SaaS Content Marketing: 2019 vs 2017
This is part two of my four-part series, exploring the state of content marketing in the world’s biggest software-as-a-service companies. It updates and expands upon a study I did in 2017. We’ll see how content marketing has changed since 2017, and how the fastest-growing companies can use content to challenge the biggest names in SaaS.
Part I: SaaS Content Marketing in 2019 vs 2017
To start with, let’s look at the Montclare SaaS 250 — the world’s biggest SaaS companies. Has their approach to content marketing changed since 2017, and how is their content performing?
Content Marketing Strategy
As the starting point, I looked at some of the key elements that form the foundation of any content marketing strategy:
This gave me a high-level understanding of how the world’s biggest SaaS companies approach content marketing, and how this has changed over the past couple of years.
15% of SaaS companies don’t have a blog (up from 11% in 2017)
My results found that 38 out of the 250 biggest SaaS companies in the world don’t have any sort of blog presence. In 2017 this was only 27 companies, and while it’s still a small percentage of the companies on the list, it represents a 40% increase in just two years.
Is it time up for SaaS blogging? I doubt it — but let’s see how things look when I revisit this in 2021!
For now, I’ve considered these companies to be outliers. The rest of this post looks at the vast majority of SaaS companies that do invest in blogging as part of their content marketing, with a defined strategy and an active blog.
So let’s look at the rest of them.
54% of SaaS companies use WordPress (down from 68% in 2017)
In 2017, WordPress was the most popular content management system for these leading SaaS companies. In 2019 it still holds the top spot, but there’s a definite shift taking place, with far fewer companies choosing WordPress as their CMS.
Drupal was the second most popular choice, used by 12% of the list (a tiny decrease from 2017). Interestingly, there’s less variance: in 2017, these 250 SaaS companies were using 20 different content management systems, but this has dropped to 16 in 2019.
In the second part of this study, I look at 250 of the fastest-growing SaaS companies. Click here to see how their choice of CMS compares to these established companies.
36% of SaaS companies blog to educate
Of the SaaS companies that do have a blog, I identified four different use cases:
- PR, self-promotional content: these blogs only focus on the company and its products
- Educational content: these blogs share helpful content that is designed to solve problems and provide value to the reader
- Both of these two types of content: the company shares all its press and educational content in one place
- Engineering content: there were only a couple of these, which shared technical content — written by developers and aimed at other developers.
Much like in 2017, the ‘mixed’ approach was most popular, adopted by 51% of the companies I looked at (up from 45% two years ago). It offers a platform for product updates alongside their educational content that’s designed to help customers benefit from using their product, or learning more about the problem their products are aiming to solve.
It’s a smart move: you teach your readers about a problem they’ve got, and in the same place have content positioning your product as the solution to that problem. No wonder more companies than ever are adopting this approach to content marketing, rather than keeping different types of content siloed in different channels.
Interestingly, while there was a fairly even split between educational and PR-style blogs back in 2017 (24% and 20% respectively), there’s been a significant shift in 2019.
36% of companies provide educational, value-based content compared with just 12% sharing press releases and broadcasting about their company. That’s a win for valuable content… but the news isn’t all good.
Educational blogs receive half as much organic traffic as PR/News-focused blogs
As you’d expect, for both styles of blog, there is huge variance in the levels of organic traffic they receive each month. At the low end, organic traffic levels are similar for PR-focused and educational blogs:
- 24% of PR style blogs receive fewer than 500 visits per month from organic search
- 26% of educational blogs receive fewer than 500 visits per month from organic search.
At the higher end, the results were more surprising: 8% of PR-focused blogs are generating over 100,000 visits from organic search each month, compared with just 4% of educational blogs.
And on average, educational blogs are receiving half as much organic traffic as PR focused ones.
On the plus side, both styles of blog are seeing much higher levels of organic traffic compared with two years ago. Educational blogs are getting around 2x the amount of organic traffic, while PR style blogs have seen their organic traffic grow 5x compared with 2017.
Content Design Insights
Once I had a high-level understanding of how these enterprise SaaS companies approached content marketing, I wanted to look in more detail at their blogs, what they looked like, and whether they were used as a lead generation channel or just for sharing information.
- What did these blog posts look like? How important was design and imagery?
- What was the purpose of these blogs? Were they used to generate leads, build an email subscriber list — or something else entirely?
As you’d expect, there were lots of different approaches to this. Some companies clearly invested a lot of energy in the design of their blogs, making them easy as well as interesting to read. Others… not so much
76% of blogs use stock photography for featured images
This a fair increase — up from 65% in 2017. Interestingly, there has been a drop in the number of blogs with no images at all — this has halved from 16% to 8%, suggesting that many companies who previously didn’t use any images in their blogs have switched to using stock photos instead.
What this meant was that so many of these blogs looked the same. I saw a lot of the exact same stock images crop up several times.
If you want your content to stand out — particularly on social media — invest in custom artwork for your blog posts.
