10-Step SaaS Content Marketing to Increase Organic Traffic by 28x

All of the top SaaS tools have one thing in common – a stellar content marketing strategy.  

They get millions of views on their blogs every month and are deemed as an authority in their niche. And it’s all thanks to their quality, strategic content, which attracts quality leads and converts them. 

As the leading content marketing and SaaS SEO agency, we have helped SaaS clients like Postalytics increase their organic traffic by 28 times and others grow organic site traffic by 275%. We know how to get results from content marketing and are ready to share these insights with you today.

What We'll Cover:

What is SaaS Content Marketing? 

SaaS content marketing involves creating and promoting content to attract, educate, convert and retain customers for your SaaS business. 

An effective SaaS content marketing strategy involves answering key questions and crafting a strategy based on the outcomes. 
Some great starting points are:

• Who is my target audience?
• What kind of content will appeal to them? Which channels should we promote this content to reach our audience?
• What does the word “consistent” mean for our brand? Does it mean producing an article every week or more?
• How are we planning to create content for each stage of the funnel? Should we focus on a particular stage more than the others?
  

Note that content marketing isn’t limited to creating a blog or article content. The best SaaS companies adopt an all-encompassing strategy. They target a wider audience by focusing on content like videos, infographics, podcasts and ebooks.

Why Do SaaS Companies Need Content Marketing? 

Almost every SaaS company prioritizes content as a part of their SaaS marketing strategy. Why? Because the benefits of getting into the top search results for their niche keywords are priceless. Content marketing also costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates over three times as many leads.

If that’s not enough to convince you, here are some other results you can expect through content marketing for SaaS: 

Increases Brand Awareness 

If your brand is on the first page of Google for all important keywords, it signifies that your brand is an authority leader in your niche. This makes your SaaS product more credible. This strong brand credibility is an important element of product-led marketing. 

Stronger Brand Credibility 

If your brand is on the first page of Google for all important keywords, it signifies that your brand is an important authority leader in your niche. This makes your SaaS product more credible. This strong brand credibility is an important element of product-led marketing. 

Showcase Your Product’s New Features 

Effective content marketing lets you discuss product updates and helps your existing customers get more advantages from subscribing to your tool. Look how ClickUp has provided an independent category for feature releases to talk about new updates and announcements.  Product-led content can also provide value to your readers and generate qualified leads for your business. 

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Maximize ROI Within Your Budget 

Unlike paid ads, which only deliver as long as you pay, you can enjoy long-term results from your content marketing strategy. For example, a popular guide you created could bring in leads even two years after it was published. This indicates that even with a low budget, you can maximize ROI with this strategy. 

Guide More Leads Towards Conversion 

If you study the content created by great SaaS companies like Ahrefs, you’ll see that they strategically place their product or features in every article. This way, when someone reads those articles, they think, “I can use this tool to solve my problem.” Strategic content marketing can guide more visitors and drive higher conversion. 

Reduce Customer Churn 

In the SaaS industry, you’re not selling a one-time subscription. To keep your revenue stable, you must retain your customers so they continue paying monthly or yearly. You can reduce customer churn by providing your existing customers with valuable and actionable content that helps them solve their problems consistently. 

Foster Relationship With Your Customer   

Building and nurturing customer relationships is crucial to having a loyal community of fans for your brand. With content marketing strategies like email marketing, you can foster relationships with your customers and keep engaging with them on various platforms. 

What Makes SaaS Content Marketing Different? 

Whether you want to create a B2C or B2B SaaS content marketing strategy, you must be mindful of five important reasons why SaaS content marketing is more complex and different. 

1. B2B and even complex B2C SaaS products have long sales cycles and often involve many decision-makers, so you need a set content strategy for the different stages.
2. As the SaaS model is based on recurring payments, you need to retain your customers and provide helpful content to them continuously.
3. Because your product is intangible, your SaaS content marketing strategy must address buyer hesitation and common queries.
4. As your business is online, prospective buyers search for your product or services on engines such as Google, making SEO an important part of your content strategy.
5. As there is a lot of competition in the SaaS field, you need to build trust and credibility in your brand with content marketing.

10 Steps to Create Your Winning SaaS Content Marketing Strategy 

So, how do you create a stand-out SaaS content marketing strategy? Below are 10 steps, with real-life examples and case studies, to help you create an effective SaaS content marketing strategy. Let’s get started. 

1. Define Your Content Marketing Goals 

Without a specific goal or objective, your team will be left making haywire content, resulting in no conversions.

Here are some overall SaaS marketing goals you can build up on: 

‍ Before creating a goal, define your objectives first. These objectives could be: 

• Increasing ranking on search engines and improving brand visibility
• Driving more traffic to your website, blog, and social media profiles
• Building trust and credibility by showing your expertise in the field
• Getting backlinks from authority sites
• Lead generation and nurturing
• Increasing free trials and then converting them into paid customers
• Engaging existing customers

Once you have defined your overall objective, you can define a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound) goal. 

For example, if your overall objective for this quarter is “getting backlinks from authority sites,” a SMART goal would be: 

Getting 20 backlinks from authority sites (with a DR above 70) for the keyword ‘project management’ in this quarter. 

