The biggest mistake in B2B SaaS marketing is to confuse strategy with tactics. An inaccurate understanding of how strategy exists to support business goals through tactics – while operating within budgetary constraints and audience needs – leads senior marketers to execute methods that (may) produce short-term results but don’t deliver sustainable growth.

A high-performing strategy is not guesswork but a ladder with four steps:

1. Business goals

SaaS content marketing forms a subset of a larger business strategy and helps solve for customer acquisition, value activation, or retention. Unless you understand the problem at hand, content marketing will be seen as a cost center instead of a growth function. To establish its business value, the content strategy must focus on the right formats, distribution channels, and metrics.

Website traffic and brand awareness are two different business goals. The former may be necessary for established companies that already have a user base and require new customers to expand, but emerging players in an already content marketing saturated market need thought leadership to differentiate themselves and get paid users before working on SEO. 

2. Buying process

Intel on the customer journey clarifies where users need content and why. The B2B SaaS audience prefers both written and video content to learn about products and make buying decisions. But for a bootstrapped business, longform product-led content is budget-friendly and a great way to acquire users through organic search. A robust strategy is mindful of the context around market maturity, customer preferences, and budget to try content formats and distribution channels that meet short-term and long-term goals. 

3. Average contract value

The average contract value is the third criterion for building a powerful content strategy. For companies with low ACV, a product-led approach works better and tackles problems related to customer acquisition and value activation. Airtable and Notion are great SaaS examples that deploy product-led SEO content to get users on the product through free templates and reduce the time they take to experience value. 

Another is Ahrefs. The above image illustrates how it targets queries like “how to perform keyword research” with high search volume and shows readers how to use Ahrefs for keyword research, getting it in front of the user right at the top of the funnel. But the same approach doesn’t benefit companies with a high ACV and sales-led approach. With the goal of lead generation and direct communication with buyers, email and gated content fuel their pipeline.

4. Product type

Horizontal and vertical SaaS are different categories with unique business challenges. As Ryan Law and Rease Kirchner put it, horizontal SaaS has niche use cases for a massive total addressable market (TAM), but vertical SaaS serves a niche market with general use cases. 

Going back to Notion and Airtable examples, they are horizontal SaaS with project tracking and management features for B2B and B2C users. But vertical SaaS like HRtech and Femtech tools target only one audience group. The different challenges and buyer needs require these two SaaS categories to implement strategies that address customer acquisition, value activation, and retention differently. 

While the horizontal SaaS needs to start with one audience segment and measure results before replicating that content formula for other categories, vertical SaaS, for example, must contend with low monthly searches for seed keywords and club them with long-tail secondary keywords to win traffic, if it’s target audience uses search to learn about and solve their challenges.

Lead with strategy, not tactics

Before treating any “definitive guide” to B2B SaaS content marketing as gospel truth, think hard about your business model and audience before choosing any tactics. These will help you pick the right content formats, distribution channels, and success metrics. Get in touch to get quality longform content that converts.