Content Marketing Strategy: A Complete Guide for SaaS Companies

Jimmy Daly

better marketing

How to Create or Refine a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing has become very popular in the last decade. But for all that growth, there seems to be more noise and lower quality than ever. What we’re seeing is an influx of spending and a massive increase in content creation, but a lack of content marketing strategy.

Content is a significant investment in your marketing. It also takes time to pay off, which is where many B2B SaaS companies get into trouble. Unlike paid acquisition channels, content isn't a marketing tactic you can easily turn on and off. It takes months, even years, to build momentum. If you’re going to spend that much time working on a blog, you better have a content strategy.

How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

A blog is only as good as the content strategy behind it. Here are the questions you must answer before and during—these are essential to earning traffic and proving that your company’s investment is getting them a return.

1. Who Will You Write For?

Your target audience should be living, breathing people, not fictitious buyer personas. Target readers should be people you know and trust, people that you’d be honored to have read your blog.

It’s important to use real people and not fictitious personas because it affects your approach to creating content. Creating content for “SaaS Sally” is very different than writing for your friend Ty Magnin who runs marketing at Appcues. You’ll hold yourself to a higher standard if you’re writing for real people. Fictitious personas also tend to reflect the average, not the median. This means you risk writing for a person well outside the stated demographics.

Be thoughtful about the personas you create. “Reaching decision-makers” is a trope. Every content strategy aspires to reach the C-suite. But consider that software is often adopted by a collection of people:

Leader: sets the strategic vision, holds team accountable
Implementor: the people using and setting up SaaS tools
Researcher: the person tasked with learning about various tools and capabilities

Reaching readers in the C-suite is hard, but it’s actually not good enough. This is why you need to create content for the entire payscale—anyone who could be involved in the research, buying or using of your tool needs to be addressed. We think of this on a spectrum from very tactical to very strategic.

Tactical readers need information, comparisons, instructions and best practices. Strategic readers need models, frameworks and principles. Your blog needs a variety of tactical and strategic content to be comprehensive. For a more complete breakdown of writing tactical and strategic content, check out our guide to creating reader personas.

Remember that your ideal reader is the one who buys your product. It’s easy to get distracted by pageviews and newsletter subscribers, but the goal of a B2B SaaS blog is to drive business growth. Identify your ideal reader and serve them well.

2. What Will You Write About?

Topic ideation is something to be systematized. But first, let’s layout a framework to help you understand the best way to choose blog post topics.

Your blog is not a publication, it’s a growing library of information. There are many reasons you need to adopt this mindset, but here’s one guiding principle that should be enough reason on its own.

Blogs that act like publications create series of standalone posts on different topics. They are hesitant to cover the same topic more than once.
Blogs that act like libraries create hubs of related posts. They have the freedom to cover the same core topics over and over again.

This strategy pairs nicely with another content marketing strategy essential, which is that people should primarily discover you via search. Since readers aren’t checking your site each time you post something new, you can write about the same thing for weeks in a row. No one will care since they are finding what they need, when they need it via search engines.

Most of your blog post topics should be driven by 1) keyword research and 2) sales and support feedback. Use keyword research to identify entry points for new readers. Keywords should be top and middle of the funnel, meaning they serve searchers who are looking for information and education. Create content for the bottom of the funnel by talking to your sales and support teams about what prospects and customers are having trouble with. This process helps you address the entire lifecycle, from awareness through purchase.

Top of Funnel: Use keyword research to address high-level topics, introduce new readers to your brand.
Middle of Funnel: Use keyword research in addition to sales and support feedback to tie problems to your specific solution.
Bottom of Funnel: Use sales and support feedback to write directly about your product.

