How to Build a Killer Content Marketing Machine
B2B SaaS Formula to Generate Sales Pipeline
To win in the content game, you will need to put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer. The successful formula for B2B SaaS content strategy is creating engaging content that draws in quality visitors while tailoring a content journey that adds value at every step of the way. A more tailored content strategy increases the time spent on your website while building trust to move visitors down the funnel. Here are the steps you can take to develop a strategy and build a killer content marketing machine:
1. Develop your audience & buyer personas
In the B2B SaaS content marketing industry, one of the biggest challenges is writing the right content that will target decision-makers who can influence the sale. Your personas might vary depending on the product you are selling — specifically if you are targeting small businesses or large corporations. You need to consider not just the decision-maker but also the people who will influence his decision when considering an enterprise provider. In the case of selling IT infrastructure software to big companies, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) will sign off on the purchase based on the following factors:
- The IT analyst who will be using your software daily
- The data team who are concerned about data security and safety
- The finance manager who will approve the budget
When selling to small businesses, decisions will likely be made by fewer decision-makers or the founder. You’ll need to develop detailed personas to understand the challenges and issues that matter most to tailor your messaging content effectively.
2. Map out your customer journey & sales funnel
Find out your customer's pain points and create content that addresses them. Not only should you create the right types of content, but you should also place that content in the right places. Your marketing funnel directly correlates with your audience’s content journey, so it’s critical to map it out. If you offer free trials (which you should) or product demos, you will quickly realize that case studies are needed to increase conversions. To help increase your customer retention, you should also create customer success guides.
Content funnels are universal, even if B2B SaaS companies are unique. As a result, you will be able to quickly identify the different types of content and their appropriate placement.
You’ll need attractive content to build awareness:
- Top-of-funnel blog posts
- YouTube videos
- LinkedIn infographics
Youll need engaging content to enhance consideration:
- Ebooks, white papers & solution briefs
- In-depth guides
- Webinars & online courses
Convincing content will drive conversion:
- Case studies & customer stories
- Competitor comparison pages
- Testimonial videos
Your website’s customer journey will give you insights into the psychology of your customers and where content can be optimized. As an example, if you have a low conversion rate on your pricing page, you can start including content types such as:
- Influencer testimonials
- Links to customer stories
- A new call-to-action that minimizes risk
3. Commercial intent: find your most valuable keywords
Identify keyword phrases with high commercial intent. The money keyword phrases for every B2B SaaS solution are transactional or commercial in nature. If someone types that phrase into Google’s search bar, they are actively looking for a solution with the intent of buying soon. This would likely be to drive free trials or paid subscriptions. For example, WorkPatterns, an employee management platform for mid-level managers, might have commercial keywords that include:
- Workforce management tool
- Team management software
- People management software
- One-on-one meeting management software
However, this is just half of a money keyword phrase. The other half is where intent comes in. These words within the keyword phrase give it a high buying intent, such as:
- Free-trial
- Pricing
- Comparison
- Buy (or purchase)
Hence, keywords such as ‘Workforce management tool pricing’, ‘Team management software free trial’, and ‘Purchase people management software’ are true money keywords with high commercial intent. As well as being essential for conversions, these commercial keywords will also guide an important part of your white papers, solution briefs, webinars, and, particularly, your pillar product pages. Discovering your commercial keywords from scratch can be done in three ways:
4. Identify topics for your top-of-funnel content
Create a list of topics that you would like to drive targeted traffic to your website. There is no way for conversions to occur without traffic — it is the lifeblood of your content marketing efforts and should be the first thing on your strategy list to address in order to achieve success. Research has revealed that most prospects will typically engage with 13 pieces of content before they are ready to make a purchase or at least sign-up for a free trial of your product or service. A combination of your buyer personas along with keyword research comes into play at this point. It basically comes down to three types of content at the top of the funnel:
- Content about solutions to pressing challenges they face in their business.
- Content that helps readers reach their end goals better by providing them with unique insights that they won’t find anywhere else.
- Content that provides readers with critical updates and trends about the niche or industry in which your business operates.
5. Develop your consideration & conversion content
Plan out which types of content will help you to gain consideration, build desire, and foster trust among your audience. You need to drive targeted traffic to your site, but unless you have the right content to guide your visitors to a conversion, you are leaving a lot of hard-won attention on the table. There are two types of content that you can use: middle-of-the-funnel (consideration) content, which introduces your product or solution into your readers’ conversation, and bottom-of-the-funnel (conversion) content, which encourages your customers to take action.
There is a tendency to frame consideration content as webinars, templates, ebooks, and reports, but those are just formats, not exactly what consideration content is about as far as the content is concerned. It is important to educate your audience about what your product can do that will directly benefit them and their current situation, in order to gain their consideration. Effective mid-funnel content combines the power of education with the power of persuasion to create powerful results. For B2B SaaS companies looking for consideration content, here are a few content format examples:
- Ebooks
- Solution briefs
- Whitepapers & analyst reports
- Demos & free mini-tools
- Email courses
- Webinars
It is essential for your content strategy to include conversion content. In consideration content, you are warming up your readers to the true benefits of your solution and how it can be applied to their needs, but in conversion content, you are making the final push to bring them over the finish line. These include:
- Customer reviews & testimonials
- Customer stories & case studies
- Product or competitor comparison pages
- Your pricing page (yes this is content too)
It has been proven that customer stories are powerful tools to showcase not only the benefits of your solution, but to humanize your brand and your customers as well.
