Creating a Killer SaaS Content Marketing Strategy, Quick

Introduction

You’re probably aware that many successful SaaS companies around the world are using content marketing to generate quality leads. 

By this point, you’ve probably already tested it out for your own business and seen some results. However, you’ve also seen just how time-consuming it can be.

Especially because, in order to see success, you need to create high quality content. Consistently and regularly.

According to a recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute this is the second biggest challenge for SaaS marketers. Right after creating engaging content.

So, how do you create engaging content, consistently?

The short answer: you need to implement an effective, full-funnel SaaS content marketing strategy. 

In this in-depth guide, we’ll run through our miracle 5-step process. With it by your side, you’ll be able to build a smashing SaaS content marketing strategy that drives real results. Quickly. 

The best part? There’s no catch. Let’s get started. 

Putting the SaaS in Content Marketing

Before we get started with the main show (strategy-building), let’s cover some groundwork. 

Why is content marketing so important for SaaS companies in particular? 

While you’d be forgiven for thinking of your SaaS business as selling a “product,” it’s probably more helpful to look at it as selling a “product” and the service that goes alongside it. 

Because this is a higher stakes sell, there’s usually a lot more touch points required to convert a prospect and a lot more education involved in the process. 

This is where a well-devised SaaS content marketing strategy comes into the picture. 

You need to be able to create content that answers all the questions your prospects are asking and aligns with every stage of the funnel in order to generate sales.

The Importance of a Full-Funnel Approach

In our process, building a content marketing strategy should always be a full-funnel approach. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the funnel concept, it is essentially the most common way of visualising the SaaS buyer’s journey; from first touchpoint to paying customer.

The larger group at the top are potential customers, the mid are warmer prospects and the narrow group at the bottom are actual customers.

You’ll hear B2B marketers like us refer to these stages as: top-funnel (TOFU), mid-funnel (MOFU) and bottom-funnel (BOFU).

When you’re devising your SaaS content marketing strategy, you want to make sure you create content that aligns with the needs of your audience at each of these stages of the funnel. And that you cover them all. 

This is what we call a “full-funnel approach” and is the key to our success. 

5 Steps to Creating a Killer Full-Funnel SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

Now that we’ve covered why it’s so important for SaaS companies to smash their content marketing out of the park and why a full-funnel approach is key – it’s time to jump into what you all came for. The strategy build. 

1. Understand your target audience

The first step in building a successful SaaS content marketing strategy is to really get a grip on who your target audience is. Who are they? What do they do? What do they desire? What are they currently struggling with?

This may seem like a self-explanatory point, but you simply can’t write great content unless you know everything about the audience you’re talking to. And that’s where content marketing personas come in.

Create or flesh out your buyer personas

If you don’t already have buyer personas – you absolutely need to create them. If you already have them, that’s great, but don’t skip this step! You’ll most likely need to update them or flesh them out further in order to truly slay your content marketing efforts.

So, how do you create an effective persona? Essentially, you’ll need to create a profile for each person involved in the decision making process for your product. We’d generally recommend creating 3-5. 

Populate each profile with key demographic info and data points about that person – covering everything from their age and job title to their problems, needs and desires. You’ll want to make sure to collect the following: 

Basic Details	Further insights
Age	Psychographics (personality, values, \opinions, attitude, interests & lifestyles)
Gender	Behaviour
Location	Pain points
Job Title/s	Media Use
Job Function	How they would use your product / service
Seniority Level / Level of Experience	Any objections they might have to using your product / service
Company Type	Technology
Job Responsibilities	Goals

This is by no means an exhaustive list of info points to collect, but it is a good starting point for your excavation and research. Once you have a list, it’s time to dig into the data.

Back it up with data 

To start your quest, online databases like Zippia, Seek or Career Explorer can be super helpful. Particularly when it comes to finding demographic info (gender, age, location stats), sussing out job responsibilities and assessing decision making power. 

On the other hand, to gauge topics and interests your personas care about, you should be using content tools like BuzzSumo, Facebook groups, industry publications and industry conference itineraries. 

These can give you a better idea of what topics and subjects your personas are interested in learning about and help shed light on their desires and challenges. 

If you have an established website, you should also be looking at your site analytics and your CRM and/or email marketing data. Plus, if you have any interviews or surveys you’ve run previously, or have the budget to run new ones, this is really worth doing.

In this research-gathering part of the process, it’s important to use as many data sources as possible and make note of all of them. You want to grab as much high quality data at this point as possible. 

