Content marketing has risen in the last few years to become one of the most effective digital marketing philosophies available online. By focusing on relevant content over promotional messaging, you can increase your credibility and attract potential customers who are otherwise cynical about promotions directed at them.
Naturally the concept can benefit your SaaS digital marketing efforts, as well. If you are looking to attract new subscribers for your SaaS solution, consider building a content strategy that can help you accomplish this goal. This post will help you get started.
Establishing Thought Leadership
At the core of effective content marketing is thought leadership. Your goal should be to publish content that can both help your current and future subscribers make informed decisions, and position yourself as an expert in your field. According to the Marketing Insider Group,
Thought Leadership means you provide the best and deepest answers, to your customers’ biggest questions, in the formats your audience likes to consume … You tap into the talent, experience, and passion inside your business, or from your community, to consistently answer the biggest questions on the minds of your target audience, on a particular topic.
You become, in other words, the trusted source for an audience looking for answers to their questions and pain points.
Common Content Marketing Tactics
Across industries, a variety of tactics exist to enhance your content marketing through content leadership. Blogs, for example, allow you to both post relevant content for your audience, and optimize that content to be easily found on search engines.
Social media helps curate other content that positions you as a credible source on your clients’ industry, while email can provide a more personalized outreach to cut through the clutter of other promotional tactics.
All of these tactics can work in the SaaS space. An impressive 90% of organizations use some form of the concept, including countless SaaS providers. But to truly succeed, you may want to think beyond content marketing as a simple way to get audience attention. Here are some additional tips in maximizing the success of the content.
Attract Leads Through Webinars
Webinars work, especially in B2B industries. If you can get potential subscribers to sign up for a relevant presentation and discussion on your topics of choice, their chances of actually adding to your bottom line will increase dramatically.
In fact, a number of studies and surveys show webinars to be at and near the top of the most successful types of content in the B2B space. If you can come up with and hold a live online presentation about a topic that is both related to your software and that your audience is actually interested in, its benefits for your content marketing success are undeniable.
When visitors land on your website, your goal is to convert them into leads for more targeted marketing efforts. The average lead conversion rate on a general page, of course, is only at 7% for SaaS marketers. On the landing pages where your visitors can sign up for webinars, however, that conversion rate jumps to almost 40%.
Guide Trial Users to Conversion
For SaaS providers, content marketing can do more than just generate leads. In fact, it can also help your trial users convert to paying subscribers.
As new trial users first encounter your software, they don’t want to be left alone. Instead, they’d love guidance on how to use some of the features and functionality that they may not yet be aware of.
Through targeted content, you can answer their questions and increase their engagement with your software. The more indispensable it becomes for your audience, the more likely they’ll be to convert to paying subscribers.
Information and learning-oriented content, such as a glossary or tutorials, is vital in this stage of the buyer’s journey. HubSpot, for example, has an extensive knowledge base that can help even trial users learn everything they need about the software before committing to a full subscription.
Minimize Churn With Effective Content
Any experienced SaaS marketer knows: simply getting a new subscriber is far from the end of the journey. Your business model relies on recurring revenue, meaning that you have to center many of your efforts on preventing churn by existing subscribers.
At this point, you may not be shocked to hear that content marketing can help in the process. The key to preventing churn, as KissMetrics points out, is continuous engagement. A subscriber beginning to disengage is a warning sign that they’re about to jump up. Through relevant content, you can keep your subscribers’ attention on you.
Both of the above tactics, webinars and tutorials, continue to be effective at this stage. But you may also want to think about building and publishing content that is exclusive for your subscribers. Adding an air of exclusivity to your content invokes the scarcity principle, and helps existing subscribers feel valued.
Strategic SaaS Content Marketing
Using content marketing to its fullest degree means taking advantage of its potential to increase awareness and credibility of your solution, improve your trial conversion rates, and reduce churn for existing subscribers. In other words, content marketing can do heavy lifting for your SaaS solution, for a fraction of the price other promotional efforts would cost.
But to be successful, you need to approach the concept strategically.
Much success,
Looking for more great reads? Check out these related articles:
