A SaaS content calendar serves as a cornerstone for SaaS companies aiming to connect with their audience effectively. This article outlines practical approaches to build a comprehensive content plan that aligns with your business goals and addresses each phase of the customer’s decision-making process.
You’ll learn how to incorporate various content formats, maintain a steady publishing schedule, and use data-driven insights to refine your SaaS content strategy. These techniques will help you create a robust content plan that resonates with potential clients and fuels your company’s growth.
This guide will equip you with the tools to elevate your content strategy and achieve better results for your SaaS business.
Strategic Importance of a SaaS Content Calendar
When you set up your content calendar for your SaaS product, the first thing you want to make sure is that you’ve aligned your business objectives with your overall content strategy.
Map Content Themes to Product Benefits
What this means is that you want to map the different content themes you brainstorm to your products, to the features of your products, but most importantly to the benefits of your products. At the end of the day, people are buying the benefits. They’re not necessarily buying the features.
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Here’s a way to think about this: if you were selling a drill, yes, people buy the drill bits, but they really want the benefit of the drill bits, which is making holes or screwing in screws into wood, things like that. They’re buying the benefits.
To translate your product features into benefits, you can do a simple exercise:
- On the left side of a sheet of paper, write down the feature
- On the right side, describe the benefit
- You can phrase it as “We have X feature so you can benefit”
Create Content for Every Stage of the Buyer Journey
Once you’ve mapped out these benefits and features, you can start looking at the different customer journey stages. This is really important because people go through various stages.
A customer might be in the evaluation stage, which is ideal because you can then try to close them fairly quickly. But not everybody is at that stage. In fact, some companies estimate that only 5% of buyers are at the evaluation stage at any given time, which means there’s 90-95% of people who are not yet ready to buy. They’re not even sure what they want to purchase. Those stages of the journey are awareness and consideration, where they’re trying to figure out how to solve their problem.
In your content calendar, have content for every stage of the buyer journey, bucketing your ideas into:
- Awareness stage
- Consideration stage
- Evaluation stage
Maintain Consistency in Brand Voice
Another thing you want to make sure is that you maintain consistency in your brand voice. Many companies are using a conversational tone, which is wonderful because it’s very easy to read. If that’s your brand, keep that consistent. Do not suddenly take one article and make it sound very professional using third person voice if you’re using first or second person voice in everything else.
Check out our CEOs Guide to Content Marketing
Be consistent in your voice and tone to maintain a cohesive narrative that connects your overall branding and theme. Brand is much more than just a logo – it’s the way you talk to customers and how people perceive you. Using a conversational tone usually means you’re more accessible.
Use Templates and Subject Matter Experts
Some companies use templates for different types of content. For instance, if you have a checklist, be consistent in the way you create and use them. If you have white papers, use a similar brand for the design, such as the cover.
You might find that different team members have different areas of expertise. Many companies assign content ideas based on the subject matter expertise of their staff or an expert they work with. This allows you to create deep, rich content to address the various needs a prospect might have. All this collectively forms the basis for your SaaS content marketing calendar.
Real-World Example: MailerMailer
In one of my prior companies, MailerMailer, an email marketing software company acquired by Ziff-Davis Nasdaq:ZD, we created content for people who were ready to buy. One article at the evaluation stage was about criteria to decide which email marketing software to use.
We also wrote an article for the awareness stage about open rates, click rates, and bounce rates. We created additional material like what is a good click rate, open rate, and bad bounce rate, tying it all together because people who wanted to know the answer to one wanted to know the answer to another.
This enabled us to create a lot of awareness stage content that we used to nurture people. We offered a guide on our website, captured their email address to send them the guide, and then sent them additional material to nurture them to closing.
This is just one example of how you can create a content marketing calendar that addresses all the different types of questions a prospect might have on their pre-sales journey. As you create all the content ideas, you can start to put them into a workable calendar that makes sense for your business. If you can do four articles in a month, plot them out. If you’ve got 30-40 article ideas, plot them out on a calendar, and that will become the basis of your SaaS content calendar.
Key Components of an Effective Content Marketing Calendar
When creating a content calendar for your SaaS company, it’s important to remember that it’s not just about writing blog posts. A comprehensive content marketing calendar should include a variety of content types.