6. Plan out your customer retention content
Prioritize customer success to delight customers
It is important to solve the challenges of your customers in order to achieve success with your product. Despite the fact that you may be an expert in your solution, you have to assume they aren’t. Your content should provide them with all the necessary information in a step-by-step format, so they can successfully utilize your platform or product. Ensure that your customers have the best experience with your solution by going granular and hyper-detailed. As part of Moz’s knowledge base content, the company guides users through how to navigate the platform. By providing instruction and guides, they dive deep into specific topics with step-by-step ‘How-To’ articles that assume the reader is a beginner. Also, they created a quick start guide for both paid and free trial signups, to educate and onboard them. This allows them to get results quickly through their solution and builds customer trust and competence of it. The process is ongoing, especially when your solution is updated or new features are released that your customers haven’t yet seen.
Teach them something valuable to expand their horizons
This is when your content needs to add value — not just something they already know they want or a problem they are well aware they need to solve. Bring forth new horizons, new insights, and new possibilities they didn’t know were possible. Make learning fun and engaging by teaching them something valuable. Video production company Wistia, for instance, creates documentary series and documentaries to share new ideas with their audiences (especially their customers). Users gain new perspectives and brand advocacy is built. Retaining customers doesn’t have to be a big-budget production. Simple written content can work just as well. As a regular part of their development process, Close frequently creates ‘playbooks’ that teach their existing customers (as well as general audiences) key lessons on how to be a better sales manager and executive.
Build your own tribe and bond with your customers
Creating guides and instructional content is valuable, but nothing beats person-to-person interaction, and that is where building a community can help you retain customers. Customers not only create user-generated content that others can engage with and interact with, but they can also be great seed ideas for bigger topics you can build on. Through a forum discussion board, Shopify, for example, bonds together their customers. In a virtual town hall setting, their staff can communicate directly (and individually) with their customers, while other users can just join the conversation. It’s critical to ensure that your customers are successful in their goals and maximize the value of your product to foster customer loyalty. Focus on what your customers want & need instead of highlighting your awesome office culture.
7. Define your content marketing goals
SaaS companies need to convert attention and traffic into tangible business results. It’s easy to waste your marketing dollars unless you can grow your user or customer base consistently. Identify the points of conversion in your customer buying journey and develop bottom-of-the-funnel conversion content to get prospects off the fence.
Is there anything you would like to accomplish with your content in the short term?
For B2B SaaS companies, driving more business and increasing the bottom line is the end goal, but you must understand where you are in your content marketing journey. First and foremost, you’ll want to drive traffic to your website if you’re starting. Your website’s core metrics will be traffic growth and developing core metrics such as:
- Increasing the number of backlinks for your website
- Increasing your domain authority
- Ranking for keywords that matter
Your KPIs here will be rather tactical. After you have covered your basics, you will want to track the key metrics that B2B SaaS companies need to track. Here are some examples of how your content marketing metrics will change as your goals evolve:
New customer acquisition
The metrics to track here will include:
- Free trial registrations
- Demo requests (especially if you are selling a big-ticket item)
- Customer acquisition costs
- Lead conversion rate
Focusing on top-of-funnel content is crucial to winning new customers; however, you should also aggressively push toward content that will convert, such as case studies and competitor comparisons.
Retaining your customers
The main metrics here to focus on will be:
- Customer churn rate
- Email list growth rate
- Customer lifetime value
- Monthly (and annual) recurring revenue
Ideally, you would like to increase the commitment and business of your existing clients in order to increase customer retention.
8. Organize your publishing schedule
Now that you know what keywords to target and what content you should produce, you should create a publishing plan. You should publish as much high-quality content as possible if you want to develop traction and start driving organic traffic to your website. HubSpot recommends posting three to four times a week. Your content creation will need to take precedence when you’re just starting. Developing middle and bottom of the funnel content once a quarter is a good starting point for smaller B2B SaaS blogs.
Develop conversion content (such as solution briefs and case studies) at least once a month as your content team grows, or you work with an agency. When it comes to content creation, quality still reigns.
You’ll need to develop your content development process in order to build your content publishing schedule on solid ground:
1. Curate a team for content creation
In the same way that Nick Fury assembled the Avengers, you’ll need to assemble your team of rock-star content creators — or at least start with the bare minimum. So here are the minimum requirements for starting a blog for your B2B SaaS company:
- A content manager
- A content strategist
- The content writer and editor
- The content designer
- The SEO specialist
Despite 5 roles sounding like a lot, a content manager can also act as a content strategist if you start small. You’ll have to dedicate specific individuals to these roles as your content production needs to increase.
