Posted by Entrepreneurs who venture into the SaaS industry are often fueled by the passion of building phenomenal products that can change their customers’s lives, but also consider marketing and sales central to realizing their goals. Marketing for a SaaS business is uniquely challenging. Unlike traditional product- or service-based businesses, the element of tangibility is low.
While there are many so-called hacks to follow when strategizing, there is only one approach that can yield consistent revenue regularly. It involves successfully leveraging content to your advantage. Here’s how.
1. Optimize your website for conversions.
Content optimization and keyword research are central to ensuring that your SaaS site comes up when customers search for a product that you offer. How do you go about doing it? Identify all the buy-intent keywords that your potential customers may be searching for and optimize your existing landing pages to target them. The idea is to direct potential customers to your website whenever they’re making a purchasing decision.
You should be focusing on drawing traffic that has the potential to convert, impact the business’s bottom line and deliver promising ROI. This is exactly what’s promised by the hockey-stick content-growth strategy, which focuses on generating leads with content.
Related: Buying or Selling an SaaS Company? Read This First.
2. Create content that meets your target audience’s queries.
To drive organic traffic to the landing pages, it needs to be layered with content pieces. Focus on answering queries that cover what customers in the consideration phase of marketing funnel would ideally be looking for by targeting middle-of-the funnel keywords. This ensures that the leads entering your funnel will be higher along in their journey of discovery and more likely to convert. These content pieces also act as a bridge when building backlinks to your landing pages, driving link equity as well as referral traffic back to the conversion-optimized pages on your blog.
3. Make sure your content comes up in relevant searches.
In a perfect world, you would only need to produce stellar content and your audience would automatically discover it, publications would organically link to it and you would get a string of leads flowing in right away. The truth is, no matter how well-researched your content is, it seldom reaches its audience unless you put forth some serious effort. How do you do that? Build backlinks for your content. Pitch to high-authority industry publications within your niche that target the same audience as you and offer to write guest articles for them. This builds the authority for your SaaS website, getting your content to rank organically while driving referral traffic at the same time.
Related: 4 Ways SaaS Can Make Entrepreneurs More Efficient
Now that you have attracted leads, nurtured them with information and gotten them to convert into paying customers, what next?
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Optimize your content for the entire sales cycle. The retention stage of theSaaS sales cycle is often of crucial importance, because the SaaS model relies heavily on ongoing subscriptions rather than one-time purchases. Having an ongoing relationship with the customer is crucial for their engagement and retention. The value of content isn’t limited to the inbound traffic. It can be used as a tool for training the existing users and offering them added value to retain them as well.
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Leverage content as a remarketing tool. Content can be used to connect with the leads stored in your SaaS CRM software and re-engage with them. The SaaS industry is highly dynamic and rapidly evolving, and SaaS entrepreneurs need to stay abreast of all changes by constantly upgrading their products. Content opens up new avenues for upselling and cross-selling in Saas.
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Monitor the customer actions. While content is certainly crucial to getting qualified leads into your sales funnel, getting them to eventually convert requires insights into analytics and expertise in user experience. Monitor what actions your users are performing on your website to figure out what is working and what isn’t.
SaaS is an industry where everything — the product, its marketing, sales interactions and customer support — is tightly bound. Every touchpoint of customer interaction needs to provide a seamless experience to the users to unlock revenue potential and ensure long-term growth. Marketing is no exception.