Your SaaS Startup Needs Content Marketing – Here’s Why

Congratulations! You just launched your startup! You have a great SaaS product out there on the web with your fancy new website and you’re ready to take on new customers. However, there’s just one problem: your target audience doesn’t know about you yet. How are you going to get new customers?

Social media is a great outreach method a lot of startups use. You might also invest in paid search ads or on-site ads. However, one sometimes overlooked option is content marketing, and your startup needs it. In fact, without it, you’re going to lose 48% of your website visitors. Let’s talk about how content marketing can benefit your SaaS startup, how it works, and how you can use it to stand out against the competition with an 80% increase in conversions.

What Content Marketing Does for SaaS

Software products like yours are most often online. Customers sign up and use your dashboard in their web browser by visiting your website. With so much focus on your website, it’s important to consider a few questions: how do your customers get here, what’s their first impression, and how do they get their questions answered?

It’s no coincidence that 90% of SaaS businesses have a blog. It’s an effective tool that helps them generate 67% more leads than their non-blogging competitors.

How is this all possible? It’s all thanks to three main advantages of content marketing:

• Organic search leads: your website can rank for competitive search keywords on Google and other search engines.
• Nail that first impression: high quality content on your website solidifies your legitimacy and helps your audience trust your brand.
• Answer customer questions: FAQ sections, blog posts, and other website content can help answer questions your customers need answers for, helping you maintain their loyalty and engagement.

Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine

Your website may be your greatest weapon in attracting your audience. Potential customers are out there right now using search engines to find answers to their questions. SaaS startups can rank for the keywords customers are searching for and deliver an answer that eases their pain points. In fact, this strategy can net you a lead growth rate of 400%. However, to do that you’ll need a solid content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing Makes Your Brand Look Legit

This applies both on and off your site. If you provide high quality content for your audience on your SaaS startup’s website that’s engaging, authoritative, and helpful, your audience will take you seriously and respect your brand. Since 27% of B2B customer time is spent doing independent research, you need to make yourself look good, no excuses.

In the same way, if you’re ranking highly for keywords your audience is searching for, that makes a significant difference for how they’ll perceive your company as an authority in the industry. When people look for “best music streaming” on Google, you’ll find Spotify or Amazon Music. The same could be done for your brand in your industry if you play your cards right.

Answer Customer Questions

Search engines aside, high quality content is helpful for your customers at the human level. Everyone has questions, and content marketing is an excellent way for your SaaS startup to answer those questions and build customer trust. Think of it like customer service. Give them the answers they need, and they’ll be happier.

You might approach this by:

• Setting up an FAQ page and on-page FAQ sections.
• Writing blog posts with troubleshooting steps for common problems users experience while using your product.
• Publishing newsletters for current customers that answer questions about recent changes and updates to your product.

It’s important to think beyond just writing for search crawlers and instead write for humans first. Being genuinely helpful is how you’ll win the hearts of your customers.

How to Succeed with Content Marketing for SaaS

You have three options for approaching content marketing for your SaaS startup:

• Do it yourself: cheap but prepare for an uphill battle as you manage every other aspect of your business.
• Contract or hire writers: getting a content writer on your team or hiring a freelancer are both good options to have someone dedicated to working on executing your content strategy.
• Work with an agency: if you are super ambitious or have a large-scale content plan you want to execute, agencies are dependable and effective at a higher cost.

Each option has its own pros and cons, so let’s explore each of them to see what’s right for your business.

Do It Yourself

If you have a blog, a keyboard, and some creativity, anyone can do content marketing. It may be the most cost-effective way for your SaaS startup to begin ranking on search engines. This is especially true if you and your leadership already have previous experience with search engine optimization (SEO).

You’re an entrepreneur, so you’re no stranger to heavy workloads and being a one person army. So, what’s one more task to you? Depending on the situation, you may be right. However, executing content marketing correctly takes a lot of dedicated effort. You’ll need to not only create content consistently, but also track your performance and improve existing content as you go.

AI can help streamline the process but be warned: AI doesn’t understand your customers like you do. Your capacity for human connection is far more valuable than AI generated content. AI will help you get started and will be an invaluable tool to your success, but your humanity will get you the rest of the way toward capturing those leads.

Ask for Help: Freelancers and Team Members

If doing your content marketing yourself isn’t up your alley, another option you can try is to try is getting some help in the form of a new team member or freelancer. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 57% of the most successful B2B businesses outsource their content marketing projects, so this certainly isn’t unknown territory.

The cheaper option will be a freelancer. Since you’ll be working with them on a contract basis, you’ll only be paying for what you need when you need it. However, you may run into trouble if that freelancer ghosts you or if they turn out to be unreliable. Similar to freelance programmers, switching up talent over time can make things inconsistent. However, if you find the right freelancer you can work with them over an extended period of time to maintain that consistency and quality while saving money.

Hiring a full-time content writer is another option. This is great if you want to have a strong, consistent, and always on content strategy. On the other hand, a full-time employee for content marketing may not be the best choice if you aren’t making content all the time, as it will be much more expensive.

Partnering with a Content Marketing Agency

If you have a lot of money to spend and not as much time to spend on finding the right talent yourself, an agency may be your best bet. Content marketing agencies have a team of talent already prepared. That means less time training employees and searching for contractors.

Although more expensive out of the gate, an agency may be a worthwhile investment if you need content marketing done fast and efficiently. However, in the long term an agency may be more expensive than having talent in house. They may be a good option for a short-term campaign you don’t have the money for a consistent long-term partnership.

How to Get Started with Content Marketing for SaaS

So, with these options in mind, how do you actually make your first content marketing strategy for your business?

We’ve covered a lot already, and I plan to go into more detail on this in a later guide. However, here are some universal steps you should know to succeed:

1. Understand your audience: content marketing is useless if you don’t understand your audience. Do research and surveys to dig in and find out what they’re searching for so you can provide content to match.
2. Develop a content marketing strategy: based on your findings, plan to develop content for your brand. What keywords are you going to target? What content will you create? When will you do it, and for how long? Answer all of these questions in your plan.
3. Track your results: analyze the performance of your data and make course corrections to move in the right direction. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 90% of the most successful B2B businesses measure their content performance.

If some or all of these steps seem unfamiliar to you, it may be worth considering hiring a freelancer, a full-time content marketer, or partnering with an agency.

Set Up Your SaaS Startup for Content Success!

With the right content marketing strategy, any SaaS startup can succeed. Now that you know how to get started, the future is up to you to decide. How will you transform your website into a lead-generating machine? I’d love to hear from you about your plans. Let’s work together to make your brand shine in SERP and stand out against the competition!