SaaS Content Marketing: The Biggest vs the Fastest-Growing Companies
This is part three 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 II: How Content Marketing Differs Between the Biggest and Fastest-Growing SaaS Companies
Now I’ve looked at how SaaS content marketing has changed between 2017 and 2019, let’s compare two very different sets of SaaS companies: the Montclare 250 and the top 250 fastest-growing companies taken from the SaaS 1000 (note: for simplicity, I’m going to refer to this subset as the SaaS 250).
With the Montclare 250, we’ve got a list of very established, enterprise SaaS companies, compared with this second list of younger, faster-growing SaaS companies. I was particularly interested to see whether there were many differences between how the two sets approach their content marketing, particularly now we’ve seen how the established SaaS companies have made huge gains in terms of traffic, links and social media activity in the last two years.
Are smaller SaaS companies able to use content marketing to drive growth, or are they not seeing the same benefits as established companies who have been investing in content for longer?
Content Marketing Strategy
As before, I started by looking at the key elements that form the foundation of your content marketing strategy:
This gave me a high-level understanding of how these companies approached content marketing, and whether smaller SaaS companies are considering content marketing as worth investing their hard-won dollars in.
14% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies don’t have a blog
My research found that 35 of the 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies (14%) don’t have a blog. While this is only a small percentage, I was surprised by how similar was to the percentage of the Montclare 250 who don’t have a blog, which was 15% (or 38 companies).
So for enterprise and smaller, fast-growing SaaS companies alike, content marketing is an important marketing strategy — but it’s by no means essential.
WordPress is still the most popular Content Management System
63% of the SaaS 250 use WordPress as their CMS — most likely thanks to how versatile it can be. This was in line with what I expected; it’s more interesting to look at the second most popular choice of CMS.
For the SaaS 250, HubSpot was the second most popular choice, used by 12% of the list. But for the Montclare 250, the second most popular choice was Drupal, used — again — by 12% of companies on the list.
In fact, across the two lists, HubSpot and Drupal have almost exactly the same total share, mirroring each other across the two data sets. For the SaaS 250, HubSpot is used by 12% of companies and Drupal by 1%; for the Montclare 250 Drupal is used by 12% of companies, and HubSpot by 3%.
The popularity of HubSpot among these emerging SaaS companies is testament to the work HubSpot has done positioning themselves as the best solution for small-to-medium sized businesses.
Interestingly, among the 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies, there’s even less variance in CMS use than in the Montclare 250 list: across all 250 companies there are only 13 different content management systems in use, compared with 16 on the list of more established companies.
16% of companies use their blogs for PR
As before, there were three common use cases for these SaaS company blogs:
- 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
- A mix of these two types of content: the company shares all its press and educational content in one place
As you can see, the split was pretty similar to the Montclare SaaS 250. However, there’s a slight shift back towards PR content and away from educational content compared with the Montclare 250.
This suggests that either fast-growing SaaS companies don’t have the resources to dedicate to regularly creating educational content, or they believe sharing more content relating to their company, mission and vision is the best way to make themselves stand out in a crowded space.
Content Design Insights
My next point of comparison was to look at these blogs in more detail. What do they look like, are they used as a lead generation channel, and how does this compare with the approaches used by enterprise SaaS companies?
- What do these blog posts look like? Is design and imagery important?
- What is the purpose of these blogs? Are they used to generate leads, build an email list — or something else entirely?
31% of blogs use custom images for their blogs
My research found that the fastest-growing SaaS companies are twice as likely as enterprise SaaS companies to invest in custom designs and imagery for their blogs (31% of the fastest-growing companies compared with 16% of the Montclare 250).
This suggests that design, branding and a strong visual identity are considered important for SaaS companies looking to stand-out against more established competitors.
One quarter of blogs offer product demos as a call to action
(Note: some companies use multiple calls-to-action in a single blog post, which is why there are different variations depending on the combination of calls-to-action used.)
Across both sets of companies, it’s been interesting to see companies taking different approaches to generating leads through their blogs.
26% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies have calls-to-action offering information relating to their products: either a demo, free trial or product tour. This is a marked increase compared with the enterprise SaaS companies, where only 10% offer product-related calls-to-action.
