Create a SaaS content strategy
Create a SaaS content strategy
1. Ask your sales team and account managers to create a list of the most frequent questions that users have before buying.
For example: How do customers find you, what are they looking for? Why were they searching for a solution in the first place? What specific problem were they trying to solve? How are they currently solving it? What are their objections during sales calls? What convinces them to buy?
2. Listen to a few customer calls to see if there are specific details that they ask about in the first call versus the second one.
Look for patterns in the types of questions asked by people with different job titles, and from different company profiles.
3. Add all the input to one spreadsheet.
Include the customer names, job titles of the contact persons, industry and company size, reasons to buy and barriers, most used features and so on. Check if there is a profile that appears more frequently, for which the sales cycle is shorter and who doesn’t require that much attention from the customer support team.
4. Ask for input from your customer support team to understand how the existing customers are using the product.
Ask questions like: Which features are the most used? Which features do they complain about most often? What do they need more support with? Ask the product team to give you a full product demo. In the same document where you have the audiences, write down the following: Your competitors and what differentiates your product from theirs. Onboarding aspects that aren’t clear to you and might also confuse users. The words and terms used by customers to describe the niche, the product, the problem, and the features.
5. Create a spreadsheet with the keywords that you can extract from the input from previous steps.
Google each term and write down the additional suggestions that you get in the “People also searched for” box, and at the bottom of the page. Use a tool like AnswerThePublic to find additional questions that might be a good target. Use a tool like Clearscope to find keyword ideas based on Google’s autocomplete feature.
6. Create your lead gen funnel by mapping the keywords to each stage.
For the BOFU (bottom of the funnel) content, reserve the keywords with strong commercial intent. For the MOFU (middle of the funnel) content, use more generic keywords that describe the pain point. How to [pain point], Tools to [solve pain points] etc. For the TOFU (top of the funnel) content, use broader keywords with a less clear intent. [pain point], [solution], [category of the product], [pain point] in [industry] etc.
7. Develop the first five content pieces.
BOFU: One comparison post that includes your product first, followed by two competitors. One detailed article explaining the product use case most relevant for your target segment. MOFU: One article focused on the pain point of your target segment. TOFU: One long-form article to serve as general guide or foundation knowledge for the topic. One article to tell the story of your brand and why you’ve created the product. Use Clearscope to optimize your content. Clearscope analyzes top ranking organic content and gives actionable recommendations on relevant terms, word count, readability, and content type.
8. Look at groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Slack, or communities like IndieHackers and GrowthHackers.
Google your niche/product followed by “newsletter”. Use a tool like SparkToro to see which accounts and influencers are followed by your target segment.
9. Distribute your first 5 content pieces.
Share bits of the MOFU content in the chosen community and in your newsletters. Promote your BOFU content with paid ads on LinkedIn. Share bits of your TOFU content organically on your social media accounts.