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© Copyright 2024 B2B Hackers - All Rights Reserved • Educational Resources for B2B SaaS Digital Marketing • By Team4
Content Marketing is the fuel for a smooth-running marketing engine. Making sure your content marketing strategy is on point will help your B2B SaaS Company grow. In this comprehensive guide, we cover all the essentials from start to finish.
Content is the fuel for a smooth-running marketing engine; without content, you cannot connect emotionally with leads or educate decision-makers. In B2B SaaS marketing, content marketing has the power to transform companies’ fortunes, touching every aspect of the customer lifecycle, driving brand awareness, and even customer loyalty.
In short, a strong content marketing strategy is essential for all B2B SaaS companies that want to grow. In this guide, we’ll explore the role content marketing plays in the success of B2B SaaS businesses and discuss how to build a robust strategy that will fuel your growth.
Does that sound like a lot? Well, it is. You can use the quick links at the top to jump to the section you are most interested in learning more about. Happy reading.
You know what content is. You know what marketing is. Put them together, and what do you get? A marketing strategy aimed at attracting and engaging customers through various content types, from articles and videos to online courses and podcasts.
In the B2B world, content marketing specifically centers around creating content tailored to businesses to attract, convert, and retain ideal customers.
SaaS content marketing serves many purposes. It allows prospective customers to get to know your product better, showcasing how it can meet their specific needs while positioning your brand as a leader in the space. Ultimately, your B2B content strategy framework will educate your audience on the problems you can help them solve, provide your software’s value, and drive business growth by building trust.
Content marketing is essential for all B2B SaaS businesses wanting to drive sustainable growth. To help us illustrate its value, we’re breaking down the key advantages B2B SaaS content marketing offers businesses.
Understanding the B2B buyer's journey and aligning your content with different stages of the sales funnel is essential for attracting, nurturing, and converting leads into loyal customers. This section explores how to create content that caters to the specific needs and interests of individuals at various stages of the buyer funnel.
Content plays an important role at every stage of the B2B buyer journey and should be tailored depending on the questions potential customers will be looking to have answered at that time. The goal is to guide prospects through this journey by providing them with the support they need via valuable, relevant content. Here’s how content marketing aligns with each stage of the buyer journey.
During the awareness stage, potential buyers are just beginning to recognize a problem or need.
At this stage, content shouldn’t push a hard sell but instead focus on attracting attention, educating, and positioning your brand as a thought leader and reliable source of information.
Types of content to use include blog posts, infographics, and social media content that introduce relevant industry topics, trends, and challenges, helping to build awareness of the issues that your SaaS product addresses.
During the considering stage, buyers have identified their problem and are actively seeking solutions.
At this stage, your content should be more in-depth and focused on guiding them toward understanding how your SaaS product can meet their specific needs. As buyers will be evaluating their options, you want to position your product as a strong contender by addressing common pain points and showing how your solution fits within their broader business context.
Types of content to use include e-books, whitepapers, case studies, and webinars, which offer detailed insights into your product’s capabilities, use cases, and the benefits it provides.
During the decision stage, buyers are comparing options and are close to making a purchase decision.
At this stage, your content should be highly specific and geared toward closing the deal. This should address any remaining objections, highlight your unique value propositions, and provide clear calls-to-action that guide buyers towards making a purchase or signing up for a trial.
Types of content to consider include product comparisons, detailed specifications, customer testimonials, and interactive demos, which provide the necessary information to reassure buyers that your SaaS product is the right choice.
During the post-purchase stage, content continues to play a crucial role, even though the buyer has converted.
At this stage, your content should aim to enhance their onboarding experience and reduce churn by ensuring they quickly realize the value of their investment.
Types of content to consider include onboarding materials, user guides, and advanced tutorials which help new customers get the most out of your product, while ongoing content like product updates, newsletters, and customer success stories can help foster loyalty and open upselling opportunities.
During the advocacy stage, satisfied customers can become powerful advocates for your brand.
At this stage, your content should encourage and facilitate customer advocacy by strengthening customer relationships while leveraging their success stories to attract new leads and reinforce your product’s credibility in the market.
Types of content to use include case study collaborations, testimonials, and referral programs, helping turn your best customers into vocal promoters.
However, it’s important to remember that the bigger the buyer, the less linear their journey to purchase. With more chefs — or stakeholders — in the kitchen, they are more likely to move back and forth through the stages and explore more options before selecting a product.
Want more detail on the type of content you’ll need to create? We’ve got you covered.
Another way to look at the customer journey is through the B2B content marketing funnel; this helps illustrate how your content will move from more educational and informative at the top of the funnel to more product and value-focused as the customer becomes more aware of the business and approaches the bottom of the funnel. Let’s break down the type of content you’ll create based on each section of the funnel.
At the top of the funnel, the primary goal is to capture the attention of a broad audience and introduce them to your brand. Therefore, your content at this stage should educate and inform.
