What’s an Ideal Growth-Expanding Content Strategy for B2B SaaS

When preparing a solid B2B SaaS marketing strategy, it’s hard for marketers to strike the perfect balance between growth plans that can deliver tangible results. Because of the misconceived values and slow outcomes, B2B agencies choose to ignore the most important growth element — content.

A 2022 study on content preferences by Demand Gen found ‌that B2B buyers crave for concise and well-researched content prior to the purchase process. Further, the study revealed that 72% of respondents consumed over three content pieces to make an informed decision.

Effective B2B SaaS content marketing can render invaluable outcomes in the long run. It increases brand awareness and establishes your business as a helpful and insightful resource for your target audience. 

But what does an effective B2B SaaS content marketing strategy look like?

What is B2B SaaS Content Marketing?

We can closely categorize B2B SaaS content marketing as an elaborate form of inbound marketing where marketers focus on providing the right information at the right time. It is designed to market your product and offer convenience to your targeted business industry.

SaaS content marketing is all about consistently creating and distributing content that is insightful and relatable about your product to attract and retain target customers. SaaS marketers use a strategic approach to deliver the content in multiple forms such as blogs, videos, emails, eBooks, whitepapers, and more.

Why B2B SaaS Content is Not a Regular Everyday Thing?

B2B SaaS marketing requires specific and to-the-point content, as the stakes are higher and the path to making a purchase is often complex. You’d have to take a less overtly sales-y approach that positions your brand as a leader in your niche.

Every piece of content that you put out must contain a lot of value for your customers. Creating such high-quality, high-value content that brings high traffic and conversions will not be a regular everyday thing.

Your B2B SaaS content marketing strategy should align with your go-to product marketing strategy to ensure you deliver the unique value proposition. This enables you to differentiate and position your brand from the rest of the competitors in the industry.

Should Your B2B SaaS Content Marketing Focus on TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU?

Content is the most essential and effective resource if tailored according to each stage of the SaaS sales funnel your customers are in. But what stage of the funnel should you focus on when crafting content for your B2B SaaS product?

It’s common practice for marketers to start from the top of the funnel (TOFU) because of the assumption that every B2B owner starts from there. They fall prey to the fallacy that they need to educate all the potential customers at every stage, starting with the top.

However, this is not always the case. Unless your B2B brand is creating a new category of SaaS products, your audience already knows a great deal about the most basic elements. These prospects are not at the top, and creating content for that stage is mostly a waste of your effort.

Thus, your B2B SaaS marketing efforts should focus on creating content for the middle of the funnel (MOFU) or bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Prospects in these stages need a little more convincing, and tailored content created specifically to do so can aid in your conversion rate.

That said, let’s see how to create content that drives growth for your B2B SaaS:

Creating B2B SaaS Content Your Audience Can Resonate with

1. Research Ideal Clients and Identify Their Needs

There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all content strategy. Each B2B client is unique and has distinct needs, personality traits, and mindset. For your B2B SaaS content marketing to be effective, you need to research what problems your ideal clients face and how they plan to resolve them.

Reach out to your ideal prospects and strike conversations with them through any digital platform. Without offering a solution straight away, here’s what you should do:

• Listen to them delving into the specifics of their problems
• Note down their personality traits and decision-making abilities
• Recognize their needs and the extent to which  they are ready to go for the solution

Instead of putting your prospects in segmented boxes based on the buyer personas created on an assumption basis, try to understand their needs by going beyond just that. This will give you insights and notions to create personalized content that cater perfectly to your prospects’ needs.

2. Audit Existing Content to Find Gaps to Bridge

Once you document the needs of your ideal clients, look through your existing content and see if it meets their newfound needs. Run a content audit to get actionable insights that help you improve the current state of your B2B content.

Doing so will help you discover which content your audience engages with and appreciates the most. This will enable you to focus your content efforts where you can get a high return on investment.

And for the same, prepare a descriptive content strategy that answers the following questions:

• Who your content is targeting?
• How well your content answers the questions users have?
• What type of content is missing from your strategy?
• What content pieces need updating, addition, or merging?

3. Prepare a Comprehensive Content Framework

The content you have so lovingly created and perfected would just feel like noise if you don’t have an elaborative framework and goals to back it up. Your goals shouldn’t just be about increasing traffic and engagement, but also fit into the larger company picture.

