Content Marketing Is Hard for SaaS Companies. Here’s How to Do It Right.

By Harry Mackin

B2B SaaS content marketing can be notoriously complex. Your SaaS company’s solutions are built to solve problems for a highly select subset of a professional audience. If you can’t find and reach this audience with your content, creating it feels like a waste of time.

No matter how niche your SaaS solutions are, however, content marketing can and will work for your brand. In a space where it can be especially tough to differentiate and be found by your audience, a well-crafted content strategy can be your key to breaking through. Let’s talk about how.

Major challenges of SaaS marketing

The SaaS industry is a hot place to be, but strategies are under a magnifying glass. Many of the key challenges that characterize B2B marketing more generally are intensified in the SaaS environment:

Market education: Solutions are often especially complex and innovative, driven by advancements in digital transformation.
Long sales cycles: Signing up with a SaaS provider is a major investment (financially and operationally), making it a heavily-scrutinized decision.
Acquisition versus retention: The subscription-based nature of the business model means needing to dually showcase value to new audiences while reinforcing it for existing customers.
Steepening competition: New SaaS companies are popping up just about every day. McKinsey has estimated the global SaaS market could be worth $10 trillion by 2030.

How B2B SaaS companies can elevate their content marketing

There are many aspects that go into an effective SaaS marketing strategy built to address the aforementioned barriers, but content can be the underpinning of your growth engine. Follow these key tips for great SaaS content.

Don’t neglect upper and mid-funnel educational content

If you want your SaaS content marketing to make its greatest impact, high-funnel content is even more important than demand generation content.

As a B2B company, 95% of your customers are out-of-market at any time, which means you’re inherently speaking to a small potential audience with conversion-focused content.

When you focus on top-funnel, educational search terms, you can grow your audience by catching them at the beginning of their customer journey. Use your content to answer questions your target audience has about the pain points your SaaS service can solve to start building trust and memorability with this audience, even when they’re out-of-market.

When this audience is in-market, the good will your content has built will pay off. According to Gartner research, brands that audience members are already familiar with are more than twice as likely to win their business.