Today I interview Adriana Tica about content marketing for SaaS companies.
Adriana Tica is an expert marketer and copywriter, with 10 years in the field, most of which were spent marketing tech companies. She is the CEO of Idunn, a digital marketing agency that helps SaaS clients all over the world with copywriting, social media marketing and marketing strategy.
Show Notes
How Adriana started working in the SaaS industry
She started working for tech companies as a marketing manager and she later moved on to freelancing where she did various gigs in different industries.
Along the way she realized that she needed to go back to tech because that was her passion and she enjoys working with SaaS companies.
Why startup founders need to know their audience
Most startup founders start off on the wrong foot, they put out content such as blog posts for themselves because they don’t know their audience.
If you take time out to research your buyer persona, understand their needs and explain how you can meet their needs then you can set yourself up for success.
How SaaS founders can discover the industry to work in
If you start writing for everyone then you will be writing for no one because everyone needs to feel special.
Finding the ideal industry to work with starts in the early stages of research as you are building your product. You can get important information from your prospective users via surveys, beta testers and asking questions on social media.
If we take the social media marketing space as an example, there is a very interesting segmentation that is occurring at the moment where most of them are focusing more on digital marketing agencies and less on individuals or single marketers.
Their positioning is based on their research and you will observe that most of them have free plans for one or three accounts which is useful for single marketers or marketers working for a single company.
You can tell that their plan to increase their MRR with marketing agencies because that is where their money is.
It is also important to find the intersection between what your readers need and what your company needs.
Why you should hire people with a marketing background instead of people with a writing background
Marketers can easily emulate different tone of voice and understand different buyer personas. Writers are often grammatically sound but they don’t know how to write for the web because they are often writing essays. The content you are creating needs to sell, it doesn’t need to read like a Hemingway novel.
How to distribute your SaaS content effectively
You can’t just create a new blog post and expect it to go viral instantly, you need to put in some extra work.
You should post it on your social media channels ideally more than once because all your audience are not online at the same time. If you are creating evergreen content you can post it repeatedly.
There are other things you can do such as answering to HARO pages and getting links back to your content. If you mentioned an influencer or someone in your industry in your piece, you can tag them on twitter or facebook because they will retweet or reshare your post.
You can also use report and statistics from small research outlets to make your content better and they might retweet or mention it on their social media platforms.
You need to be social with your content and make it look like a big discussion among experts in your field.
Tips on publishing content and content schedules
It is important to have a schedule because people are creatures of habit so if you promise your email subscribers new content weekly or monthly then you should keep your promise.
The frequency of content you write depends on your bandwidth, you should be realistic, don’t stretch yourself too thin and publish content daily just for the sake of publishing content that neither your readers nor Google love.
Studies from HubSpot say that you should publish 16 times per month in order to make a dent in your SEO rankings and on a general note the more you publish the better you will rank and you also will be able to capture more leads but that is if the content you are creating is quality content.
If you are not sure you can produce 16 pieces of amazing content per month you can cut it down to eight, four or even two.
A cool trick you can use is content repurposing, for example this podcast can be transcribed into a blog post because some people in your audience will prefer to read it, it can also be in video format.
If you have several podcasts that cover similar topics you can create an e-book or white paper that deeply tackles the subject.
How to evaluate your SaaS content marketing strategy
Evaluating your content can be summed up in a single phrase “follow the money” because you are creating content to pad up your bottom line.
If a certain type of content is not working for you, is not bringing in leads, or it is not converting, then you should ditch it, you shouldn’t feel remorseful about it even if all your competitors are doing it.
Make sure you track relevant KPIs, don’t be obsessed with traffic and social media followers, those are vanity metrics, they will not pay your bills.
You should look at your latest blog post and find out if it brings any new leads? If so, how many?
How many people were you able to convert with the latest white paper you put out? If you can attach a number to each of your KPIs, then you will know what you need to keep or change in your content strategy because it is constantly evolving.
Resources
Copywritech – We help tech companies get more clients
Idunn – Professional web copywriting services
Haro – A source for every story
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