Content is an integral part of an effective software marketing strategy. Software as a service (SaaS) organizations should be creating content like any other business to improve SEO, drive engagement on your website, and move leads along your sales funnel so that they purchase and enjoy your software. Unfortunately, creating content as a SaaS company isn’t always easy. Oftentimes, your software may be technologically complex or competing for attention in an already-crowded arena.
Additionally, writing about technology can be dry or full of industry buzzwords that may not be familiar to the average consumer.
So if we know that content is a crucial part of attracting and retaining leads, but content creation for software companies can be a challenge, what’s the solution? We reached out to other digital marketing pros and software organizations to see how they’re tackling this challenge. Here are three tips to create content for SaaS and build your software marketing strategy.
Know Your Audience
Regardless of your industry, one of the most important places to start your software marketing strategy and content creation efforts is by getting to know your audience. Particularly with software services, you’ll need to have a strong idea of the personas you’re targeting and their understanding of the technical details behind the software service you provide.
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“First thing first...you have to know your target audience,” Lavinia Buciuman, Content Marketing Specialist at Flipsnack, explains. “You can never start writing your articles without knowing who you’re addressing.”
Without targeted personas, you likely won’t see good engagement with your content because you may be speaking too technically to an audience who doesn’t have the knowledge to understand or too simply to an audience with more advanced technical knowledge.
Speak to Pain Points
Nate Rodriguez, Web Analyst and Account Manager at Gain Liftoff, suggests using pain points to find your keywords. “Talk to your customers and figure out their pain points, then use that data to back into keyword ideas. Then keywords are pre-vetted as pain points for your target audience.”
Those pain points are likely similar to the words or phrases your leads may be searching for in search engines, so creating content for those subjects can help you see results with your search engine rankings and move your audience through the sales funnel towards your software as a solution for their problem. While your keywords may not be exclusively related to your customer’s pain points, keeping those common struggles or difficulties in mind is a key to creating content that provides value for your audience.
There are a few different ways that you can determine what pain points your customers and leads are experiencing. If you can seek out the opportunity to do so, there’s no better way to gather this information than to ask. Opportunities to ask leads what problems they’re facing include in chatbot conversations on your website or in technology forums related to your software.
Provide Educational Content
One of the most common tips we got (and one that we suggest ourselves) is to include educational content in your marketing strategy. Technological fields are booming, but the average consumer may not have the specialized knowledge to understand the components or functionality of your software.
Tarun Gurang, Digital Marketer at iFour Technolab, touches on the importance of providing detailed educational content related to your software. “The best way to convey complicated technical information is through step-by-step guidance either with video or image screenshots so that a user can easily understand the process of the product.”
Even if a lead has a specific pain point that brings them to your content and software looking for a solution, if they have trouble understanding how your service can solve their problem they likely will look elsewhere. Visuals can be an excellent way to convey complicated or technical information that can be challenging to explain in a large block of text.
“The easiest way we convey our technical information is through videos or tutorials of the product,” says William Chin, Web Consultant at PickFu. “We try our absolute best to ensure that users fully understand our product before they pay for it.”
By offering easily accessible and understandable content that illustrates how your software works, you can provide valuable content that also shows leads how valuable your software is. Your visual content doesn’t have to be limited to videos or screenshots. Visual content that can be downloaded or shared — like an infographic or ebook — is an ideal way to provide content that is gated, where you capture lead information through a form before providing the downloadable content.
“We've seen the most success with infographics,” Reuben Yonatan, CEO and Founder of GetVoIP, explains. “Infographics simplify all the technical bits. While most people have a rough idea of what cloud communications entails, once you start talking about hosted PBX, UCaaS or omni-channel routing, most readers will check out. Using infographics simplifies the information.”
Providing easily digestible educational content can extend far beyond tutorials about your software (although developing comprehensive content covering all aspects of using your software is an ideal way to continue to delight your customers after their purchase). As Reuben points out above, while many consumers may have a shallow understanding of the niche your software fills in the expansive technological field, there is often more specific terminology or concepts that you can create educational content around. Not only does this continue to improve your SEO and build your content calendar and strategy, it can establish your company as a thought leader in your technological space.
"Our focus on brand building through podcast interviews opened up many opportunities to reach new potential clients. We use each interview as 'micro-content' for new blog ideas, social media posts, and email content," Samantha Stephan, Marketing Associate at RoadBotics said. "Our content strategy revolves around providing useful insight into asset management for infrastructure, educating potential clients about our products, and showing how our product has helped our clients."
Go Forth and Create
Building an effective content strategy takes time, effort, and lots of trial and error. If you start with the tips introduced here — know your audience, learn their pain points, and provide educational content to speak to those problems — you can adapt your software marketing strategy so that your content is playing a successful role in bringing in new leads and keeping them engaged.
For more tips, tricks, and free downloads to help you build your software marketing strategy, check out our Resource Center.
