SaaS Marketing Strategy Guide – Top 4 Tips to Move the Needle in 2023

As a SaaS owner or marketer, you may or may not know that a specific marketing strategy for your type of business is a huge key to success. When you focus on the right things to create awareness of and promote SaaS products, you can more easily bring your product to market and promote it to the best audience, leading to more signups and sales. Here, we’ve got your complete guide to all things SaaS marketing strategy, including our very own firsthand experience here at SureSwift, with examples from our products.

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Keep reading to learn more about:

• Why you should have a SaaS marketing strategy
• Steps to consider adding to your SaaS marketing strategy, including:
  1. Create new, useful content
  2. Market your content to the right audience
  3. Use the right SEO and marketing tactics for exposure
  4. Invest wisely in paid media

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Why Have a SaaS Marketing Strategy?

At first, it may not seem like you need to develop your SaaS marketing plan any differently than you would for a different type of business – after all, you’re trying to promote, market, and sell whatever product or service you offer, software or otherwise. But it’s not that straightforward.

Since you can’t physically hold or touch a SaaS product, you need to come up with other ways to address its lack of physical presence. A good SaaS marketing strategy mainly focuses on selling SaaS products through digital channels and content marketing. And those marketing efforts better stand out if you want to attract new, long-term customers. After all, people are bombarded with a lot of digital information each and every day – to the tune of 2.5 quintillion bytes created and $1 million per minute spent online – and the SaaS product market is projected to reach nearly $200 billion in 2023. We know you definitely want as big a piece of that pie as you can get, and that’s what this SaaS marketing strategy guide can help with.

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Top Things to Consider for Your SaaS Marketing Strategy

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1. Create Useful New Content

You might be asking yourself if creating content is worth the time and energy. For most businesses, the answer is yes. Creating and sharing quality content gives your business the chance to truly connect and form a relationship with your target market. Once you’ve built a rapport, they’ll be more inclined to trust you, try out your product and advice, and associate positively with your brand. All of this boosts your reputation and positions you where you want to be.Whether you’re creating blog posts, landing pages, website copy, social media content, email campaigns, or anything else, new content has multiple benefits:

• Increased trust from customers,
• Being perceived as an expert in your field,
• Growing your content library which contributes to brand establishment & recognition, and
• Getting an SEO boost which helps to attracts new page views, leads, and sales.

High-quality, optimized content should offer comprehensive, practical, original, authentically-experienced, and helpful information that’s relevant to your audience. It should also give the user a great experience with easily understandable and scannable information and visuals.

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2. Market That Content to the Right Audience

Content marketing helps you generate leads by attracting more traffic to your site, and its benefits compound over time the more people share and refer back to your content. Now, there are various considerations to make when marketing your content, including:

• Where in the sales funnel your readers are at. For example, if you’re pushing a landing page for your ecommerce sales tool that shows off all its amazing features, your audience should already be at the point of researching or evaluating products for their business. Think about where you might find these people – platforms like LinkedIn and Business 2 Community might host more potential leads than TikTok or Instagram, for example.
• Anticipating the questions and pain points your target audience has and addressing them with useful information that links back to your content.
• How you plan to earn backlinks so that your content ranks (e.g. source opportunities yourself; run an affiliate program; offer to guest-post on an influencer’s site in your niche).
• Sharing comprehensive or valuable content in exchange for an email address. This way, you can potentially convert the reader into a sale through your marketing campaigns. If people truly feel they’ll get value from your content – whether it’s an ebook, infographic, video, or something else – they’re usually happy to opt in.

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Popular Articles:

• Growing Your SaaS to $1M ARR With B2B SaaS Lead Generation
• How to Prepare Your Startup for an Exit (or Anything Else)
• What Most Founders Get Wrong About Customer Happiness

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3. Use the Right SEO and Marketing Tactics to Be Seen

Here are some key SEO and marketing actions you can take right away to help achieve your SaaS marketing goals.

Update Your Content

We all hear about “quality content”, but what does this mean? Among other things, it means keeping content fresh, timely, and relevant. That means you need to keep regular tabs on your blog posts, landing pages, and everything else, and update accordingly.

Why is updating content so important?

Updating content is so important for a couple of reasons. First off, it builds domain authority, or how much of an expert on a certain topic your site is deemed. Google and other search engines regard this strongly and will rank your site higher in search results as a result.

Updated content also helps establish your credibility and earns you the trust of prospects and customers. People often look to sites like yours for useful information on a particular topic or niche. And if your content hasn’t been updated in over a year or contains inaccurate or incomplete information, people might wonder if you’re still around and paying attention. If they’re confused or unconfident in what you’re saying, they might leave your site quickly. This raises your bounce rate which is not only detrimental on its own, but it also demotes your domain authority in the eyes of search engines.

Tips for Creating Quality, Converting Content

Your content – new or updated – should always be:

Long-form. Although many of us are super busy with minimal attention spans, you might assume short-form content (e.g. videos, social media posts, infographics) is the best content strategy. Sure, you need this as part of your strategy, but when it comes to blog posts, long-form simply outperforms short-form in organic rankings, traffic, social sharing, and backlinks. Reasons for this include that it’s more useful to readers and that you have the ability to easily target many keywords and show off your brand credibility and authority.

