B2B SaaS Content Marketing
You might have heard a lot about these two terms- B2B and SaaS. With the SaaS industry already exploding, 80% of businesses plan to switch completely to SaaS by 2025.
While the definition of these two terms may be known individually, less we know is the power of B2B SaaS.
B2B SaaS as evident is a business that offers software like applications, add-ons and plugins to other companies as a service. This form of service has been in existence for more than a decade now and companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google and Adobe are the big players.
But, what do these companies have in common? The short answer is- Amazing Content!
Irrespective of the company size or the services they provide, these prominent B2B saas providers have a dedicated blog page, tutorials, helpdesks and web content online.
Hence, a B2B SaaS business necessarily needs content marketing to thrive in a competitive space and build its presence online.
In this blog, we will be sharing everything you need to know about B2B SaaS content marketing and its benefits along with the steps to build an effective B2B SaaS content marketing strategy.
What is B2B SaaS Content Marketing?
B2B SaaS content marketing is a form of inbound marketing that the business would need to solve problems, answer the reader’s questions and provide every nitty-gritty detail about its product or services.
Thus, B2B content marketing would deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time.
Content in any form such as blog posts, ebooks, emails, whitepapers or web content will surely serve your audience but only at the right time.
Throughout your sales funnel, you would need to educate your audience with enticing content that serves the purpose of each stage.
The thing with SaaS content marketing is that it is highly competitive. It is all about creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to not only gain a new audience but also retain the existing ones for a long time.
That’s what Nectafy did with one of its clients. This content marketing strategy saw a staggering 647% growth for one of its clients by merely using the content marketing efforts.
Hence, a well-devised B2B SaaS content marketing strategy is a lucrative tool in gaining the right audience and achieving better conversions.
Importance of B2B SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
When it comes to B2B, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing in their strategy.
Content is King and it always will be.
Imagine yourself as a business that is willing to buy a product from a B2B SaaS provider.
What would you rather prefer- a forced selling pitch right from the beginning or educating your client about the benefits and problems it solves?
That’s what a B2B SaaS content marketing strategy guides you into. This strategic approach is of utter importance in targeting the right audience.
Here is how a content marketing strategy can help B2B SaaS providers:
Authority Building
You can’t survive in a competitive industry until you have built trust or authority over your customers.
And when it comes to B2B, the buyers are even more selective about the brands they are working with. This can only be achieved with the help of content marketing.
Building authority for your brand may require some time and most importantly, a well-executed content marketing plan.
Brand Awareness
Content marketing is key to driving brand awareness. Let’s say, you own a content platform for SaaS with a non-branded domain name.
Now, how would you drive organic traffic to your website?
Using the mindful Google search queries such as ‘SaaS content platform’ or ‘Best Content platform for SaaS businesses’ may drive the right type of audience to your blog.
Plus, you get to recall your brand. The more you get noticed, the more people will remember your brand.
Educate your audience
The Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) always involves educating your audiences and solving their pain points. Even down the funnel, you would need to consistently educate your audiences about the product features and benefits.
That said, content marketing plays a huge role right from the research stage till the decision stage.
In fact, 49% of buyers consider content as paramount during their purchase decision.
Drive traffic to your website
The more you create content that revolves around your industry, the more you can generate traffic that is trusted and relevant.
Content marketing is a major contributor to your website traffic. By posting the relevant content along with the mindful SEO techniques, you can attract readers who are readily looking for the answers.
Now that you have seen the importance of a B2B content marketing strategy, a lot of planning and research goes into creating this.
How to build a B2B SaaS Content Marketing Strategy
To meet your SaaS content marketing goals and to hook your audience, you need a robust content marketing strategy.
Obviously, it may take some time to hit the nail but with a strategy in place, you can be sure that you are going in the right direction.
To keep it short and concise, we have divided the process into five simple steps:
- Decide Your Goals
- Know Your Targeted Audience
- Create Content for Each phase of Buyer Journey
- Develop a Promotional Strategy
- Track and Optimize
The guide below explains each of the above steps in detail and the best practices to achieve exemplary results.
