How to Set Up Your SaaS Content Marketing Strategy: 6 Steps to Success
Do you have a SaaS business? Are you publishing content as a way to bring in and nurture potential customers? ⬅️ If so, you need a SaaS content marketing strategy. To put it bluntly, content without a strategy is akin to a house without a foundation, support beams, walls, or a roof. Instead of welcoming a constant flux of eager visitors to your beautiful abode, you’ll just be sitting alone on a pile of bricks. The strategy gives your SaaS content marketing a purpose, structure, goals, and a strong foundation to build on. Without it, you’ll flounder with content. You won’t nurture leads – you’ll lose them. The ONLY way to start seeing exponential, compounding online growth with SaaS content marketing is to outline your content strategy plan, fill in the blanks, and follow it to the letter. Don’t believe me yet? Let’s look at the difference between content created & published without a strategy vs. WITH a strategy. How to Build a SaaS Content Marketing Strategy: Table of Contents Content Marketing with and Without a Strategy: What’s the Difference? 2 Years in, Without a Content Marketing Strategy What Happens with a Content Strategy in Place? What Do You Need for Successful SaaS Content Marketing? 6 Key, Strategic Pillars 1. Know the Base Levels of SaaS Content Strategy: Define Topic Areas, Goals, & More Goals and Content Mission Topic Area(s) of Focus Content Differentiation Factor 2. Get to Know Your Audience for Solid SaaS Content Marketing Find Your Ideal Target Buyer Research, Research, Research Know Your Customers’ Common Buying Journeys 3. Integrate SEO Research Long-Tail Keywords and Connected Topics Optimize Your Content 4. Build Your Content House 5. Understand How to Create Content for SaaS Marketing Fill Your Audience’s Knowledge Gaps Write to Engage Kill the Fluff 6. Track, Measure, Update, & Maintain Track and Measure Update and Maintain Your SaaS Content Marketing Strategy Is Covered [bctt tweet=”With all the offers out there, how can you make sure that your SaaS company and product stand out? @JuliaEMcCoy tells how and why you should make SaaS content marketing strategy right now ” username=”ExpWriters”] Content Marketing with and Without a Strategy: What’s the Difference? At Express Writers, we’re not selling SaaS, but our content plays the same roles as it would for a SaaS business: building audience trust in our brand, showing our expertise, and nurturing traffic and leads. Unfortunately, without a content marketing strategy, our content didn’t have the impact we hoped it would. We weren’t meeting our goals at the beginning. 2 Years in, Without a Content Marketing Strategy With 215 blogs published, we were only ranking for 141 keywords Our monthly gross income never topped $29K At most, we saw 500 visitors a day On top of these lackluster numbers, I was suffering, too. Hustling every day but not seeing any rewards (because I was misdirecting my energy) Stressed and scrounging for leads Working constantly to make ends meet Then, in September 2016, I finally built and implemented a content marketing strategy. What happened next? What Happens with a Content Strategy in Place? Life was never the same after our content marketing strategy hit the ground running. A few months after executing the strategy, we hit our first, landmark $71K income month. Our ranking keywords shot up from 3,900 to 6,000. It didn’t stop there. Within roughly one year, we were hitting records every month – January 2018 saw us hit our first-ever $120K income month. We were ranking for over 12,800 keywords My blogs were getting the highest number of shares I’d ever seen. EW ranked #1 for hot keywords (e.g. “content writing outsourcing”) Today, we’re still blowing our old records out of the water. 99% of our clients come to us from our content marketing We rank for over 24,000 keywords in Google We’ve earned over $4.5 million in agency sales We see 90,000 to 100,000 organic visitors every month As you can see, no content strategy = If you say YES to a content strategy, however… ✔ It’s true for SaaS and non-SaaS industries alike that invest in content. For those of you tuning in from a SaaS background, stay with me. We’re about to get into how to build your SaaS content marketing strategy. [bctt tweet=”Do you need a SaaS content marketing strategy? Don’t think twice. @JuliaEMcCoy shows the HUGE difference in ROI between having none vs. using a well-planned strategy for @ExpWriters.” username=”ExpWriters”] What Do You Need for Successful SaaS Content Marketing? 6 Key, Strategic Pillars So, you need a SaaS content marketing strategy. That means it’s time to learn how to do SaaS marketing the right way. The best SaaS marketing campaigns use these 6 pillars. They form the foundation for a working content marketing platform for your business. 1. Know the Base Levels of SaaS Content Strategy: Define Topic Areas, Goals, & More Your SaaS content marketing plan needs a few basic factors defined before you can get into the nitty-gritty of audience research or content creation. Goals and Content Mission First, what is your main goal for your content marketing initiative? What do you hope to achieve? How will you build relationships with customers through content? Outline the answers to those questions two ways: As an overarching mission for your SaaS content marketing. Phrase it the way you would phrase your broad business mission and goals. The two should be tied together and complement each other! Focused goals with measurable outcomes in the form of KPIs (key performance indicators). For example, Content Marketing Institute offers some solid KPIs tied to common goals for content marketing: Create brand awareness – Track and measure social shares Drive more traffic to your website or blog – Track total website visits monthly, the percentage of return visitors, or the time on site where the visitor was actively engaged Generate leads – Track the number of leads each piece of content earned, or track conversion rates for your landing pages Improve customer retention – Track … Read more