Today, many SaaS companies take pride in tech proficiency, so when content marketing is mentioned, they almost completely ignore the concept. During the preliminary stages, most SaaS companies think that features are the major determining factor for success or failure. They also believe that the right set of features is all that is needed to hook potential prospects and make them stay loyal to the brand. However, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.
While features are important, they don’t make or break your product. Starting in 2016, content marketing has become essential. Most prospects have grown immune to strong promotional messages and hype. Don’t be the SaaS who gets left behind because you ignored this crucial fact.
A Look at Content Marketing
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of confusion surrounding content marketing, and many companies have no idea what it really is. Some companies still believe that content marketing consists of publishing sporadic blog posts and waiting for the Google bot to work its magic.
There are even some companies that think content marketing consists of weak attempts to create buzz on social media sites by talking about curated articles and new trends. Real content marketing doesn’t involve any of these strategies.
The Definition of Content Marketing
Consistency is one of the key terms to understand. A schedule is a critical element of any content marketing strategy. It’s important to realize that content marketing should be viewed as a marathon and not a sprint. It must account for every phase that the buyer goes through.
Value is another term to remember. A major component of successful content and SaaS marketing is delivering value to potential prospects. To provide value, a company must provide wisdom and insights that competitors can’t offer. It’s possible to use proven content, but the value is determined by how the content is presented.
Many companies focus on attraction but never deliver the advice needed to properly recommend their SaaS product. If this is the way a company plans to handle content marketing, they’ll end up giving all of their leads to competitors. Studies show that a company that consistently blogs is much more likely to gain a positive ROI.Profitable customer acquisition is also important. Without a game plan, a content marketing strategy is almost guaranteed to fail. Every asset that is published needs to solve a particular problem. For example, a blog post addressing the buyer’s awareness stage might talk about the issues the buyer is currently facing.
Blog posts targeted at the buyer’s desire stage should talk about the need for advanced features and highlight the successes that your existing clients have obtained. Over 50 percent of all successful content marketing campaigns have an editorial mission that has been documented. Many companies do nothing more than post and pray, which is a great example of how not to handle content marketing.
SaaS Companies Must Care About Content Marketing
After clarifying these important terms, it’s important to understand why SaaS companies need to care about content marketing. The problem is that SaaS companies are forced to play ball against their peers far more often than virtually all other ventures in the tech market. The result is an overcrowded landscape, and SaaS companies must find a way to stand out.
A content marketing agency could be the answer, or companies might consider using content marketing management software. To stand out in an overcrowded landscape, SaaS companies must figure out how to provide value, and they must be able to deliver value consistently. They need to make sure they’re always on the minds of their prospects.
In the overcrowded SaaS industry, customers will always have other options to flee to. Many customers enter with unrealistically high expectations, and when these expectations aren’t met within the first month, they flee to a competitor. Another issue is that many customers are never properly on-boarded, so they don’t see the value in your SaaS product.Some companies try to accomplish this goal with banner and YouTube ads, and they end up failing because these strategies aren’t engaging or valuable. The good news is that content marketing is engaging and valuable. A major problem that SaaS companies must deal with is called churn. One of the top causes of customer churn is options.
Content marketing works very well for teaching customers what to expect, which occurs during the attraction stage, but it also gives them all of the tools that they need to properly explore the software and enjoy some level of instant gratification.
Eventually, it even serves as an effective way to offer after sales to customers. The reality is that SaaS companies do not have a tangible product, so they must work extra hard to convert prospects.
Content marketing provides the leverage and opportunities to convert prospects, and it serves as one of the best ways to establish an ongoing relationship with prospective buyers. When a content marketing strategy is deployed effectively, it converts the vendor into a welcome guest and doesn’t cause prospects to view the vendor as annoying.
How to Properly Combine Your Sales Funnel with Content Marketing
If you look at a typical SaaS sales funnel, you’ll see that it attracts prospects and offers many content marketing examples. Next, it converts the prospects, gets them onboard and retains them. The end goal is to get a high LTV for every prospect. These are all different stages of the sales funnel.
By adding a hook to every stage, content marketing can significantly improve the odds of success. If you want to make your SaaS marketing easier, a content marketing agency can help. There are several successful content marketing examples to look at.
The Attraction Phase
A popular SaaS product is HubSpot. Almost all noteworthy pieces of marketing content originate from HubSpot. To make navigation easier, HubSpot’s blog is cut into three categories. HubSpot never restricts itself to narrow topics.
It gives away cold calling templates, pushes out stunning infographics and offers cheat sheets for Excel shortcuts. Most people would find it difficult to search for anything related to marketing and not find a listing from HubSpot.
While most SaaS ventures don’t have a budget to sustain something this large, HubSpot can be used as a great benchmark. With such a prolific profile, HubSpot has no trouble attracting prospects.
The Conversion Phase
If a prospect has been primed properly, conversion requires nothing more than making the prospect a believer. SaaS ventures can use past successes to build trust with potential buyers. Since most SaaS ventures have a few successful case studies to share, they’ve already won half the battle.
However, it’s not enough to tuck case studies away into an obscure corner of your website. Successful case studies are assets, and they should be given center stage.
An example of a company that does this exceptionally well is NetSuite. They have a customer success portal, which showcases hundreds of challenges that have been solved for global brands.
It even gives prospects the ability to filter through the success stories and find companies that they resonate with. With this powerful functionality, prospects are able to find circumstances similar to their own and decide if NetSuite is a good fit.
The Onboarding Process
Another important phase is the onboarding process. If clients explicitly ask for it, they want to be assisted. Self-service is quickly replacing handholding, and as a result, more intuitive interfaces are being created to eliminate frustration.
The problem is that many SaaS ventures don’t pay enough attention to onboarding content. For this phase, you might want to forget about emails and blog posts.
You’ll do much better with customized demonstrations and FAQs. Cloud vendors can use WalkMe and similar platforms to create industry specific demos. These demos allow customers to learn independently and provide guidance as it’s needed.
The Retention Phase
The next phase is retention. Although many ventures use them, customer success representatives cannot guarantee a reduction in churn. To retain customers, a SaaS company must prove that it’s a source of actionable advice and useful information. These forms of value are what make customers stick around.
Podcasts and webinars are great ways to deep dive into subjects and provide the value that retains customers. Webinars are especially useful for discussing the problems that your SaaS product aims to solve.
There are several brands that use monthly podcasts to retain customers. Over time, customers become used to hearing the voice of the podcaster and would never think of embracing any other brand. There are countless examples of SaaS ventures handling customer retention like champs. If you need help, you might want to consider content marketing management software.
Conclusion
In the end, you must realize that we’re living in a world based on experiences. Tech and price are quickly becoming less relevant, and new technologies are getting ripped and imitated in a matter of weeks.
Features used to be very popular, but most SaaS buyers don’t think features are nearly as important as they used to be. Proper content marketing is the key to inspiring trust and has the power to make your SaaS venture much more successful.
