By Michael Brenner

How do you win brand visibility in a crowded market without overspending on resources?

For SaaS companies, content marketing is, in many ways, the most powerful opportunity to achieve growth and outshine competitors.

It’s no secret the SaaS market is highly saturated – some would even say polluted. In fact, nearly 60,000 software companies are listed on the G2 Crowd across over 700 verticals as of 2020.

Additionally, startups don’t have the luxury of being unique anymore. They must be better – not just different – from competitors if they want attention and sales.

Whenever brands come to me with this issue, I give them the same answer: Focus on customer-centric content, and you’ll achieve outstanding customer-centric growth.

The concept is really that simple. Putting it into practice, however, is another story.

Gaining thought leadership in a market filled with intelligent experts is not easy. Ranking for major keywords isn’t enough. You must commit to the craft with authority, relevance, and warmth.

Your customer should always be the hero of any story you tell.

That’s the secret recipe I’ve used for years to help SaaS companies thrive. Today, I’ll explain my rank-and-win process I used to help a leading content collaboration company (which I’ll call “Brand X” for our purposes). While I can’t disclose the brand name, I can promise you the tactics I used to help the company achieve growth are very, very real.

Let’s dive into four methods you should consider implementing for customer-centric growth.

1. Establish a voice.

Voice is everything. Any successful brand voice must:

• Immediately resonate with your target audience.
• Maintain consistency across all content and platforms.

Brand X developed an ideal voice to suit their content: funky, conversational, and banter-heavy.

Using this quirky voice, we managed to create content engaging enough to spark interest without pushing leads away with a sales-y tone.

Consider how you might find your own brand voice to ensure your readers are consistently delighted with the valuable content your company — and your company alone — can offer.

2. Map the repeating method for customer-centric growth.

Next, I had the team map out a flywheel diagram – an idea I got from Jim Collin’s book, The Flywheel Effect. The flywheel diagram dictates a repeatable process that achieves growth every time it’s implemented.

Like Jon Dick writes in this post, funnels lose momentum as they close in. Flywheels, however, leverage the momentum to continue spinning.

At the top of the diagram, we placed the goal of increasing Brand X’s website traffic. The wheel would spin like this:

Increase traffic to the website → Traffic generates demos and trials → Demos and trials turn into sales → Sales earn brand recognition → Recognition triggers more website traffic and the cycle repeats

At the end, we reinvested in research/development, sales, and marketing.

The flywheel diagram works for customer-centric growth every time because it’s focused on buyer needs and …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog