How to promote B2B SaaS content
Are you investing heavily in inbound content, but don’t have a system to get that content in front of your target audience to read, enjoy and share?
Do you want to know what the best channels are to promote your content?
As you know… writing a long, quality piece of content is not a simple thing. Then to spread it to the world… much harder!
Whether you’re a startup, growth or expansion stage SaaS company, organic marketing is normally the go-to lead gen strategy because of it’s cost advantages and proven effectiveness at driving higher quality leads.
The only real costs are the salaries of the staff to create the content.
But the problem is…
CONTENT PROMOTION
Most SaaS companies invest time and money to create content, then make the BIG mistake of never promoting it.
Their idea of content promotion is 1 email blast to their email newsletter.
Then that’s it.
But if your sales team needs leads now, or you have aggressive growth targets you need to hit this quarter…
Then you need your content to generate new leads fast… so you have safe, consistent, scalable lead flow.
Ask yourself this question…
Do you have a fool-proof system for how to promote your best content?
If not… here is the 2-part fool-proof system our agency has developed so you can successfully promote every piece of B2B SaaS content you write to your target audience.
Part 1: Organic Content Promotion
I first want to cover a simple 5-step organic strategy, because I know a lot of SaaS companies want to do everything they can to move their content piece organically before thinking about paid traffic.
Here is the organic strategy, in an easy step-by-step checklist format:
Organic Content Promotion Checklist
Step 1: Send email to list (at whatever time you have the highest open rate, based on your historical email stats)
Step 2: Share article on social media accounts as soon as email campaign is sent
Step 3: Look for channels relevant to your SaaS and submit links there (eg: forums, FB groups, Slack groups)
Step 4: Wait for a few days to get some analytics data (stats, shares and comments)
Step 5: Send emails or tweet editors of big publishers who report on your content topic with eye-catching headline and screenshot of proof of traction (eg: “My post has 50% share rate, screenshot attached, repost maybe?”)
The goal with your organic content promotion is to identify which pieces of content get the most engagement (shares and comments) with YOUR market organically.
Once you know which of your content pieces perform the best organically, you can then follow this next strategy to get even more highly targeted visitors reading your content and engaging with your brand.
NOTE: If you already have proven content pieces (with significant shares and comments), you can skip straight to this next part…
Part 2: Paid Content Promotion
Most SaaS marketers idea for paid content promotion is:
Step 1: Hit the “promote post” button on FB and Twitter
Step 2: Hope and pray the post generates bulk traffic and leads
Let me show you a better way…
At my agency we developed a system called the “SaaS DNA Profile”.
The SaaS DNA Profile is made up of 24 unique data points.
It starts with the Industry Vertical in grey on the bottom right.
We then go into the Demographic Data on the top row in gold that includes… Company Size, Revenue, Job Title, Age, Gender, Income, Marital Status and Location
After that we look at the Psychographic Data in orange on the middle row that includes: Software, Celebrities, Blogs, Books, Topics, Keywords, Media and Competitors
Then we look at the Competitive Intelligence Data in red on the bottom row that includes: Competitor Keywords and Competitor Ads
And finally we identify all the Owned Media that we can leverage on the bottom row in yellow that includes: Website Traffic, Blog Content, TOFU, MOFU and BOFU (I’ll explain what those acronyms mean later if you haven’t read my other articles).
What I’m going to do is show you a case study of HubSpot, and how we use the SaaS DNA Profile to come up with a Paid Content Promotion Plan before ever promoting any content on any ad networks.
The first piece of data I’m going to cover is Industry Vertical.
Your SaaS might target 1 industry vertical or multiple industry verticals.
But’s it’s important at this stage to just pick the 1 industry vertical that you want to build your paid content promotion campaign around, then go back through this process for other industry verticals once you finish.
For HubSpot, one of their biggest industry verticals is Professional Services.
And one of their main target customers within that industry is Marketing Agencies who are a major channel sales partner for HubSpot.
In particular their product is a great fit for Marketing Agencies who sell web design, online marketing, branding, social media marketing, SEO, SEM and advertising services.
After we know what vertical we’re targeting, we then define the key demographic data of our clients ideal target customer in that vertical.
We select the most relevant demographic data points from the 8 you can see highlighted on the screenshot above.
For HubSpot, I’ve used 4 of the 8 demographic data points to further define their ideal target customer.
This is a Marketing Agency who has a:
- Company Size of 11+
- Revenue of $1M+
- Job Title that includes C-Level, VP or Manager, and
- Located in the United States
After we know who the customer is that we want our sales people talking to and signing up for our software, we now need to identify the psychographic profile of that customer.
We’ll then use that psychographic profile to start to develop a plan to target only qualified prospects who like specific activities, opinions and interests.
At this stage we pick a mix of 5 psychographic data points, and start our research process.
For HubSpot we chose Software, Celebrities, Blogs, Topics and Competitors.
We first start by identifying 1 well-known psychographic data point in each category.
For HubSpot we know that many small to medium size marketing agencies:
- invest in SEMRush software
- follow Gary Vaynerchuk
- read the Search Engine Land blog
- like Online Marketing, and
- use a competitor software tool like Pardot
From their we would then expand our list of psychographics by using research tools to find similar software, celebrities, blogs, topics and competitors in the market.
This will give us a tight list of 5–10 data points in each category that we can then use to promote our content to at a later stage.
In the screenshot above you can see the list of psychographics that we researched for HubSpot in each category.
Now that we know who our ideal target customer is and the psychographics we can use to target them, we now need to have a proven sales funnel in place to convert that traffic into sales (using our Owned Media).