This suggests that more of the fast-growing SaaS companies have a product with a low entry point such as a free trial or freemium product offering. Something that means their products are easy for customers to try out and start using, rather than requiring comprehensive onboarding to get up and running.
Also, 40% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies use calls-to-action as a way to showcase related content. This highlights the importance of keeping visitors on-site and engaging with your content, and perhaps points to the increasing competitiveness of organic search: once you’ve got someone on your site, keep them there and keep delivering value, because they may not find their way back otherwise.
Overall, fastest-growing SaaS companies were 1.5x more likely to push related content, and 2.5x more likely to offer product demos than the established SaaS companies — and half as likely to have no call-to-action at all (8% vs 16%).
Content Marketing Performance: Benchmarking Overall Blog Performance
Now, I turned my attention to what I was most interested in: how these blogs are performing. This would give me insight into how effective these fast-growing SaaS companies’ content marketing strategies are, particularly in comparison with the SaaS behemoths in the Montclare 250.
As before, I looked at three main criteria to assess the performance of these SaaS blogs:
1700 organic search visits per month
Across the list of the 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies, I found that the average blog receives 1700 visits from organic search each month. This is remarkably close to the 1800 visits the average enterprise SaaS company receives each month.
But as I’ve seen throughout this research, the averages don’t tell the full story.
As expected, there’s huge variance in levels of organic traffic — both between the high and low ends of this list, and compared with the Montclare 250.
The gap between top performers and those receiving the lowest levels of organic traffic is big — though nowhere near as vast as we saw in the Montclare 250. The most-visited blog on the SaaS 250 list receives more than 750,000 visits from organic search each month, while at the other end of the spectrum, six blogs receive less than ten organic visits 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:
Interestingly, at the high and low ends of the spectrum, the SaaS 250 are seeing organic traffic levels similar to what the Montclare 250 were achieving two years ago — but on average they’re achieving very similar levels of search traffic to the Montclare 250 today.
Organic search is a hugely important statistic for SaaS companies: it can be a powerful source of qualified leads, and eventually customers. Having seen how organic traffic had grown for the Montclare 250, I was worried that these huge SaaS companies would have established such dominance that the newer, fast-growing companies wouldn’t be able to carve out a space for themselves online.
It turns out that wasn’t the case. While the top performing SaaS blogs in this newer list aren’t reaching the heady heights achieved by the top performers in the Montclare 250, they’re still generating decent levels of organic traffic each month.
This means blogging — a key element of most content marketing strategies — still offers companies the potential of a predictable source of traffic, leads and customers.
2720 backlinks from 285 referring domains
Across the list of the 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies, I found that the average blog receives 2720 backlinks from 285 referring domains.
This means that on average, the fastest-growing SaaS companies receive half as many backlinks as the average enterprise SaaS company.
While backlinks and referring domains used to be closely linked to organic traffic, it’s interesting to see the emerging SaaS companies almost matching the established SaaS companies in terms of traffic, with half the amount of backlinks.
But as we’ve seen before, it’s at the top end where we see the biggest gulf between the established and emerging SaaS companies: the top 10% in this dataset receive around 76,000 backlinks, while the established companies have an average of 1,360,000 backlinks.
Is this because the established SaaS companies have been around longer and so have had longer to accumulate backlinks? Is it because they’re more well-known, so more likely to be considered reputable sources to link to? Or is it something else entirely?
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that there’s a clear gulf between the top-performing enterprise SaaS companies and the top-performing emerging ones.
Additional channel: Conversational Marketing
31% of the fastest-growing SaaS startups use chatbots
Since the first State of SaaS Content Marketing in 2017, conversational marketing has surged in popularity.
While conversational marketing isn’t the first thing people will think of when it comes to content marketing, it’s still using content to market to potential customers, by engaging them in a conversation. So I was interested to see how many SaaS companies were using chatbots for conversational marketing.
The fastest-growing SaaS companies are twice as likely as the established SaaS companies to use chatbots for conversational marketing (31% vs 16%).
A note on Drift
This shows how smaller, less established companies are more able to quickly embrace emerging technology and marketing trends, and are open to trying new ways to connect with potential customers.