You can create content that addresses common pain points or questions within your industry, helping you provide value without requiring a commitment. Types of content include:
In the middle, prospects move into the consideration stage, actively researching solutions to their problems. Your content should provide solutions to specific challenges while showcasing your expertise.
From an SEO perspective, you should optimize this content for keywords related to specific problems and solutions, indicating user intent to find a solution. You can also introduce gated content such as e-books, templates, and webinars that require users to provide their contact information in exchange for valuable resources. Types of content include:
At the bottom of the funnel, prospects are ready to make a decision. At this stage, your content should be focused on encouraging them to choose your product or service.
You need to optimize your content for branded keywords and terms related to your product or service to capture users actively searching for solutions. Plus, include clear and compelling CTAs that encourage users to take the next step, such as signing up, requesting a quote, or making a purchase. Types of content include:
When creating a content strategy for SaaS, content is distributed across a range of channels, including within the product itself.
Creating a content marketing strategy is akin to creating a roadmap for achieving your goals. In this chapter, we’ll break down the B2B content strategy template into seven steps. Let’s dive in!
Any good strategy starts with goal setting. Establishing what you want to achieve with your content efforts early on will help you form your strategy and keep you focused once you begin crafting your content. The key components of goal setting include:
The foundation of your marketing strategy lies in creating content that resonates with your ideal customer and drives action. That means becoming an expert on your audience and crafting relevant, impactful content that is tailored to their industries, addresses their challenges, and sets your business apart from competitors.
In this step, you will be aiming to answer the below questions through rigorous audience, market, and competitor research:
The more you know about your ideal customer, the more likely you are to create content that truly resonates and engages. Conducting thorough audience research will help you develop detailed buyer personas, including details such as:
Laying out these details as part of fictional profiles representing your ideal customer will help guide your content creation efforts.
In B2B SaaS, purchasing decisions aren’t usually made by one person. This is especially true for large organizations, which may require the sign-off from multiple stakeholders.
By mapping each stakeholder and their concerns, you can create content that effectively communicates your product’s value to each group while supporting the decision-making process.
For example, a CTO may be concerned about your software’s technical aspects, while a project manager, as the end-user, might focus on ease of use; in this case, you can direct the CTO toward your technical guides while arranging a demo with the project manager.
In today’s competitive SaaS landscape, you can’t afford not to differentiate your product. Standing out requires more than just having a good product or a good website; you need to clearly and effectively communicate why your product is better than your competitors.
Brand differentiation starts with identifying gaps in the market that you can leverage to offer customers something unique, such as deeper insights or a unique perspective on their challenges.
Now that you understand your audience, it’s time to get into the meat of the matter: creating an actionable content plan.
Your first step is to outline the types of content you’ll be producing based on:
Once you know what types of content you’ll be creating, from whitepapers to webinars, you can identify the topics your customers are interested in. Keyword research will help you understand what your customers are actively searching for, helping inform your content themes while ensuring your content is aligned with their interests.
Next, you need to figure out how you will reach your audience. The tactic here is to choose the channels where your target audience is most likely to be; this information should have been gathered during the audience research phase.
Some channels will be obvious choices based on the content type. For example, there’s only one place for a podcast episode to go! However, other content pieces, such as infographics, are more versatile and may be distributed across multiple channels or repurposed for different audiences.
Finally, it’s time to answer the all-important question: How will we do this?
Creating a content calendar provides a visual schedule outlining all publication timelines. This will help you ensure content is produced on time and delivered to the audience promptly while also allowing you to plan your resources effectively.
This is what we’re all here for! Creating the assets that will act as the bedrock of your marketing strategy. This stage is focused on creating high-quality content that is informative, relevant, and on-brand, delivering a consistent and engaging message to audiences.
Here are our recommendations for acing this stage:
This section is all about data! You can’t just let your content go into the world and never check up on it again; instead, measuring the success of your efforts can help you learn what does and doesn’t work, allowing you to optimize your strategy moving forward.
There is a huge range of metrics you use, and what you choose to measure will depend on the content type you’re analyzing and the funnel stage:
Here are some of the most relevant metrics to consider.
Newsflash: content marketing is not a one-and-done activity and neither is strategy optimization. This final stage will last as long as you’re creating content, allowing you continually adjust your strategies based on real-time learnings.
The objective here is to maintain relevance and drive continual success by refining your content strategy based on performance data, industry trends, and audience feedback. This might involve adjusting your content topics, launching different formats, or even testing new distribution channels.
Thankfully, artificial intelligence (AI) can help lessen the burden by automating previously time-consuming tasks such as identifying industry trends, analyzing content impact, and suggesting content optimizations!
