Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies live in a highly competitive universal with mathematical code, complex processes, and technical jargon. 

Your potential customers need a way to unpack industry jargon and explain it in plain English like they are five years old.

Content marketing solves this problem for SaaS companies. However, the common question is, "Can we win without content marketing?" Unfortunately, the short answer is no, but I'll explain in more detail throughout this article. 

Quick Takeaways

• The branding for your SaaS needs to communicate its complexity with simplicity.
• Since long-term relationships are the basis of the SaaS business model, your content needs to form and nurture relationships.
• A solid content marketing strategy builds brand awareness in a saturated market and drives ROI.
• SaaS companies can showcase their unique value proposition with a comprehensive content marketing strategy.
  

SaaS Companies Need A Long-Term Marketing Strategy

Convenience is the most complementing advantage that your SaaS customers enjoy. This is because they can automatically renew their subscription at the click of a button. There's no need to go online or to the store to get the new batch of software. IT forms a long-term customer relationship. 

SaaS companies, in turn, need branding and a marketing strategy that nurtures relationships. Content is how you inform potential customers about the service and how it can help them generate more revenue while solving their biggest problems. For example, blog posts, YouTube videos, and other types of content enable existing customers to get the most out of their SaaS investment while also being valuable ways to ensure customer loyalty. 

Content Marketing Builds Brand Awareness

Unless you are an industry giant, your SaaS company needs to inform your target audience that you have a service that can help them. This is where content marketing comes in. In fact, "SEO Guru" Neil Patel steered his SEO software into a business powerhouse by providing customers and prospects with easily accessible and actionable content on his blogs and newsletters. 

If you're a small to medium-sized SaaS company, your content marketing strategy is the easiest way to drive more sales compared to traditional marketing strategies. According to a study by DemandMetric, it is 62% more affordable and produces 3x more leads than paid traffic and other marketing strategies. 

The more informative your content is, the more value prospects and customers see in your service bringing to their business or personal lives. As a result, SaaS companies are differentiating themselves from competitors with content that showcases the advantages of working with them. 

SaaS Companies With A Comprehensive Content Marketing Strategy See A Unparalleled ROI

Just like everything else in life, statistics show that SaaS companies leveraging content marketing are enjoying massive ROIs up to 657% on their investments. That's what we call WINNING. Whether you are a SaaS company just getting started, a legacy SaaS, or somewhere in between, when you rub the numbers, this is hard to refute. 

SaaS Startups 

Many of the most popular SaaS companies today were startups just a few years ago but have risen to become a global powerhouses, thanks to them focusing on strategic content marketing outputs. Hubspot and Moz, for example, have experienced incredible growth due to their consistent effort in content marketing. 

 Legacy Brands

Similarly, many technology-based SaaS that has been around for decades and even centuries have been using content marketing to stay ahead of the number of ever-growing SaaS Startups. For example, SaaS giant IBM controls a large portion of the search engine today through their massive library of thought leadership content, created by regular employees and not only their marketing department. 

Your Content Marketing Strategy is the Key To Your SaaS Success

A solid content marketing strategy can drive insane numbers in terms of ROI, so let's look at the marketing strategies that AccretionEngine utilized to yield consistent and proven results to our clients. 

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Leverage key employees' expertise

Massive SaaS companies like IBM showcase their employees' expertise by building trust among prospects through content marketing. In our experience, employee-generated leads are SEVEN times more likely to convert than traditional marketing messages. 

Furthermore, the content generated by non-marketing employees has EIGHT times more engagement than those from sales and marketing teams. Whenever your SaaS company's subject matter expertise is brought into the content marketing process, the authenticity of your brand shines through.

 Focus on your Customers

Customers in today's marketplace want to deal with companies they trust - a business that is an authority in its respective field. Customer-centric content marketing is the best way to earn the trust of your prospective customers. 

Study Customer Data

Content Marketing, when implemented correctly, starts with a deep dive into your prospects and customers' data. Knowing their needs, desires, and their pain points gives your content team enough insight to create content that helps them rise to meet their challenges. 