When you think of the term ‘conversational marketing’, chances are you think of Drift. The Drift team have done an amazing job of creating the category of conversational marketing, and positioning themselves as the leaders in that space.
So it was interesting that less than half the companies using conversational marketing were using Drift.
While 31% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies use chatbots, only 13% of them use Drift, while 18% of them use other tools. For the Montclare 250, 16% use chatbots, with 7.5% using Drift and 8.5% using other services.
Disclaimer: this analysis was done by eye. I’m aware that some companies set up time delays so don’t trigger Drift (or other conversational marketing tools) until you’ve been on-page for a certain length of time. As I was doing this research myself, I was doing so at speed, so it’s likely there’s some sites who were using Drift (or other tools) where I wasn’t on the page long enough to trigger it, or they only had it set-up on a handful of pages, and I didn’t visit the right pages to trigger their playbooks.
Content Marketing Performance: Benchmarking Top Post Performance
Enough about chatbots. Let’s turn our attention back to the blog posts and infographics that are at the heart of companies’ content marketing activity.
As before, I looked at the top-performing articles within three different criteria:
As with the Montclare 250, I have averaged these data sets to create clear benchmarks for you to measure your own content marketing performance against. For each criterion, I’ve reported on the average across the full data set (all 250 companies), the top 10% (the 25 best-performing posts), and the bottom 10%, creating high, medium and low benchmarks. I’ve also compared these numbers (the fastest-growing SaaS companies) to the established ones we saw earlier… Spoiler alert: it wasn’t what I expected.
Now, onto the numbers.
Top Blog Posts receive 297 Shares on Social Media
Is social media the place where emerging SaaS companies have the edge over their more established competitors?
When I analysed the top-performing blog posts from the SaaS 250, I found that the average ‘best-in-class’ blog post was liked, tweeted or shared 297 times on social media.
This means that on average, the top posts by the fastest growing SaaS companies receive 39% more engagement compared with the top posts by the biggest SaaS companies.
While the top 10% of the best-performing posts don’t quite reach the heady heights achieved by the Montclare 250 (the top 10% receive on average 13,000 shares on social media, while for the SaaS 250 the top 10% ‘only’ generate an average of 7,400 social shares), as a whole, they’re outperforming their more established counterparts when it comes to generating engagement on social media.
If you’re just starting content marketing for your SaaS company, generating 300 social shares on a single blog post may seem ambitious — but not unimaginable. Finally: a realistic target to aim for, as a benchmark for your social media strategy.
And remember: this is for the single, best-performing post by all of these companies. Chances are, each company has a handful of posts that do well, and head towards the 300 mark, while the rest are closer to the lower end, perhaps struggling to get their first five, ten or 20 shares on social media.
81 Backlinks and 9 Referring Domains
Now let’s take a look at how these ‘top-performing’ blog posts fare for backlinks and referring domains.
When I looked at the best performing blog posts from each of the SaaS 250, I found that the average post was generating 81 backlinks from 9 referring domains. This is 32% lower than the number of backlinks received by the top-performing Montclare 250 posts, from a comparable number of referring domains.
352 Organic Search Visits Per Month
This was what I found most interesting. The top-performing blog posts by the emerging SaaS companies generate, on average, 352 visits from organic search each and every month.
This is 10% more than the top-performing posts from the established SaaS companies.
So even though the emerging SaaS companies are generating fewer backlinks than their more established competitors, on average their best posts are receiving more organic traffic.
To refer back to an earlier section, it’s worth remembering that on average these SaaS companies are generating 1700 organic search visits per month — just 6% less than the biggest SaaS companies, in spite of the bigger companies having (presumably) bigger budgets, more established brands and name recognition, and sites that have been around for much longer, with the authority that comes with longevity.
While at the top top end, the Montclare 250 still has a fair edge over the SaaS 250 (their top posts average almost 11,000 visits from organic search, compared with 8,600 — a 20% difference), the gap is far less than I was expecting.
And that’s the power of content marketing. You may not have the money, or the name, or the brand recognition… but you can still compete with the big guys.
Originally published at http://ek-byford.com on April 28, 2019.