Bring it all together

Once you have all the information you need, it’s time to bring it all together and create a nicely designed document for each persona. 

The “look” (formatting, fonts, imagery etc.) may sound like an afterthought but if your docs aren’t appealing or easily accessible, there’s nothing compelling yourself and your team to refer back to them later. Trust us – we’ve learnt the hard way! Keep your persona docs pretty and public.

Need a bit more guidance to nail your personas? You can always use a template like this one by One Red Bird or the many other helpful templates you can find with a quick search on Google. This is an easy way to ensure you have all the details you need.

2. Do your content research

Once you understand your audience back-to-front: it’s time to start fleshing out your full- funnel approach. What does this mean? Researching the kinds of questions you should be answering with your content at each stage of the funnel and the types of content you should be using to achieve the best results.

Keyword research

The first step here to create a full funnel approach is to do keyword research. If you’ve done any sort of marketing before you’ll be no stranger to the importance of keywords. We recommend using Keyword Planner, SEMrush or Ahrefs keyword research tools here. Each of these tools are great for giving you the lay of the land and giving you the ideas you need.

Once you’ve fired up one ask yourself: What are the broad informational keywords around their problem that people are searching for at the top of the funnel? What are the mid-funnel terms that link the problem to the solution? What are the terms with commercial intent that would fit at the bottom? 

Enter in terms you think will be relevant for each stage, and just gather as much info as you can. Doing this research, assessing relevance and analysing the search volume and competition of each term will take time but it’s a VERY important step in informing your overall strategy. Particularly if SEO or Google Ads will be key channels for you. 

Once you’ve pulled together all the relevant terms in a document, categorised by funnel stage, and matched with a relevant persona, you’ll have a list of key topics for each stage of the funnel. This list will be the basis of your strategy. 

Refer back to your content research

Pull up the content ideas document you pulled around personas in part 1.

While keyword research is great for giving you an idea of the types of terms and topics you want to target, it’s good to match these with “trending” pieces of content that you’ve found around the subject that are performing well and that your persona is already engaging with. This will give you a bit more direction when it comes to content creation. 

By combining your persona content ideas with keyword-specific ones, you can ensure you have a diverse bank of content ideas to tap into for different channels / funnel stages. Even content topics you found don’t necessarily align with keywords, they can still be helpful for guiding your content on social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram where search intent isn’t important. 

The more ideas you have here – the better!

Competitor research

Once you’ve done your keyword and content research, it’s time to bulk this up with content ideas taken from what your competitors. With a few clicks of a button, you can see what content types your competitors lean towards, what type of content is getting them the most engagement and where most of their efforts are delegated. 

Reviewing what your competitors are doing (whether they’re doing it well or not] can really help you ensure your content is relevant to the market, cutting edge, and adds value to the conversation rather than repeating it. 

Follow these simple steps:

1. Identify at least 5 of your biggest competitors. 
2. Log into a tool like Ahrefs 
3. Check out their “organic keywords” “paid keywords” and “top ranking pages”
4. Make note of any content that is performing well 
5. Go to their website and read through their blog / resources section 
Add any relevant / compelling ideas to your own research 

Now that you have all your research – consider what specific topics you want to focus on for each stage of the funnel and each persona. We find it easiest to start with one persona, one general theme and then map out the content at each funnel stage for that theme. 

For example, say your persona is the CMO Steve and your product is an online Lead Gen tool. At the top of the funnel, you might choose to address the struggle many CMO’s are having with Lead Gen. 

Then, in the middle, you could talk about how to solve this problem, with one solution being yours. And then at the bottom, a BOFU case study which covers the specific benefits of your solution for solving that problem. 

3. Choose your formats

Now that the research portion is done and you’ve thought about the topics you want to cover at each stage of the funnel – it’s time to choose your content formats! We’ll run through each funnel stage and the content formats we’d generally recommend for each.

Keep in mind, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach here. These are just our suggestions:

TOFU 

The focus of top-funnel activity should be on generating awareness and establishing your brand to a target audience who doesn’t know who you are. 

As such, you should stick to easily digestible, stackable and engaging pieces of content. And focus on educating your prospects, and answering their questions as opposed to selling to them. Examples of suitable content formats for this funnel stage could include:

-Videos
-Infographic
-Blog post
-Tools
-Social media posts

MOFU 

For mid-funnel activity, you should be focused on driving high quality leads in your target audience. As well as presenting your business as a viable solution to their pain points in a non-salesly way. As such, we strongly suggest you provide prospects with high-value, long-form gated lead magnets that address their pain points and subtly introduce your solution like: