Let’s face it; the majority of in-house content marketers and outsourced content marketing agencies focus on the amount of delivery and activities they will provide on a month-to-month basis.
But do they commit to signups and conversions as metrics you can gauge them against?
Would it make more sense for a SaaS owner or CMO if they are getting over 100,000 visits to the blog articles a month with the hope there will be someย conversions or if they are getting 25,000 visits based on their SaaS Content Marketing Strategy with a 2-4% target as conversion rate?
I’m sure you, as a SaaS owner, would agree to have the latter would be a better option and something as a business you can bank on with respect to planning your growth numbers and revenue targets.
Why should SaaS Companies focus on KPI-based Content Marketing?
Marketers are led to believe that focusing across the funnel is essential to get their content marketing efforts spot on.
Some even go to the extent that they are led to believe that having a higher proportion of top-of-funnel content is essential.
This is based on the understanding that buyers need to be educated about the niche, benefits of the SaaS category and how the product can facilitate potential users to solve their problem statement.
But that doesn’t have to be the case in all instances.
The reason for this is that the chances of your Saas Product being a breakthrough category are limited. A host of existing competitors would already have focused on writing content marketing articles for the SaaS segment covering Top of Funnel topics.
So why waste valuable resources writing more along the same lines when you can easily piggyback your competitor’s content that has facilitated the prospective buyer further down the user journey?
This brings us to why SaaS Companies should focus on conversion-oriented SaaS Content Marketing Strategy and Implementation.
Simply put, you need to have a razor-sharp focus on ensuring you don’t leave money on the table.
Where are the SaaS Content Marketing examples to show that this works?
I’ll share two case studies of SaaS companies we’ve facilitated through Content Marketing.
One is a Project Management app with a US and European market focus.
The ConvertBunny client struggled to increase their free, premium and business trials before contacting us.
We went through their page stats and were able to identify that there were over 2200 articles published on the blog over the past five years.
That’s roughly 40 long-form articles a month.
The pressing thing for us was that nearly 90% of those 2200 articles were either top of funnel or middle of funnel at best.
Despite getting over 250,000 organic hits to their SaaS website monthly, they struggled to increase their signups by an inch.
On the contrary, it steadily declined over six months before the engagement period.
Post diagnosis, our SEO and Content Strategy team at ConvertBunny strongly needed to focus on Bottom of Funnel content during the engagement.
So we proposed to the client that we’ll do articles at roughly the same monthly frequency for the 3-month engagement but manage expectations for growth through razor-sharp attention to conversion-oriented content.
Our bottom-of-funnel content was primarily focused on comprehensive listicles.
Our goal was to provide reviews for readers that answered all the significant feature queries people search for, explaining any differentiators between products and the pricing structure for each product.
Given this Project Management app already had an excellent Domain Reputation and link profile, we were always confident we could build topical authority for the new titles based on the clusters we had envisioned.
The results spoke volumes that we got the strategy right!
We started with the client hovering in the 120,000 monthly organic search clicks per month.
By the third month of publishing, we had crossed 170,000 monthly organic search clicks per month.
We began publishing in November early and were already ranking for the critical bottom-of-funnel keywords by Mid December 2022.
Despite ranking for the new conversion-oriented keywords, we didn’t see a spike in traffic until early Jan 2023, the post-holiday season, in our primary target market.
But the increase was substantial, close to a 50K monthly increase in organic search clicks.
But that’s not all.
The average business trial the client got before the engagement was between 50 and 60 trials per day.
Post-implementation and holiday season, this was between 100 and 130 daily business trials.
So we had 2x trial signups for the Project Management tool within a short engagement period.
Hence we at ConvertBunny are always confident about getting our strategy and implementation right for clients in different segments and niches.
3 Ways to Ensure Your SaaS Content Marketing Strategy is Conversion Focused.
SaaS companies have a never-ending thirst for new clients.
Though retention is 5X less costly for most companies, the eventual time frame it takes to hit product market fit and optimise your SaaS product means that companies need more signups daily.
But how do businesses ensure that content marketing does not just bring in any visitor to their website but the right visitor?
Fine-tuning your approach and creating content that resonates with the client is what matters.
Your strategy needs to address paint points that people have and how your SaaS product can facilitate prospective clients in mitigating them.
1. Focus on Content that answers pain points.
Pain Point Identification is essential as a starting point; you need to get your thinking cap on to get the right insights.
The best way of approaching this is to have a questionnaire with you that you ask your clients, the customer success team and the leadership team.
Having input from each can be a game changer as you can understand the challenges in more detail.
This will allow you to produce content that is not fluff but answers business problems.
Having a sense of direction always helps.
So the team at ConvertBunny wants to share a Research Questionnaire that we use for understanding clients’ pain points.
This questionnaire is life-saving, and we would like to credit Grow and Convert for sharing this.
Here is a breakdown of questions we ask the Leadership Team regarding pertinent issues about their B2B SaaS clients:
- What were some of the largest deals closed in the last year?
- Which customers were the easiest to close? As in the shortest sales cycleโฆ Why was that?
- What other products or services come up in sales conversations?
- Are there any products or services that prospects often switch from?
- Who typically buys the product or service? What is the most common title of the person buying our solution?ย
- Who are the other decision makers that were involved in the buying process?
- When youโre on a sales call with a prospect, is there any situation or circumstance that indicates someone is more likely to buy? For example, are there any telltale situations or scenarios that you know this lead will close whenever you see it? (Or this lead will never close).ย
- For the companies that bought our product/service, what was the most common reason they bought?
- Of all product or service features, are there one or two that people seem to be attracted to when buying?
Questions we ask the Customer Support Teams.
- What customers have a low support headache?
- What are the most used features of the product?
- What customers see the value of our product or service?
- Who are our largest accounts?
- Who do you view as our โbest customersโ?
- What companies have you been able to sell additional products or services to?
- What are some of the most common questions great customers ask?
- What are some of the most common questions the not-so-great customers ask?
Product-Related Pain Points to Ask Customers.
- What is the primary benefit that you have received from (Product or service Name)?
- What are the top 3 benefits you get from (Product/ Service name)?
- How would you feel if you could no longer use (Product or Service Name)? Why?
- What would you likely use as an alternative to (Product or Company Name) if it were no longer available?
- Have You Recommended (Product or Company Name) to anyone? If so, how did you describe it?
- What other roles or titles besides yours do you think would get a significant benefit from (Product or Service Name)?
- How Could We Improve (Product or Company Name) To Better Meet Customer Needs?
- At what point would this product/service get expensive but still worth it?
- What problem were you trying to solve when you initially came across our product or service?
- Whatโs holding you back from using x product/service?
Once you have the pain points answered, as a Marketer and SEO, you need to align with the Content function to produce insights that answer the exact queries you got as part of the questionnaire above.
2. Answering real-life problems and challenges clients face is a top priority; aligning with keywords comes secondary.
Fair enough that you want to have a content calendar in place.
We do the same.
Planning is fine.
But don’t write for search engines or algorithms in 2023.
Focus on content that answers people’s queries and things they want to educate themselves on.
Don’t produce content that only tries to align with keywords; follow a linear process.
Content that works best for SaaS companies is focused on solving problems for visitors and proposing your product as a potential solution.
Writing 2000+ word count articles to follow an SEO process is not okay.
Remember that you always stay connected with the goal you set for yourself.
The goal is to write for people, not for search engines.
Readers are much more informed and need more actionable insights versus answering who, what, where, and when frameworks to cover all bases for content development.
Your content team should ideally be filled with writers who are subject matter experts.
Getting a marketing grad with no development experience to write for a technical SaaS product is a recipe for frustration.
Focus on writing content through specialists who understand the industry and niche & can relate to real-life challenges people face.
3. Our Recommendation for 2023 is don’t embrace AI right now – Maybe a couple of quarters down the lane; this may change, but not yet!
Based on experimenting with AI and increasing traffic for multiple clients, I can honestly tell you that, especially for higher DR websites, you can get content to rank through AI.
But there is a challenge with AI that doesn’t align well with the content that most AI tools produce.
Like I’ve been reiterating, don’t write for search engines and attempt to align your copy with the best SERP Results and try to go one up by being more comprehensive and having a better link profile and subsequently higher DR.
You want to answer questions that people have in their minds and are searching on engines.
Though AI can stillย generate content that does answer whatever pain point you’re trying to address.
The problem is that AI doesn’t know you, your target audience in as much detail, or your product offering as a product owner would, so aligning all that is currently challenging through an AI Tool.
Hence, our recommendation is to stick with human-written content, and each word and statement needs to be well thought out and structured so that your content is aligned with what your audience is looking for.
Go for quality over scale, but it would be ideal if you could manage both.
Remember, in most cases, SEO will take time, regardless of your approach.
Though you can dramatically increase the conversion rates for your content marketing if you focus on the customer and their challenges instead of keywords.
Actual people will read your content, and hence does not have to be aligned with what bots think or want.
Focus on your ideal user, understand their pain points and focus on answering them.