In general there are 3 types of media…
- Earned Media like word-of-mouth, PR and reviews
- Owned Media like blog posts, case studies and whitepapers and
- Paid Media like GDN ads, AdWords ads and Twitter ads
Owned media consists of marketing assets that you’re in full control of. The primary goal with your owned media is to continue to provide value to leads as they move down your sales funnel.
At our agency we like to find ways to leverage owned media that’s already been working for our clients, and drive paid traffic to it so we can do more of what already works.
To do that we leverage lead assets and inbound sales funnels that have already proven to work for SaaS companies organically.
What we’ve found is that the most successful SaaS companies have a TOFU, MOFU and BOFU offer (even though they may not call them that).
TOFU meaning top-of-funnel, MOFU middle-of-funnel and BOFU bottom-of-funnel.
You can see on the above screenshot 3 examples of SaaS companies (including HubSpot) who use a TOFU/MOFU/BOFU funnel to convert cold traffic into new sales.
A TOFU is a top-of-the-funnel lead asset that is built to acquire market specific leads. It’s job is to appeal to both beginners and veterans alike so you can fill the top of your funnel with thousands of leads.
One of HubSpot’s many TOFU lead assets is a Buyer Persona template that helps marketing agencies define their ideal buyer persona.
Their marketing automation then pushes people down to the middle-of-the-funnel where they have their Buyer Persona webinar offer, and then finally down into a bottom-of-funnel Free Trial offer for their software product.
To get marketing agencies into the funnel, HubSpot have a strategic piece of content that first gets people engaged in the topic and promotes their TOFU offer.
By promoting a high quality piece of content, with a proven inbound marketing funnel behind it you almost guarantee your paid content promotion will produce results.
This strategy gives people value first and is the strategy we recommend so you can fly under the “ad radar” of your prospects on any ad network, by showing them a native piece of content that gets them really interested in your TOFU offer.
To find a company’s highest converting pieces of blog content we will look inside their Google Analytics account to see which blog posts are driving the highest amount of Goal Conversions.
Or if the company doesn’t have Goal Conversions setup to track their organic leads, then we’ll take a look at which of their evergreen blog posts have the most amount of comments and shares.
Finally, now that we’ve identified the owned media assets we’re going to use to send traffic to from our paid ads, we want to take a look to see what’s working for our competitors, so we can get 2 key pieces of data:
1) Proven topic ideas to add to our psychographic profile
2) Ad copy ideas for when we write our ad copy
Here is one of HubSpot’s major competitors… Pardot, and a list of Pardot’s top 5 PPC keywords that they have been paying to advertise on for over 380 days.
Because Pardot has been advertising on these keywords for such a long period of time, there is a high probability that these keywords are profitable for them.
By looking for patterns in the keyword data, we can find profitable topics we can advertise on.
For simplicity I’ve only displayed 5 keywords on the screen out of the 5,400 Pardot advertise on. But just from looking at these 5 we can already start to see some of the most profitable topics we could add to HubSpot’s psychographic profile like “Inbound Marketing” and “Lead Qualification”.
We’ll also look at their highest converting ad copy to see what the “buzzwords” are in that market getting people to click on their ads.
We’ll then incorporate some of those “buzzwords” in our ads (if they make sense with the content piece) to get a higher click-through-rate.
When we start digging even deeper into the different paid media funnels Pardot have setup, we can also start to get ideas for high converting ad copy from their PPC landing pages.
If HubSpot aren’t getting a high enough landing page conversion rate on their TOFU offer, then we’ll look at competitive intelligence data like this and provide their team with recommendations for landing page optimizations.
By modeling the highest converting landing pages in the market, we can often get significant lifts in lead conversions.
When you get this right… you go from blindly guessing how your going to promote your content… to targeting based on these 5 different layers.
You develop a plan based on what’s proven to already work in your market, so you only show your ads to the most qualified traffic with your proven-to-convert owned media assets.
Here’s what HubSpot’s final paid content promotion plan looks like.
We now have 5 audiences we can start promoting our content to.
You can see we’ve researched 5 different categories of ad targets (based on industry vertical, demographic and psychographic, and we added in some of the most profitable competitive intelligence data we found).
By doing it this way, we’ve built the whole paid content promotion plan around HubSpot’s ideal customer profile so we get qualified traffic.
Here is a summary of the paid content strategy, in an easy step-by-step checklist format:
Paid Content Promotion Checklist
Step 1: Identify industry vertical you want to target
Step 2: Identify key demographic data points you want to target
Step 3: Identify key psychographic data points you want to target
Step 4: Identify key competitive intelligence data points you want to target
Step 5: If your goal is lead generation, make sure you have owned media assets to move people through your funnel (Blog Post > TOFU > MOFU > BOFU)
Step 6: Create audiences on the media channels where your target customer hangs out
Step 7: Promote your content to them (watch this webinar if you want to see how we do it)
Conclusion
The real secret behind the success of many multi-million dollar paid media campaigns is in customer avatar research.
Paid content promotion works, but most people don’t do it right because they skip over the research that is “tedious” and “boring”.
Each piece of content has a unique audience and each audience has its own problems.
When it comes to content marketing for your SaaS remember this rule…
200% promotion, 200% writing
Don’t sacrifice the time you spend on your writing for promotion. Shitty content doesn’t spread. The 200/200 rule means you should be twice as strategic about your content promotion, and twice as dedicated to writing unique, original content than your competitors.
Do this and you won’t have a traffic or lead generation problem ever again. You’ll have consistent, targeted, compounding traffic.
What You Should Do Now
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