Diverse Content Types
Your content calendar should feature:
- White papers
- Case studies
- Webinars
- Product demos
- Tutorials
- How-to guides
- Infographics
- Videos
- Interactive content
For B2B SaaS companies, a cost calculator that demonstrates the ROI of purchasing your tool can be one of the most effective pieces of content.
You can use MakeMEDIA to produce a significant portion of this material, including blog posts, white papers, case studies, and how-to guides, simply by talking. Other AI tools can also be utilized to transform descriptions into infographics and other visual content.
Consistent Publication Frequency
The frequency of your content publication is another crucial aspect of your content calendar. Aiming to publish one blog post per week, resulting in four pieces of content per month, is a great starting point.
Consistency is key, so ensure that you adhere to your schedule. MakeMEDIA can help you achieve this by making content creation fast and easy, but you’ll need to secure buy-in from all team members to ensure everyone is willing to contribute.
Effective Distribution Channels
Your content distribution and publication channels should include your social media platforms. For B2B companies, LinkedIn is the primary platform, while Facebook and TikTok are more suitable for targeting consumers.
When posting content on these platforms, avoid simply sharing a link to your blog post. Instead, create engaging posts that contain insights from your article. You can start with a hook, provide depth, and build up to a partial answer before sharing the link to the full article. This approach encourages people to read the entire post and engage with your brand.
MakeMEDIA can generate these social media posts for you based on the article dialogue and interviews you provide.
Leveraging Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are another powerful tool for promoting your content and staying in touch with your customers. While not everyone is active on LinkedIn or regularly visits your website, an email newsletter allows you to reach people who have expressed interest in receiving communications from you.
MakeMEDIA can help you generate content quickly, which you can then share on your website. You can use teasers or social media posts in your newsletter to entice readers to visit your site and read the full article.
Tailoring Content to the Buyer Journey
By creating a content calendar that includes material for different stages of the buyer journey, you can test which content resonates with your audience.
Let’s say someone clicks on an article about what to ask your email marketing service provider before signing up. This indicates they are likely in the evaluation stage of the buyer journey.
By sending them articles from different stages via your newsletter and tracking their clicks, you can gauge their readiness to buy and tailor your engagement accordingly. For instance, if they consistently engage with evaluation-stage content, it might be time to reach out with a phone call.
Data-Driven Approach to SaaS Content Calendar Planning
Using data and analytics to inform your SaaS content calendar planning goes beyond just email click tracking. You can leverage several other analytics to gain valuable insights.
Setting Up Google Tools
Set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics, which are excellent free tools provided by Google. These tools analyze your website traffic, user behavior, and engagement metrics. You’ll know what search terms people are typing into Google that lead them to your page and how many clicks your content is getting. This information can help you fine-tune your keyword research strategy.
Incorporating SEO Best Practices
Incorporating SEO best practices into your content is essential these days. It’s almost table stakes if you want to get found on Google. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and there are guides available on MakeMEDIA for best practices and the anatomy of a stellar SEO article.
When you identify a couple of keywords you want to get found on and add them to your article preparation in the first step of creating an article with MakeMEDIA, it will incorporate those keywords throughout your article. The end result is fairly ready to go, but there are a few other things you’ll want to add:
- External links that point to other websites, such as news articles, Wikipedia, or Investopedia
- Internal links that point to other articles on your own site
- Images with alt tags containing your keywords
Creating a Content Plan
Creating a content plan will help you identify the keywords to use, keyword gaps, and keyword opportunities. If your business is seasonal, even if you don’t think of B2B SaaS companies or IT service companies as seasonal, many of them make quite a few of their sales during the end of the fourth quarter. Companies have budgets at that point that they need to either exhaust, or there’s an opportunity for them to get deals.
A/B Testing and Experimentation
A/B testing and experimentation are also important. A popular place to do this is in the title of your email newsletter. You can send out an announcement about just one article you’ve created and use two different subject lines. This can give you an indication of which subject line resonates better based on opens or clicks inside the message. You can use data to test headlines, formats, content length, and different types of calls to action.
Let’s say you have a call to action at the end of a piece of content that includes a contact form. The last thing you want to do is use the word “submit” as the button text. It’s very unclear. Instead, tie the call to action to what the prospect wants.
