The State of SaaS Content Marketing 2019
This is part one 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.
In 2017, I put together a huge study on SaaS content marketing.
I’ve now updated and expanded it for 2019. I analysed 500 SaaS companies’ content marketing efforts, to understand exactly how content marketing works (or doesn’t) in SaaS.
There are two parts to this study: revisits the companies I looked at in 2017, to see how their approach to content marketing has changed over time; compares the content marketing strategies of these established SaaS companies with a similar-sized list of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, to see how SaaS companies at different stages approach content marketing.
Methodology
I have expanded upon the 2017 study I did with Cobloom, and updated it for 2019.
The Montclare SaaS 250 was the starting point for my analysis: the same set of companies I looked at two years ago. This is an index of the world’s most successful SaaS companies based on revenue, funding, growth and company size.
In addition, I took the top 250 companies from the , a list of the fastest-growing SaaS companies based on growth indicators including hiring trends and number of employees.
This meant I could see how SaaS content marketing has changed between 2017 and 2019, and also the differences in performance and execution between the biggest, established SaaS companies and the smaller, fast-growing companies.
If you’re short on time, click here to skip to the statistics summary at the end, for all the key content marketing stats, updated for 2019.
With 500 companies to look at, I compiled a massive spreadsheet of content marketing data. I analysed everything from how much organic search traffic a typical blog generates, to what types of call-to-action companies favour.
All of this comes together into SaaS-specific insights on blogging, link-building and social sharing, to help you benchmark your own company’s content marketing efforts.
Tools used:
- Ahrefs for the numbers
- Google Sheets for pulling all the data together
- My eyes for on-page qualitative research.
Statistics summary
Want to get more detail about any of these stats? Click here to read the complete post.
Key content marketing statistics for the world’s biggest SaaS companies
- 15% of the world’s biggest SaaS companies don’t have a blog
- 54% of the world’s biggest SaaS companies use WordPress
- 36% of SaaS companies use their blogs to share educational content
- 12% of SaaS companies only share PR content on their blogs
- Educational blogs receive half as much organic traffic as PR blogs
- 23% of SaaS blogs receive fewer than 500 organic visits per month
- 4% of SaaS blogs receive more than 100,000 visits from organic search each month
- 76% of blogs use stock photography
- 42% of SaaS blogs have a ‘subscribe’ call-to-action
- 25% of companies share related content as a call-to-action
- The average SaaS blog receives 1800 organic search visits per month
- The average SaaS blog has 5800 backlinks from 378 referring domains
- The best SaaS blog posts receive 214 shares on social media — 13% less than in 2017
- The best SaaS blog posts receive 321 organic search visits each month
Key content marketing statistics for the world’s fastest-growing SaaS companies
- 12% of SaaS companies use Hubspot for their CMS
- The 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies use only 13 different content management systems
- 31% of blogs use custom images for their featured images
- 25% of blogs offer product demos as a call-to-action
- The fastest-growing SaaS companies are 2.5x more likely to offer product demos as a call-to-action than the biggest SaaS companies
- The average blog for the fastest-growing SaaS companies generates 1700 organic search visits per month
- The fastest-growing SaaS companies have half as many backlinks to their blog as the biggest SaaS companies
- 31% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies use chatbots
- 13% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies use Drift
- Top-performing blog posts receive 297 shares on social media
- Top-performing blog posts receive 352 visits from organic search per month
- Top-performing blog posts rank for 206 keywords — 45% more than the top posts by the biggest SaaS companies
- Top-performing blog posts receive 10% more organic traffic than the top posts by the biggest SaaS companies
Originally published at http://ek-byford.com on April 28, 2019.
