When it comes to marketing for Software-as-a-Service companies, a different approach to content strategy needs to be taken. You’re not only offering a product, but also an ongoing service, which can lead to new and more complex customer fears.
Your content strategy must utilize search engine optimization, educate your customers, and have a solid base of positive reviews. It is no wonder that in 2021, 82% of marketers are using content marketing in the Saas industry.
This article will outline how you can create a content strategy for your software-as-a-service company while providing the best possible value to your customers.
Know Your Audience
It’s essential to know who you are marketing to, what their desires are, their pain points, and their fears.
You can build up a customer profile almost like a character description. By having a “face” you are marketing to, you can begin to tailor and customize your content.
For example, if your business offers a cloud phone system, a likely pain point for customers could be time-management based, as their current software is unreliable and slow. The customer’s desire is to have software they can trust, their fear is that they might invest in you, only to be disappointed. Knowing this, content could be a blog post specifically addressing how your software combats reliability issues and continues to develop.
This is not the only customer concern that you must address. The reliance upon your service over a long period of time increases the customer risk. A demonstrable strong customer support system can help reassure leads and encourage them to complete a sale.
If your customer service is currently lacking, it can be very useful to turn to contact center analytics in order to review the most common complaints and customer needs, as well as addressing the efficiency and effectiveness with which they are dealt.
Once you have identified the pain points your customer is experiencing, the goal should be to identify and resolve them as seamlessly and quickly as possible. Keyword analysis can identify what leads are searching for, and what brings them to you. Patterns in this data can help you to incorporate keywords effectively into content, so a question is answered before it is even asked.
Know Your Campaign Goal
It may seem like an obvious point that you want to earn more revenue. But break that down – are you looking to acquire new leads? Are you hoping to increase your conversion rate? Or reduce your cost per acquisition, perhaps?
As these elements occur at different points in the conversion funnel, the content you create will reflect this.
Once your content is out there, having a clear campaign goal can also make the analysis of both your successes and failures easier. You can see quantitative information that demonstrates how close you came to your goal, and you can start to assess how and why. Below you’ll find a few useful pointers for creating an effective content strategy for Saas.
Research
Using the information you gained about your customers, research topics that will be of interest to them. Make a list of the keywords that you want to include in your content, and note which pieces it would work well with.
Get Organized
Everyone loves a clearly structured calendar – and this is exactly what you are going to need. Your content calendar should plainly display when you are going to post things, where they will be posted to, and any keywords, links, or tags that will be applied.
Create Your Content
Creating content is undeniably the hard part of your content strategy. Your first consideration should be what media your content will be. In 2021 so far, we have seen that the two most popular forms of content are videos and blogs. This may be relevant to your business but remember to always revisit your customer profiles. You want to provide the highest quality content for your audience, not just what is the current trend in marketing.
For example, you may find that educational content is more relevant and impactful with your audience, and choose to prioritize eBooks and white papers over blog posts.
Some media may require more dedicated expertise. For example, a video might need professional filmography and video editing. This can increase the costliness of the content. If, as previously mentioned, your goal was to reduce cost per acquisition, this would turn out to be counterproductive.
It’s also important to ensure that you’re not accidentally producing duplicate content.
You might be wondering, what is duplicate content? Duplicate content is anything that replicates either exactly, or too closely, content that is already on the internet. Search engines such as Google will not list more than one article featuring duplicate content, so you risk your efforts being wasted.
This is easy enough to avoid – when creating content, make sure it’s written in your unique tone of voice and follows your company brand.
Schedule Your Posts
There are lots of different programs that will enable you to schedule your posts, including Buffer (social media) and Marketo (email marketing). Scheduling software can be very useful, as you can have all the content prepared for several weeks at a time, enabling you to focus on other aspects of the business.
Once published, by looking back at the data analysis of each post, you can begin to see the successes and failures of certain pieces of content. The more effective content can become a “template” of sorts for future content, enabling your content marketing strategy to keep refining itself as time goes on.
To Summarize
Content marketing is a brilliant way to push your SaaS business and increase engagement with current customers and new leads. Once you have created your content, there is no rule to stop you from repurposing it again in the future or using it across multiple platforms. This versatility makes it cost-effective, and with the number of tools available online, it’s simple to conduct.
Begin creating your content marketing strategy, and give your customers a higher value for their money, as well as a great incentive to keep coming back.