You can create goals for all your objectives and track them with relevant KPIs. These KPIs could be organic traffic for blogs, free trial registrations, demo requests, search engine rankings, downloads for lead magnets, newsletter subscribers, and so on. 

2. Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile 

You can only formulate content that hits the mark when you know your customers’ motivations, behaviors, and requirements. For example, if your customers are more active on Instagram, you can create more educational reels or carousels. 

To form an ideal customer profile, you can get answers to the following questions: 

• What kind of companies/individuals do we target?
• What is the approximate budget of the user?
• Which other SaaS products do these users utilize? Can we help integrate those with our tool?
• What problems are they looking to solve?
• On what content/social platforms are they most active?
• Which content formats do they ideally prefer?
• Which websites/social media profiles do they regularly follow?
• What are their demographics (age, gender, income, etc.) and psychographics (goals, interests, motivations, etc.)

To find these answers, here are four methods you can resort to. 

• Actively participate in online communities where your target audience is active, like Quora, Reddit threads, LinkedIn groups, etc. 
• Get in touch with those teams that interact with customers daily, like sales teams, customer support teams, product teams, etc., and get data on existing customers from them. 
• Distribute surveys and interview existing customers to get to know them better.
• Conduct competitor research and find out the kind of customers they are targeting. You can do this by looking at the articles they’re publishing, the audience interacting with their content, and so on.

Let’s take Slack’s example. They cater to different customer segments and teams like engineering, project management, sales, etc. 

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Look how they have implemented a filter on their blog so customers can easily select their domain and get relevant articles. 

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3. Select the Right Content Types 

Before finding keywords or churning out content, you must determine the right content types for your audience. Here are three of them you can start with. 

Blog Posts 

While prospects might not be aware of your SaaS tool, they might actively seek information to solve an existing problem. When you create in-depth guides and articles that help solve this problem in a unique way, you attract more leads.  

Shopify is one SaaS brand that creates blog posts for the entire customer journey that add value to the reader. 

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Videos  

Did you know that 91% of consumers want to see more online video content from brands? With more people scrolling through shorter video formats like reels and TikToks, you can jump on this trend to get more engagement. You can even experiment by repurposing your guides to video tutorials and sharing them on YouTube. 

HubSpot is one brand that regularly creates educational videos for its audience. 

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Ebooks 

Instead of giving all the information for free, many SaaS companies create ebooks and use them as lead magnets. For example, if there’s an article on project management, you might choose to promote your ebook on “Best project management techniques from the best in the field.” In return, you might ask them for their email address. 

Here’s an example from Semrush. 

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4. Effective Keyword Research 

To get your content to rank higher, you need to find the keywords your target audience is searching for. While some companies start with topics and then search for keywords, some follow the other way around. 

Whichever route you choose, subscribe to keyword research tools like Ahrefs. You can even supplement it with a free tool like Google’s Keyword Planner. 

Let’s take the example of a project management tool to understand how to proceed with the research. 

Type in the term “project management” in your tool. 

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You can add modifiers/filters to find keywords for different buyer stages. These could include a guide, tutorial, how, why, what, examples, tools, etc. 

You can play around with the “Keyword Difficulty” part to find easier topics or keywords that you can target for your content strategy. 

Here are some best practices you can follow while conducting keyword research: 

• If you are just starting, prioritize content creation around less difficult keywords, as you can realistically rank for them.
• Make sure you use the keyword in the blog title and URL. Also, keep your URLs short and simple so that Google can understand what your content is about.
• Include secondary long-tail keywords in your content. This will strengthen your blog posts, and you can even build topic clusters with these keywords.
• If you use a keyword for a certain topic, ensure that the topic matches the search intent. For example, when people search for “project management best practices,” they want to get information on managing projects efficiently. If you talk about your product exclusively in that article, you’ll see a lot of bounce rates.

It’s important to note that keywords mean nothing if your content doesn’t deliver on them. That means you also need to focus on creating SEO-optimized content. 

5. Define Your Success Metrics 

You don’t want to keep investing money in marketing tactics or strategies that don’t bring results. The only way to find this is by setting KPIs and metrics and tracking them regularly. 

Here are some success metrics that you can implement: 

• What is the number of free trial registrations you’re getting? You can segregate the requests coming from your blog or resource guides to determine the effectiveness of your content.
• Monthly traffic you’re getting for your blog page, use case page, and where it comes from.
• Do you see an increase in organic rankings because of your SaaS content marketing efforts? Has your website’s overall rank improved? Has any of your blogs reached the first few SERPs?
• Is your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) at par? How does this cost compare with the returns you’re getting from acquiring each customer?
• Have you noticed an uptick in the backlinks you’re getting? Are you getting backlinks from any quality sites?

One way to improve these metrics is by offering free resources such as lead magnets. Take HubSpot’s recently published article “How to create a social media calendar to plan your content?” 

At the beginning and the end of the article, they have a unique CTA. 

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When someone opts to receive this ebook, HubSpot can store their email address and use it for retargeting or pushing them down the sales funnel. 