2. Create your content calendar
You will be able to streamline your content production needs and ensure you hit your content milestones by creating your content calendar. In addition, you can easily develop your content calendar using apps like Trello, Basecamp or Clickup, which will allow your entire team to be on the same page, making it much easier to collaborate.
3. Set up your content review & approval process
A content review and approval process is essential for hitting your publishing goals while maintaining high content quality. You’ll be able to quickly fix any errors, make sure your content is native to your platform, and determine whether your content is valuable enough to your audience. Here’s how to set up a review and approval process from scratch. By setting up these three pillars and your content marketing budget, you can determine how much content you can create and publish every month.
9. Decide how you will distribute your content
As important as creating content, you also need to develop a distribution strategy that goes beyond just publishing blog posts on your website or uploading videos on YouTube. For B2B SaaS companies to gain the most exposure and traction for their content marketing efforts, they need to be aware of and utilize three content distribution channels. In addition, there are three types of media channels: owned media channels, paid media channels, and earned media channels.
Owned media channels
The key distribution channels for B2B SaaS companies are owned media channels, which are easiest to control and establish. This includes your website (blog and pages), social media channels like LinkedIn and YouTube, and email marketing. Although you will eventually drive organic traffic to your owned media channels, SEO will take months to gain traction — that’s why you will need to tap into the other two distribution channels to reach your target audience.
Paid media channels
You need to pay to play in marketing — and that goes for bringing in your ideal customers to your content. This is the most effective way to reach your ideal customers while keeping the message under your control.
These includes:
- Pay-per-click Ads (PPC)
- Social media ads (Facebook, Quora, Reddit)
- Influencer marketing
- Retargeting ad campaigns
For paid media channels to work, you need to be familiar with search engines and social media marketing, as well as have a healthy budget. However, you can still build traction and distribute your content effectively through earned media channels if that is a challenge.
Earned media channels
With this channel, your content is hosted and shared by third parties, such as industry or niche websites, without you having to pay for it. However, you must invest time, effort and work to build relationships. Groove grew its brand and reached more than a million people through guest posting, including product reviews, forum posting, media mentions and most importantly guest posting. Guest posting makes it easy to connect with your existing audience while adding value to them simultaneously. By allowing them to visit your website (referred to as referral traffic), you can convert them into customers of your solution. This post isn’t even counting the SEO benefits of the backlinks it will generate.
10. Determine the relevant CTAs for points of conversion
Content strategy involves determining where to place call-to-actions and which ones to use. CTAs for B2B SaaS generally fall into a few different types and placements:
- The Free Trial or Money Conversion CTA
- The Expression Of Interest CTA (Demos etc)
- The Lead Generation CTA
Although there are more nuanced CTAs, these three categories cover most of them. Here’s a brief overview of each and where your website should feature them.
The free trial (or money conversion CTA)
Free trials are the final step in committing to your B2B SaaS business for most prospects — they sign-up for them, and, if they like it (and you keep reminding them), they become paying customers. Free trials should be displayed on different parts of your website to capture conversions. However, they need to be showcased at least in the following four places:
- Your homepage
- Your pricing page
- Your case studies page (and within individual case studies)
- Your use cases (or industry use) pages
A free trial CTA is displayed on key pages like Basecamp’s pricing page to increase conversions. Prospects may hesitate at the last step — even if it’s free. All of these factors should be addressed to increase their likelihood of signing up. In this case, you simply want to get a free trial conversion. Prospects may have concerns about credit card requirements, auto-renewal fears, and cancellation issues. Additionally, you can integrate a free trial CTA at the bottom of every page to save your prospects time.
The expression of interest CTA
A CTA that expresses interest is normally used when the visitor is not quite a prospect but is a little warmer than a lead. Although they are interested in learning more about your product, they haven’t yet seen enough value for them to buy. It’s your job to convince this group of ‘fence-sitters’ through further content marketing as well as the strength of your product itself. Your CTA will be to get your readers to:
- Attend a webinar (live or recorded)
- Watch a product demo
- Download a product use case or solution brief
If you want readers to believe your solution can help their specific industry, niche, or unique situation, location them at places where a more detailed explanation is needed. For example:
- Your main product or service showcase pages
- Your product's key features pages
- Your industry solutions pages
When you are selling a high-ticket product, this is even more important. Snowflake, for example, places their expression of interest CTA on their industry pages because they know readers need more convincing before they become paying customers (or try their service for free).
The lead generation CTA
Despite the possibility that our traffic will convert directly into a free trial, most of your visitors will be only somewhat interested or just slightly curious about your brand and offering. To convert a visitor into a prospect usually takes 3 to 5 positive interactions with your brand’s content. Because of this, you must capture as much of your cold traffic as possible into your marketing funnel to nurture them down the line to ensure they are as warm as possible. As a B2B SaaS provider, you should have your readers subscribe to your newsletter through your marketing materials. To maximize the chances of growing your subscriber base, you should integrate a direct lead generation CTA on your main blog page and every single blog post of your blog. For example, I place my lead generation CTA on the main page, which hosts all of my blog posts, and at the bottom of each blog post.
