Why Content and B2B SaaS Marketing Belong Together [2023 UPDATED]

January 2023

Buffer, HubSpot, Shopify, InVision, Canva, Salesforce... We could go all day name-dropping multi-billion SaaS brands that made their name using amazing content. Instead, let’s look at some stats from the 2021 B2B Content Marketing report:

Content is an essential element of a B2B marketing strategy

  • 60% of top-performing B2B brands have a documented content marketing strategy,
  • 80% have an editorial calendar where they plan content publishing,
  • and a whopping 94% of them use metrics to track content performance.

 

B2B content statistics

 

These numbers prove that content marketing has become an essential part of the business revenue generation strategy in B2B companies. But why exactly? We will develop on that, showing you how the right content can help B2B SaaS brands attract and convert more leads for their software.

Content and B2B SaaS marketing go hand in hand

Buyers consume 13 pieces of content on average before deciding whether to purchase/subscribe to a B2B product or forget about it. Now, let that sink in. If you don’t have any content to show—or any useful content that solves the reader’s challenges—potential buyers won’t even get close to considering your SaaS solution, let alone buying it. 

On the other hand, purposeful, well-written content can help your SaaS business in four main ways:

  1. Brand awareness: It makes the world aware of your brand/product.
  2. Customer education: It helps customers understand what you do and how to use your product.
  3. Lead generation: It helps you attract potential buyers.
  4. Brand reputation: It is essential for establishing credibility and building trust.

SaaS-related content achieves these objectives by tackling several common barriers. Let’s spell them out.

Making buyers aware of the problem...

To beat the competition, SaaS products often need to be as innovative and unique as it gets. This means they might need to address a new issue that many customers aren’t yet aware of.

To illustrate that issue, we’ll need to do some time traveling. Around a decade ago, we could see marketing people starting their day by posting company social media updates to every channel that existed at the time, one by one. Customizing each post, logging into every account separately, and adding the relevant update could have easily taken a few hours. And, oh boy, was it tedious!

Then, Buffer appeared, making it possible to schedule posts to various social media ahead from a single place. That functionality was a real breakthrough and found its way into many tools, both old and new. We’ve covered the most important of these tools in our social media scheduling guide and have another one about doing that in HubSpot specifically—make sure to check them out!

... and the solution

Back to our Buffer story, their solution was a huge time saver, but the company faced one problem: how could a marketer know he or she needed the scheduling platform if nothing as it had existed before? To make its target audience aware of the issue and promote its software as a relevant solution, Buffer turned to content generation.

Buffer’s case can teach all B2B SaaS brands an important lesson: for many of them, the main barrier to creating relevant content isn’t talking about a solution customers already know. Their biggest pain is how to reach those companies who aren’t aware of the problem or don’t know there’s a product out there that can help them resolve this problem.

That’s exactly the challenge faced by one of our clients (we can’t share the full name, so let’s just call them PP). To raise awareness of its product among short-term rental businesses, the company launched a series of webinars on dynamic pricing strategies. It also publishes a blog to educate customers about the solution and its features, introducing them to the available options for managing rental revenue. These content marketing activities slowly but surely make PP’s audience more accustomed to the service and, essentially, show that there’s value in it for them. Once they’re ready to pay for that value, they’ll know where to find it.

➡️ We’ve supported PP in their efforts, helping them plan out and distribute content by integrating a CRM platform that not only delivers content to the right audiences but also helps measure the results of that distribution and improves every content cycle. We can assist your SaaS brand with that, too!

 

Why Content Marketing and B2B SaaS Belong Together_2

 

Debunking common misconceptions about B2B

Every industry is surrounded by misconceptions that often prevent potential customers from purchasing. Content marketing is a great way for B2B SaaS companies to dispel these myths and any client fears.

Let us use our customer example again. The Doctors Answer, a US medical call answering company, struggled to reach small and medium-sized healthcare providers. Many of them incorrectly assumed that phone answering services were only affordable for hospitals and clinics, not SMEs. They also feared that an external team wouldn’t be able to handle patient calls in a professional and considerate manner.

To overcome these customer qualms, The Doctors Answer had to educate its target group and convince decision-makers within healthcare organizations that their fears were unfounded. The company has achieved this with a content-based inbound marketing strategy.

➡️ Sounds interesting? Read our case study to learn how we helped The Doctors Answer increase its brand awareness. Or contact us directly if you are struggling with a similar challenge.

 

6Minded has generated 400% more leads than our previous SEO company. At the same time, our cost per lead has gone down, and our marketing return is up 38% from the same time last year. They write intelligent pieces that get engagement from potential customers.”

