Running a SaaS company, especially given the increased market share of SaaS in the software space, is quite difficult. Marketing a SaaS solution, however, is almost equally as challenging. Fortunately, there are things that differentiate SaaS from marketing other types of online businesses. For example, if you run an ecommerce shop, you need to consider how you are going to promote particular products and sell to consumers who may be wary of stepping outside of traditional ecommerce retailers such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. However, the SaaS space has more opportunity for market penetration, as even the big players, such as Hubspot and Salesforce, are focused on particular demographics and do not broadly meet the needs of all businesses.
To differentiate yourself, you are going to want to create content. But not just any content. ‘Content is king’ is such a well-worn adage that it has functionally becoming meaningless. Instead, SaaS companies need to create content with a particular focus in mind. And that focus is SEO. While SaaS companies don’t have to promote specific products in the way an ecommerce store would, they do need to frame their SaaS offering as something other than a product. When launching a SaaS offering, SaaS companies need to keep in mind that very few people are specifically looking for software to solve their problems. As such, you are not only fighting a battle for viewers, but you are also fighting a battle to give people a reason to look at your SaaS offering as something other than just a software solution – something that actually helps people to solve their problems.
So, you can’t just make content. You also have to get eyeballs on it. And some of these eyeballs, ideally are going to become user so your SaaS solution. To do this, SEO is the most effective strategy, as there is a much higher intention behind search than there is on social media or other discovery platforms. Plus, search leads potential users directly to your website, which is very important when it comes to actually generating leads and conversions. Using a SaaS SEO strategy, you can better position your SaaS offerings to be a solution to people’s problems and not just a software. You can then target this content to keywords, which can make sure that your content marketing efforts are actually geared toward problem-solving and not just self-promotion.
When using keywords, a SaaS company should specifically be looking at both informational queries and longtail keywords. Longtail keywords generally help businesses rank for niche queries, and for SaaS, the solution to a problem is often niche. This will help you a lot as you can create content that targets these longtail keywords that will bring in very high-intention traffic. This, in turn, will help you convert more eyeballs into users as these people see that your SaaS solution actually can provide value to them and help them solve their niche problems.
After you do this, you are going to want to build links to your keyword-targeted content in order to help it rank. For SaaS companies, link building efforts should be focused on websites that cover various business and technology topics that are related to their SaaS offering. Doing so will help to build relevance with Google and ultimately help their SaaS company rank particular pages on their website toward target keywords.