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SSC Example: MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media management and scheduling tool, so, naturally, social media is a huge piece of its marketing strategy. The product has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

That said, the site also provides MeetEdgar users and visitors with plenty of helpful, long-form information related to online marketing on its site. Readers can learn more about business & strategy, the latest app updates, social media marketing, webinars, and more by visiting the blog. They can filter blog posts by choosing a category or searching for keywords. And in the website’s footer section, visitors can access multiple social media guides. Users are also presented with CTAs for subscribing to the mailing list (via embedded form) or downloading a freebie, such as 13 Instagram Story Templates (via pop-up form).

Evergreen. News and trends may have a warranted place in your strategy, but it’s the timeless, ever-relevant – or evergreen – pieces that shine in terms of brand awareness, helpfulness, thought leadership, and SEO. And to keep your evergreen content relevant over time, it needs to constantly be – you guessed it – updated and fresh.

Recent and relevant. In general, more recent content tends to rank higher than older content. This means you’ll want to keep close, regular tabs on your blog posts, web copy, landing pages, and any other content to be sure its got the most recent, relevant, and meaningful information as possible.

Targeted and personal. When you connect with your readers on a personal level, you’re more likely to evoke positive reactions from them that could naturally drive them to take your desired call-to-action – whether that’s signing up for a newsletter or free trial, joining a webinar, or making a purchase. And you’re more likely to connect with them personally by writing casually and conversationally in your tone and voice, using very little to no corporate content, and adding real-life examples, statistics, quotes, images, and media.

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How to Update Content to Get Results

Follow our tried-and-true method for updating content that gets you results and drives your business to more success.

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1. Maximize your top-performing blog content

Keep in mind, it’s not about quantity when it comes to your SaaS marketing strategy, it’s about quality – whether you have 5 or 50 blog posts, if they’re not driving trials, they’re not performing well. You need to identify your best-performing posts to maximize them even further, and here’s how you do just that.

Step 1: Identify your top-performing blog content in Google Analytics

Log into your Google Analytics account or set one up if you don’t have one yet. Without analytics, you really can’t manage a website or a blog properly.Go to the “Acquisition” tab, click “Search Console”, then “Landing Pages”. Sort your data by goals and dig in. If you don’t have goals set up, do this immediately as it’s crucial to identifying your top-performing content. Looking at impressions alone won’t tell you enough – just because a post is popular doesn’t mean it’s doing its job.

Step 2: Do keyword research in Google Analytics and Google Search Console

You’ll probably notice right away that there are some pages and blog posts that convert much better than others. Click on these posts to see which keywords are driving traffic to them, and how your post ranks on Google search for those terms.Ideally, you’d be ranking #1 for all of these keywords in order to bring in the maximum amount of organic search traffic to your top-performing posts. It can take some time to get there, but posts that aren’t ranking high yet just means you have an opportunity to optimize them to get more search traffic and drive more conversions.

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Step 3: Perform SEO updates

Before you update the SEO for your top-performing posts, it’s a good idea to check out what your competitors are doing well, and then do it better.

Use a preferred tool to run competitor audits on higher-ranking competitor pages. Then, look at those competitor page audits. How many optimized images do they have? How many backlinks? What’s the word count?

Go back to your post and maximize it where necessary by adding more optimized images, adding a new section to up your word count, spending some time on promotion to get more backlinks, or doing all three. You should also go back to your list of related keywords and work them into your post in a natural way – but avoid content stuffing. Your ultimate goal should always be to create content that’s valuable to your audience and that also performs really well for your business. Just throwing a bunch of keywords into a blog post won’t help your customers, and it won’t get you more trials.

You’ll also want to double-check SEO basics like image alt tags and file names. Check out this super simple SEO checklist to make sure you’re covering all relevant steps. And it should go without saying, but don’t forget to ensure that all information and data are accurate and as current as possible.

Now, think about what other posts on your site should have internal links to this post, and add them in. Building backlinks can be time-consuming, and there are no guarantees that someone else will link to you. But building internal links is a no-brainer: It takes almost no time, and it’ll improve your search ranking.

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Step 4: Optimize conversion points

Use a tool like hotjar to help you figure out how your customers are using your site, and their screen reading patterns. That way you can make sure your CTAs are in the best spots. It’s no use having a bunch of targeted, amazing blog content if your conversion funnel is broken. By adding hotjar to your top-performing posts, you can see a heat map of where people are clicking and their screen-reading patterns on your site.

Here are a few quick and pretty universal ways you can optimize your SaaS marketing conversion funnel:

• Add a sticky header with a button for your free trial (or member signup, etc). You want people to be able to read a blog post, but always have a conversion button in their line of sight.
• Add a promotion button to the bottom of your posts. The bottom left corner is a great spot for these.
• Give away something free behind your signup wall. For example, on MySiteAuditor, we give away a free SEO contract. People who want that are the perfect target audience for the tool, so we can help them while driving signups.