The ability to create high-quality content can set your brand apart. High-quality content not only engages your audience but also influences search engine rankings, making it a cornerstone of your B2B SaaS Inbound Marketing Strategy. In this chapter, we'll explore how storytelling techniques can help you create engaging content for your tech brand.
Storytelling is a powerful tool that transcends mere information delivery, helping connect with your audience on an emotional level. Here’s how to tell a story that leaves an impact in five steps.
Effective storytelling begins with understanding your audience's preferences, needs, and pain points. Tailor your narrative to resonate with them by considering their demographics, interests, and challenges.
Clarity is key, so take the time to craft a clear and engaging story structure. For example, when creating a case study, start with a captivating introduction, build tension or curiosity in the middle, and provide a satisfying resolution or takeaway at the end.
No matter what type of content you’re creating, your narrative should go beyond the functional aspects of your product by diving into the values that drive your company. This will create a foundation for impactful storytelling that will spread throughout your content, creating a consistent view of your brand’s identity and story.
Paint a vivid picture with your words by using descriptive language. Sensory details will help immerse readers in your narrative and make them feel like they're part of the story. Stories appeal to your audience's emotions by evoking empathy, joy, or curiosity, and they are more likely to be shared.
Social proof is essential to building trust amongst prospects. Including real-world examples such as case studies, testimonials, and customer success stories adds authenticity and credibility to your content.
You can also incorporate anecdotes and research that helps illustrate your points, contextualizing your content and positioning your business as a thought leader.
Content isn’t just about the words you use. When creating high-quality content it is important to make sure you create content that is not only rich in terms of the content but also from a visual perspective. This can mean designing dedicated landing pages or even creating videos that summarize the main points of the content.
Like any area of marketing, there’s a right and a wrong way to do content marketing. Follow these four best practices, and you’ll be well on your way to creating a robust and effective B2B SaaS content marketing strategy that drives engagement, builds trust, and generates leads.
With the evolution of AI content marketing tools, producing content has never been easier. AI tools like ChatGPT can generate blog posts, social media updates, white papers, or even product descriptions based on given parameters, freeing up your B2B SaaS content writer to focus on strategy and creativity.
However, they are not infallible, and like any tool, it has its limits. You still need to do your due diligence to ensure you’re maintaining a high level of quality when it comes to writing and storytelling if you want to enjoy the full benefits of content marketing.Here are three examples of when AI can help optimize your SaaS content strategy:
To balance the conversation, here are three watch-outs to keep in mind:
If content is king, consistency is queen. In terms of content marketing for SaaS, this means ensuring that your brand story, product USPs, and voice are consistent across all content; this will help you maintain a recognizable brand identity that resonates with your target audience.Our recommendation is to document these elements in a TOV (tone of voice) guideline, which should include:
In B2B SaaS marketing, your goal is to solve specific problems for your audience by educating them on relevant topics or how to use your product.The key here is to focus on creating content that delivers real value. For example, in a product document, don’t just list the product’s features. Instead, highlight how your product addresses relevant business challenges and back this up using data, testimonials, and real customer case studies.
Your individual pieces of content shouldn’t exist in isolation. Help your customers navigate across your platforms by using backlinks and clear calls-to-action. Your content should guide customers from piece to piece, keeping them engaged while moving them through the buyer’s journey.
Looking for examples of great content marketing to guide your B2B SaaS content writing journey? Here are three of our favorites.
As part of its Help Center, Active Campaign has an entire section dedicated to release notes. This includes the latest product updates and enhancements, providing a breakdown of technical terms users may search for.
This sits separately from the rest of their content and is a great example of how businesses can support existing customers with product-focused content.
Sprout Social, a social media management software, has done some great work creating comprehensive pillar pages around terms their ideal customers will be searching for.
Pillar pages act as comprehensive guides to a specific topic and typically exist within a company’s blog; in Sprout Social’s case, one such page focuses on ‘Social media marketing.’ This pillar page includes links to other pages relevant to the topic, including ‘social media management,’ ‘social media goals,’ and ‘social media demographics,’ forming a comprehensive topic cluster around the term ‘social media.’
These pages also each feature backlinks to the pillar page and links to relevant product features, boosting them on search engines and establishing Sprout Social as a trusted resource in its category.
Unsurprisingly, Hubspot, a CRM software product, is great at content writing for SaaS. And they offer a wide range of courses tailored to their audience: marketers.
Some of the certification courses they offer include digital marketing, social media, and lead management, all essential skills marketers need to learn. What’s more, these courses are free.
By helping users and non-users upgrade their skills for free, Hubspot helps solve problems for their ideal customers and builds trust, while ensuring their product reminds top of mind.
While there’s a lot to consider when it comes to building a successful content marketing strategy, it doesn’t need to be overcomplicated.You can refer back to this guide whenever you need a reminder of the most important elements of content marketing for B2B SaaS products, ensuring you prioritize the correct types of content for your audience and goals.
Good luck!