7 SaaS Content Marketing Strategies For All Stages (That Bring High-Quality Leads)

What’s the best SaaS content marketing strategy for your current stage?

What strategy will bring you the most high-quality leads?

What content marketing strategy will bring you the most organic traffic?

Today we’ll review a couple of rock-solid content marketing strategies for SaaS companies and startups who wish to take the market by storm.

From my experience, each one of them can start bringing you at least:

• 5000+ monthly visitors;
• $10k in new MRR each month.

So let’s get started.

#1 Produce ROI-based content for getting more qualified leads

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU), or we like to call it – ROI-based, articles target high-intent keywords. These keywords have less volume, but they are also effortless to rank.

Alternatives, comparison articles, and reviews present you with a rich pool of choice — don’t worry, you’ll run out of ideas any time soon.

Here are some example keywords for SaaS companies:

• “Alternatives” — pick a variant: “best/free/cheap (Competitor) alternatives”;
• “Comparison” — something along the lines of “Compare (Competitor 1) and (Competitor 2)”, or “(Competitor 1) vs. (Competitor 2) / (You)”.

To throw something more in: test and compare free plans and trials and review the functionalities.

You can do this in every industry, not just SaaS.

Almost 95% of the articles that we write at Contenthorse are ROI-based articles. Content such as alternatives, comparisons, reviews, and others.

We’re implementing this strategy for almost every client we work with. For example, we wrote one article for the folks at Userpilot 3 years ago.

That one article has been driving over 50 high-quality leads to Userpilot for over three years straight.

Pretty fascinating, right?

The bottom line is that instead of going for high-volume keywords and competing with category leaders in your market, go with ROI-based content that targets high-intent keywords with smaller search volume and keyword difficulty but bigger buying intent.

This especially applies to B2B SaaS companies doing less than $5m ARR. You need those users! You don’t need tens of thousands of organic visitors.

#2 Create a rich knowledge base to grow TOFU traffic

The purpose of Top of the Funnel (TOFU) articles is to increase awareness of your brand.

There’s no better way to do so than to appear as a knowledgeable industry pro.

Not only you’re helping the community eager to learn, but you’ll grow traffic on your website at the same time.

Taking SEO as an example: SEO glossaries are particularly great for getting huge traffic on TOFU articles.

The steps below are universally applicable for different businesses:

1. Identify 100+ key terms in your industry;
2. Write shorter (500 – 1000 words) articles for each keyword;
3. Optimize each article for related keywords, especially “what is…” keywords which tend to appear in Google’s featured snippets;
4. Link to related terms and propose associated topics for further reading below the articles;
5. Organize everything in a single knowledge base.

• Expect 10k+ traffic!

Although this is an excellent strategy for dominating your industry and positioning yourself as the go-to response, keep in mind that this kind of content usually has fewer conversions.

However, it still works in favor of your brand awareness.

We advise focusing on this strategy a little bit later in your journey – when you’re around $5m – $10m in ARR.

#3 Rank high for hard keywords with Pillar and Cluster topics

The idea is to pick one general term in your industry and create one extensive article with 20+ smaller pieces.

This SaaS Content Marketing strategy is beneficial for ranking first on hard keywords with a search volume bigger than 5000.

Here’s how to do that:

• Pick one Pillar topic — Chatbots, for example. Write an excellent, lengthy article about chatbots that is easy to understand and a delight to read.
• Then, work on 20+ Cluster topics related to the Pillar article (i.e. What are the chatbots? How to use chatbots, How to create chatbots, etc).
• Create an internal link from each cluster article to the pillar page.

Et voilà! You’ve ranked for difficult keywords and provided value.

Drift did this well with their Chatbots pillar page:

As you can see, they’re ranking second on Google, right after Wikipedia:

For a superhard keyword with over 66k in search volume:

The bottom line: Pick one broad topic in your industry, and write one pillar (main) page that consists of 20+ other articles that go more in-depth on the subject.

You can expect this strategy to start bringing you a lot of organic traffic. Conversions from visitors to paying customers might be lower than usual (except in some ROI-based cluster articles if you have them).

This makes this saas content marketing strategy perfect for larger brands with more than $5m in ARR.

#4 Content framework by Dan Martell

Dan Martell is teaching this SaaS content marketing strategy in his program for early-stage SaaS companies. It will essentially help you go from $0 to $10k in MRR pretty quickly.

