Your B2B SaaS content marketing strategy plays a huge role in getting you new customers and keeping your current ones.
This is especially true in an industry where the buyer journey is long, hard, and non-linear; and where the customer only spends a small percentage of their CLV (customer lifetime value) upfront due to the recurring revenue model of a B2B SaaS company, which means that keeping them as a customer is a pretty big deal for your bottom-line.
In this article, we’re going to go through 5 tips for a more impactful B2B SaaS content marketing strategy to help you achieve both growth and retention for your company:
1. Align content marketing and company business goals
Why are you creating content?
Who is it for?
How are they going to get the content?
How will you measure the success of your content?
Your B2B SaaS content marketing strategy answers these questions.
But before you get started on your strategy, you first need to be clear on your content marketing goals. You also need to ensure that those goals align with your overall business goals. This helps you move in the right direction as well as deliver measurable business impact.
Your goal is what you want to achieve, your strategy is your plan for how you’re going to achieve it, and your tactics are the actions you will take to make your plan happen.
Everything needs to connect from end-to-end or you’ll END up wasting time and resources.
Here’s a simplified flow of what that might look like in terms of goal alignment:
Business Goal: Increase revenue
⬇️
Content Marketing Goal: Increase organic traffic
⬇️
Content Marketing Strategy: Publish evergreen content
⬇️
Content Marketing Tactic: Build content hub
Once you have your goals set, you need to choose the content marketing metrics you want to track to measure your progress and performance.
For instance, some key content marketing metrics to track for instance are:
- email subscribers
- SEO ranking
- signups from blog
- conversion rates
A mistake that some marketers make is that they want to track every single metric, which isn’t necessary.
And this is a tough one.
Justifying content marketing ROI has always been a challenge. So sometimes we get caught up with reporting vanity metrics that make us look good. Nothing wrong there. You just need to be able to also discern between vanity and actionable metrics and choose a mix of both that make sense for what you want to achieve.
Not sure if a metric is actionable?
Just ask yourself this question:
“Does this metric help me make a decision?”
2. Develop both your Buyer Persona and ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
Who are you creating your content for?
The B2B SaaS buying process is different compared to a B2C one. Since it’s a larger investment, it often comes with both a human validation process as well as a corporate one.
Having a target audience list isn’t enough.
You need to be able to see things through the eyes of the decision-makers, as well as the company they represent.
Because of this, you want to develop both buyer personas and ICPs (ideal customer profile) so you have a comprehensive understanding of the content that you need to create.
What’s the difference between the two?
A buyer persona contains more individual-level data such as:
- demographics
- psychographics
- role details
- challenges
- motivators
On the other hand, an ICP contains company-level data such as:
- Company size
- Industry
- Annual revenue
- Organisational structure
- Roles involved in the decision-making process
3. Map out your buyer-to-customer journey map using your buyer persona(s) and ICP(s)
How can you help your customer?
This is the biggest question your content marketing strategy needs to answer.
After all, customer-centric content (or rather, a customer-centric company) helps to foster a positive environment, which results in:
- increased customer loyalty and satisfaction
- increased retention and/or upgrades
- customer referrals
One way to do this is to map out your buyer-to-customer journey using your buyer persona(s) and ICP(s) to match the right content with your target audience’s goals, wants, pain points, emotional states, and so on.
The buying committee for B2B is generally larger than the one for B2C. This means you’ll have profiles with various roles, needs, wants, and challenges.
A content piece on, say, your project management software, needs to be written and positioned differently for your various ICPs and buyer personas:
- For the CEO/founder: company overview/reports-focused
- For the project manager: usability-focused
- For the startup: price-focused
- For the scaleup: scalability-focused
This gets increasingly complex the more content you create, so mapping it out properly helps you keep track of everything you need to do and where your content fits in the buyer/customer journey.
Below is a spreadsheet example I created. Feel free to make a copy here.
4. Build a structured content hub
What’s all this hubbub about a content hub, huh?
Content marketers like Neil Patel and Brian Dean have long since recommended and even implemented this content framework.
And for good reason.
Simply put, a content hub is a directory with various resources around a particular topic, which your website visitors can go to for answers and information. Most define it as being smaller than a website but bigger than a blog post.
Including a content hub as part of your content marketing strategy is great because it helps you:
- have a structured, one-stop shop for internal linked content
- drive in traffic to your site
- generate leads
- build authority
The content hub itself could look like a webpage on your site and it might contain only blog posts, or it might contain a media mix of blog posts, videos, infographics, audio podcasts, and more.
The point of it is to provide your target audience a centralised and engaging place for information around a particular topic/theme.
Here’s a quick rundown on the 7 essential steps to your building your content hub:
- Decide on your main topic
- Do keyword research and competitor analysis
- Map out the structure of your content hub – main topic and interconnected subtopics
- Audit and optimise existing content
- Write the subtopics first, then write your pillar page
- Decide where you want to host it and how you want it to look (blog style, directory style, etc.)
- Promote both the hub and the content within the hub
5. Take seasonality into account for content promotion and distribution
How and where you distribute your content, matters.
So does when.
For example, running a webinar when your target audience is deep in their peak business season likely means that you’re going to see a lower number of signups than usual.
While B2B does means business-to-business, people, are still who you actually sell to at the end of the day. And people are affected by seasonality.
It’s just that in this case for B2B SaaS, some of those seasonal trends may be more business-related instead of consumer-related.
It’s good to include seasonal trends in your content marketing strategy so you can set content priorities in place for your content calendar. This also helps you work your way backwards when you map out content production timelines later on.
Seasonality trends to include in your strategy:
- Quarterly periods (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4)
- Budget cycles
- Weather and seasons
- Work-related trips and events
- Holidays and special occasions
What is B2B SaaS content marketing?
B2B SaaS content marketing (business-to-business software-as-a-service content marketing) is the action taken by B2B SaaS companies to drive consistent, valuable, and engaging content in order to attract, engage, acquire, and retain a target audience.
What is a content marketing strategy?
A content marketing strategy is a documented plan to create, develop, deliver, and measure content in order to acquire, engage, and retain a target audience.
Why is a content marketing strategy important?
A content marketing strategy is important because it's a documented plan to ensure that you're on the right track to consistently publish and distribute content in line with your business goals - all at the right place and time, for the right target audience.
What's the difference between a content strategy and a content marketing strategy?
A content strategy focuses on usable content for an business/company, whereas a content marketing strategy focuses on content to attract, engage, acquire, and retain a target audience.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona outlines outlines the characteristic of a semi-fictional profile of your target customer based on a mix of data and research.
What is an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)?
An ICP or Ideal Customer Profile is an outline on the characteristics of the type of company that best suits the product/services you offer.
