Content Marketing for B2B SaaS
It’s too easy for good SaaS companies to get lost in the shuffle. To gain the online visibility needed to grow, content marketing for B2B SaaS companies is a strategy that builds relationships with prospects and puts your brand on the winning side of search engines like Google.
Through high-quality materials designed to provide real value to readers, our content marketing strategy:
- Helps you climb Google and other search engine rankings
- Draws the right people to your website and resources
- Increases lead quality, quantity, and conversions
- Decreases the need for paid advertising
- Offers sales enablement for better sales interactions
- Showcases the industry knowledge and superstars in your organization
Sound good? New Leaf Marketing Solutions is a small, mighty content marketing agency for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and startups looking for a better way to connect with customers and stand out in crowded markets. If you have a great SaaS solution, take pride in helping businesses solve problems, and want to grow, let us show you how content marketing can help!
B2B SaaS Companies Need a Content Marketing Strategy
If your SaaS company builds an amazing solution in the woods but customers can’t find it, was it really a great solution? According to Gartner, the B2B SaaS market is growing rapidly and estimated to generate close to $141 billion in 2022. Even if you’re the first to market in your niche, someone may see your bright idea and spin up a similar offering.
Content marketing is the flare that gets your brand above the treetops — so you can make connections with the right people and show your value. If you’re curious how content marketing works for B2B SaaS businesses, we’ll break it down for you…
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is all about gaining market exposure, building traction on search engines, and moving the sales funnel by creating materials that directly solve your customers’ questions or challenges. It could be a blog, whitepaper, telegram, or anything else.
Your prospects are out there, right now, surfing the web for answers. They trust search engine results and click away — the same as you probably do in your personal or professional life. By creating materials that address people’s online searches, you give your brand a chance to make an impression that could lead to a long-time customer.
When your content focuses on addressing customer challenges instead of your solution, you’re:
- Proving that you know the industry, trends, and customer challenges
- Showing interest in helping — not just profits
- Building trust with prospects and search engines like Google
- Bubbling up businesses that are a better fit for your SaaS solution
How Does Content Marketing Help with SaaS Sales?
Content marketing focuses on the customer, not products. Not talking about products might sound counterintuitive to selling. We’re not saying to throw out your product brochures. But, we are saying that there’s a lot of research going on before people are ready to hear about your SaaS technology. Content marketing fills that gap. It puts your brand on the radar while prospects gather information and prepare to make a decision on a SaaS partner.
This strategy goes hand-in-hand with solution selling, which has become a popular and proven way to create happier and more profitable customers.
Content marketing isn’t a sales strategy, but it is often great for sales enablement, lead quality, and conversion. When SaaS providers push a solution too hard or too early in the process, it can do more harm than good. First, people tune out the sales pitch. Second, when businesses get to the request for quote (RFQ) or bidding stages without any groundwork, they end up in bidding wars because they have no other leg to stand on. In this scenario, partners are often picked based on side-by-side feature comparisons, reputation, and costs. This is an uphill battle. It forces businesses to maintain bottom-dollar prices while launching revolutionary features to stay ahead of deep-pocket enterprises and new players trying to disrupt the market.
The best customers come from a good fit. Content marketing allows you to build a reputation before the first call or demo. In this scenario, prospects are finding your content, consuming information willingly, and learning more about your brand with every click.
All of this content consumption before the sales process weeds out less-than-ideal prospects and warms up good leads. When they’re ready to talk, content marketing already broke the ice. The prospect may even have grown attached to the brand as a trusted knowledge resource. Now you can focus on solution selling based on your prospect’s challenges and needs — leading to more engaging interactions.
As your content marketing strategy matures, you’ll see less poor leads while the progress you’re making in search engine rankings will bring in more quality leads.
What is Great B2B SaaS Content?
There’s more to it than just “doing content marketing.” Content marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme or a few pieces of content. It’s a strategy and investment that builds. But, what is good content marketing? It’s a tough question, because the value of content marketing comes down to your business goals. At the highest level, good content marketing achieves three things:
- Solves a reader challenge or provide some level of insights
- Boosts search engine visibility and inbound traffic
- Ties back to a business goal
Developing a content strategy will identify key challenges to address in your content, business goals, and search engine optimization (SEO) needed to give you a foothold in search result pages. Goals vary by company, but some common examples include increasing website traffic, form fills, or lower costs per lead.
When getting into specific topics, we focus on a customer-oriented scope for each piece of content. A piece of content might help with:
- Awareness: Coverage of current or upcoming industry and world events
- Decision-making: Information on SaaS best practices and industry trends
- Overcoming challenges: Tips and educational materials on specific topics
- Aspirations: Providing perspectives to help businesses or individuals achieve a transformative goal or milestone
These are high-level, but you’ll notice everything focuses on a benefit to the reader. We generate topics based on what people actually search for, and we mix in knowledge found uniquely within your organization to put a spin on content that only you can provide.
Why work with New Leaf Marketing Solutions for your B2B SaaS Content Marketing?
We deliver much more than blogs to fill up your website. We invest in aligning our content strategy with your business goals, getting to know your ideal customers, understanding the competition in your industry (and for your key search terms), and put together a comprehensive program that helps you get the most out of everything we create.
We’ve been doing content marketing for B2B markets for almost two decades, including B2B SaaS. As a small agency, we can give focused attention to your business needs and truly get to know your team, solutions, and audience.
FAQs about Content Marketing for B2B SaaS
It depends on the maturity of your market, competition, and how much high-value content you publish. Some businesses may start to see results in just a few months, while others may take a year or two before it replaces other marketing strategies. We help determine this in our kickoff strategy session with new clients.
Blogs on their own won’t move the needle much without a strategy driving the topics, SEO, and efforts to get more visibility to your posts. With a content marketing strategy, we develop a plan that aligns content to your business goals. We’ll determine what kind of content to create, how to link and weave disparate content together, a publishing schedule, and plans to reach your ideal audience.
Running ads will generate leads or give your brand visibility. However, digital ads on Google, Facebook, or other platforms tend to be very expensive. Also, the quality of leads varies as ads don’t always find people when they’re ready to buy. Leveraging content marketing can help you improve brand awareness, increase conversions, and move people from researching to purchasing.
Content that helps prospects helps your business as well. If your outbound sales team is cold-calling, it’s helpful to give them as many tools as possible to connect with a cold prospect. Content is a great icebreaker or leave-behind. For sales teams following-up on leads, the same idea applies. When your content addresses specific challenges faced in your industry, it’s easier to show value and make a connection.