How to Create a Killer SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

Chris Garrett

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For most SaaS companies, the reasons to start content marketing are beyond compelling. For instance:

On average, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, yet generates around 3x more leads
SaaS companies that use content marketing see 30% higher growth rates and 5-10% higher retention rates
The customer acquisition cost (CAC) of SaaS companies from content marketing is about 15% lower than that of paid ads
20% of the average person’s time spent online is now used to browse content

In this article, we’ll show you step-by-step how to create your own killer SaaS content marketing strategy, including all the tactics, methods, and tools you’ll need.

Let’s go!

How Does Content Marketing Differ for SaaS Companies?

Unlike traditional companies whose main aim is usually to get a sale, most SaaS companies use content marketing to differentiate themselves from their competitors and attract trial subscriptions or demo sign-ups.

As the SaaS space gets increasingly competitive, software is becoming less differentiated by features alone and consumers are placing higher importance on branding, positioning and content when deciding which software to choose.

What’s more, SaaS companies do not sell their software for a one-time purchase fee. Instead, they operate on a recurring revenue basis, which means that they must constantly keep their users engaged in order to prevent churn and decreased MRR.

As such, content marketing for SaaS companies is not solely about attracting new users, but can also be used to retain existing users and even upsell them to higher plans.

Dive Deeper:
* How to Create a High-Performance Content Marketing Strategy in 2023
* 22 Brands with the Best Content Marketing Campaigns
* SaaS Marketing Strategy: 12 Killer Ideas to Grow Your Company

A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Killer SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

Creating great content is only one part of a winning formula. To see long-term success, however, you must first take the time to create a content marketing strategy. Why is a strategy so important?

Common pitfalls that can occur without a SaaS content marketing strategy:

Lower content engagement and reach. Not only will you put yourself at risk of producing content that no-one cares about, but without creating a promotional strategy to decide how you’ll attract people to your content, you’ll reach a far smaller audience and your content marketing results will suffer.

Delays, inefficiencies and rising costs. With a strategy in place, your SaaS content marketing will run like a well-oiled machine, with defined costs, deadlines and expectations for each part of the process. Without it, content will be produced inconsistently and coordination between different people in the process will be inefficient, which naturally will lead to delays and rising costs.
Lack of management buy-in leading to budget cuts. One of the most important things to realize about SaaS content marketing is that it’s a long-term strategy that’s unlikely to yield instant results. Therefore, in order to be successful, every relevant stakeholder within the company must truly believe in it.

Otherwise, if you aren’t able to demonstrate any tangible results within the first few months, but others can see that you’re investing a lot of money into it, you could experience internal pressure to stop. However, by creating a killer strategy first, you can share it and get buy-in from others within the company to (hopefully) prevent this from happening.

Inability to measure success. If you never define what your goals are or what represents a successful outcome, you won’t be able to objectively measure how well your content marketing efforts are performing. Specifically, when it comes to SaaS content marketing, tracking, attributing and measuring results is far trickier than most other companies who have the goal of gaining sales.

Step 1 – Evaluate Whether Content Marketing Is a Good Fit for Your SaaS Business

Everyone has limited time, money and resources, so before committing to content marketing, you should step back and evaluate if it’s the right focus for your SaaS company.

Below is a list of clues to help you evaluate whether content marketing is a good fit for your SaaS business. If you find yourself nodding in agreement to a few of these, then take that as a sign to start creating!

A) Your customers have a few pain points for which they typically Google the answer

Take the very competitive email marketing industry. There are numerous pain points involved in sending emails, including issues of deliverability, technical woes of verifying your domain, and GDPR compliance.

Unsurprisingly, a quick check on Google Keyword Planner shows that many people are searching for ways to solve these problems. For example, the phrase “email deliverability” receives between 1K-10K searches per month.

All of this could mean that there’s a good opportunity for SaaS email marketing companies to create relevant content with high buyer intent.

Dive Deeper: 7 Creative Ways to Collect Emails Without Being Spammy

B) You operate in an industry where things change quickly

One example of a fast-paced industry is e-commerce. Most software in this space is designed to provide tools to eBay, Amazon or Shopify sellers to help them automate their business.

