How do you get attention for your brand without overspending on resources in a saturated market?
How do you find new sources of traffic without spending a ton on advertising on different channels?
It’s a question of ‘how do you rank and win?’, which means placing high organically on Google for important keywords in your market.
To do this, you must commit to the craft of content marketing. It also helps to have an authentic and quirky voice. Let’s explore how the right strategy and voice helped one of our B2B SaaS clients achieve massive organic growth.
Quick Takeaways:
- Use a flywheel diagram to help you define and meet your content goals.
- Create KPIs that align with your content goal to understand its true ROI.
- Be consistent in publishing and follow your blog strategy to ensure you meet your content marketing goals.
The Problem: Startups Start from Behind in Saturated Markets
SaaS startups don’t have the good fortune of being unique anymore. Now, they have to be better than their competitors to get market attention. They may not be inventors, but they can be innovators.
Attempting to gain thought leadership in a market where many experts are smart and publish great content isn’t easy. To rank well organically on critical keywords, they need a voice and a method.
This is a case study of how we helped one of our clients, a SaaS company, achieve its goals with content marketing.
The Action: Creating a Voice and a Method
The brand created a funky, conversational, and banter-heavy content strategy. The content was interesting enough to consume without sounding too salesy or out of touch. The company has taken to heart one of our tenets of content marketing—be the best answer on the internet.
They have two defined personas that work in the world of content. To resonate with their target buyers, they use thought leadership content. They do this by innovating content, not inventing it, and doing research on keywords and audience pain points. They didn’t invent the market, instead, they are the answer to a need of the market. This fact reflects in their content.
The team created a flywheel diagram, an idea from the Jim Collins book, The Flywheel Effect. The diagram describes a repeatable process that adds growth each time the process is used. At the top was ‘increase traffic to site.’ From that, a cycle would trigger. Traffic generates demos and trials. Those become sales. The brand achieves more recognition, translating to increased profits. At the end, there is a reinvestment in R&D, sales, and marketing.
Then it starts over again. This process isn’t possible without content. Content that is of a high quality, uses SEO best practices, and is interesting wins traffic. The brand is winning, accomplishing great returns for its investment in SaaS content marketing.
What’s great about the returns from content marketing is that they are continuous, as the flywheel suggests. Its return on investment (ROI) is much higher than investing in paid ads alone.
The SaaS company’s content marketing strategy is blog focused, so the KPIs (key performance indicators) reflect this. The content analytics that were the most valuable are organic search rankings, blog page views, blog subscribers, and new trials to their software.
Looking at organic traffic, they are up 450% since they started working with us.
They also now rank for 2.4 X as many keywords as they did just 18 month ago.
They get a few hundred email subscribers and dozens of trials or leads every single week from the organic search traffic we bring them. In fact, this company says that their inbound leads from blog page views even out-perform their outbound sales and paid search efforts.
And the revenue from customer gained from this effort far exceeds the costs by about 7x. We’ve helped this B2B SaaS company build an ROI-producing inbound sales channel!
They now publish about 4-5 articles a week and have a blog strategy that delivers real ROI.
The company learned that volume was instrumental to the success of the blog. They also learned that 80% of traffic to their blog is new. That’s a considerable amount, which means they don’t have to worry about writing about the same topics. They simply need a new angle.
What Problems Do We Solve
I asked this question to the founder recently. Because we essentially ghost write for them, they asked that they keep their name confidential. But his answer really hit the nail on the head:
“This content thing is hard… Defining a strategy, researching topics, brainstorming ideas and making the time to produce quality posts consistently takes a substantial amount of time and brainpower. And when there’s no dedicated team (or at least not enough staff) internally to execute all that, it just doesn’t get done with the consistency that is needed.
Couple that with budget constraints and a frequency goal that is actually going to move the needle… You quickly realize that outside help is needed.”
That’s why they use Marketing Insider Group. Because this company realized the potential to “growth hack” their way to new trials and customers using their website. But they don’t have the time or the resources to publish as frequently as needed. Our services are significantly cheaper than hiring a new sales rep. And the ROI is higher.
You get the content quality your audience expects. And you get the frequency and consistency of website content that you need to see significant organic growth. All at an affordable monthly cost. That’s the definition of ROI.
If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service. Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books ($29 value). Get started today–and generate more traffic and leads for your business.
