Why you should think of your content as a product
Insights from Jakub Zieliński, Founder of Much2Kind
Research shows that consumer willingness to buy SaaS products has declined by about 90% in the last six years. At the same time, customer acquisition cost (CAC) has increased by at least 60% during the same period.
To win the fierce competition, many companies are turning to content creation. But today, just posting things online is not enough to set a company apart because everyone is doing it.
Jakub Zieliński, Content Lead at Semrush & Founder of Much2Kind, shared some tips on how to drive more marketing and business results with the right content.
The pitfalls of popular content strategies
Here are the main mistakes SaaS companies make when they deploy their content strategies.
1/ Acting on “great” ideas
SaaS companies stakeholders or execs often approach content managers with spontaneous ideas they come up with. But before acting on them, check how they align with your product or service, or buyer personas. Do these ideas actually have anything to do with what you deliver to the market?
2/ Not aligning content production with other processes
Often, execs or stakeholders not privy to the intricacies of content production believe that content strategy can be set once and for all. However, if you don’t constantly discuss the impact of your content strategy or adjust it together with other teams, content may seriously misalign with company goals.
3/ Quantity, not quality
There’s a popular idea that to get results, you should just post more. It’s not true. All SaaS marketers use the same channels nowadays, so setting yourself apart from your competitors just with the amount of content is not enough and may be harmful to your brand.
Tips for building the right content strategy
To make a good strategy, you shouldn’t write for everyone and about everything. Instead, treat content as a product.
1/ Do customer research
Get and analyze customer data. Undertake qualitative and quantitative surveys and research. Who is your content for? What do they want? You may discover that your hypothesis and market reality do not align. But it’s better to learn before the campaign is launched.
2/ Segment your customers
Just as you can’t sell your main product to all customers in the same way, you can’t make a one-size-fits-all messaging. Who is your audience? How are its segments different from each other? How do they consume content and in what channels?
3/ Create or refine the value proposition
How do your product and content make your customer’s life easier? What are their pains & gains?
4/ Define your messaging
How are you going to convince your customers that your product will make their lives easier? For best results, show the first iteration of your content to some of your customers before you launch a campaign. They will let you know if it really has the effect you aim for.
5/ Organize your content
It’s important to not just deliver content, but also see how it forms a system. Divide it into customer-facing content and sales & customer success enablement content. Sales and marketing departments cannot be separated from your content team. On the contrary, it should be a close relationship to produce content that will help those frontline teams work with leads and clients.
Distribution prior to creation
A good idea to consider is to plan content distribution before you create it instead of preparing a bunch of content and then trying to figure out what to do with it. In fact, doing so is quite easy if you start your content creation with the research stage.
When you research what your customers want to know, you automatically see a number of distribution channels and options for content repurposing — they tell you where they consume content and how. Besides, if you reach out to experts from other brands at the research stage, you earn additional audiences and those experts are very likely to share the final piece of content they helped to produce.
This content can be repurposed for months ahead via blog articles, guest posts, organic social posts, press releases, infographics, graphics, quotes etc. Just imagine how much time and work it saves you.
If you want to stand out in the competition with your content, don’t blindly follow popular strategies like “more content is better.” Focus on your customer instead and base your strategy on research. Examine who your client is and what they want. Use this data to build the right messaging.
This approach will show you that your content creation becomes more strategic and serves your customers’ needs more closely, thus bringing better results.