product to draw in and nurture potential buyers. 

In their content, SaaS companies have to cover dozens of touchpoints and move prospects through their journey, providing solutions and educational resources every step of the way.

What is SaaS content marketing?

At its core, SaaS content marketing is about creating thoughtful and targeted content for potential customers. Your goal is to educate them about the features of your product, address their common pain points, and help them find the information they’re looking for.

For SaaS businesses, “content marketing” encompasses several different channels and content types:

• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Landing pages
• Videos
• Webinars
• Case studies
• White papers

SaaS content marketing vs. B2C marketing

In most B2C applications, content marketing is much more focused on direct response and conversions. SaaS content marketers are more focused on developing an ongoing relationship with prospects and nurturing them through the customer journey.

This is an important distinction because the average SaaS sales cycle lasts 84 days, and buyers are more than halfway through their buying research before they reach out to sales. Each buying group has between 6 and 10 decision-makers, on average.

So, for B2B SaaS content marketing to be effective, it has to:

• Educate and resonate with potential buyers
• Cover each stage of the buyer journey
• Address different decision-makers’ concerns

This requires a mix of different content types and channels, delivered strategically over an extended period of time.

How content marketing benefits SaaS companies

Even in the case of similar or competing products, no two are the same. Organizations use SaaS content marketing to develop their voice, maintain it, and use it to ensure the right leads find and engage with their brand.

Briefly, let’s dive into the importance of growing your SaaS brand through valuable content:

1. Ranks businesses for the right keywords and topics.

SaaS keyword research goes a whole lot deeper than an Ahrefs data set. It involves understanding the language and the context of your target audience.

By…

• Talking to sales and marketing teams
• Collecting and analyzing customer data
• Creating buyer personas
• Learning how real businesses use your product
• Performing a competitor analysis with keyword research tools

…you can successfully create keyword and topic clusters that address the specific needs of their customer base.

With time and consistency (and SEO experts in your corner), you’ll show up on search engines when your prospects look online for that information. From that point on, they’re in your funnel.

2. Puts you right in front of your ideal customers.

Even compared to competing products and services, each SaaS product is nuanced in one of the following ways:

• The types of companies they serve
• The members of the company they sell to
• The problems they solve
• The industries and markets they operate in
• The features and advantages their product does best

A SaaS content marketing strategy ensures the organization isn’t just copying and outranking its competitors’ content—it is consistently speaking to the unique set of readers and site visitors who relate to or benefit from its product.

3. Doubles as a sales enablement tool.

By creating content that addresses common problems and demonstrates how your SaaS product solves them, buyers can envision themselves using it.

Publishing content gives target customers a realistic picture of what it’s like to use the software and provides an easy way to explore different features.

4. Ensures consistent engagement across all stakeholders and touchpoints.

Although 86% of B2B decision-makers start their journey with organic search, organic traffic is only a fraction of the total engagements on a SaaS website.

A well-rounded content marketing strategy includes blog posts, landing pages, white papers, and case studies that appeal to different customer segments and buyer personas throughout the entire process.

5. Builds credibility with industry leaders and professionals.

The best SaaS content marketers (think HubSpot, Salesforce) have industry-wide notoriety because they publish their own research.

When a company curates its unique brand positioning and justifies it with case studies, reports, and original research, it stands out as an industry leader.

By giving back to their customers through content and education, they develop a credibility that is impossible to duplicate.

6. Increases organic website traffic and leads.

Since buying behavior starts with a Google search, so, then, does lead generation.

By creating quality content with search engine optimization in mind, SaaS companies increase their organic website traffic and leads.

How to create a SaaS content marketing strategy

To create content for your SaaS business, you need a multi-channel approach that maximizes the value of your content. You have to address user intent at every marketing funnel stage, starting with the bottom.

Let’s dive in.

1. Define your target audience.

Before anything, you need to define who you want to attract with your content. That’s what guides content creation.

Consider the following details about your audience:

• Size of their company
• Members of the buying group, and how many
• Roles and departments they represent
• Industry
• General location
• Tech stack

Now, unless your product is very niche or relatively new, you’ll have subscribers across dozens of industries, roles, and company types. Most SaaS companies use tiered pricing and per-user billing to accomodate this.