Here are some examples:
- If the contact form is for downloading a guide, your call to action button should be “Download,” “Get it now,” or “Yes, I want this.”
- The words “Yes, I want this” have tested to be very effective in getting people to download and opt in to a newsletter.
Using Data to Inform Your Content Strategy
Use these different techniques to get data that will inform your entire content strategy, not just in terms of creating a content marketing calendar, but also to use insights to learn what people are clicking on and responding to.
You have a few options:
- Conduct surveys
- Interview people directly
- Use tools that do heat map evaluations on your website articles and webpages
These show where people’s mouse is hovering the longest or what they’re clicking on the most. All of this can help you understand your prospects much better and plays a big part in the future articles you put into your SaaS content calendar.
Balancing Evergreen and Timely Content in Your SaaS Content Calendar
You may have seen questions posted in discussion forums where content planners say they’ve created a full content plan and are being very strict to it. But then something comes up in the industry that’s a new trend or some news item that’s big and should be talked about, but it’s not part of their content marketing calendar.
What do you do? Here’s an easy way to fix that.
Creating a Flexible Content Calendar
Definitely create a SaaS content calendar that allows you to post blog posts, white papers, guides, social media posts, and newsletters on a preset schedule. But also in your plan, leave a couple of items blank.
Let’s say in a month, you publish eight pieces of content, so two a week, which is a wonderful pace for a business to start getting lots of traction as you produce more and more content. Instead of pre-setting what all eight articles or pieces of content will be, leave one or two unassigned at any given time of the month.
Accommodating Breaking News and Trends
Leaving some content unassigned within your calendar gives you the flexibility to talk about breaking news that you want to provide commentary on. By not being restricted to sticking with the eight specifically preset pieces of content, you allow yourself the flexibility to create a brand new piece of content that’s timely.
If something breaks out in the morning or yesterday, you can go into your content platform, create an outline real fast, talk about it, and generate an article that you can publish the same day or the next day if you need more time, along with social media content. You can be very timely with getting news commentary and analysis out on trending topics, which by the way is an excellent way to show off your expertise.
Then you can continue on with the rest of your schedule. Having the flexibility allows you to rejigger your schedule as needed to accommodate additional news and trending items.
Balancing Evergreen and Timely Content
The other thing you want to pay attention to is balancing the evergreen content along with the timely content. The evergreen content is things that you plan, things that you know your customers are regularly trying to figure out. Tie that back to the benefits that I mentioned earlier. People aren’t necessarily buying the features. They’re buying the benefits.
Think about what their day looks like, not just in terms of what their day using your product looks like, but also consider:
- What are the other things that they have to take care of?
- What are the problems that they have to solve throughout the day?
Create checklists or templates that they can download. People love getting that type of content so that you provide content that stands the test of time.
Types of Evergreen Content
One of the strongest pieces of content you can produce is customer case studies. These are success stories that your existing client base is just thrilled to talk about because they see the value in what you’re providing to them. It’s a much deeper form of testimonial, which might be just a line or two. A case study goes in-depth about the problem someone had and how they used your solution to get to a better place.
Here are a few other types of content that you can have in your library of evergreen content:
- Comprehensive guides on the core concepts that your product offers. As an illustration, at MakeMEDIA we have content about SEO best practices, which is a core theme that our clients want to know about.
- Create a frequently asked questions (FAQ) list that addresses common customer pain points and questions they might have.
Regularly update this evergreen content to make sure that it’s fresh. In fact, I would recommend you do not put a date on content that’s evergreen.
Imagine you had an article on a template and years go by, your template may now be four years old. Even though it may still be applicable, people might look at that and say, “Oh, this template’s four years old,” and look for something new. For such cases, I just wouldn’t put a date on your content.
With all of these techniques, you can really build out a very healthy content calendar that makes your brand awareness skyrocket.
Streamline Your SaaS Content Strategy
MakeMEDIA can help you streamline your SaaS content strategy. It will create an effective content calendar that aligns with your business objectives and then work with you to make content about your product benefits, address each phase of the customer journey, and maintain your brand’s unique voice.
Try it free to help you turbocharge your content marketing calendar and drive growth for your SaaS company.
