SaaS content writing requires a lot of creativity and boldness. Without these characteristics, you’re likely to create the same sort of dull SEO content that can be found everywhere. All over the internet.
You know the sorts of posts…What is? How is? Who is? Why?
The ones that splatter the target keyphrases into dictionary-style writing.
Well, I’m here to tell you that I do this too.
We all do.
Otherwise, we won’t rank.
The good news is that you can please your audience, write for SEO, and grow your brand all at the same time.
Don’t believe the people who say that writing for SEO means you’re writing for search engines and not people, because people use search engines.
In this post, I’m showcasing my top 5 SaaS content writing wins of all time.
What makes SaaS content writing special
There are a few things that make content marketing for SaaS different than for other types of companies.
Now, I’m going to preface an assumption. I’m talking about B2B SaaS, and most likely you are too. I don’t touch B2C SaaS with a 10-foot pole, and you probably agree.
- Incentivized to do well with SEO – Running Google search ads for some B2B SaaS products can set you back a horrendous $30 or $50 per click. This means that SaaS companies are willing to invest tremendous amounts of resources into content marketing, particularly SEO blog posts.
- Longer buying cycles than B2C – The buying cycles can be a bit squirrely. Some people rush to sign up for your software subscription, others take their sweet bleeping time. This means that there is so much different types of content to write. You need to cover your high intent and low intent search queries and everything in between.
- Need for pre-purchase and post-purchase content – Not only do you need content during the buying cycle, but you also need content for after the buying cycle. SaaS onboarding isn’t just about emails (though those are important). You need a variety of content, including searchable content, for your current customers to up their utilization of your platform and their results.
- Importance of complex subject matter expertise – For many B2C products, you can work with content writers that don’t have a lot of subject matter expertise. Or at least, they can get up to speed quickly. With B2B SaaS, you’re talking to employees or business owners. You can’t pretend to know more than them. You also don’t want to give them useless content. That makes the writing much more challenging. To create amazing SaaS content, you need to interview subject matters, or at least spy on their social media posts and communities.
Quick ways to improve your SaaS content writing
Do you want some quick and easy ways to instantly become a better SaaS content writer? Here’s what you should do.
- Watch videos of conference speeches to find great advice from real subject matter experts. This means you avoid relying on crappy blog content from other writers for your research.
- Batch your subject matter expertise interviews. For example, write 4 blog articles about a similar topic, and interview your client for 30 minutes and use that call to inform all 4 articles. This way, you require the minimum amount of time from the subject matter expert as possible.
- Write a blog post that targets a top competitor, such as “competitor name alternatives.”
- Don’t use HARO for an advice roundup. Or at least only use it for a few quotes, but don’t rely on it. (So many people answer HARO queries when they aren’t an expert!) Instead, reach out to people in LinkedIn for their quotes. The benefit is you can target real experts and build relationships.
- Put SEO keyphrases in your subheadings without sounding like a dictionary. Just check out the H2s of this article to see how I incorporated the keyphrases in a more interesting way than just “What is SaaS content writing?”
SaaS content writing wins you can learn from
So let’s put all of this into action. Here are some of my favorite SaaS pieces I ever wrote, so you can learn a bit from them.
1. Brand journalism
This post I wrote for TravelPerk is about a company that offers breastmilk shipping services so that working moms don’t have to throw away liquid gold, and can bring it home and give it to their baby! Yay for more date nights.
TravelPerk’s female social media followers were delighted by the article, with one commenter even saying “Now I love TravelPerk even more.”
This piece fostered brand loyalty among many female customers.
2. “Alternatives” article that ranks
Everyone is always complaining in the SaaS Growth Hacks Facebook group about the cost of Intercom, so why not create an article about it? I did, and it’s awesome.
3. The legacy software guys sleeping on opportunity
It’s always lots of fun when your competitors aren’t paying attention. You know, when they’re just like sleeping on SEO. It’s great when that happens.
With TravelPerk, everyone was trying to rank for “travel management” with their home page, so I zagged and went for a mega guide. With TravelPerk’s killer PR and domain rank, it ranked in Google in just 3 months, though I did have to make some edits to it to get it up there.
4. Mega guide with SEO rankings plus tons of shares
This article ranks and it did extremely well on social the few months after we published it (when we were all promoting it heavily).
Also, I’m proud of the opening:
Product-led growth marketing is like the business equivalent of really great storytelling. And that is → Show don’t tell.
5. Controversial (for marketing geeks) content
In the B2B world, occasional controversy is essential to keeping your content interesting. But the controversy doesn’t to be political (we could all use a little breather from that).
Instead, you should poke holes at the status quo. This article ranks and it does well on social media.
You never thought a blog post about SaaS content writing would feature so much pink did you? Neither did I. Neither did I.