Benjamin Pure, President at TDA

 

A niche service is hard to find

Imagine a financial company looking to ensure compliance with position limit regulations. The compliance managers want to automate and streamline the process and are looking for software that monitors derivative positions. Of course, they start their search on the internet. Your SaaS offers the features the managers need, but will it show up high enough in search results so they can easily find it?

It will if you have created enough quality content on the topic for Google or Bing crawlers to place it on page one. Another of our clients, FundApps, achieves that goal through quality content about position limits, derivative traders, short selling, and shareholding. Applying the right content tactics puts its services in front of the right audience. It also establishes authority in the field with online seminars and other learning resources that nurture existing customers and attract potential ones.

➡️ Would you like to know more about how they accomplish that? We’re here to tell the story!

How did we help with content for SaaS brand

Check our case study for scandinavian aviation training company who hired us to help with content.

Apples and oranges

No SaaS solutions are alike, so comparing them is usually difficult. Let’s think about a PM who realizes that her team’s task lists, notes, and wikis are a total mess. She needs a solution to combine all of them and store them in a single place. She knows what product she needs; she understands the pain point but doesn’t know where to find the solution.

Sure, she can go to G2Crowd or another software comparison platform and browse product categories. But what category does the platform she needs belong to? Is it a project management tool? Maybe, but hundreds of PM solutions are out there with a plethora of features, and probably only a few offer the function our PM seeks. And once she finds the ones that do, how does she choose the best one?

The more innovative a product, the bigger the problem, as it becomes more difficult to classify. Besides, established products usually appear first in the search due to the higher total number of reviews, which is an important factor for indexing algorithms. Add the choice overload effect to it, and it seems that software review sites, while helpful, aren’t the best tool to market your SaaS, especially if it’s relatively new.

 

Choosing the right CRM

Another client of ours, Infermedica, faced similar problems when promoting their software. The product supplies healthcare providers and insurance companies with various AI-based tools, including call center triage or smart symptom checker. While these tools are listed in popular directories, the company uses content marketing as the primary promotion channel. This helps them focus on increasing the awareness of its services among potential clients and boosting visibility on Google.

As Infermedica grew, so did its customer base. To help the company efficiently manage new and existing leads, we’ve implemented HubSpot Sales and have assisted them with ongoing CRM support ever since. 

➡️ Check out our case study to find out more about Infermedica’s challenges and our solution.

 

Where does content marketing fit into B2B digital marketing strategy?

We believe that honesty is the best policy, so at this point, we need to stress one more thing. All the campaigns we mentioned have been leveraging inbound marketing techniques, where content is tightly integrated with the conversion strategy (HubSpot has a lot of excellent resources about inbound if you want to find out more). But if yours is a highly-sophisticated, industry-oriented, and bespoke solution, chances are you’ll be better off with an account-based B2B marketing strategy. It still uses content but in an entirely different way.

Most of our clients are small to medium B2B SaaS companies that offer self-service or transaction-supported products. It’s exactly the type of business that benefits the most from inbound marketing. Here’s why:

Their average deal size is much lower (ca. $50K/year)

Which means that they sign more deals in a year. More deals equal more clients, and getting them requires more leads. With extensive B2B digital marketing automation and intense content generation, inbound techniques are a perfect match in this case. Since lead volumes are high, we can run test campaigns and try out various attribution models to optimize published content constantly and drive better results.

 

Their sales cycles are shorter

Thus, these companies see ROI faster. With sales happening constantly, we can generate trial submissions, pass leads to the sales team in shorter cycles, and get quick feedback on what works and doesn’t. Conversely, if you’re a big company that only signs a couple of deals a year, assessing the profitability and performance of your inbound marketing campaigns would be extremely hard.

 

Why Content Marketing and B2B SaaS Belong Together_3

 

Content-based B2B SaaS marketing—tough but worthwhile

Let’s be clear: content marketing isn’t easy—if it was, our agency probably wouldn’t need to exist. Effective and sales-boosting content pieces don’t just appear out of thin air, even if they’re brief social media posts. You’ll need a well-thought-out B2B marketing strategy for your content to bring returns. Developing it will take time and investment, but all that effort will pay back.

So, if you feel that your digital presence is lacking or that a content-based approach would work for your business, get in touch with our team! From B2B SaaS marketing strategy to ongoing article writing, we’ll help your SaaS attract new customers and generate valuable leads through content marketing.

 

Drive growth through content.

Let's talk!

AUTHOR

Joanna Borkowska

Head of Content at 6Minded, Joanna has +13 years of experience in content creation for IT/Tech companies. Technical writer, software trainer, marketing manager, translator + copywriter - she's been there, done that. Now, she focuses mostly on crafting content marketing strategies, producing copy for websites and blogs, and managing a team of talented content creators. That is, if she's not currently roaming the jungle or binging on true crime docs.

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