Building a B2B SaaS Content Marketing Strategy [with Industry Benchmark Report]

Having worked alongside B2B Software as a Service providers in ERP and customer service software, we know just how important standing out in such a crowded market can be. And your content and SEO strategy can play a crucial role in this.

Our report reveals how top-performing businesses in the market win organic search and find growth opportunities. From our research, we’ve uncovered some common tactics for creating a successful strategy as a B2B SaaS provider. In this guide, we’ll build on these insights, offering further guidance to help your business thrive.

Why content marketing & SEO are important for B2B SaaS

Long sales cycles, heavy keyword competition and targeting technical audiences are just some of the most common struggles faced by B2B SaaS providers. Tackling these issues starts with a strong, focused content and SEO strategy.

The reason why this can make such a difference is simple – you’re meeting the needs of prospects without blatantly advertising your services to them. With relevant, well-optimised content, your services will organically be at the front of mind for the right people at the right time.

Our research (and what we found!)

Our benchmarking report reveals how the most successful B2B SaaS providers sharpen their organic search strategies, improve performance and spot lucrative growth opportunities.

We’ve analysed keyword ranking volumes, positions, and search traffic sources to find out what helps businesses in the industry stand out against competition. With actionable insights and proven content tactics, other SaaS providers can learn from the best and focus on what’s most important.

40% of top-trafficked pages serve top-funnel content

We analysed the top businesses’ top-trafficked pages and uncovered that 40% were top-funnel content, followed by product/solution pages (21%). This shows that providing target audiences with informational expert content works when it comes to improving organic visibility and traffic.

How to build a content & SEO strategy for your B2B SaaS business

Creating a strategy that’s going to help you stand out for all the right reasons? It starts with laying the groundwork…

The groundwork

Having a good understanding of your overarching business goals, target audience and customer personas (including their interests and pain points) can help you weave in a well-aligned strategy.

As a B2B SaaS provider, you’re likely targeting other businesses, rather than individuals. This means your content needs to be relevant for different teams, such as procurement – especially if one of your goals is to boost buy-in on your services. You should also be aware that prospective buyers often spend a long time in the research stage, evaluating services, understanding their pain points and looking for guidance, so this should be factored into your strategy.

When you know who you’re targeting, it’s much easier to create a plan for how you’ll do this and tie your strategy nicely to your desired results. This step forms the groundwork for a successful B2B SaaS content marketing strategy.

Keyword & topic research

If you’ve laid the groundwork for your audience persona knowledge and built customer profiles, the next stage is to use SEO tools to find relevant keywords. Why? This research means you can start building topic clusters, as well as helping spark ideas for relevant content that your audience will be interested in.

Allow your customer pain points and interests to guide your keyword research, although you can also look for general SaaS keywords like ‘software’, ‘platform’ and ‘tool’ to get you started.

Many SEO tools, like SEMrush, allow you to check the intent of different keywords. Doing so can help you maintain a good balance between high-intent (bottom of funnel) and educational (top of funnel) keywords, which provides you with a solid basis for our next recommendation.

Build a content funnel framework

The decision-making process isn’t linear for your prospects, so why should your content be any different? Covering all funnel bases, from top to bottom, will ensure that your content supports the customer journey and gives them everything they need to know at different stages.

Prospects could come to you from any part of the funnel, depending on whether they’re ready to invest in a new service or searching for ways to overcome common pain points. Your job is to make sure your brand is at the forefront of all the most relevant search queries.

Here are some examples of content types that sit within the different funnels:

• Top-funnel: Educational and awareness blogs
• Middle-funnel: Comparison pages, use cases and industry-specific content
• Bottom-funnel: Product-led content, customer stories and landing pages

Struggling to come up with ideas? Top-funnel educational content for a SaaS provider offering customer service software could be on the topic of understanding key metrics like customer effort scores or return rates. Meanwhile, bottom-funnel content examples could include an in-depth service page covering pricing and features.

SEO & conversion optimisation

Technical SEO actions are essential for ensuring your site is operating at optimal performance and ready to provide the results you’re looking for.

It’s crucial to regularly check that everything on-page, from internal linking and page speed to CTAs and schemas, is working as it should be. Not only does this mean that potential prospects have a smooth user experience, but it also means you can stay on top of on-site optimisations and spot improvement opportunities sooner.

Content creation & distribution

After all the planning, it’s time to create the content. But to ensure the content doesn’t fall flat, there are a few things to keep in mind, including:

• Following EEAT guidelines: Standing for ‘Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness’, this framework is used by search engines to evaluate and rank the quality and relevance of your content.
• Maintaining the balance between good SEO practices and targeting user intent: You should be ready to write content with a human angle while still targeting relevant search queries from your keyword research findings.
• Plan a steady stream of content: With the help of our Content Strategy Planner, you can plan the perfect strategy and schedule completion and publication dates for your content.

Distribution of content is equally important. Use your customer profile insights to choose relevant touchpoints your prospects will engage with. This might mean going beyond organic search channels and sharing content via social media or email. You could also consider outreaching newsworthy content, such as updates to your services, to help gain coverage and backlinks. Putting content in the right places will help improve brand visibility and reach wider audiences.

Ready to enhance your organic search performance? Get in touch

Need a helping hand getting ahead of the competition in a saturated market? Get in touch with our team of industry experts who can help boost your organic search performance and make sure you’re a top player in the B2B SaaS world.