The Best Ways To Determine If Your SaaS Content Marketing Is Working

A few years ago, I read a book by Peter Drucker that had a great quote in it. It said:

“if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

I thought about this quote for a long time and it stuck with me because it’s so true. I’d just started working as a content marketer for a SaaS company at the time. In fact, we were spending money on things like outbound marketing, social media marketing, SEO and PPC—sales were up and leads were coming in. 

I understood that just like a good investor should review their portfolio of investments from time to time, companies should track their content marketing efforts to see which strategies are effective and which are not. This has been the practice of many successful SaaS companies today. But, don’t just take my word for it, here are a couple of SaaS companies you can learn from:

Moz: They have always won at content marketing by using a diversified approach to content creation and promotion. They use a unique content strategy that has become one of the most reliable sources for information due to their content creation strategy. They give value to their customers by providing extensive knowledge on different topics and business models.

1. Kissmetrics: They focus more on analytics software. Their content strategy uses a process of giving out relevant information via blog posts, infographics and FAQs sections that teaches users how to use their products. This automatically leads them to conversion. Kissmetrics’ blog is divided into different segments, to better serve the large audience and also make it easy for readers to find their topics of interest. It’s surprising to know that Kissmetrics doesn’t create most of their content with in-house creators or freelance writers. Instead, influencers provide advice through guest posts. One strategy to take away from Kissmetric is their “how-to” content that boasts of a lot of marketing guides. 

2. Trello: Using boards, lists, and cards, Trello is one of the most popular SaaS marketing companies. It’s an analytic tool that converts users from its free model to premium plans without actually providing marketing plans. Their strategy is simple. They focus on UGC and emphasise how this tool helps their customers in their daily tasks and activities. In using this approach, they have given customers a reason to believe while also showing them a need for the tool. Brilliant, isn’t it?

3. Zendesk: Here’s a customer service software and sales CRM that takes their customer relationships seriously. The goal of their content is to create a better customer service experience for their clients using their content. Zendesk has an online magazine and annual event which focuses on customer service. It addresses the aspect of self-care, work- life balance, etc. The magazine content is distributed through different channels like standard posts, podcasts, videos, and online events. Zendesk uses their content marketing strategy to build brand awareness and equity. 

4. Hootsuite: Content creation is an important part of business and that’s why Hootsuite uses its content marketing tools to drive more traffic to itself. One example of a creative content marketing idea once used by them was a Game of Thrones opening video style. It was named “Hootsuite’s Game of Social Thrones”. This was a unique, and engaging way to promote their product.

Watch here: https://youtu.be/el8Ydwh0QlQ 

Monitoring your SaaS content marketing results is an important part of your marketing strategy in business. Once you are clear on the strategic goals, you have to define the performance metrics. Some metrics that should be considered in content marketing for SaaS include percent of visitors who are new and returning, sign-ups per visitor, increase in monthly visitors and so on. 

Content creation comes in different ways. It could be social media posts, blogs, or articles. Whatever form it comes in, it’s important to track your content results. Here are some reasons why. 

1. It helps you see where sales and traffic spikes are coming from. With analytics, you can discover which content drives more traffic the most. You will also find out the content that customers rarely engage with. If you run a website, a blog or host webinars, you can track buyers’ content engagement when they subscribe to the blog or attend a webinar by capturing their email addresses and using cookies afterwards.  By doing this, you can track the buyers’ progress, and see which CTAs best convert visitors into customers. 

2. It helps you know if you are spending money on the right content efforts. Tracking your results and studying how well your content marketing strategy works will help you decide if you are doing the right thing. 

3. It helps to know when it’s time to move on from a particular content effort. If after your analysis, you see that a particular content is not working, it lets you know not to continue putting effort into that format and move on to more productive content strategies.

Setting goals and metrics is one of the best ways to be successful with content marketing. Here are some examples of metrics you should set and track as a SaaS company:

1. Registrations: Not all SaaS products offer free-trials or self-service options. Instead they redirect you to a salesperson before you can try out the software. Little do they know that self-service is one of the best ways to reduce the cost of customer acquisition. However, for companies that use this feature, registrations/sign-ups is probably the most significant metric. Whether you are offering visitors a 3-day trial or cheap plan rates, your marketing goal should be to get registrations. Dropbox is a good example. They have several tiers with features and prices increasing at every step with a free trial and plan at the first step. 

2. Demo request: This refers to the trial version of software distributed freely by the companies once customers are onboard. Demos can only work for a limited period, and they are mostly conducted over the phone by sales reps, even though some companies now offer self-service options. The number of demo requests received determines if your SaaS content marketing is actually doing well. 

