The 7 Secrets to Must-See, Must-Read SaaS Content Marketing

So you’ve got your SaaS content marketing strategy all mapped out. Now what? 

Here are some valuable tips to keep in mind as you’re working on launching your strategy. And trust us, this extra effort will be worth your time. Think about it—SaaS will only continue to grow at rapid speed in today’s digital world: 

• The SaaS market is projected to grow from $225.6 billion in 2020 to $436.9 billion by 2025. 

As your industry becomes inundated with more software, free trials, and subscriptions plans, you need to consistently attract, grow, and retain customers amid this fierce competition. 

So how exactly do you achieve this in the SaaS space? We’ve got seven secrets to SaaS content marketing you need to know and own. Let’s dive in. 

1. Don’t Just Sell—Offer Value

We get it. With the full schedule you’re juggling, you want to cut to the chase and sell right away. But you know what the biggest turn-off is? Selling! No one wants to be bombarded with ads and pestered about products they may or may not need. 

A general rule of thumb: Focus on educating and gaining trust first before you sell. Why? 

• Sure, your product is central to your business, but it’ll be hard to gain their trust if you aren’t helping your potential customers get to know your product. 

• Organizations are generally pretty slow at adapting to new technology. And we can’t blame them—there are so many choices and learning curves involved, all of which take time. 

It’s as important to offer valuable information consistently as it is to have a painless customer onboarding process. This information can be leveraged in ways that illuminate your unique value propositions. 

Example: Ahrefs

Ahrefs—an SEO software company that offers tools for link-building, keyword research, competitor analysis, and more—produces a lot of great videos that offer value. They inform while strategically using their products to drive the discussion. 

Take a look at Ahrefs’ “How to Write a Blog Post That Attracts Backlinks” video for reference. Sam Oh takes us through his process of creating a blog post with high-authority backlinks. Along the way, he uses Ahrefs tools to obtain the results he needs. 

By weaving in their software to inform and educate, Ahrefs illustrates how their product can alleviate the audience’s pain points. It’s a strategic way to offer people value without pushing them to buy.

2. Keep the User Experience in Mind

There are various ways to market your SaaS business. In our beginner’s guide, we mention different forms of content your team can use to help educate, such as: 

• Blog articles
• Infographics
• Videos
• Webinars

As you’re building out your content, find strategic ways to communicate your message. This might involve: 

• Organizing your blog posts in a way that’s more readable and approachable (e.g., adding a table of contents that enables readers to jump to specific sections)
• Combining two different types of content (e.g., weaving videos into your blog posts) 

Prioritizing the user experience can help your SaaS team think of creative ways to talk to your audience. Since SaaS is a technical-heavy field, you want to identify methods that can help your audience understand the intricacies and takeaways of your product (and want to stay on your page!).

Example: Vidyard

Vidyard doesn’t have the largest content library, like some other SaaS companies. But they do a particularly good job at offering in-depth, user-friendly content.

Let’s take a look at their blog piece on personalized videos. Vidyard begins with a table of contents with anchor links that allow readers to jump to different sections. You can see just from skimming through their table of contents that the article is well-organized—it’s split into sections that address the what, where, and how. 

As you dive into the article, you’ll notice Vidyard supplements their copy with helpful video content that offers examples to illustrate their concepts further. Using a good mix of content helps Vidyard: 

• Break up their text with useful, enticing, and visual content that maximizes the reader experience.
• Offer their audience members more value. 
• Create content that is more engaging and helps increase the time readers spend on the page.

3. Demonstrate Versatility

Make it clear your product is not just a one-trick pony. Showcase everything it can do. 

Even if your software has an obvious primary use or function attached to it, the more of its uses you can showcase, the more perceived value it has for potential customers. 

This is especially useful to those in the mid-to-low stages of the customer journey. Leads are likely comparing your product to your competitors’ and flirting with the idea of signing up for a free demo. It’s imperative to put your best foot forward in these phases, so go above and beyond to illustrate your expertise. 

Example: HubSpot

HubSpot—a SaaS company that creates inbound marketing software products—is known for their high-quality content. They do a particularly good job of offering educational blog material that covers various topics like marketing, sales, customer service, and website development. 

This versatility demonstrates HubSpot’s expertise and potential in helping businesses establish well-rounded marketing techniques with the help of their software tools. 

We also can’t help noticing their regard for the user experience! As HubSpot produces numerous blog posts, organizing them into topics is a great way to help the audience navigate their site and get a better feel for their SaaS offerings. 

4. Use a Consistent but Distinct Voice and Face

So many successful content marketing strategies for SaaS products rely on one person to be the face of the business. Using a specific face and voice offers consistency that can help humanize your brand. A familiar face can generate awareness, which is a great way to establish trust and authority in your space. 

After all, people want to connect with a fellow human (the way people relate to brands is similar to how they connect with friends) rather than an ad that annoyingly hovers over their browser. 

Examples: Backlinko, Neil Patel, Vidyard, and Moz

Think: 

• Bryan Dean of Backlinko: If you look through Backlinko’s videos and blog posts, you’ll find they’re all produced by the founder himself. 

• Neil Patel of Neil Patel Digital: Like Dean, Patel takes full ownership of his company, being the main face of the website and content pieces. 

• Tyler Lessard of Vidyard: Lessard (Vidyard’s VP of marketing) is featured quite a bit in Vidyard’s videos, which helps spark their pages with authority. 

• Rand Fishkin of Moz: Moz’s Whiteboard Friday videos haven’t had as much traction since Fishkin left the company. This is unfortunate, as their content is very good, but it just goes to show the impact having a specific voice and face can have on your business. 

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a face of content adds to a brand’s authority and authenticity.

5. Offer Tangible Resources

All forms of content should be useful and fulfill a specific purpose. You can take this a step further by offering tangible resources your leads can apply in their roles. 

Example: HubSpot’s Learning Templates

On top of their blog content, HubSpot offers valuable guides and resources leads can download and use in their day-to-day business strategies. 

Here are a couple for reference: 

• 101 Sales Template Qualification Questions: This resource offers 101 questions to ask contacts when qualifying, closing, negotiating, and upselling. 
• Customer Service Metrics Calculator: This exclusive calculator tool helps marketers decipher their business’ key metrics and KPIs for their customer support services. 

These templates are strategically woven into HubSpot’s landing pages and blog posts, offering readers a chance to apply what they have learned. Most of these resources are also gated, which means HubSpot can further gather useful audience data to hone their content marketing strategies.

So take time to think outside the box—what are some tangible assets your prospects can use in their day-to-day?  

6. Use the Hub & Spoke Model

The hub and spoke model is a strategic internal linking method that helps maintain your traffic and engagement rates. 

• Hub: Also referred to as pillar pieces, hubs are large content pieces that broadly cover a particular topic. 
• Spoke: Your spokes are supportive content pieces placed as internal links in your hub piece. Spokes further elaborate on topics covered in the hub and are also referred to as cluster pieces. 

The hub links to each spoke piece, and each spoke links back to the hub. The benefit of this model? One high-performing spoke can elevate search rankings for all your other spoke pieces linked to the same hub. 

Example: Cloud Elements

An API integration platform, Cloud Elements follows the hub and spoke model in their Definitive Guide to API Integrations page. This hub piece links out to blog posts (spokes) on their site, which further expand upon the topics presented in the guide. In addition, the spoke pieces link back to the hub page. 

By thoroughly following the hub and spoke model, Cloud Elements won a 53 percent increase in organic traffic. 

7. Don’t Be Afraid to Begin with the Basics

Not all content has to aim directly at the expert-level buyers in your audience. Even if you sell to C-suite executives, you can build a good reputation by covering all levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc.). 

Example: Big Leap + SaaS HR Client

Here, at Big Leap, we’ve had the pleasure of helping one of our SaaS clients in the HR space build and write glossary pages. 

While most of our client’s customers (HR professionals) are probably familiar with the majority of these glossary terms, the glossary database is still a great way to: 

• Showcase our client’s expertise in the HR field. Covering lower-, mid-, and higher-level content helps our clients foster trust and expertise in their field. Displaying a mastery over the basics illustrates that they have the right foundational knowledge to understand and tackle the bigger challenges of HR management. 
• Expand our client’s reach. The glossary piece serves as a content piece that can entice HR professionals of all experience levels to flex their skills and knowledge. 
• Encourage more engagement. Each glossary piece links to other relevant pages of our client’s site. This encourages users to keep exploring the site and its resources. 
• Build brand awareness in SERPs. These glossary pages have been a multi-year effort, but the dividends are starting to pay off. These pages now have more than 1,000 keywords ranking in the top three positions on Google, which means HR pros regularly see this brand as they explore the web. 

Accelerate Your SaaS Content Marketing Strategies

Doing the bare minimum won’t get you anywhere. In a crowded space like SaaS, it’s about doing things bigger and better than your competitors and partnering with a trusted marketing team who has the right expertise—this is where Big Leap comes in. 

You can lean on us to help bolster your SaaS content marketing strategies to great heights. And we mean it. If you’d like to learn what we can accomplish for you, start by reading our case studies and contact us.