Here are examples of each from Wistia:

Top of the Funnel: Shooting Video with an iPhone This post introduces anyone interested in shooting better video with an iPhone to some really useful tips. Many of the people who find this post won’t be ready to buy Wistia, but some will be doing research for a work project and will remember this resource.
Middle of the Funnel: Using Video with Marketing Automation This post is textbook middle of the funnel content. It inserts the product directly into a conversation about a broader and highly relevant topic (marketing automation). It’s thorough and insightful, with just the right amount of sales pitch.
Bottom of the Funnel: Get Better Organized and More Productive with the New Wistia Trello Power-Up Product updates are a great way to educate existing customers and nudge prospects. When you’re targeting the bottom of the funnel, don’t be shy about addressing your product.

To wrap up, don’t forget these two rules about topic ideation:

Write about the same core topics from every angle.
Serve the entire lifecycle, from top to bottom.

3. When Will You Publish?

It’s impossible to write too much, but it’s easy to publish too much.

“A lot of content marketers worry about not publishing enough,” says Podia CMO Len Markidan, “but the truth is that publishing too much is a more dangerous mistake. Write something that your readers will love, and then give them time to enjoy it, share it and hunger for more. This lands at the very top of the list of ‘things I wish someone told me when I started.'”

Remember the publication vs. library framework? Well, publications also sometimes get into the habit of publishing too often. The result is typically shorter, less valuable pieces of content. This is not ideal.

The ideal publishing schedule is relative to your budgetary constraints. Still, it’s difficult to scale publishing volume without sacrificing quality no matter how much money you can afford to spend. As a general rule, publish as often as you can without dropping your quality standards. There’s no use publishing content that won’t get read.

Here are publishing schedule templates you can use depending on your budget:

Level 1:

1 article/week
1 ebook/quarter

Level 2:

2 articles/week
1 ebook/month

Level 3:

3 articles/week
2 ebooks/month

Remember that a good content marketing strategy is all about compounding growth. Level 1 may not seem like much, but will result in 52 articles per year. Brian Dean grew Backlinko to 100,000 monthly uniques with just 35 posts. Level 3 will get you 153 posts in a year, but it doesn’t guarantee traffic. Don’t publish more if that time or money compromises time spent doing solid keyword research and great promotion and distribution.

4. How Will You Earn Traffic?

Here’s the golden rule of content marketing strategy: compounding growth is the only growth. Don’t invest significant time in non-recurring acquisition channels. When it comes down to it, organic search and your own email list are the only channels you can count on.

Organic Search

You should be thinking about organic search from day one and every day thereafter. It’s essential that you gain traction in search engines if you want to grow your audience. Here are a few things to think about:

Internal linking: Go on Wikipedia and observe how they link all of their entries together. Apply the same SEO strategy to your own site by linking to and from related posts. This helps search engines contextualize your site and reduces bounce rate.
Technical SEO: Your site structure, navigation, meta descriptions, canonical links—it all plays into your rankings. If you don’t have an internal SEO resource, hire a consultant to make sure you aren’t working harder than you need to.
Content Saturation: If you’ve been in the habit of publishing too much, consider deleting or refreshing old content. Pages that live on your site and don’t get traffic can hurt your rankings.
Content Length and Depth: Most research says that longer posts rank better. That fits nicely with the idea of publishing less often but does require plenty of writing. Brian Dean recommends a minimum of 1,900 words per post.

Email

Organic traffic compounds faster than email, meaning it should be the primary source of growth. But email is a medium that you have complete control over. It’s not a channel for new reader acquisition, but it is an excellent way to drive traffic to middle and bottom of the funnel content. Here’s a template for email that most SaaS companies can use:

Weekly Content Newsletter: Get readers in the habit of hearing from you each week.
Regular Product Updates: Let people know about product updates. This is a good way to tie education to your solution.
Free Email Course: This is an underrated way to capture email addresses on top of funnel posts. These can be short—three to five emails in a series—but should be comprehensive.
New Subscriber Welcome Series: Let new readers know about your product, what it does and how it can help them.
Free Trial Onboarding Series: Use a blend of help docs and content to get people going. They should feel well-equipped and inspired.
Recurring Emails: Weekly or monthly usage emails. These are a great opportunity to use content to help people make progress in areas where they are lacking. (Example: “You haven’t created a new campaign in a while, here’s some inspiration from our blog.”)
Retention Email Series: Highly targeted emails for users who aren’t engaging in the product. Use a blend of content, questions and help docs to get them going again. Test these emails early and often.

