How SaaS Companies Can Beat Their Competitors With Content Marketing

Software as a service (SaaS) startups have grown in leaps and bounds with content marketing. Startups like BufferApp, Netsuite, Salesforce and HubSpot owe their success to a great extent to content (or inbound) marketing for SaaS. To flourish under stiff competition, the best companies in SaaS use inbound marketing intelligently by the application of the following strategies.

1. Stepping-up web traffic

Increasing web traffic is one of the most important steps your company will use to propel growth with the use of inbound marketing for SaaS. The following are strategies for increasing web traffic that are commonly used.

• Blogging and the development of buyer personas: Here you will create profiles of your likely software customers by making a careful study of their problems and how they want them to be solved; you develop personas for your buyers.
  To create buyer personas, check out our free template that will help you with that >>
  
  Get that information by any means even if it's by interviewing your customers that are already buying from you. When you have detailed personas, with all their challenges, problems and expectations in them, you'll then begin working on blog posts whose aim will be to tackle those same challenges.
  
  A basic guide to determine the challenges your current and potential customers face is by a careful study of what they search for in search engine pages. The content you create from this insight will be optimized for search engines. A good rating will let your blog posts feature prominently in search engine results which your personas will use to solve their problems. Blogging regularly, like 2 to 3 blog posts a week, and by no means skipping a week without blogging will attract search traffic to make good business after a period of time.
  
  
• Content promotion on social sites and industry networks: In inbound marketing for SaaS, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) needs to be complemented with other content promotion methods for an overall positive effect. Such methods include:
  
  
  1. Taking advantage of social media’s reach to share your content with your personas whose preferred social sites you'll have established.
  2. Collaborating with other prominent players in your industry in the creation of content. This content can then be posted in shared blog posts, webinars and newsletters including sharing such collaborative efforts with each other’s email lists.
  3. You could also have your content published in leading industry websites where your personas frequent for industry news and updates.
     
     
• Input from paid Ads: If you're not receiving your desired levels of web traffic, you may want to consider gaining this traffic with the use of paid ads. The profiles of your personas will determine which paid ad module will work best for your efforts. These will include:
  
  
  1. Ads on social media bring good results if promoted properly. Posting ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can induce multiple sharing of your content and the visibility can also gain you new traffic.
  2. Paid ads in search engines with Pay Per Click on Google being the most widely used.
     Learn how to make your PPC campaigns successful here >>

Important to note is that your company should not be relying too heavily on paid ads as this will erode your return on investment. What you need to do is to put in extra effort to gain traffic through organic means as this invariably is less costly. Website traffic is not the only focus in marketing and other marketing methods will need to be added to the overall inbound marketing for SaaS.