3. Conversion rate: This depends on how you’ve defined your marketing and sales process for leads. You might have: 

• Subscribers who are just subscribed to your blog .
• Customers that filled out a form on your website in order to download an eBook.
• Customers that fit a description of “fit” and “interest” based on how they’ve interacted with your content and what you know about their content.
• “Product-customers”  that are using part of your free products. 

When measuring your lead-to-customer conversion rate, make sure to define your lead type distinctly. Conversation rate is a good way to keep track of your SaaS content marketing success. 

After setting these metrics, you might be wondering which tools to use for checking them. Well, there’s a wide option of analytics tools available. Let’s go into it. 

1. Google Analytics:: it’s one of the best analytics tools for integrating content marketing with other Google business tools. The interface is user-friendly and can be used to track your content performance across all platforms. For clear understanding, Google Analytics provides metrics for traffic, navigation, conversion, and organic search. It lets you track user engagement level, and provides more insight to how your audience engages with your content. If you use other Google BUsiness softwares then you will be able to access all your data and insights in one place. 

2. Matomo (fka Piwik): So not really a Google Analytics fan? Piwik-sorry, Matomo is the perfect alternative for you. It’s an open source analytics solution free from data alternatives. What makes it a popular alternative to Google Analytics? Two words: daraa privacy. With Matomo, you can own your website visitors’ analytical data which cannot be said for other proprietary services like Google Analytics who own your data. It also allows you to import your Google Analytics data directly!

2. Hotjar: This analytics tool is good for tracking and visualizing sessions on your website with heat maps. The maps show how and where your customers spend most of their time while checking out your content. Hotjar offers three types of plans and they are all affordable. The first one is the basic plan and it’s free and allows 35 daily sessions. The second one is the plus plan which goes for $31/month and offers 100 daily sessions amongst other perks like events API. The third plan is the business plan that goes for $79/month. This plan offers 500+ daily sessions and added benefits of custom-built integrations and frustration and confusion signals. They also have a scale plan that offers unlimited daily sessions and full access to every feature. This plan however is not at a fixed price and requires discussion with a Hotjar team member.

4. SimilarWeb: This content marketing analytics tool is best for understanding the comparison between company content strategy and industry standards. You need this information to measure your performance against competition. SimilarWeb can be used to break down your daily active traffic and also discover more about your audience. 

5. Moz: It’s best for measuring SEO content strategy and determining the best keywords to use. It measures the impact of your SEO optimized content. You will also gain insight on how your website is ranking in the industry and the best keywords to use for your strategy. Moz’s software uses SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) that shows your competitor’s rank. 

6. Quintly: If you want to improve social planning, then this is the best analytic tool for you. It provides enough insight required to analyze your marketing campaigns. With the metrics, you are sure to make better decisions when it comes to social planning. Quintly uses a machine learning system to automate results. Users can access API, and integrate with popular software programs. 

7. BuzzSumo: You can use this analytics tool to analyze marketing trends so you will be able to create content that your audience can relate to. BuzzSumo gives the opportunity to customize your feed so you can have access to relevant data. 

8. Kissmetrics: This is one company that keeps coming up in conversations about SaaS content marketing. Their analytics tool helps with tracking audience interaction with your content. Kissmetrics focuses more on behavioural analysis, which is essential for brands that want to learn how their customers react to their content. This will help decide the best content to keep creating. 

9. Cyfe: This is a tool that is popular among businesses for its consolidated dashboard. It is an all-in-one online business dashboard app that helps you easily monitor and analyze all of your business data in one, organized place.  With Cyfe, you can connect  and pull data from your advertising, email, monitoring, sales, finance, SEO, social media, support, and web analytics accounts. It basically allows you to easily organize and view all of your business data in one place. The cool thing about Cyfe is that you bring all of your business data into a single and highly-organized view, and save yourself a ton of time by eliminating the need to manually log into, analyze, and report out data from multiple services each and every day. A dream come true. 

So what’s next?

Now that you’ve read about SaaS companies that have succeeded with content marketing, the importance of tracking your content results and the best ways to determine if your strategy is a success, you should be able to check your business and know where to make improvements. Also, it might be time for you to implement new content types. Your old and usual content might have started to bore your visitors/ customers. So why don’t you switch things up? 

Hera is here for you! We can help make your SaaS content marketing work. We offer planning and execution of result-driven strategies with minimal supervision from you. 

Let’s take your SaaS content marketing strategy to the next level. You know you want to.

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