Over the last two decades, the world of marketing has seen massive shifts. Today, it takes a lot more than just a good product and sleek designs to attract prospects. Before proceeding with a transaction, your customers need to develop some level of confidence in your brand, your expertise, and your ability to solve their problems.
This is especially true for the software industry, which is largely responsible for running the most vital components of a business - including operations, accounting, marketing, sales, and customer success of small and large businesses. SaaS marketing teams have to compete with constantly evolving competition that often offers similar solutions to the same audience.
But the question remains – how do you build trust and confidence?
Enter: Content marketing, the art of strategically planning, creating, and promoting informative, insightful, and entertaining content to a clearly defined market. That content, in turn, can help attract, convert, and retain prospects and customers.
Think it’s not worth it? Here are some interesting stats that say otherwise:
Point being – content marketing works, and marketers in SaaS and other verticals are going all in to create engaging material.
If you’ve never dabbled with content before, keep reading. In this whitepaper, we’ll break down 4 practical ways you can get your content engine up and running, including:
Let’s dive in.
Whether you’re a Fortune 500 SaaS enterprise or a tech startup, your content efforts should always start with in-depth research. The quality of your research will determine the quality of your execution.
This process can be broken down into the following easy steps.
Start by looking for fresh, creative content ideas catered toward your buyer personas at different stages of the buying cycle.
These include the people you’re creating content for, aka the executives, leaders, and managers (i.e., the decision-makers), at the organizations you’re marketing your software product.
As an example, consider a company offering a CRM with three main buyer personas (marketing, sales, and customer success).
Assuming those personas have been exposed to that company’s content and are close to making a decision, their goals in reading your content may be:
Once you identify the goals of your audience based on where they are, you can start coming up with ideas that align with them.
This is simply a matter of looking in the right places, such as:
Ultimately, the goal is to establish a repeatable framework for coming up with new content ideas. Here are some tools that can help with that:
Once you have a process that works, you can automate and scale it.
When we search for anything on Google, we start by typing in a term, and Google fetches millions of (ranked) results - in a split second. Those terms are called keywords.
Content creators take certain steps to optimize their content to increase their chances of ranking higher in search results, or the SERP (SEO 101). One of which: making sure they’re targeting keywords relevant to their business.
Every keyword and search term has a purpose behind it (i.e., a searcher may be looking for some information, a specific product, or something else).
We call that purpose “search intent.”
Based on intent, keywords can be broken down into the following types:
In addition, users can also have other types of intent, which marketers recently began classifying as:
By understanding search intent, we can shortlist keywords that are highly relevant to the information we’re trying to provide.
With the basics out of the way, here’s how you can actually start finding keywords.
Start by plugging in a seed term in a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Surfer SEO.
Here’s what the Keywords Explorer tool on Ahrefs looks like:
This seed-term should be closely-related to the content you’re writing about.
For example, if you’re selling a no-code website builder targeted to marketers and small business owners, you can start your keyword research process with broad terms like “web design” or “web development”.
After plugging the seed term, the tool will provide some numerical data, along with keyword ideas. That’s where you should be looking.
Choosing keywords should be a data-backed decision.
To make that call, just look at the following metrics. Every keyword research tool provides this information, which makes it easy to shortlist keywords that are likely to bring traffic and help achieve your goals.
Look for keywords with high search volume and relatively lower keyword difficulty scores.
Going back to our example from earlier – while terms like “web design” or “web development” have thousands of people searching for them, they are quite broad and usually difficult to rank.
For that reason, you should look for related keywords that are more targeted, such as “web development services,” “web application development,” “web design process,” etc.
With a solid foundation in place, it’s time to plan and create your content.
To consistently generate content on scale, you need to build and follow a solid content creation framework.
The following are the different steps involved in this process.
As marketers, we need to take a strategic approach when planning out our content efforts.
This entails:
Make sure that this plan is easily accessible at all times by everyone on your team.
There are three ways you can execute your content creation plan:
That decision completely depends on your specific circumstances (availability of talent, your goals, budget, etc.).
All things aside, considering you’ll be creating technical content meant for an audience looking for software solutions, the content needs to be crafted by a Subject Matter Expert (SME). These are experts who have actually spent time in the industry and really know their stuff.
They should have ample experience writing about the subject, should know the audience like the back of their hand, and be familiar with all relevant nuances.
Here’s a small checklist for hiring a SME:
Alternatively, you can hire an agency that specializes in that specific niche (for instance, an agency that specializes in RevOps). A quick Google search can reveal some promising options.
