Content marketing for Software as a Service companies

In an article published on September 25, 2016 on Betakit.com, Sujan Patel, co-founder of Web Profits and a Hubspot Academy instructor, unveiled all his best tips on how to best use content marketing for a Software as a Service (SaaS) company.

Content marketing creates a link between customer and brand

1 Content marketing is essential in today’s marketing world, and must be integrated into a company’s basic marketing strategy. According to a survey published by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends Survey, 88 percent of business-to-business (B2B) companies use content marketing, because it works. Not only does it create a link between the customer and the brand but it can also acquire, influence and retain customers in the long term. Defining a good marketing content strategy also improves the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of the site, generates traffic and encourages the prospect to make a purchase.

The main rules to adopt to define your content marketing

Determine your budget to know your content

It is important to determine your budget and know how you are going to spend your money. Large corporations can afford to invest thousands of dollars, but if you do not have a big budget, do not worry, do it within your means. Even by investing small amounts, the benefits can be positive. Your budget should be spent wisely. no matter how much you throw at things, if you spend your budget on the wrong things, it will not work. For a startup company, good content marketing can make the difference between you and your competitors. It can also generate trust with customers and can generate brand awareness.

Define and know your audience for better targetting

Ask for information directly to your prospective customers. Conduct surveys focusing on open-ended questions rather than closed-ended questions. The development of the questionnaire will depend on the objective. As a general rule, you will get more answers with short polls than with long surveys. Also, try to use just one or two open-ended questions in the survey as this will gain better results, and make the customers think about what they want.

Search for content ideas to attract the right consumers

Once your budget and target are set, the next step is to know what type of content you are going to have to create. The main challenge is to maximize your income so as to achieve a positive return on investment. The blog is a key support for marketing content. It allows the publication of all types of informative, educational articles that will be useful to your target. Your content should be spiced up with images that attract your targets. The main thing to think about is how to build your brand. Brand awareness is a concept that is intrinsic with content marketing. If no one knows who you are, how will you sell your product?

Brand awareness techniques and content design

Your brand needs to depict you as a thought-leader in your industry. The place people go to to kow about certain products, and the best place to buy quality. Educate  your target with knowledge of who you are and what you do. Educational articles can offer good, long-term rewards, and when it is on your own blog, it is very cost-effective.

There are many tools available to you on the web that will make content creation easier, including Canva for the graphic part and We Video for video editing. Your links will then need to be visible on other sites to increase your ranking. And they will need to be engaging enough to make people want to visit you. You also need to create content that other people and sites will want to share. If your content can potentially be picked up and linked by other sites, then you have a good chance they will link back to your site from theirs, increasing your brand awareness. These links are important in building up your site’s domain authority, and boosting your search engine visibility.

Use social media for better visibility

Finally, social networks are a good lever to ensure better visibility, provided you know how to use them well. They require little financial investment, and the results can quickly be impacting with sharing. But if it is not done right, then it can easily backfire, producing the reverse effect to what you were hoping for. Social media content has to be more personalized, in order for it to be attractive. Consumers on social media like to think that you are talking directly to them, so your content has to be unique to your target audience through the many social media channels. For example, the content you use on Facebook will not be as effective on Twitter or Line. Although it may look like a lot of unnecessary work, more than 50 percent of driven traffic can be generated by good social media content.

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