Content marketing works great for most businesses, but it works best for SaaS companies. The only trick is in doing it right and executing your strategy in a way that lets you see the benefits immediately.

What is Content Marketing?

Before you can create content, you need to define what you’re doing. After all, content marketing doesn’t simply mean creating content; it can mean marketing an entire business and brand. For more information, read 10 principles of successful content marketing. SaaS companies are especially vulnerable to becoming outdated, but their companies need content marketing to keep their customer bases happy. Without a consistent stream of content, you risk losing your customers or getting overlooked by potential customers, and this is a huge threat to startup SaaS companies. To avoid this trap, take advantage of the following content marketing strategies: Create Digital Content An important thing to remember is that content marketing doesn’t have to be a strategy all in itself.

How Content Marketing can benefit your SaaS

As the owner of a SaaS, you’re likely aware of content marketing, but have probably never gotten the opportunity to try it out. With so many copycat companies dominating the SaaS industry, it can be difficult to stand out and bring the right value to the customer. Content marketing provides the most direct route for you to stand out. A great way to understand content marketing in a SaaS is to simply run a quick Google search for your company. This will bring up any content the company has on its website. This could be blog posts, videos, white papers, anything. There are a couple of strategies you can take here, such as a content blitz. A content blitz is an idea of creating a lot of high-quality content to help educate your customers on how to use your product.

How to use content marketing for your SaaS business

When it comes to content marketing, there are several strategies for startups: Create a blog that is useful to the market. Make your blog valuable by telling stories, providing educational resources and information, and asking for feedback. Create case studies where you explain the steps that you took to get a business up and running and share some interesting stats and stories along the way. It’s great for potential customers to learn how your company got up and running and keep them engaged with your brand. Create a list of advice or insights from experts in your industry. This will help readers get a glimpse of what it’s like to be an expert in your industry.

Step 1: Define Your Content Marketing Goals

Your content marketing goals should be geared toward growing your company's sales. If your goal is to improve the conversion rate, create an email course that tells people how to use your product the way it's meant to be used, explains all the options they have, and walks them through the process. If your goal is to drive traffic, create some kind of engaging and compelling newsletter that is full of stories, tips, and tricks to use your product to its fullest, and then start tracking how much traffic comes from it. Otherwise, you may be wasting time and resources trying to drive traffic, which doesn't usually result in conversions. Step 2Determine the Audience You Need to Target First, you need to decide how you want to reach your audience.

Step 2: Figure Out Your Audience and the type of content that will work best for your business

What kinds of content will your audience engage with? Do you want to tell stories or provide tips and tricks? What’s your angle? You may have an idea of who your audience is, but you’ll have to figure out who they are, and how to engage with them before you can determine what will resonate with them. There are also a lot of myths around content marketing. For example, some marketers think that getting more shares will improve their content’s performance, but there’s more to it than that. For every three shares, there will be three unanswered questions, and for every three unanswered questions, there will be one dissatisfied customer. You can’t help your audience unless you understand who they are.

Step 3: Know Your Competition

Every startup has its own unique set of goals and problems to solve. Instead of just measuring against the competition, the goal is to measure against your customers. Step 4Set a Target Now that you know what to do, you need to figure out how much time you have to do it. Aim for one piece of content per month, and focus on one small portion of the customer journey: Wish List & Foundational Content Online shopping and CRM Team Building Social Media & Social Media Marketing PPC & Display Advertising Perpetual Marketing For an in-depth discussion of customer journey optimization and the differences between these techniques, check out this guide.

Step 4: Create Your Content

The next step is to create your content. Content marketing is more of a series of interactions than a series of static pieces. To make content marketing work, you need to make sure that every step of your content marketing is high-impact. Here are some examples of what you should be creating: Updates to blog content Relevant emails Product catalogs Translation information Testimonials Industry publications Think about everything that your customers will need, and focus your content on creating ways to fill these needs. Step 5Keep it relevant and responsive It's really important to make sure that the content you create is good and relevant. Think about the products and services you offer, and be sure to have information that is both up-to-date and useful.

Step 5: Promote Your Content

Set a schedule for content marketing—keep your routine and let your team know that important projects are coming up and that they’ll need to be ready to push their ideas out the door when the time comes. Step 6Invest in Webinars and Events Watch your traffic—and watch it grow. Step 7Ask for Press to Promote Your Content A tactic that works well for content marketing is getting press coverage for your content, and letting the media know you’re looking for an article. Step 8Promote Your Content If you’re smart about it, your press coverage should help boost your traffic. Just don’t expect it to suddenly boost your email sign-ups, too. Step 9Add a Website SaaS companies can usually benefit from a nice web presence, but be sure to build it the right way.

Step 6: Measure Your Progress

Now that your business has a solid foundation, it’s time to turn your attention to growing your business through content marketing. While there’s no magic bullet for achieving a high level of success, some useful tools and processes can be used to gauge the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.

Are you starting to have the same success that your competition has?

Are you enjoying the results that your target audience is expecting?

If so, you have the right formula for success. If not, it’s time to do some self-assessment and identify areas of improvement.

From there, you can make the necessary changes to your content strategy and create the growth you’re looking for.

What tips do you have for growing your SaaS business through content marketing? Let us know in the

Conclusion

Content marketing is a huge part of a startup’s strategy - it could be an even larger part of a startup’s success as it becomes established and less unique. With that in mind, here’s a comprehensive guide to content marketing, which covers everything from what it is to what you can do to optimize your content strategy.