Even just using your own photos rather than stock images will make you stand out! Otherwise you’re using the exact same libraries of images that everyone else is using, so your content will look just like everyone else’s.
Only 16% of blogs don’t have a call to action
To me, this shows big progress since 2017, when 36% of blogs had no call to action — no way for these SaaS companies to encourage their readers to further engage with their business.
42% of blogs have a ‘subscribe’ call to action
In 2019, as well as more companies using calls to action, I saw more variety in terms of calls to action: not only are companies building subscriber lists and offering downloadable content, they’re also sharing related content and offering product demos. Many companies had multiple calls to action on a single post:
It was interesting to see 25% of companies sharing other, related pieces of content as calls to action on their blogs — something that I didn’t see at all when I did this research back in 2017, and now it’s the second most popular style of call-to-action for these enterprise SaaS companies.
This suggests that time on site and pages visited per session is becoming more important to these companies. Perhaps a Google algorithm update has given additional weighting to sites with longer times on site, or perhaps it’s simply that these organisations have realised that a one-time site visit isn’t that valuable; it’s returning visitors that ultimately progress through the sales funnel and eventually become customers.
Content Marketing Performance: Benchmarking Overall Blog Performance
Next, I turned my attention to what really counts: how these blogs are performing. This would give me insight into how effective these top SaaS companies’ content marketing strategies are, and whether they’ve improved since 2017.
When assessing the performance of these SaaS blogs, I was looking at three main criteria:
Organic search was the primary measure by which I assessed the success of their content marketing efforts: it reveals whether they’re creating useful content that addresses topics people are searching for, as well as whether their content is ranking well in relevant search results.
And while numbers of backlinks and referring domains are closely linked, I recorded both separately to see if either has a particular impact on organic search visitor. It also provides more detail about where each blog’s traffic is coming from: were blogs receiving backlinks from lots of referring domains (indicative of it being seen as a valuable reference or resource), or are they only linked to from a handful of other sites?
1800 organic search visits per month
Across the full list of the Montclare SaaS 250, I found that the average blog receives 1800 visits from organic search each month. This is a marked increase from 2017, when the average blog received 573 visits per month.
This is a hugely important statistic for SaaS companies: organic traffic can be a powerful source of qualified leads, as visitors to your site from organic search have sought you out — or found your blog as an answer to their specific search query or problem.
With organic search visits having trebled since 2017, it suggests blogs can be a valuable and predictable source of new leads and revenue that compounds over time — especially when combined with the wider variety of calls to action, showing that companies are looking at new and different ways to convert blog visitors into leads and prospective customers.
But the averages don’t tell the full story:
As in 2017 there was huge variance in levels of organic traffic. The gap between top performers and those receiving the lowest levels of organic traffic was astounding — and even wider than in 2017. The top 10% of blogs receive 104,000 visits each month from organic search — and the top-performing blog receives 5 million visits a month! At the other end of the spectrum a handful of blogs don’t even get ten visits from organic search each month.
To give you a better idea of what this looks like, here’s the full spread of sites. As the variance was so huge, the only way to plot this was on a logarithmic scale:
A note on HubSpot
In 2017, HubSpot was the top-performing blog by far, generating 1.8 million visits per month from organic search. In 2019, their traffic levels are even more astounding: 5 million visits every month from organic search — twice as many as Zoho, who came second on my list with 2.6 million.
There were just a handful of blogs receiving more than one million visits each month, so outliers like HubSpot and Zoho skew the averages quite a bit!
5800 backlinks from 378 referring domains
Backlinks and referring domains are two of the most important factors that have been proven to directly influence search engine results. So let’s take a look at the backlinks profiles of these 250 enterprise SaaS companies:
The average SaaS company in this data set had 5800 links back to their blog, coming from 378 referring domains. This marks a big change from 2017: while there was just a small (4%) decrease in backlinks in two years, there was a huge increase (42%) in referring domains.
I saw a similar trend at both ends of the performance spectrum: the bottom 25 SaaS companies saw their backlinks drop from 317 to a meagre 89, while at the same time seeing a slight increase in referring domains, up to 18 from 15 in 2017.
As for the top 10% of SaaS blogs, they saw increases across the board. And not small increases either: 1.36 million backlinks, up from 167,000; and 14300 referring domains, up from 4630. These ‘big name’ companies are clearly regarded as reputable sources, frequently referenced and linked to by other companies, blogs and websites — and reaping the benefits.
Correlation with organic search
Unsurprisingly, the companies with the highest levels of organic traffic generally had the most backlinks and referring domains.
That suggests the more backlinks and referring domains your content has, the more likely it is to rank well in search results, and drive organic traffic to your site. At least, that’s what I found in 2017:
In 2019, my findings were similar: the number of referring domains is still a significantly stronger predictor of organic traffic than backlinks. Search traffic and referring domains still have a strong positive correlation (r=0.66, compared with r=0.72 two years ago), and search traffic and backlinks still have a weak correlation (r=0.29 compared with r=0.26).