Step 5: Repeat

Go back to Google Analytics, pick the next top-performing post on your list, and repeat these steps. Keep checking back regularly (every 90 days at the very least, but monthly is better) to see how posts are performing and ranking, and if there are additional opportunities to optimize.

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2. PURGE POOR-PERFORMING CONTENT FROM YOUR BLOG

The next phase in maximizing your SaaS marketing strategy is to redirect content that’s not converting to content that is. Look for the posts that aren’t contributing much by checking Google Analytics for those with zero traffic and/or zero impressions. Then, set up 301 redirects from those posts to new, optimized content, or to related posts you’ve already optimized.

Don’t:

• Send 301 redirects to the homepage
• Simply delete old posts
• Change your URLs

You never want to just delete a post or set up all of your 301 redirects to go to your home page – you’ll confuse Google and lose any link juice you had for that content. Instead, create a new, better-performing post and send any future traffic going to the old post over there.

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3. Create laser-focused new blog content

Millions of new blog posts go live every single day so, if you’re not insanely focused, you won’t stand out against all of that competition for your potential customers’ attention. Here’s how to differentiate yourself from the crowd.

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Step 1: Create a mission for your blog and write to it

Having a clearly stated mission for your blog will not only help your audience decide right away if your content (and therefore your product) is right for them, it will help you create high-performing content for your blog.Once you have a mission, it’s much easier to do your keyword research and start coming up with topics that will speak to your audience and drive conversions. And you don’t need to be an SEO expert to improve your SaaS marketing strategy – Google Trends is an easy, free way to come up with topic ideas for your blog. Just start typing into Google to see what questions/topics come up in the search bar. It will practically write your blog post titles for you.Based on your keyword research, brainstorm a topic list. Store it in a tool like Checkli, Trello, or Google Sheets. Whatever tool you use, keep a running list for your copywriter (even if that’s you). Above all, never just start writing without a plan. When it’s time to work on a post, you want to already know what you’re going to write about so you can focus on optimizing your post for the keywords you’ve pre-selected.

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Step 2: Define conversion points for every post

The same methods you used to define conversion points when you were optimizing top performers can be used for new content:

• Install hotjar
• Make sure new posts have a sticky header with your free trial (signup, etc.) button
• Add in-post CTA (call-to-action) buttons. Try out both text and graphic CTAs in the body of your posts, as well as at the end.
• Whenever you create new content, think about what content upgrades can go with it that you can use to drive trials.

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Step 3: Create content that markets itself

Aim to spend 3 times as much time marketing your post as you did creating it. If it takes you 7 hours to write a high-quality, optimized post, you should be spending about 21 hours marketing it. This includes things like creating social posts that can be scheduled throughout the year, reaching out to others who might amplify them, and putting them in your email marketing.Build your marketing plan into every single post you write with these quick tips:

• Follow SEO empire-builder, Rand Fishkin’s advice and ask, “who would amplify this and why?”
• Add ego-bait by finding real-life people or adjacent startups to mention – they just might re-share your post (love this example).
• Make sure people can easily market the post for you with share buttons, click-to-tweet links, “Pin it” images, etc.
• Include a featured image and use an OpenGraph plug-in to have it easily shared with your content. Rich content is twice as likely to be shared.
• Create featured snippets that come up automatically when people share a link to your post, with a tool like Yoast.
• Schedule your most relevant content pieces to be posted on your social accounts.
• For new content related to an evergreen piece you already have on your blog, promote them at a similar time, before and during your new content launch as a campaign.
• Repurpose your evergreen content into new formats over time.

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SSC Example: Back in Stock

Back in Stock, a restock notification app, uses a number of content marketing strategies to engage its target market, including posting blog content to sites like Medium, Business 2 Community, and LinkedIn. The team also answers forum questions on Quora and Shopify Community.In addition, Back in Stock connects with its target market through social media like Twitter and Facebook. This SaaS also has a blog with posts announcing new features and integrations, plus marketing tips and strategies for growing an online store.

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4. Invest in Paid Media

To supplement your SEO and content marketing with quick traffic boosts, you should consider implementing a paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategy. Doing so (carefully) drives targeted traffic to your site and is very scalable, so you can easily and quickly adjust your investment up or down at any point. The cost and results of PPC campaigns are also quite predictable, making it easier for you to make a business case around using this strategy.

Dedicate a budget for branded search terms that include your business name. These are search results that competing SaaS companies will likely pay for – so you’ll want to capture as much of those clicks and resulting traffic as you can.

Your PPC ads should be attractive and engaging, while clearly showing the benefits your product offers. Here are some key tips to keep in mind:

• Test the ads repeatedly with many compelling ad copy variations that speak to your audience and include an encouraging CTA.
• Do thorough keyword research for terms your target market will likely search.
• Run A/B tests on landing pages to see what best converts.
• Monitor your metrics and results to learn how to improve next time.

This SaaS marketing strategy guide is a great base to get you up and on your way to running successful marketing campaigns for your SaaS business. With the right team and the right steps, you’ll be bringing in more traffic, trials, and conversions before you know it.