If your goal is to increase subscriptions to your B2B SaaS product, then your content should resonate with that goal to educate and show your users how you can solve their problems. For the same, you must prepare an editorial content framework with a mission to help your B2B clients succeed in their jobs.

A comprehensive framework is the one that answers the ‘How’ of content creation, e.g. how to organize and optimize your B2B SaaS content for search?

Certain frameworks can help you organize and manage your B2B SaaS content that include:

• Topic clusters
• Blog categories
• Format-driven content hubs

4. Refine Your Content to Target Clients In Important Stages of the Funnel

Before you start with content creation, it’s vital to identify the important stages of your SaaS sales funnel. Here are the stages an ideal sales funnel comprises:

1. Awareness is where clients look for educational information.
2. Engagement is where clients find credible resources to go deeper into understanding B2B SaaS products.
3. Exploration is where clients look for the value your B2B SaaS products offer.
4. Conversion is where clients finally decide to go with your product.

The first thing you need to do is identify the stages your ideal B2B clients are in. As we have mentioned, most of your clients will have gone past TOFU, i.e. awareness stage, as they possess some level of understanding and knowledge about your B2B products. Thus, creating content for the TOFU will not be helpful.

You must target the most important stages, which are MOFU and BOFU. Create and offer content with incredible value for clients to go deeper and explore features your product offers. This will build interest and trigger purchase intent on clients to take the next step.

5. Choose Content Types That Work Well with Your B2B Audience

As important as it is to refine your SaaS content strategy, it’s also vital to choose the content type that works best for your B2B target audience. The right content format and theme can bring about a significant improvement in your essential conversion rate benchmarks. Plus, it ensures your content fits perfectly into your long- and short-term goals.

Here are some content types that B2B buyers often engage with during the purchase process:

However, finding the content type and format that works well with your target audience is like finding a needle in a haystack. One way you can approach this is by analyzing Google SERPs for relevant keywords to see what type of content the search engine presents.

You can incorporate various content assets, such as textual, interactive, video, graphical, or others, into your B2B SaaS content marketing strategy.

6. Select Channels to Distribute & Amplify Content

Great performing content assets have one common thing and that is, they are well distributed among many channels that amplify their reach beyond just your website. Selecting effective content distribution channels will ensure that your content creation efforts don’t go to waste.

The question is what channels can help amplify the reach of your content? Let’s get to it then:

Email Marketing

Keep your email contacts in the loop by sending them major occasional newsletters, content updates and product news.

Organic Distribution

Organic distribution channels include enterprise SEO and social media. These organic channels help your well-written and optimized content to reach the right people.

Backlink Creation

Link building for SaaS is the best way to increase the organic performance of your content. Make sure your content packs a real punch of value and it’ll eventually receive quality backlinks.

Paid Promotion

Apart from organic distribution channels, you must also leverage paid search and social ads to get the word out about your B2B SaaS product and the content that revolves around it.

7. Reshape Your B2B SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

Once you have selected the channels and deployed your content marketing strategy, the last thing you want to do is keep track of how your content performs. Your content strategy is a living document that grows along with your brand.

Often revisit your strategy to work on it, refine it, and reshape it as and when required. Your B2B SaaS content strategy should be in tune with every change in your business model. If you find there’s a drop in traffic and engagement, then it’s time to delve into finding reasons for what has changed.

Also, another constantly changing aspect is customer needs and, as mentioned in Step 1, research your ideal customers for their changing needs to reshape and drive growth for your B2B SaaS business.

Win Your B2B SaaS Content Marathon With Practice

B2B SaaS marketing is not a set-and-forget strategy that surely won’t drive significant traffic to your site. If you want to be unique, you must test and adopt different tactics to drive growth for your B2B SaaS brand. And SaaS content marketing looks to deliver impressive results.

However, the hard truth about SaaS content marketing is there’s no finish line; it’s a long marathon that consistent and rigorous practice can only win. A SaaS content marketing agency like Growfusely can help you get ahead in your B2B niche whether you are starting from scratch or revamping your current content marketing strategy.

Help from subject experts can prove to be the most valuable and effective way to win your content marketing marathon and drive growth for your B2B SaaS product!

Image Source – Demand Generation Report 

Author

Vijay Khatri

Vijay Khatri is a Creative Content Writer at Growfusely, a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.