Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate organic quality leads for your SaaS business. When a potential buyer consumes your content online, they’re 75% more likely to actually buy from you, assuming it’s quality content.
Here’s a big question though. How do you actually win in the content marketing game? And how do you get actual leads versus just a bunch of likes online?
In this article, I’m going to walk you through the 3 principles that you absolutely need to know on how to actually build a content marketing machine so that you can accelerate your path to that next stage of growth for your SaaS business
In This Article:
Principle Number 1: Specific Ideal Customer
When you’re getting into publishing content online is to start thinking about a very specific, specific ideal customer.
One of the biggest mistakes that I made early on was my product could target a whole bunch of different verticals. And so I would just post one day targeting this vertical or another day targeting this vertical. And I thought, the market is really huge.
Let’s cast a wide net and let’s see what we can attract. The problem with that was content algorithms. If you’re posting on LinkedIn or X or Facebook or wherever it may be, they’ll get confused if you’re targeting a different ideal customer every single day, and when they get confused, they basically don’t promote you.
But if you show up every single day consistently serving a very specific type of audience, the algorithms will kick in and start to double down on you and start to promote more of your content. It also gets you to a point where you start to focus and your message and your content gets better and better, and you can build on the momentum that you have.
So principle number one, if you’re starting and building out your content marketing machine, is to have a very specific ideal customer.
It turns out this is a core principle just in growing your SaaS business, period, not just in content marketing. If you’re building your SaaS business, you really want to be thinking about is, if I’m at this revenue level, to get to this revenue level, what does my ideal customer profile look like? And you can expand that ideal customer profile over time. Your total, total addressable market. Once you have that down and you’re focused on exactly who you’re serving, then comes principle number two.
Principle Number 2: Build and Lead Your Movement
Principle number two is to build and lead your movement. There’s a nuance between posting online and a bunch of random things, trying to sell your product versus really serving an audience and telling them about a movement that you’re leading.
The best SaaS companies don’t just say, hey, we’re just another CRM, or we’re just another marketing tool, or we’re just yet another AI tool. For developers, they actually lead a movement. They stand for something. And the best people in the content game, whoever you look at, don’t just publish under the brand, because people don’t really follow brands for content, they follow people. So what you’ll see is its founders stepping up.
They’re owning the go to market machine.
So they’re getting out there and leading a movement about what their software actually delivers in terms of a transformation. They’re not just saying, we’re yet another CRM and you should use our CRM. That’s marketing and selling, and that doesn’t quite work in the content game.
They’re going out there and saying, look, you can use any CRM in the world, but here’s what we believe. Here’s the big movement we’re creating. Here’s the big transformation we bring to your specific industry.
Here’s what we’ve learned with our customers as they’ve used our platform. That’s a much higher level way of communicating. And when the founder gets out there and communicates that, they get followers, they get people actually engaging with the content, and they turn into leads.
And when they turn into leads, they’re actually more likely to buy from you because they’re starting to trust you and they start to understand your differentiation in the market. Now, there are a lot of different ways to really lead a movement and define a movement. You can’t get completely detached from reality. If you start to get two frou frou, two out there, people won’t resonate. That content won’t really hit. So it’s an art form to really figure out what is different about us, what is the movement that we’re leading, what’s different between us and what our competitors believe, and how do we turn that into a movement and communicate that in our content?
Before you write a piece of content, you really want to figure that piece out, because that will help you drive content on a daily basis that’s consistent and really communicating to your target audience about why they should listen to you.
Once you have these two pieces, then you have the beginnings of a proper content marketing strategy.
Principle Number 3: Consistent Content to Educate Buyers
There’s a difference between just posting versus doing content consistently to educate your buyers.
This builds like principle number one is specific buyers, specific ideal customers that you’re talking to. Principle number two is a very specific and differentiated message about the unique perspective you’re bringing. Once you have those two pieces, the way you build on that is you go to the channels, whether it’s LinkedIn or Twitter or outbound or whatever, or SEO or blogging, whatever content channel that you choose.
What you wanna do is you wanna get consistent and you actually want to go from a place of educating your buyers. The biggest mistake that I see founders make, and really even professional marketers make, is that they go out there and start marketing and selling, and that doesn’t work. People are just gonna keep scrolling and ignore whatever you’re posting.
It’s when you get out there to educate your buyers. It’s when you represent a unique transformation you bring into the market, when you actually share, like, hey, here’s what we’ve learned, and you should learn it too based on the customers we’ve worked with. That is when content really starts to take off.
And one of the most important pieces on this is you always want to tie it to some sort of a lead magnet. When you actually share content consistently online, you’ll also want to link to your lead magnet so they actually become leads. Otherwise people will say, cool, nice content and they’ll scroll to the next thing.
And there’s a unique distinction on how to do that effectively. The best way to do it is actually take your manifesto and turn it into a lead magnet and then plug it into the consistent content that you’re publishing. That way, every single time you’re educating the buyers and delivering value, you can say, hey, check out my lead magnet. And that way you can become a lead and you can get more details about this super powerful, okay, now based on all those three things, you will be able to launch your content marketing machine.
Bonus Principles
Now there’s some gotchas that always come up. So here’s some bonus principles that you should know about.
Doing This Is For Leads, Not Likes
There are a lot of brand marketers that steer founders the wrong way and say, look, we just need to share cool stuff and we’ll get 1000 likes. And I’ll always look at it and say, cool, did you get any revenue from it? And very quickly founders will say, yeah, we use that agency they posted for me.
We got a bunch of likes, I got a bunch of followers, but we didn’t get any revenue. The biggest thing you wanna know, when you’re doing the content marketing game the right way is you want leads and not likes. And this all goes down to these three principles and doing them in the most effective way. So you’re actually driving for leads.
Wanna Out Teach, Not Outspend
You don’t wanna go out there and say, look, I just wanna spend a bunch of money on ads, or I just wanna send a thousand emails with my content, or I just wanna post and tell them about how awesome we are.
If you do that, you’re just gonna be another one of those and no one’s gonna pay attention to you and you won’t win the content marketing game. You wanna take it from a place of teaching. You actually wanna educate your buyers about that transformation. And just remember that when you’re writing a piece of content so that will ensure that you’re really getting that voice out there.
Serving Your Audience Versus Selling To Them Or Marketing To Them
The moment you think of it as content marketing and like, I’m gonna sell it on my product, the moment you’ll lose that, content will just not get prioritized by the algorithms.
It’s smart enough and people just don’t like it. But if you think about serving your ideal customers, about your narrative and your manifesto, and then you tell them, hey, to learn more, engage with us. That’s when content marketing really kicks in. And the only way that’ll work is if you actually go into it from a place of serving your audience instead of just trying to sell to them or market to them.
Conclusion
Here are the 3 principles that you absolutely need to know to win in the content marketing game so that you can generate organic leads for your SaaS business and drive growth.
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Pick a very specific, ideal customer that you want to be writing content for.
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You wanna build and lead your movement. Don’t just write random content that you think will get likes. Leads are more important than likes. So think about what your movement is, what your transformation is, what your messaging is. It differentiates you, what you believe that no one else does and start to write content about that. You start to write content about that people will resonate. And that way you will actually get actual leads and revenues versus a bunch of likes or crickets.
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Consistently post and educate your buyers and make sure that you’re driving to your manifesto, your lead magnet, so that you are actually generating leads so you’ll want to be consistent about it. And remember, this compounds once you really get it going, it becomes easier and easier and it can actually scale for you. And finally, some of the bonus pieces you want to focus on leads, not likes. Don’t hire that shitty brand marketing agency that will ghost right for you. It won’t work. You’ll get a bunch of likes and then no revenues. Make sure that you’re out teaching them versus trying to outspend the competition. Out teach your competition, serve your buyers instead of marketing or selling to them. And that will really up level you in the content marketing game.