Decide your goals
The first and foremost thing is goal setting. What do you want to achieve using content marketing?
The problem is that there are a lot of content marketing objectives to achieve and targeting all of them at once can be overwhelming.
From acquiring new customers to email subscribers or a free trial registration to customer retention, content marketing goals may vary for different businesses and at different times.
Goal setting gives your content marketing strategy a kickstart and a direction to plan ahead. Breaking down your end goals into small and achievable goals ensures that the content efforts are in the right direction.
Most content marketers consider the macro-goals as:
- Create brand awareness
- Educate your customers
- Build credibility and trust
- Lead generation
Know your target audience
Everything starts from the audience. Since your purpose is to sell it to the customers, you need content that empathizes with your audience.
The starting point for identifying your target audience is creating a checklist of questions like:
- What problems can you solve for the SaaS provider?
- What industry are they in?
- Which social media platform are they most active on?
- What trade shows do they follow?
- What type of content would they prefer?
- How large is their customer base?
By adding more questions to the checklist, you can come closer to identifying your buyer persona.
While you can use the market research tools for conducting audience research, search engines like Google or social media can be a free resource for identifying the target audience.
In some cases, you might have more than one type of buyer persona. Hence, the best practice is to create a unique profile for each of your ideal buyers.
Create Content for Each Phase of Buyer Journey
To get more qualified leads and better traffic, you need to create different content at different stages of the buyer journey.
Refer to the below infographic by Digital Insights.
While this may not be always imperative, a marketing funnel should necessarily be injected with content at all stages of the buyer journey.
One of the major perks of creating content at each stage of the buyer’s journey is that it helps in identifying qualified leads. If your target audience can relate to what you offer, they can proceed further.
On the other hand, if they find that what you offer isn’t a good fit, they can leave at the early stage. This is actually a good thing as you may only have qualified leads in your basket.
Most marketers divide the buyer’s journey into three phases:
- Awareness Stage: In this stage, the audience needs to be educated more about their pain points and aware of the potential consequences.
- Consideration Stage: In this stage of the buyer’s journey, the prospect might have more than one option to consider. They haven’t made a buying decision yet but are looking for the best possible solutions to solve their problems.
- Decision Stage: This is the buying stage. To turn your prospect into a customer, you need to build more trust and tell them why choosing your brand would be a win. Use social proof, customer testimonials and video reviews to build trust and close the sales.
Develop a Promotional Strategy
While Search Engine Optimization may get you a lot of traffic, you will still miss a large portion of traffic or resultant leads if you are turning a blind eye to other promotional strategies.
Besides the organic traffic, you can leverage social media, email marketing and paid advertising to boost content promotion and attract more qualified leads.
According to Hootsuite, 80% of leads that are generated from social media come from Linkedin. Thus, LinkedIn is a goldmine for grabbing your customer’s eyeballs.
To get even more personal with your customers, you can leverage the power of email marketing. Though traditional, 93% of B2B email marketers still use email to distribute their content.
Thus, a cross-platform publishing strategy can be significant in boosting engagement and driving qualified traffic.
Track and Optimize
The last step is where you revisit the goals that you have created. Right from the beginning to the end, you need measurable data on what content works best and what are your potential target audiences.
By analyzing the performance of your content marketing efforts, you can evaluate and optimize the buyer journey wherever necessary.
The best way is to set up a report using an analytics platform. By doing this, you can set up the desired KPIs and review the results of your campaigns.
A web analytics platform can track various metrics like page views, conversions, bounce rate, time on page and others.
Finally, you can also find the best performing content and what distribution channels work best.
Conclusion
Content marketing is undeniably one of the cornerstones for B2B SaaS providers. Use content marketing as a messaging platform to distribute and deliver the content to those that need it the most.
By following the above-listed B2B SaaS content marketing strategies, you can fill in the potential gap between your audience and your brand. Additionally, content marketing contributes to increased brand loyalty, maximized lead acquisition and higher conversions.
Hope you have liked our actionable step by step guide to build an effective B2B SaaS content marketing strategy.
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