Here’s the idea:

• Pick one hot button: a pain point/problem of your ICP;
• Write a great lead magnet that solves that problem;
• Write a couple of lead articles that will “distribute” that lead magnet.

The overall idea is to offer a great lead magnet that solves an actual problem for your audience.

Let’s run this through an example:

• You have a subscription management app;
• Your audience doesn’t have clear insights into what’s going on with their; subscriptions (new users, revenue, churn, etc.);
• You prepare a free subscription management Google sheet for them – this is your lead magnet.;
• You run ads for this magnet;
• Besides running ads, if you’re low on budget, you also write a couple of articles targeting some low-hanging subscription management keywords. The CTA of these articles would be to download your lead magnet.

#5 Podcast + Content framework = Win

More than theory, people love to hear from the ones that succeeded.

Their practical tips and stories attract plenty of attention and introduce a new crowd to your work.

After all, interviewing big shots from your industry and letting them talk about their battles, tricks, tactics, wins, and failures; is an excellent way to learn new things.

Once your podcast is completed, you can repurpose it in multiple ways and have 30+ content pieces out of one episode:

• Write a case study about the interviewee and distribute it across earned and owned channels;
• Create social media content out of it: videos, graphs, infographics, photos, and more.

Earned channels are channels where you need to get a reputation/influence to have some results. These channels include communities, Quora, Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and others.

On the other hand, owned channels are your channels – your company’s social media profiles, employee’s social media, newsletter, and more.

For example, I repurposed this podcast episode:

Into this LinkedIn post:

To learn more about content distribution, check the distribution process of Harry Dry from Marketing Examples.

The bottom line: This SaaS content marketing strategy aims to get as biggest exposure as you can. The main goal is to grow your brand awareness and get more people into your newsletter.

To do this on the scale and with as low effort as possible, you’ll need to invest a little bit more money.

The main “conversion game” is happening in your newsletter – so make sure to have a great email marketing strategy as well.

We recommend this strategy to B2B SaaS brands with more than $1m in ARR.

#6 Get exposure and become a thought leader with ease

How to get exposure without investing 10+ hours in writing an article?

Easy! Get featured on the best podcasts in your niche and invest only 30 – 45 minutes of your time per podcast episode.

For example, I was a guest on 20+ podcasts so far, and the plan is to speak on 50 more by the end of 2022.

Why is this a great content marketing strategy for B2B SaaS businesses?

• Well, for the beginning, you’re getting access to thousands of people who are your dream customers – without lifting a finger to build that audience.
• You have the listeners’ full attention for 30+ minutes – no other media format can achieve this.
• Again, you can use this content and repurpose it to fit other channels and grow your brand and following.

If you don’t have time or don’t know how to get yourself booked on podcasts, a podcast booking agency can help you out with that.

Since this would be a low-effort-high-return content marketing strategy, in the long run, brands of all sizes (especially the early stage ones), can use it effectively.

7. Make user-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) is more heartfelt than anything professional content producers can create.

It comes from your customers and fans: people who fell in love with your product and know what they’re talking about.

Don’t miss an opportunity to interview your customers and promote their results.

This quick, easy, and compelling content creation process takes little effort but brings hefty results.

Furthermore, it improves your brand awareness and provides even more value to your target audience.

A great example of this comes from lemlist.

They created a “lemlister of the week” project where each week, they feature one user who got some outstanding results with lemlist’s app:

Just pay attention to the number of shares on the right.

The Bottom Line

Whatever strategy you choose, make sure to invest a lot of time in it.

You can’t build a predictable revenue machine from content marketing overnight.

It requires some time.

Some of the saas content marketing strategies mentioned above will bring results sooner, some later, but eventually, all will have a great ROI if implemented correctly.

However, keep in mind that not every strategy is suitable for every stage of the business.

So:

• If you have less than $10k in MRR – your focus should be on acquiring more users and getting a great product-market fit. Get more feedback. Focus on Dan Martell’s strategy and Podcast Speaking.
• If you have between $10k and $200k in MRR – your focus should be on getting more users and revenue at any cost. You want to be profitable from day one. In this case, the best strategies for you are:

• ROI-based content

• Dan Martell’s SaaS Content marketing strategy for early-stage brands

• Podcast + Content Strategy

• Podcast Speaking
• If you have more than $200k in MRR – you’re in the scaling phase, and now you need to work on your brand awareness. In this case, focus on:

• ROI-based content

• Knowledge Base/Glossaries

• Pillar/Cluster topics

• Podcast + Content Strategy

• Podcast Speaking

• User-generated content

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