Visibility is everything for SaaS. Getting your service noticed and building your audience requires a multifaceted strategy. You’ve probably already started working on your outreach strategies with social media, email, and content marketing. However, your blog may be your most important asset — more than you realize. If done correctly it can boost not just your organic search presence, but also your conversion rate, Let’s talk about what makes a great blog and why you need to take another look at yours.
The Value of Blogs for SaaS
Blogs do more than just please search crawlers. Humans read them if you make posts correctly. That makes your blog a tremendous opportunity for all sorts of things like:
- Brand awareness: consistently sharing valuable content increases your visibility, especially if you are sharing your blog posts regularly on social media and in your newsletter.
- Building customer trust: by demonstrating thought leadership, expertise, and case studies with your blog, you can gain authority and trust with your middle of funnel audience and existing customers.
- Lead generation and conversion: traffic isn’t everything. Structuring blog posts for humans will transform high intent leads into conversions down the road, even if not immediately.
Let’s dive deeper to explore the value of blog posts for SaaS.
As found in my post about content marketing, businesses with blogs net 67% more conversions than those without blogs.
Beyond Search Ranking and Traffic
A long time ago, I used to say: “if humans aren’t interested in it and it won’t rank well, don’t bother writing it.” These days I’m not so sure about that anymore. Organic search is extraordinarily useful for your outreach and may very well become your number one acquisition source. However, high traffic doesn’t necessarily mean high conversions. A lot of readers may be finding your content, but that doesn’t mean they find it interesting. They may not even need your service!
Diagnosing Your Audience
If your plan is to go viral, especially if you’re a B2B SaaS, I’m afraid you’re missing the point. The vast majority of people out there on the Internet don’t care about your business. However, there is a select group of people out there who need your help. Your goal should be to reach them and as many of those specific people as possible.
Take a look beyond your traffic statistics and look at your on-page engagement metrics. How long are readers spending on the page? Are they clicking around or viewing multiple pages per session, or do they bounce just as quickly as they landed? This may reveal more details about how interesting your content is to your audience and whether you’re attracting the right audience or not.
Making Content Your Audience Wants to Read
Making content your potential customers actually want to read is about more than just hunting down nice keywords in your SEO research tools. Yes, it’s true that will get you into competition for critical search positions, but it’s not the full story. You need to also look at other content styles that may not get you as much organic search traffic but will perform well for website visitors, social media sharing and in your email newsletters.
Did You Know?
The Content Marketing Institute conducted a survey that reported that the three most popular content formats are:
- Videos (94%)
- Short articles and posts (93%)
- Case studies and customer stories. (79%)
Thought Leadership
This is especially effective if your SaaS is B2B. Your business customers want to know everything about you before they buy. Skip lengthy Q&A in your sales calls to assess your expertise — show it off in your blog instead. This is helpful even if the page doesn’t have a direct path to SEO success. Thought leadership posts will help your business establish credibility with potential customers.
Educational Content
A lot of your potential and prospective customers simply don’t know what they want or need. Here’s your chance to show them. A blog is a great way to educate your audience about how to achieve their goals.
It’s tempting to withhold information. However, it’s really important for your credibility to tell them what they need to know. If there are alternatives to your service, tell them what they are. If you have a good value proposition, the right people reading the post will realize that your option is what they need. They’ll also appreciate that you were honest and explained the alternatives.
For example, in my blog post about content marketing strategies, I explained various solutions beyond just hiring a freelancer. Sure, I would love to partner with you. However, if partnering with a agency or doing it yourself is the best move for you, that’s what you should do. At the end of the day, I want what’s best for you, and you should want what’s best for your audience.
Customer Success Stories and Case Studies
Your blog is a great showroom for your successes. However, it’s also a solid strategy to separate your case studies from your blog. That’s something I did here on my site; I separated by blog from my portfolio. However, for SaaS websites your blog can be a good place for your case studies too.
Get as original and unique as possible. Talk to your clients and interview them. Do your own research and get statistics that you can share. Unique statistics are very quotable and will make the finance people that work with your potential clients happy. I’ll go into more detail about case studies in a future post, because they are super important for your success.
Remember
Your customers are one of your greatest resources. Talk to them and build good relationships. Work with them to get high quality numbers and stories that you can use as social proof for your product.
Industry and Product News
You blog is an excellent place to talk about news and updates about your service. Your current customers will appreciate it, and your potential customers will see that you actively support the service you provide. This is a great opportunity to include details about how you listened to customer feedback when bringing in changes to the service. This will show potential customers the you value the experience of your clients and will build loyalty with your existing customers.
Industry news is another opportunity, but the benefits of which aren’t as obvious. Although plenty of dedicated news outlets cover industry news with far more authority, ranking and readership, don’t underestimate the power of your blog. Sometimes your audience wants to hear about that industry news from you. This accomplishes a few things:
- Your audience sees what industry events you care about most.
- The unique coverage of those events gives you an opportunity to provide your expert insight.
- Writing about industry news gives you an opportunity to talk about how those events may affect your customers and advise them about what they should do.
The Next Step
Now that you know about the value of blogs for SaaS, it’s time to dive into how to write all that great content, but that’s for another day. Thank you for reading! If you have any questions, I’d love to hear from you!