There are, of course, other ways to get traffic but they tend to be fickle and temporary. Should you invest at least some time in things like social media marketing, communities and guest posting? Yes, but never take your eye off organic search.

5. How Will You Support the Business?

B2B marketers need to get very used to the phrase business objectives. Traffic is great. Email subscribers are great. But those things cost you money. The only thing that makes you money is recruiting more paying customers.

There are plenty of popular blogs out there that don’t drive business growth. A comprehensive content marketing strategy includes monetization. Here are four things that absolutely cannot be overlooked as you start, grow and run a blog.

Let Readers Know About Your Product

You have to assume that readers do not know there is a software product behind your content. It’s likely that they have 10 tabs open, Twitter notifications coming in and a meeting that starts in five minutes. Make it abundantly clear that they are on a B2B SaaS product site, not just a blog. To do this:

Consider using a conversational messaging tool like Intercom to ask questions of readers while they are on your site. (Example: “Is there something about [topic] that we can help you with?”)
Keep your blog in a sub-folder, not a sub-domain and definitely not on Medium. You want your main site navigation menu on all blog pages. The ideal URL is saasinc.com/blog, not blog.saasinc.com.
Use author bios to let people know who they are hearing from. A post from “Jessica, head of marketing at SaaS Inc.” inspires more confidence than “Tom, freelance writer.”
Use product language in the header, footer and sidebar. Don’t be shy about offering free trials, showing testimonials or using social proof to show that people love the product.
Use contextual calls to action. If a post is about push notifications, use a CTA about push notifications.

Capture Email Addresses

99% of readers won’t be ready to buy now, but many will need your product in the future. This creates an attribution problem that makes measuring content difficult, but it also means it’s vitally important to capture email addresses. You need to establish an ongoing relationship so that if and when the times comes to buy, every reader knows where to go.

Offer a course instead of a newsletter. People know that newsletters are eternal and that’s a big commitment. Courses have a clear start and end, which makes it easier for people to opt-in. Once it’s over, you can transition them to an infrequent newsletter.
Or just send a newsletter. Courses are an easier entry point for new readers, but good old-fashioned newsletter can still work too. Just make sure you let them know the frequency of emails they can expect ahead of time.
Use content upgrades for contextual calls to action. Whitepapers, ebooks, case studies—these are content types that work really well for lead generation. Use them within articles on relevant topics.

Follow Up with Everyone

If you have a sales team, make sure there is a process in place to hand off email addresses. If you don’t, make sure you have good drip campaigns in place to nurture leads. Following up on every single lead is no longer a huge challenge thanks to behavioral email and marketing automation. This is key to any content marketing plan—put these tools in place and don’t let anyone slip through the cracks.

Agree on Attribution

Measuring content marketing is a real pain point and often a source of contention among stakeholders. Revenue growth from content is a lagging indicator of success since almost no readers will be ready to buy immediately. There isn’t a perfect way to attribute content to revenue, but here are a few things to think about:

Capturing email addresses makes it way easier to track a user’s path from reader to customer.
Running a site in a sub-folder as opposed to subdomain makes it easier to attribute signups in Google Analytics.
Don’t try to make a 1:1 connection between reading a single post and signing up. Shoot for something more holistic, like tracking all behavior in the 90 days leading to the signup.

Scrambling to prove the blog is working is something you want to avoid (and it happens all the time). Agree on the KPIs you will measure ahead of time.

Resources:

Buffer: How We Doubled Email Signups in 30 Days: Our Strategies to Get More Email Subscribers
WordStream: 27 Tips on How to Get More Email Signups
ConversionXL: How to Measure Content Marketing ROI: A Simple 4 Step Process
Andrew Chen: The highest ROI way to increase signups
Content Marketing Institute: Understand How Content is Influencing Buyers: A Primer on Attribution Models

6. How Will You Measure Performance?

The hardest part of a content marketer’s job is turning writing into revenue. The second hardest part is proving your success to other people. That’s where reporting comes in.

No content marketing strategy is complete without reporting. By measuring the traffic, keyword rankings, newsletter sign-ups and conversions generated by your content, you create a feedback loop that allows you to ditch ineffective tactics and double-down on successful formats. (You also make it easy to win—and keep—budget from your managers and exec team).

We’ve already mentioned the difficulties of attributing concrete revenue growth to content marketing, so we recommend tracking a few leading indicators to help prove the value of your work. Sustained increases in the following metrics almost always result in increasing sales and revenue:

Month-on-month traffic growth. A well-executed content marketing campaign should generate compounding traffic, where traffic from previously published articles adds to traffic from newer articles. 6% month-on-month total traffic growth is a realistic target to beat.
Month-on-month organic traffic growth. Most blogs get the bulk of their website traffic from organic search, and regularly publishing keyword-targeted content should lead to more organic traffic, each and every month. We found that most blogs see their organic search traffic grow by 8% each month.
Total backlinks and referring domains. Traffic isn’t the only way to gauge the success of an article: content marketing can be a powerful tool for acquiring backlinks, something which is particularly valuable for new blogs with low domain authority—these links will improve the search performance of your entire website.
Total keyword rankings. Healthy, well-optimized articles should rank for a broad cross-section of keywords. These keyword rankings are often a leading indicator of future traffic: the more rankings your article has, the greater the traffic you can expect the post to generate in the coming weeks and months.
Target keyword rankings. For many searches, the lion’s share of traffic is earned by the articles that rank within the top three search results, so it’s important to track each article’s performance for its target keyword.

Content marketing generally takes time to deliver results. Reporting these metrics can go a long way towards relieving this frustration and demonstrating quick and sustained wins to managers and executives.

Resources:

Animalz: The Animalz Content Marketing Benchmark Report 2020
Animalz: 4 Realistic Traffic Goals for Small(ish) Blogs
Moz: Content Analysis and Reporting

7. Content Marketing Strategy Tools

With your content marketing strategy in place, you’re going to need tools to make it all run smoothly. There are plenty of great options out there, but here are a few of our favorite content marketing tools.

SEO + Research

Revive - A free tool we built for identifying blog posts that need updating.
Ahrefs - An excellent tool for tracking links and doing keyword research.
Moz - Track your rankings for target keywords.
Clearscope - Do keyword research and optimize your content.
KeywordTool.io - Get tons of keyword ideas.
AnswerthePublic.com - Get keyword ideas in the form of questions.
Buzzsumo - Research successful posts with search and social metrics.
Clearbit - Add data to your existing email list for better segmentation.

Content Creation + Hosting

Quip - Our favorite tool for collaborative writing.
SketchDeck - Professional design resources on-demand.
DraftSend - Create simple presentations that you can embed in your posts.
WordPress - The best content management system for most SaaS blogs.
WPEngine - Our host of choice.
Wistia - The best video hosting platform out there.

Email

ConvertKit - A tool built specifically for bloggers to send emails and create courses.
Customer.io - An excellent tool for creating behavioral email campaigns.
CampaignMonitor - An easy-to-use email tool with beautiful templates.

Promotion + Conversion

Sumo - All kinds of tools for collecting email addresses on your site.
Freshchat- Simple live chat tool for having live conversations with readers.
Buffer - The industry standard social media sharing tool.
Copper - An excellent CRM that runs inside Gmail.

Workflow

Airtable - Create an insanely powerful content workflow.
CoSchedule - Build comprehensive marketing calendars.
Zapier - Connect all your apps and automate everything.
Trello - A popular and useful project management tool.
Teamwork - A robust and powerful project management app.

Analytics + Attribution

Google Analytics - Easy and free analytics. You can't beat that.
Amplitude - Tie your product data into your content data.
Segment - Centralize your event tracking for cleaner data.

Content marketing is an ongoing challenge, not a task to be checked off your list. Stay tuned for more helpful resources from the Animalz blog by signing up for our newsletter below.

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