SaaS Content Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes” — said Oscar Wilde. Painful, but true. Yet, if there is a chance to learn from others and try to escape the same pitfalls — use it. For SaaS companies, content marketing may become such pitfall. They feel like no one that content is a twofold tool: it can contribute to your greatest success or failure if not thought-out properly.

SaaS content marketing is unique by its multi-functionality: it can step in at any stage of the customer journey and help you with onboarding new clients and closing the deals. If done well, your company can build up its marketing strategy around such content. So, let’s find out which content marketing mistakes you should avoid to successfully grow your software business.

Vague content marketing strategy

Why is SaaS content marketing so important? Because it helps your customers to understand how your product can solve their problems, educates them on how to use it and guides them through testing it.

One of the most common mistakes at the initial stage is taking sporadic efforts with no preliminary plan. To ensure maximum efficiency of your creation efforts at each stage of customer journey you need to pre-plan all your actions by compiling a content marketing strategy. It should include such main points:

• creating customer journey and outlining main problems your customers come across at each stage;
• generating content which may help to solve such problems and optimizing it for each stage;
• refining content to get rid of any factors which would lead to the failure of your content marketing strategy;
• compiling a content plan for distributing it in social media and at your inbound and outbound sources.

Content poorly adapted for customer journey

The most evident mistake is creating generic content without focusing on each stage of customer journey thus making it purposeless.

One more mistake is focusing only on top-of-funnel content for brand awareness or traffic purposes. It results in ignoring such important function as driving users through the funnel farther up to its final stage — purchase.

What to do:

Gather your team for a meetup and describe step-by-step all the most important touchpoints of your customer with your product. Discuss which problems he may come across at each stage and how your content may help him overcome them.

Not customer-oriented content

Content creation must be targeted. Ensure you know who you’re writing for, otherwise, all your SaaS marketing solutions will lead to a failure. Brainstorm with your team types of potential consumers of your product, then segment them and tailor-make content for each type at each stage of customer journey to ensure deeper engagement.

Content made for SEO purposes

No doubt, SEO may be highly useful for certain steps of the customer journey. At the brand awareness stage, it helps create articles which comprise main keywords related to your software and thus it promotes the expansion of your client base. Such a SaaS content marketing step helps them find out about the way your product may solve their problems.

Yet, beware of the case when the goal of traffic increase prevails over benefit to your customers. No doubt that article adapted for SEO has more chances for content visibility in the web. Yet if there is nothing really valuable in it for your customers your article will be unread and which is worse — your potential clients will leave.

You won’t hit your ranking goal too as Google will penalize you for oversaturating your content with keywords and thus your SaaS marketing efforts will fail. So, pay special attention to the content creation process polishing each article until it’s perfect.

The Best Trusted Ecommerce SEO Companies.

Non-credible content

creating a content in which you aren’t an expert. It provokes confusion and undermines your authority. Of course, it can expand your client base a bit, but if your content will be too generic you may lose some part of your targeted audience.

Just focus on things you know best as an expert. Your customers are tired of impersonal articles collected from multiple websites. Give them something valuable, share your company’s expertise which helped you succeed. Thus, you will make them stick to you as your content will bring them benefit and contribute to their success as well.

No promotional strategy

You may write brilliant articles but if no one sees them your work will be useless. Composing a good article requires good writing skills, professional background interesting to your readers, and time. Promoting it needs even more effort and time as you need to know the channels of your content’s distribution and optimize your writing according to them.

Neil Patel calls it an “80 20 rule”:

“If you spend one hour writing an article, you should spend four hours promoting it”.

Each channel has its own audience, a tone of voice, a format and promotional tools. So, make a survey where your audience is and focus on the most popular channels among your customers. Then align your articles and posts with their requirements and make a content plan for each channel to make your promotional campaign achieve a consistent success. It can be divided like that:

• Brand awareness stage: articles and posts at social media and guest posting about your product, platforms like Quora and Reddit;
• Deeper dive into the product: manuals, knowledge bases, academies;
• Decision-making stage: reviews from your clients and influencers at your website and at outer resources;
• Retention stage: academies from the academy builder AcademyOcean which help give clients a deeper understanding of the product and teach them how to use it to its full potential.

Conclusion

SaaS content marketing has all chances to become the cornerstone for your company’s further development and growth. Pre-plan your actions and observe closely which content works and which doesn’t for your audience and your product. If you try to avoid the most common mistakes we’ve described, your content marketing will boost your business to the level you expect and which is more important — will keep you there to excel.