The problem is, these marketplaces often introduce changes with little notice, and the software companies are forced to adapt their software accordingly. To help deal with this, companies such as Helium 10 invest heavily in content marketing, producing near-daily blog articles to educate their users:

Dive Deeper: How to Set Up Your E-commerce Product Page for Maximum Conversions

C) You have existing promotional assets that you can leverage

If you already have some promotional assets that you can leverage to share your content, then your content marketing efforts will be much easier.

For example, HubSpot has a private Facebook group with over 17,000 members. This means that every time they release new content, they can easily create a post and promote it to all these members with very little effort:

You don’t have to have a Facebook group. Instead, you may have a large email list, an engaged social media following, or a strong relationship with a key influencer – anything that could help you to promote your content to a relevant audience once it’s published.

Dive Deeper: 12 High-Performing Facebook Group Engagement Tactics

D) Your target customers are ‘knowledge-hungry’

A good example of this are CRM companies like Pipedrive that target salespeople.

Salespeople have highly pressurized jobs because they’re held accountable for how many deals they close and the revenue they bring to the company. As such, these are the types of people that are always looking to learn how to become better at their jobs and learn new sales methodologies.

Pipedrive has capitalized on this by launching a blog with how-to guides, templates and scripts specifically for sales reps. And once the salespeople see great value from the content, the hope is that they’ll sign up for the software too!

Dive Deeper: 30 Ways to Come Up with Great Ideas for Your Blog Posts

E) Your software is complex without tutorials and education

Accounting software companies like FreeAgent help small businesses and freelancers to file their tax returns. The problem is, most of their target demographic aren’t tax experts, hence, the company creates useful content to keep them up to date with tax changes and help them to understand new features.

F) Customers have no pre-existing brand loyalty when making their buying decision

Imagine that your Google Ads budget is spiraling out of control due to click-fraud, and you’re looking for some software to solve the problem. There’s a very high probability that you go to Google, type in “click fraud software” and open the tabs of the first few results:

In a situation like this, customers are unlikely to be brand loyal because they’re probably not even aware of the software companies serving this need. Therefore, content can be a great way to differentiate your SaaS product from competitors and reach potential new users first.

G) A reasonable % of your website traffic comes from search engines

You may have already seen from a previously published SaaS SEO guide that Google is generally the biggest source of traffic for SaaS companies, driving up to 77% of visitors.

If you operate a SaaS company that likewise sees a large percentage of high-quality traffic from search engines, then this is a great indication that creating content could lead to more new user sign-ups.

Dive Deeper: The Anatomy of an Effective SaaS Lead Generation Strategy

H) You have a marketing budget that can sustain producing and promoting content for the long-term

A good SaaS content marketing strategy requires regularly creating new articles and having a reasonable content marketing budget.

If you’re unsure if you have the resources to sustain your content marketing efforts for at least one year, then it may not be right for you. (Later on in step 5, you’ll learn how to calculate the budget required to sustain your content marketing strategy.)

Dive Deeper: Content Strategy on a Budget: How to Grow Your Online Presence on a Shoestring

I) Your software is geared towards one main audience

If your SaaS company has one clear audience, it’s much easier to create highly targeted and relevant content. For example, Adobe Photoshop is a SaaS application aimed specifically at creatives, which gives them the advantage of their entire user base having very similar interests and needs.

On the other hand, a SaaS company like Calendly targets multiple audiences with wildly different needs, including marketers, educators, freelancers and job interviewers, which can make it much harder (though by no means impossible) to produce compelling content.

Dive Deeper: How Adobe Does SaaS Marketing: A Case Study

Step 2 – Decide on Your Main Goals and KPIs

Ultimately, every SaaS company wants to increase its revenue. However, there are a number of ways this can be achieved in the context of content marketing. The goal you choose will have a huge impact on every aspect of your overall content marketing strategy, from the type of content you produce to how often you produce it.

Below is a list of the most common content marketing goals and KPIs for SaaS companies – we advise choosing one goal only.