How Can You Create a Winning B2B SaaS Content Strategy?

What if we told you your SaaS business could have more leads, higher retention, and fewer support tickets? 

You can.

When you build a content strategy for your B2B SaaS company, you’re building the framework for a content engine that drives organic traffic, establishes brand trust and authority, and supports your target audience at every stage of the customer journey. 

Whether you’re doing your content marketing from scratch or looking for a refresh if your content has been feeling flat, content strategy can help set the course toward success. Done well, the right content strategy can lead to more revenue, higher customer retention rates, and fewer support tickets. 

But how do you make one?

We’re diving into our top tips for creating a content strategy that will support your B2B SaaS company’s goals. 

What is a B2B SaaS content strategy? 

Say you’ve got a list of keywords to hit, a writer on deck, and a content calendar with ideas. You’re still missing the key ingredient for a successful content program: a strategy. 

Certainly, content strategies incorporate SEO research like search volume, keyword difficulty, and user intent, and it’s fantastic to have a log of ideas for future content. But neither of those things alone makes a content strategy. 

A content strategy defines your content goals and how you intend to hit those goals through content creation, SEO, and distribution. It considers your product positioning, overarching business initiatives, and ICP to outline opportunities for organic growth, such as lead generation or customer retention. 

Unlike D2C businesses, SaaS brands should focus on developing topic clusters that support subscription business models and cultivate an ongoing relationship with customers. 

Take ClickUp, for instance. Their podcast, When It Clicked, speaks to their target audience of SaaS startups hoping to get a leg up on their competition by sharing success stories. 

Your content should connect with people in every stage of the customer journey, educating them, solving their pain points, and strengthening your working relationship. 

Why B2B SaaS needs a solid content strategy 

At its most basic, strategy begets success. You can only meet goals if they’re defined and strategized, and a good strategy can earn your business the following: 

Brand awareness

Without a strategy, your content is just words on a page. 

A strategy ensures your content marketing efforts are aligned with your core brand messaging and helps you stand out as a thought leader in the saturated SaaS market. Fresh, consistent content — whether that’s SEO content, video content, or anything in between — feeds the algorithms to help discoverability and keeps your solution top-of-mind for prospective customers. 

Engaging with your audience builds long-term brand recognition. When it boils down to you versus the other guys, stand-out content could mean the difference. 

If your team doesn’t have the in-house resources to support developing a fully-fledged content strategy, partner with a SaaS marketing agency that does. Ten Speed excels at developing effective topic clusters that support startup growth. 

Leads

The number of touches it takes to convert a lead depends on the quality of those touchpoints. 

By tailoring your content marketing plan to target the right users through audience segmentation and optimizing content for different stages of the sales funnel, you’ll spend less time throwing the line and more time reeling in fish — or, in this case, qualified leads. 

Connecting your SaaS product to users at all stages of the sales funnel requires a few different content formats. Infographics are easily shareable on social media like LinkedIn and Instagram, making them a fantastic first touch. Case studies illustrate your business’s efficacy and ROI. Email marketing newsletters and demo videos can push someone to talk to sales. 

Understanding your ICP and aligning your content with buyer intent at these different stages of the funnel multiply how effective your content can be in gaining and converting leads. 

Credibility and trust

Trust cannot be bought — only earned. No matter which marketing channels you choose, great content should build your brand’s credibility. 

It’s not enough to talk the talk. Your content needs to walk the walk. Embedding accurate data into your content that highlights your company’s successes will strengthen your audience’s trust in your brand. Educational thought leadership content is a perfect way to highlight your industry experience and deeply rooted knowledge. 

Ten Speed has seen middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel content convert to revenue dollars in real time. Speaking directly to potential customers and solving their specific pain points will build trust and elevate your brand’s reputation. Plus, your sales team can leverage this content during calls with prospects to solidify your software as a leading solution. 

Customer engagement

When your customers engage with your content, they’re invested in your brand. That’s why interactive content is so effective — and a non-negotiable aspect of your content strategy. 

Ultimately, engaging content increases your conversion rate on new customers and reduces churn by keeping your existing customer base interested in what your business is doing. 

So, what content types will keep your audience engaged? Here are just a few ideas:

• Research-driven reports: B2B SaaS companies have the unique opportunity to converse with other professionals when speaking to their audiences. Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer Report is a great example of this. Engage your audience in a customer survey that will bundle into a large-scale report — then push that survey out on social media and in an email newsletter.
• Social media posts: Your comments section shouldn’t be empty. Effective content should keep your audience chatting in the comments and sharing your insights.
• Podcast: For professionals on the move, podcasts are a great long-form content format that allows them to stay connected to your brand. Plus, if you include a segment of listener-asked questions, they’ll be inclined to chime in online and share your show when it’s live. 

With the right strategy, any content can support customer engagement. 

Business growth

Improving brand awareness, capturing more leads, cultivating credibility, and engaging with customers all align toward one ultimate goal: business growth. 

Because SaaS content marketing efforts connect you directly to consumers, a comprehensive content strategy allows you to maximize that connection by educating prospects and highlighting your software as a solution to their pain points. A more educated marketplace can make better-informed decisions. 

