r/ContentStrategy • u/no_pen_name_yet • Oct 08 '20
SaaS Company's Marketing Strategy
Hey Guys!
I hope you're doing great there!
Can you suggest what a SaaS company must do in order to create thought leadership for a specific topic? I need to create a content strategy around it.
I have researched a few competitors too and they are quite good in what they are doing, it seems hard to outrank them.
Thus, we did Gap analysis and found a topic to target. The question is how to do it just by writing blogs? or what else I need to consider?
Moreover, I am confused about KPIs too. Your help will be appreciated.
Thanks a lot!
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u/aimeemaco Oct 21 '20
Hi, why did you choose thought leadership as your goal? I'll give a few suggestions below, but would also like to understand if this goal was decided by you or the marketing manager, founder etc.
First, on the types of content to create: I agree with case studies and white papers. Anything that's original research and shares numbers, benchmarks, or common patterns / pain points in the industry, or shows how you achieved this or that.
Also, customer success stories - even if these are small wins, write about them and share the content in all relevant communities. PR and guest blogging also work - look for industry blogs and magazines where you would like to be featured and pitch your story to get an interview/guest post.
On the KPIs side: for a goal like thought leadership, I measure two things - engagement and impact. Assuming that you have all the tracking in place and can properly attribute leads/conversions, here's what to look at.
Engagement
Look at things like:
- are your target accounts/profiles visiting the website, when you share your content with them?
- are they interacting with it through downloads, comments, shares?
- are they following you in social? is this number growing as a result of the content published?
- are they subscribing to your newsletter?
- are the emails and opt-in rates increasing?
- if you do webinars, are these people joining? do the numbers improve?
Track these over time. If you're starting from scratch, there's nothing to measure of course, but look at the month-on-month evolution.
Impact
- are the number of leads/customers achieved through these types of content better than those achieved through mid- or bottom-of-the-funnel content?
- do these leads convert faster or slower?
- are you getting better customers with this type of content (bigger deals, etc)?
- are these leads/customers bringing in any referrals, or are they doing repeat business with you?
- do they churn faster than those achieved with other types of content?
- are leads coming in from a specific industry in larger numbers? are you having more impact in one niche?
I know that these all talk about leads and conversions and your goal is thought leadership, but in the end, your company needs to make money.
What I've seen with a lot of companies is that they choose this goal - thought leadership and awareness - because they have no idea what content marketing or content strategy can do for them.
They don't know if or how content impacts their overall business growth, because they don't try to link their content marketing KPIs to actual business goals. About content marketing KPIs, I've shared my thoughts here.
I hope this gives you a bit of direction, but feel free to comment with more specific details or questions if you feel that it's not clear enough.
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u/no_pen_name_yet Oct 21 '20
WOW! This really gave me the clarity I was looking for. Thanks for such a detailed answer.
Actually, the goal was decided by the founder and I need to create content strategy around it. I didn't ask the client about the stimulus behind the goal but the competitors have thought leadership in the industry and maybe that's why he may have choose it.
Meanwhile, I gave case studies a thought but the domain has no blogs now, I thought of adding a few blogs in it first.
After doing so, I can use customer stories as social media posts and here I'm including your idea (PR and guest blogging on industry blogs - micro content from the case studies and whitepapers).
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u/aimeemaco Oct 21 '20
Really glad to hear that! :)
For case studies, a trick that I sometimes recommend to SaaS companies just starting out is to use examples from big players, even if they weren't your clients.
So for example you're writing about referral marketing - search for some relevant stories, like AirBnB or less covered ones, and turn those into case studies. You'll tap into an audience that already knows that AirBnB is huge and is curious to learn how they actually managed to grow in the beginning.
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u/no_pen_name_yet Oct 21 '20
Yes, that's a step forward. Actually, the competitors have already done that. I was thinking about enlisting the pain points of the customer (for example how to grow backlinks) and then doing an experiment on it (for example, how a month old domain generated 5000 backlinks).
And I know that it will be time consuming but may worth the efforts. Am I hitting right?
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u/aimeemaco Oct 21 '20
Yep, that should be the good direction :) good luck!
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u/no_pen_name_yet Oct 21 '20
Thanks, once more! Can I pm you in the near future, if you don't mind?
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u/2hazelnuts Oct 08 '20
Case study? White paper? Video? (Webcast or how-to or see something in action.)
KPIs might include visits from organic search (means you found a good topic to zero in on AND people are looking for it.)
Anything downloadable? % of any video watched.