While you may not have the bandwidth to create free resources for each article you post, you can experiment with these for a few articles and see how they go. 

6. Map Out Your Content Calendar 

While creating quality content should be your goal, you can’t expect to stop publishing content after a guide goes viral. Consistency is the key when it comes to SEO and rankings. 

By creating a content calendar, you can strategize on the keywords you need to rank for and how you should schedule content around these keywords. 

But how often should you post? 

According to HubSpot, here’s the answer: 

So, are you doomed if you do not have the resources to create 3 or 4 quality articles every week? 

No! Take a look at these figures by Backlinko. 

They managed to cross 1 million unique visits to their blog. And they have published 52 articles over the past five years. 

While you might want to push the pedal on publishing more content, you can start slow but produce quality content that can get more backlinks from authority sites. 

On to the more important part. What details should you add to your content calendar? 

• Blog title
• Content goal
• Search intent and funnel stage
• Target keywords
• Content type and structure
• Word Count
• Author details
• Deadline for different stages (writing, editing, and publishing)
• Call to action 
• Promotion channels and frequency

You can create this calendar in a Google spreadsheet or tools such as Trello and CoSchedule. 

This calendar also helps give your team and freelancers a sense of direction and the schedule they must follow to meet those milestones. 

7. Outline Your Distribution Strategy 

There’s no getting around the fact that even if you have written the best content on a particular keyword, you’ll need to promote it at the beginning to get it across to more people. 

After all, what’s the meaning of spending 10 hours working on an article just to have a few people read it?  

Here are three ways you can distribute your content: 

• Owned channels: These are channels that belong to your business, like your social media profiles, mailing list, podcasts, etc.
• Earned or shared channels: These channels are owned by third parties such as review sites, forums like Reddit and ProductHunt, news websites, websites you can guest post on, etc.
• Paid channels: These platforms or people will promote your content for a fee—for example, ads or social media influencers.
  
  

While this may seem like a lot of work, here’s an example by Buffer that shows content distribution doesn’t need a lot of your resources. 

Buffer published this blog post. 

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The next day, they created this Twitter thread around the same topic. 

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At the end of that thread, they also shared the link to their blog post in case someone wants to read about it in-depth. 

Instead of just copy-pasting the link to the blog post on social media, they respected the needs of the platform and created an engaging thread for the readers. 

Similarly, they created a carousel for Instagram on the same topic. 

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What can SaaS companies learn from this? You can repurpose content instead of creating new things for all your platforms. But while doing it, ensure you follow the best practices for each platform so that your post does not go unnoticed. 

8. Execute and Optimize 

You can now put your content strategy into execution. To ensure your writers and marketers are on the same page, create a set of guidelines they can refer to. You can do this in three ways. 

• Provide them benchmarks for each content. This could mean sharing with them the links of blogs you look up to or the articles already ranking for that particular keyword.
• Share a content structure for each article. This results in fewer edits later on, and your writer and editor are both on the same page.
• Create checklists. For example, here are some things you could have in your checklist:

• Add 10 examples
• Add a link to one case study
• Paragraphs of no more than five lines
• Include statistics
• Make use of images
• Achieve a Grammarly score of 90

Also, schedule regular check-ins with your team where you discuss your existing strategy and how you can optimize it in the future. 

9. Monitor Results and Iterate As You Go 

To ensure that your marketing investment is giving you returns, you need to track the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you established while setting your goals.  

You can use analytics software like Google Analytics to draw these insights monthly or quarterly and have a team meeting to discuss where you went wrong or how to improve on these metrics. 

You can even identify the content types or topics generating the best results and see what you’re doing differently for these topics. You can then create templates from these articles to replicate this success with other content. 

You can opt for a content refresh for the articles that aren’t performing as well. This could mean adding new insights, removing parts that are not relevant, adding visuals, etc. This helps keep your content updated and improve your rankings. 

Here's a helpful guide if you decide to move ahead with this strategy.  

10. Embrace New SaaS Content Marketing Trends 

With so many different avenues coming up, as a SaaS marketer, you need to keep up with changing marketing trends. If you don’t, your competition will leave you in the dust. 

One strategy is conducting an in-depth competitor analysis to understand what your rivals are doing well and where opportunities exist to exploit. For example, you may discover your competitor has launched a podcast and received a great response; you can experiment with that format and see how it goes. 
An excellent method to stay in the know is to subscribe to some blogs that consistently talk about SaaS marketing or become an active member of Slack channels and Reddit threads where you can discuss SaaS marketing with other marketers and founders. 

Elevate Your SaaS Content Marketing Strategy 

Gone are the days when you could rely solely on having a brilliant SaaS product. With so many SaaS businesses in every niche, you need a great content marketing strategy that reaches more people and moves them through the conversion funnel. 

With the above steps, you’ll be able to decide what content types you should be focusing on, the topic ideas that will bring the best results, and how you can promote and distribute this content on different platforms. 

If you do not have the resources or time to try out different strategies, you can reach out to us at MADX. With our experience working with different SaaS companies and helping them achieve amazing results, we can help you formulate a content marketing strategy to meet your desired goals.