At Ten Speed, we’ve seen SEO content gain customers $3.5M in influenced revenue from all marketing channels. Of that $3.5M, over $1M in revenue dollars came directly from organic marketing — thanks to successfully targeting the ICP at each stage of the marketing funnel. 

How to create your own B2B SaaS strategy in 8 steps

Here are the eight most important steps to creating a winning B2B SaaS content strategy. 

1. Define your marketing goals

Your overarching business goals should inform your SaaS content marketing strategy. This could include growing revenue, retaining customers, or improving brand awareness. 

All goals should be acutely measurable. Define KPIs to watch for campaign effectiveness, such as an increase in newsletter signups or demo bookings. By clearly illustrating your targets for success, you’ll only focus on creating content that directly supports that goal. 

Let’s look at a few ways you can pair marketing goals with content that supports them. Brand awareness can be bolstered by top-of-funnel blog posts. Sales enablement content like case studies and webinars can improve your SQL conversion rate, lending to revenue growth. In-depth email marketing campaigns are a fantastic option for lifecycle marketing, both attracting new leads and retaining current customers. 

2. Identify your target audience

If you don’t understand your target audience, you’ll never speak to the right people. 

Researching potential customers and developing buyer personas and ICPs can be done in a few ways, including conducting customer interviews, joining sales calls, and using AI summaries. 

Once you’ve established your ICP, you’ll tailor your content to speak directly to them, wherever they are in the buyer’s journey. 

3. Perform a content audit

Unless you’ve never published a piece of content, you need to do a content audit. Your backlog is ripe with opportunities for refreshes and repurposing, but auditing your existing content also identifies informational gaps that need filling and ineffective content that needs pruning. 

To perform a content audit: 

• Take an inventory of your total content. This includes all landing pages, lead magnets, and videos in your content library.
• Analyze your content’s performance. Do this using tools like Google Analytics to measure trends in traffic, bounce rates, and overall time on site.
• Determine content relevance to business objectives. Some content may not align with your SaaS brand’s current needs — you should aim to remove or refresh that content.
• Dive into SEO to identify opportunities. Content optimization, like adding backlinks and metadata, improves organic traffic by increasing search engine visibility. Using keyword research tools like Ahrefs aligns your content with your target audience’s search intent.

4. Develop content pillars and relevant topics

Establishing core content pillars supports your content strategy by streamlining your messaging. 

Valuable content will provide solutions for your ICP, so developing your content pillars and topic clusters around your customer’s pain points will prove the most effective. 

To create your pillars, consider the following: 

• Your brand expertise. Where do you excel? How did you get here? What milestones illustrate your experience? 
• Highlight your value proposition. What does your SaaS product provide customers? How does your product compare to others in the industry?
• Customer interests and questions. What are people asking in your comments sections? What is your sales team hearing in calls with prospects?

5. Create a content calendar

A content calendar can maximize your marketing team's bandwidth and efficiency. Planning your content in advance allows all in-house team members and external vendors to work seamlessly together and significantly reduces the likelihood of missed deadlines. 

Without consistency, your brand’s visibility will diminish. Maintaining a sustainable publication schedule with high-quality content helps customers stay connected with your business. 

6. Optimize content for search engines

Search engine optimization is a key component of an effective digital marketing strategy. Here are a few key ways your content should be optimized as a B2B SaaS company: 

• Target long-tail keywords. Identify powerful keywords using tools like Ahrefs or Semrush and create each piece of content to maximize visibility.
• Don’t forget technical SEO. Load times, mobile responsiveness, and schema markup are all vital to SaaS SEO.
• Utilize internal linking. Create a seamless reader experience and improve indexing.
• Implement meta tags. Compelling metadata can improve click-through rates and search engine rankings.
• Understand search intent. Know what users are searching for and deliver it.
• Include a clear CTA. This supports higher conversion rates.
• Cultivate high-quality backlinks. Support your content with reputable references.

7. Publish and promote the content

Building content is only half the battle. You also need to make sure it sees the light of day. Content distribution ensures your target audience actually sees the content you’ve created. 

Your distribution strategy should include channels like: 

• Social media 
• Email newsletters
• YouTube
• Partnerships with influencers
• Your website’s blog

8. Measure and analyze performance

To understand how successful your content is at reaching your goals, you’ll need to measure it. 

Tools like Google Analytics make it possible to keep tabs on your website content’s performance, and social media platforms offer built-in analytics tools. You’ll want to regularly review these metrics to continuously iterate on your content and stay aligned with your audience’s needs. 

Important metrics to watch include unique visitors, pages per session, social media comments, and lead generation. This will all indicate audience interest, retention, and engagement, which can help your marketing team make data-informed decisions about future campaigns. 

Rev up your B2B SaaS content strategy success with Ten Speed

A B2B SaaS content marketing strategy isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a necessity. 

If you’re not sure how to get started, we’re here to help. Ten Speed is the agency partner your business can rely on to create an effective content strategy. We’ll take the guesswork out of developing your ICP, scale your content production, and implement an SEO strategy to support your business goals. 

Book a call with us today to start making the most of your content.