I researched the content strategies of 27 SaaS businesses (A content piece that ChatGPT can't write)

A few months ago, I decided to research the content strategies of as many SaaS businesses as possible to discover insights and patterns.

My focus was on early to growth stage companies, and thus, I ended up selecting the following 27 SaaS companies for the research:

Bubble, Proton Email, Pigment, Lokalise, UserPilot, Loom, FullStory, BrightWheel, Adverity, June, TripleWhale, Close CRM, Amplitude, Krisp, Ironclad, HeadsUp, ProfitWell, LemonSqueezy, Vendr, Repsly, Runway, Toolio, Maze, Klue, Merge, Mutiny, Reprise.

After months of qualitative and quantitative research, I am happy to share the insights I discovered. Some might be new to you, while others might be familiar. However, the devil is in the details - examples, creative ideas, and implementation.

As a practitioner of the craft, I have been writing in-depth, long-form content for many years, but this research post turned out to be in a different league, and at about 11,000+ words, it is the longest one I have ever written.

IMO, it is a good example of content ChatGPT will find DIFFICULT to write.

Here is a summary and key insights from the complete research:

1. Content is still the king: What Bill Gates said in 1996 still holds as, on average, about 24% of the total web traffic comes from content. Done right, it can contribute to about 30% of the total traffic.

2. The subject of the content strategy is not the product; it's the market.

3. Content strategy is not just about blogs. You have multiple formats at your disposal.

4. Content strategy is not limited to acquisition; it can impact the complete customer lifecycle - acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and referrals.

5. B2B content strategy goes well with prospects' buying behavior and thus targets multiple personas.

6. Align the content structure and scope with the market's information consumption pattern.

7. Be a champion of conversations: Improve retention and acquisition through two-way communication - customer interviews, success stories, forums, and communities.

8. The content strategy depends on the context of your business: Without establishing the context of your business, if you do something only because others are doing it, you will surely fail. It's not a strategy; it's madness.

9. Positioning and messaging evolve with time, with the target market, and with the product. Position your business for the current target market.

10. Articulation of ideas matters. Similar thoughts articulated differently deliver vastly different results.

11. Creative strategy is a thing. However, don't confuse high-impact visual content with professional quality creatives. Many times, thoughtfully conceptualized but amateurishly created ones work perfectly.

12. The art and science of keywords: Keywords are important for search engine ranking and establishing the search intent. Companies with high organic traffic have 500+ keywords ranking at 1 to 3 positions. Early-stage companies can get quick results by ranking for specific long-tail keywords, even at low search volume. Keyword clustering works wonders.

13. Create content around key themes - most companies focus on a few themes and follow the hub and spoke model.

14. Build use cases for each target customer persona.

15. Fight side by side with your market against a common villain: When you thoughtfully position your business against an enemy your market is struggling with, you immediately develop a camaraderie with your market - you become one of them.

16. Target niche communities with native and candid content (meta!)

17. Content-led community; community-led growth: Private communities are long-term defensible moats, and you can build them around exclusive content to support your business.

18. Create content to enable champions' advocacy and help them sell for you.

19. Go big with independent content websites - their non-commercial vibes and exclusive content help build a revolution around your product.

20. Product education hubs go a long way in improving activation and retention.

21. Create cross-channel leverages - content can help other channels like referrals and vice versa.

22. Own your distribution - even the best content will not help in the growth of your business if no one reads, watches, or listens to it.

23. Be omnipresent with social platforms: On average, only 3% of the traffic comes from social platforms, but it is possible to high-quality traffic, i.e., better match your ideal client profile.

Tactical insights

1. Paid traffic needs its own content - ad copy, landing page copy, white papers, etc.

2. Interview internal and external subject matter experts to gain deep insights for creating quality content.

3. Create a brand origin story to build affinity with your market - everyone likes 'one of their own' to succeed.

4. Founders should lead from the front - write a personal blog about your domain, appear in podcasts, etc.

5. Share momentum to build trust - write about a new funding round, a new logo client, a favorable analyst report, etc.

6. Help users find answers to their biggest questions quickly by making the most of the premium real estate on your website - link the top content on the homepage, header navigation, footer, and the block just above the footer.

7. Improve SEO with internal linking.

8. Set up Google Analytics or something similar for analysis and attribution.

Thanks for reading!

PS - To dig deeper, you can read the complete research here - SaaS Content Strategy Research