Segment Your Email Audience

One of the most crucial parts of email marketing and your newsletter is segmenting your audience. Many SaaS companies have a broad spectrum regarding their target audience and need to generate enough information about their flagship product related to every part of their email lists. 

Whenever your blog posts reflect diversity, some are directed at meeting the needs of their specific customer segments. In contrast, others provide material of general interest to everyone they are targeting. Using an industry-specific menu on static content, your website's analytics can differentiate users from the healthcare industry to retail. This way, when a user becomes a subscriber, you can personalize the content they receive based on their unique needs. 

Suppose you do not use your users' online activity to segment audiences. In that case, you can use social media analytics, surveys, or a different field on your signup form to indicate their specific interests. 

Tackle Most Pressing Challenges of Your Target Audience

The difference between a winning SaaS content marketing strategy and your current strategy starts here. Defining the problems that your customers are currently facing is the first step toward solving them. Then, creating content that outlines easy-to-implement steps your readers can immediately put into action solves those problems. 

Make Your USP Stand Out From The Crowd

You do not need to create boring content about all of your SasS features in blog posts. Your prospects want to see what makes your product better than your competitors while also solving their most significant problems by showcasing your unique selling proposition with content you're showing more than telling. 

Use case studies, customer success stories, and how-to posts to demonstrate why and how the features of your product make it a better fit for your target audience's needs. When you create graphs and infographics, you're telling the story in numbers; this is crucial, especially if you're B2B SaaS company. 

Position yourself as an industry thought leader

If you're reading this article, you're probably someone in a leadership role at your company; you know way too well that yesterday's "shiny new toy" can become obsolete overnight. However, with a comprehensive content marketing strategy, you can place yourself and your expertise on the leading edge of your industry. 

Thought-provoking questions and comments on various social media platforms will generate buzz around your company. Putting these thoughts in the form of blog posts, white papers, and ebooks will start turning heads your brand's way. 

Using current events that impact your target audiences' industries will extend your reach even further. Unless the event has already been covered to its maximum traffic potential, sharing your take on an event can demonstrate your SaaS leadership and foresight. 

Offer free trials as the CTA for Bottom-of-the-funnel content.

If your SaaS lives up to the claims that your content promised, serious prospects will convert into paying customers after a free trial; once they are using your SaaS to handle a one-ff problem, the chances that they'll discover how well your software works to make their day-to-day life more manageable. If the cost to get access to your product in the hands of your ICP plus the cost of customer acquisition is lower than the customer's lifetime value, then a free trial is well worth your trouble. 

You're setting yourself apart from your competitors by providing trial users with specialized content that will help them get the most value out of their trial subscription. Then, whenever they see the success of using your software, they'll likely pull the trigger and become a paying customer. 

After the sale, your main objective is to keep customers loyal with gated content that only customers can access. Focus on content that teaches your customers better ways to use your product. 

Use account-based marketing content to land large accounts.

Some prospects have the potential to offer you a massive influx of revenue. These are usually large enterprises with an enormous user base (if you price per user). 

Or, these well-known businesses that have them as a customer will position you as a leader in your industry. Then, when other companies see that this company has signed on, they'll be more likely to jump on the bandwagon. 

Account-based marketing (AMB) content is labor intensive, but the benefits of acquiring these customers are more than well worth the effort. Start by looking at the challenges that each of these target companies' main-decision face and create content that addresses those concerns. 

By collaborating with your sales and customer service team, you'll be able to identify objections and feedback that your prospects and similar companies face; subject matter experts, such ad your dev and design teams, will provide information about the technical details that make your SaaS the one solutions that answers your prospect's objections while solving their problems. 

As time passes, you can keep a repository of effecting AMB content that you consistently tweak and repurpose for future accounts. By doing this, you allow yourself to extend a modified ABM strategy to several major prospects simultaneously. 

Content marketing stands at the head of marketing strategies for SaaS companies; its adaptability to the unique needs of SaaS burns will make your company a significant player in the space for years to come. 

If you're ready to generate more traffic to your website with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Marketing Sprint. Let's get started today and start the process of driving more traffic and leads for your business.