Here are some tips to help gauge their skills:
Whether you opt for a full-time employee, a freelancer, or an agency, working with SMEs will ensure that whatever content you publish is in-depth and offers clarity, without compromising on technical accuracy.
Here is a list of tools that can help with the content creation process:
Remember – those tools can’t replace the creative process. They are only there to make execution easier.
Before you publish and start promoting your content, you have to optimize it. This entails editing, tweaking, and fortifying your content to improve its overall quality and increase its chances of ranking higher (in case of blog posts and articles).
Here are some quick content optimization tips that you can implement right away:
To make the process easier, give these optimization tools a shot:
In order for your brand’s content efforts to actually pay off, you need to make sure that it reaches your audience in the first place.
You can do that through content distribution – a strategic way of distributing and promoting your content to the right people through the right mediums. Through organic distribution, your newly-published content can start to gain some traction.
Here’s how you can set up and execute an effective content distribution strategy.
First and foremost, finalize a list of platforms you can distribute and promote your content.
For this purpose, revisit your buyer personas and determine which channels your audience is active on. These could include various social media platforms, email, paid search advertising, and more.
Out of all those channels, social remains the most popular - 94% of marketers use social media for content distribution.
In addition to finalizing these channels, also determine the best time to reach out to your audience (HubSpot’s social and email distribution products can help with that).
Next, you have to prepare your content for distribution.
There are two broad tactics that you can use for this purpose:
Your content needs to be tweaked and adjusted according to the specific requirements of the channel you're publishing it on.
Your articles need to be in-depth. The posts you share on social media have to be short and catchy. The emails you write need to follow certain structures.
You wouldn’t copy and paste an entire long-form blog post on sales automation to an email, would you? No one would read it.
Because of that, you need to repurpose your content so it can be shared and actually consumed on multiple channels/touchpoints.
Luckily, there’s a tactic that enables brands to consistently repurpose their content assets without exhausting their resources.
We call that content atomization – the process of creating one large content asset, and then breaking it down into smaller assets that serve different purposes.
For instance, let’s say you write an extensive, 100-page long eBook on artificial intelligence.
Through content atomization, you can:
All from one large content asset.
By atomizing your content, you will have repurposed assets for days, which, as mentioned, you can then use for further distribution.
Make it a central part of your content strategy.
Another popular tactic for content distribution is syndication.
Syndication refers to republishing an already-existing content asset (blog post/article) on a third-party website. The purpose is to get in front of a larger audience and reach more people.
Syndication is a win-win situation. The third-party website gets to engage their readers with new content without putting in any resources, while the creator – you – gets to have their content consumed by more people, backlinked, and rack up more web traffic.
However, keep these pointers in mind:
Look for popular websites within your niche that accept syndicated content.
You can also use Medium for this purpose, which provides its own platform for republishing your content to different publications.
Like everything else, your content distribution efforts can be automated (to some extent) with certain tools.
Here are some good recommendations:
Use any other tool that can help automate the distribution process.
Content marketing is an on-going effort, and to consistently generate results, brands need to frequently analyze the performance of their efforts.
Content marketers can’t publish content and forget about it. Instead, they need to revisit the content a few weeks, or even months, after publishing it to see how it’s performing.
This helps you determine the potential tweaks, updates, and adjustments you can make to improve the performance of your content.
Content analysis can be broken down into two broad steps:
While setting your content strategy, select a few KPIs that align with your broader business objectives and start tracking them.
Here are some common metrics that every content marketer should keep an eye on:
To track those metrics, you can use HubSpot, Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics. Additionally, you can integrate Search Console and Analytics into HubSpot so you have all the data you need in one place.
Finally, put that data to use and start optimizing, upgrading, and tweaking your content accordingly.
Depending on how your content is performing, this could entail a world of things.
Here are some examples of common problems and their potential fixes:
Reminder – you know your analytics, audience, and content better than anyone else. Experiment and do whatever you can to improve the performance of your content.
The process shouldn’t be set in stone. As you progress, your goals will change, your team will grow, and you may need to scale your efforts. You should regularly iterate the process itself as you find improvements and your needs change
With a robust, scalable process in place, you can consistently create, distribute, and promote your content at scale.
Just remember – content marketing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal.
After analyzing your efforts, you should go back to the very first step (i.e. research).
Lather, rinse and repeat.
At Revvy, we consult businesses looking to improve their lead generation and overall marketing strategies. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need some help.