Let’s say you sell time tracking software. Your target audience might range from freelancers to agencies and remote teams. You might also offer a more extensive version of your software for enterprise customers as well.

If that’s the case have to address each of these broader segments in your content marketing efforts as well.

2. Figure out what they need at different stages of the sales funnel.

Next, you want to understand your audience’s questions and pain points for the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages of the sales funnel.

Broadly speaking, there are six types of pain points you’ll run into selling to B2B customers:

• Positioning pain, generally related to product-market fit and/or brand positioning
• Financial pain, like problems with revenue, cash flow, and profitability
• People pain, pertaining to hiring, turnover, talent management, or company culture
• Process pain, which is usually casued by an inefficient structure or procedure
• Productivity pain, including wasted time and effort in everyday tasks
• Small business pain, for SaaS comapnies selling to SMBs that struggle to compete with larger companies and economies of scale, qualify for traditional loans, delegate work, etc.

Beyond this, you have to consider how these pain points affect different members of the buying group. For example, a techincal buyer will want to know about integration capabilities, while a financial buyer will want to know about cost savings.

The technical buyer isn’t necessarily aware of how much money their current solution is costing them, and the financial buyer probably isn’t concerned about the software’s specific features.

Different facets of your content strategy have to address these pain points from all angles.

3. Map out and prioritize your business goals.

You can’t do everything at once, and content marketing is a long-term investment. To get faster results, certain things should take priority over others.

Consider the following goals and how they relate to your content strategy:

• Boosting overall organic traffic. You might want to prioritize building a blog, guest posting on high-authority sites, or improving your search engine optimization.
• Generating more organic leads. If you’re already getting lots of organic traffic but aren’t seeing as many conversions as you’d like, work on optimizing landing pages and adding CTAs throughout your site.
• Developing thought leadership and authority in your industry. To boost credibility with industry leaders, prioritize publishing original research and in-depth case studies that showcase your expertise.
• Fostering customer retention and upsells. Content marketing brings in new customers, but it also helps you with retention and expansion. Articles positioning your product as a solution to specific problems, and email campaigns allowing users to test new features/plans will ensure they keep getting value from your product.
• Expanding into new markets or verticals. If you’re looking to break into a new market, target a different audience, or bring a new product to market, you’ll need to create new landing pages for them and incorporate topics into your content strategy that relate back to that.

4. Conduct a keyword analysis.

Your next step is to determine which keywords and phrases your potential customers are searching for when they look for answers related to your product or industry.

You’ve already mapped out their pain points and questions, so now you have to match those to customer sentiment. Surveys, conversations with select customers, and in-app behavior tracking are all ways to do this.

Beyond the content your audience is specifically looking for, use a keyword research tool (we use Ahrefs) to:

• Find long-tail keywords related to your brand, product, or industry
• Scope out what topics your competitors are ranking for (see: how to conduct an SEO competitor analysis)
• See what search terms and questions people frequently use to find content related to your product.

You can determine the ROI of a potential keyword or phrase by looking at:

• How easy it is to rank for (don’t bother with anything with a Keyword Difficulty significantly higher than your Domain Rating)
• Search volume (the ideal combo is low-difficulty and high-volume)
• Traffic potential (how much organic traffic the top-ranking page receives from all its keywords)
• Keyword clicks and SERP features (come phrases generate more clicks, and you’ll want to avoid coming up against ads or featured snippets that steal clicks).
• CPC (some SaaS keywords — e.g., “CRM” — have high CPCs because they’re competitive for paid ads, so the ability to get free traffic there could be huge for your business)
• Search volume over time and seasonality (there’s no point in ranking for a declining keyword)

You can find all this information about a keyword by typing it into the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. It’ll be displayed prominently on the top of the dashboard.

5. Create valuable content.

Valuable = relevant, informative, and easy to read.

Here are a few different content types, and how you can use them in your content marketing efforts:

• Top-of-funnel (ToFu) content is designed to generate interest in the product. This may include general education posts about topics related to the industry, how-to guides for using a particular feature, or customer success stories.
• Your middle-of-funnel (MoFu) content will focus on bringing awareness to potential solutions and highlighting the features, benefits, and advantages of your product offering.
• Use bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) content to help marketing qualified leads (MQLs) discover and compare products, research the features and benefits of different solutions, and make informed purchase decisions.
• Evergreen content captures search intent with timeless topics that are relevant to your audience. It’s useful at every stage of the marketing funnel, and you shoudl regularly update it to keep it accurate and relevant.

