An outstanding content strategy can be the difference between acquiring a lot of long-term customers and people never hearing of your brand.
47% of B2B buyers read 3-5 blog posts or content pieces before speaking with a salesperson.
These 5 tips on content marketing will help you create high interest in your brand, demonstrate the value of your offer, and move your readers through the necessary buyer’s journey.
[bctt tweet=”These 5 tips on content marketing will help you generate high interest in your SaaS and move your readers through the necessary buyer’s journey.”]
1. Create a Buyer’s Journey That Retains Your Customers
A buyer’s journey includes four steps:
- Awareness
- Evaluation
- Purchase
- Retention
To maximize your sales, you need content geared towards each stage of the buyer’s journey.
First, you want to generate traffic by creating outbound content to boost awareness about your solution. These awareness campaigns will get you inbound traffic, but you still need to convert that traffic into interested leads.
The next step is to educate the prospect on the problems that your product or service solves. You also need to screen your prospects for fit, and only work with those that are a good fit for your services. In other words, only work with prospects you know you can help.
Once your readers are interested and engaged, you’d then focus on converting your leads into customers.
Finally, the aim is to have satisfied customers who want to maintain long-term relationships with your company.
2. Target Your SEO Efforts Towards Searcher’s Intent
The world of SEO is constantly in flux due to constant Google updates that often lack transparency. Luckily, there are a few best practices that stand the test of time.
Searcher intent is crucial.
Google is only getting better at determining the searcher’s intent. To take advantage of the latest trends, figure out the type of content your prospect wants from your targeted keywords.
Informational queries comprise the majority of Google searches. When people search for information, they often formulate their search as a question.
Ranking highly for question searches is an excellent way to get prospects into your funnel.
For example, if you were a mechanic, “how often should I change my oil?” would be a keyword to target.
On the flip side, people who are ready to buy will search for the solution they need. The way they type their searches will reflect their buyer’s intent. As opposed to question searches, they will often search for a company, consultant, or vendor that has the solution to their problem.
3. Tell Success Stories Using Case Studies
Customer reviews can be a good way to convince prospects to make a purchase. But the story about a customer’s experience can be even more effective. Case studies, if done correctly, do an excellent job telling stories about how your customers benefited.
Case studies are a way to demonstrate the likely outcome of buying your service by using previous customers as examples. Better yet, you could place your case studies on the Resources page on your website.
Here are three ways to create a case study that will give prospects that crucial final push:
1. Create an Engaging Story
Start by explaining the customer’s goal. Then, talk about the obstacle they were facing. And finally, demonstrate how the company’s service helped the customer overcome their obstacle. However, rather than a formulaic approach, your story must be engaging and hook the reader right from the beginning. The best way is to position the customer as the hero in the story and encourage your prospects to imagine themselves in a similar situation. Your company should simply play the role of a helping hand that gave the customer the tools needed to achieve their goal.
2. Show Creative Ways to Reduce Churn
A major problem for SaaS companies is high churn rates. Customers often struggle with the onboarding process or with fully realizing the benefits of the software. Find a way to analyze the circumstances that led to customers leaving:
- Are these customers struggling with a certain step in the onboarding process?
- Are they unable to figure out a certain feature that your service offers?
- Are they getting enough support from your technical team in resolving problems?
You can use case studies to show examples of successful user experiences with your service from onboarding to day-to-day use and reassure your interested prospects that you will help them along the way.
3. Use Noteworthy Quotes and References
You have the ability to craft a compelling narrative for your case study. With that said, customer quotes and statistics should be strategically placed throughout. You can offer a second-hand account of how the customer felt after your service helped them. But the better option is to insert a quote where the customer explains, in their own words, how your company gave them the tools they needed to overcome their struggles and achieve next-level success.
And let’s take it a step further:
The subjects of your case studies will be your most satisfied customers. So why not ask them if they’d be willing to take a few calls from interested prospects? If they say yes, then you will have a credible source touting the benefits of your service – a prospect is more likely to trust someone with no financial incentive.
4. Repurpose Your Content Once In a While
So you wrote an article and posted it on your website.
Watched the traffic pour in and received glowing reviews.
Time to call it a day?
Probably not.
Your best content contains valuable information that can possibly be repurposed and utilized to connect with leads through other platforms:
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Infographics
- Webinars
These are examples that would carry the ideas in your article to well beyond the initial audience.
You can also repurpose existing content into social media posts and find a way to make them go viral.
BONUS TIP: Create an editorial calendar to schedule your content distribution.
5. Create Unique How-To Content
Let’s say you just wrote a beautiful, engaging how-to guide for a common product in your industry.
The problem is there are 100 other similar guides out there. It’s going to be an uphill battle to get traffic.
In an alternate scenario, you wrote the guide on the same product and came at it from a different angle than the other 100 guides.
This would give you a better chance at attracting readers.
Of course, your different angle would need to be of value to the reader – but if you can combine both uniqueness and value, you could hit a grand slam.
Effective content marketing boils down to considering your target prospects. Here are some important questions you can ask yourself to get started:
- How can you make them aware of your offer?
- What are their informational needs at the current stage of the buying cycle?
- How is your offer better or different from that of your competitors?
Make sure you have good answers to these questions. The success of your SaaS content marketing strategy depends on it.