The correlation between search traffic and referring domains has weakened slightly, while it’s now a little stronger between search traffic and backlinks.
But if you’re looking to grow organic traffic to your site, there’s one area with a much stronger correlation: keywords (r=0.96).
The link between keywords and organic traffic ties in to the popularity of so-called ‘skyscraper’ content — posts that aim to be bigger and better than competing articles. One of the hallmarks of skyscraper content is length, so they can target lots of keywords within one article.
So if you want to grow organic traffic to your blog, first focus on creating content that ranks for lots of keywords, then look to generate backlinks from as many websites as possible as a second step.
Content Marketing Performance: Benchmarking Top Post Performance
As more and more companies have found success with content marketing, the more companies try their hand. Blog posts, infographics, guides and opinion pieces are created faster than ever — but for most companies, it’s only a handful of articles that see any measure of success.
But what does a successful blog post look like? What are the hallmarks of a piece that performs well?
To understand this, I identified the top-performing blog posts for each company on the Montclare SaaS 250, based on three different criteria:
I then averaged these data sets to create clear benchmarks that you can use to measure your own content marketing performance against. For each criteria, I’ve reported on the average across the full data set (all 250 companies), the top 10% (the 25 best-performing companies), and the bottom 10%, creating high, medium and low benchmarks.
Remember: these benchmarks are for the single top-performing posts on each site — it’s unlikely that any of the SaaS companies on this list (yes, even HubSpot) achieves these numbers on every piece they publish.
Now, let’s get into the numbers.
Top Blog Posts receive 214 Shares on Social Media
Social media sites are key channels for content promotion and lead generation, before we even consider the relationship between social media sharing and search engine performance.
When I analysed the top-performing blog post from each SaaS company, I found that the average ‘best-in-class’ blog post was liked, tweeted or shared 214 times. This is a 13% decrease from 2017, when the average was 246 times. But this trend isn’t the same at the extreme ends of the spectrum:
While generating 13,000 shares for a single article may seem like a daunting task, creating a blog post that generates over 200 social shares during its lifetime seems much more achievable. That’s a great indication that your social media is up to scratch.
As for what type of content is good for generating social shares? 4.5% of these ‘best-in-class- blogs were infographics. I wasn’t surprised to see a fair number of infographics in my data set; they’re very ‘sharable’ content. However, more surprising was that 5.7% of these top-performing posts were around mergers and acquisitions.
So if you want to get people talking, tweeting and sharing news about your company… time to get acquired!
Or… maybe just share some infographics.
119 Backlinks and 8 Referring Domains
We’ve already looked at the correlation between backlinks, referring domains and organic traffic, let’s take a look at how the ‘top-performing’ blog posts fare for these.
When I looked at the best performing blog posts from each of the 250 SaaS companies, I found that the average post was generating 119 backlinks from 8 referring domains. This marks a big change from in 2017: now, companies are receiving 3x the number of backlinks (119 vs 38) from half the number of referring domains (8 vs 17).
While the average number of backlinks has grown since 2017, we’re still not seeing huge numbers. This suggests that even a handful of backlinks are enough to offer a significant boost in search engine rankings and organic traffic.
While we’ve seen decent growth for the average ‘best-in-class’ post on our list, for the top, top-performers it’s an altogether different story.
As we’ve seen elsewhere, the top-performers are benefiting most from the growth of content marketing and reaping most of the rewards: the top 10% of articles receive an average of 7,945 backlinks from 304 referring domains.
Top-performing blog posts have seen more than a 12x increase in backlinks from 2x referring domains compared with 2017.
This is a massive increase, especially when you consider these numbers are all for single posts!
321 Organic Search Visits Per Month
When we talk about the power of content marketing, organic traffic is the key driver: the ability for a piece of content to attract visitors to your website without any input or additional spend by you.
A strong content marketing strategy will compound over time, with blog posts generating more and more visitors month-on-month, providing a predictable and sustainable source of visitors, leads and customers to your website. But of course, not every article is going to be a runaway success. For every top-performing post, you’ll likely have dozens of middling performers.
But when it comes to driving organic traffic to your site, what is a ‘good’ amount? How much traffic is it reasonable to expect a single post to deliver?
To help answer these questions, I identified each company’s best-performing blog post in terms of the amount of organic search traffic it received each month.
Across the entire data set of 250 SaaS companies, the average ‘best-in-class’ blog post now ranks for 142 keywords and generates 321 visitors from organic search each month. That’s more than 300 visitors that you can count on, each and every month, just from one post.
On average, top-performing blog posts rank for 142 keywords and generate 321 monthly visits from organic search.
As before though, those figures pale into comparison with the top 10% of companies, with their best posts ranking for more than 3,000 keywords, and generating almost 11,000 monthly visitors from organic search each month. And remember: that’s all coming from a single blog post!
Since 2017, the top-performing blog posts have seen increases across the board: median levels of organic traffic has increased by 317%; and the top 10% have seen a similar increase of 329%.
Originally published at http://ek-byford.com on April 28, 2019.