But you won’t get very far talking about just anything. It’s best to use a hub-and-spoke strategy — creating one big piece of “pillar” content, then breaking it down into smaller pieces that elaborate on each subtopic in more detail.

For example, I might create an ultimate guide to SaaS content marketing, then dive deeper into topics like keyword research, SEO, and social media marketing, each throguh a separate blog post.

This makes your content easier to navigate, and it improves how well it ranks in search results. Plus, it makes it easy to interlink all the different pieces of content on your website.

Survey your customers, interview them, and track their behaviors in your app. Align that with your own goals, and plan out your content strategy a quarter in advance.

6. Distribute that content.

Organic reach is useful for building a presence or establishing thought leadership, but you should supplement that with distribution channels like:

• Paid ads. These can be targeted to reach specific audiences and are great for promoting new content, product launches, and webinars.
• Email marketing. Use email lists to promote content, send product updates and announcements, or nurture leads.
• Social media. You can use both organic and paid posts on social media to share your Saas content, engage with potential customers, and showcase your brand’s personality.
• Guest blogging. Writing for industry publications or other blogs is an opportunity to reach a new audience, establish credibility in your niche, and build backlinks to your most valuable content.
• Industry partnerships. Collaborating with influencers, system integrators, and businesses in your niche gives you access to their audience and helps build your brand’s authority.

You don’t necessarily need to distribute all of your content. That would be too overwhelming.

Instead, look for opportunities to repackage and promote the content that will move the needle the most — for example, targeting competitors’ branded keywords with ads promoting a comparison page that proves you’re the better option.

Like this:

7. Track content KPIs.

You can track most of them in Google Analytics. Start with:

• Organic traffic (to measure how your SEO efforts are paying off)
• Bounce rate and pages per session (to see if people find your site useful once they click through from search results)
• Shares, comments, and inbound links (to see if people find your content useful enough to recommend or link to)
• Conversions and assisted conversions (to measure how well your content helps move people through the funnel)

In addition, use the Ahrefs’ Content Explorer tool to:

• See how many people are linking to your content
• How much traffic the page receives
• Which keywords it ranks for
• Its social media shares and estimated organic traffic value.

You can also use this to evaluate competitors’ pages, see how much traffic their content receives, and find out what’s working for them (highly shared and linked content).

From there, determine how to improve upon that content.

8. Lean into high-performing topics.

There are two activities at this stage: repurposing and refreshing your existing SaaS content.

• Repurpose the things that are doing well.
• Refresh what is almost doing well.

For example, if I have a page comparing a popular competitor that’s ranking high on SERPs and getting me tons of booked meetings, I might turn it into an infographic or video and publish it on YouTube and social media.

And, if I have a blog post that’s ranking #8 on search results for a target keyword, I’d evaluate higher-ranking content. Then, I’d revise mine to improve its content and structure and make it more up-to-date.

If my customer success team tells me a lot of customers have problems with a particular issue, I’ll use the email newsletter to push an article covering the solution.

9. Expand on what works.

At this point, you should also know what’s working well for you. Keep creating content that follows that formula, and double down on the channels that net you the highest engagement from qualified buyers.

Create more types of content that are working well for you, and use those early experiments to branch out into new ones.

For example, you might launch a podcast, host a webinar, or partner with an industry to create a co-branded ebook or white paper.

These are more resource-intensive, fewer, and further between, so you’ll want to base them on which topics have historically resonated with your audience.

Content ideas for your SaaS company

When you begin creating content, it’s a bit overwhelming. To differentiate your content and have it turn website visitors into leads, you need a mix of high-quality articles, content for social media platforms, and interactive tools your customers can use to learn more about your product and its benefits.

Here’s a look at a few examples of B2B content that perform particularly well for SaaS companies:

Competitor comparison pages

Competitor comparison pages should be among the first pieces of content on your website. They help potential customers directly compare your product with competitors, addressing doubts and empowering informed decisions.

Plus, they rank for highly valuable “vs.” and “comparison” keywords.

Here’s a look at how ClickUp starts its comparison with Monday.com:

It’s a simple, user-friendly way to help potential customers visualize where the holes are in Monday’s project management tool and how ClickUp fills those holes.

You could also take a more text-heavy approach and highlight specific features your product has over that competitor.

Asana does this over several screen-sized sections in their comparison with Monday:

86% percent of B2B software buyers use peer review sites to guide their purchase decisions. When you publish competitor pages, you appear next to them on search results, giving you the chance to represent your product exactly how you intend to.

SEO-optimized articles

This is something you should use to cover every stage of the funnel.

• Top-of-funnel content targets informational keywords like “how to {topic}” or “what is {topic}.”
• Middle-of-funnel content targets comparison keywords like “[your product] vs. [competitor]” and keywords that demonstrate the value of your product.
• Bottom-of-funnel content focuses on branded keywords, the name of your company and product(s), and specific feature and case study keywords.

Middle- and bottom-of-funnel content will move the needle. Top-of-funnel content is important for demand generation, brand awareness, and bringing in large amounts of organic traffic.

Free web-based tools

There are tons of different ways to do this, but it has to be related to your company and product.

For example:

• An SEO tool offering a free SEO audit
• A content optimization tool that provides a free content analysis
• A mini editor showcasing a design tool’s drag-and-drop functionality
• An ROI calculator that helps prospects understand $$$ in vs. $$$ back
• An interactive quiz that helps customers choose the best plan/product for their needs

If you’re thinking about investing in HubSpot for marketing automation, you can use its simple ROI calculator to understand how much you could make in excess of your monthly Marketing Hub cost.

Another phenomenal example from HubSpot is its website grader tool. It tells you how your site looks and performs overall, with actionable steps to improve it.

The great thing about tools like this is you can use them as lead magnets. Allow them to use the tool on your website, but require them to give you their email before they can see the results.

User-generated content

You’re probably already using customer testimonials and reviews on your main web pages. But have you thought about using their real-life experiences with your product as a part of your blog?

Here’s an example of how Slack does this in a recent article on productivity tips for small businesses:

Since they’re using quotes and experiences from their actual customers to get their point across, they’re differentiating themselves.

There are 1,000s of boring “workplace productivity” articles out there already. Slack’s has useful insights other readers actually get something from.

If your product is visual-heavy (e.g., a design tool or project management software), you can also repost your users’ content on TikTok and Shorts.

ClickUp does this:

Founder LinkedIn posts

The best place to repurpose top-performing topics that need more exposure is LinkedIn — the #1 social media platform for B2B audiences.

Company posts don’t usually perform very well, but your founders’ LinkedIn profiles should 100% be a part of your content marketing strategy. If they have strong personal brands, your product will sell itself to their audience.

Will Allred, co-founder of the AI email marketing tool Lavender, shares insightful content about how to write better emails and what he learns from his extensive data and personal experience in the field.

Since the software plays a role in both finding this data and automating the email process, his LinkedIn posts sometimes wind up mentioning (or even demoing) the product and its capabilities.

Your company’s own data and market research

All the major SaaS companies out there — HubSpot, Salesforce, etc. — produce their own research and data-backed reports to attract readers and build brand awareness.

This type of content works particularly well for B2B companies because it establishes your company a reliable source of information and expertise in your industry. Plus, it’s one of the best ways to earn backlinks from high-authority pages (who will reference your research) and generate leads (from those who enter their email before downloading).

For example, HubSpot’s annual “State of Marketing” report is widely cited by countless media outlets in the marketing world.

The secret ingredient here is that you’re not just producing a report full of statistics and charts. You’re presenting the information in a way that’s easy to understand and actionable for your target audience.

What should they do? What should they avoid? What do these numbers and facts mean for their business?

In other words, you’re telling a story with your data and establishing yourself as a thought leader in the process.

Another way to do this is to compile statistics or trends and add your own analysis, like we did in our B2B SEO statistics and B2B content marketing trends articles.

Grow your SaaS business with content marketing.

Like we said, SaaS content marketing is highly nuanced — getting it down will take some head-scratching and trial-and-error.

And without a content team to create SaaS content strategically, you’ll have trouble finding where to start and how to spread your limited resources.

That’s why we’re here. We can help you nail your SaaS content marketing strategy.To learn more about how content marketing fits into your overall SEO strategy, check out our SaaS SEO guide. And if you want help from the experts, reach out to us.