How to Grow Your SaaS Blog to Deliver Consistent Leads And Users

You’ve heard how a SaaS blog can turn total strangers into loyal customers.

And because of that, you’ve put a lot of effort into writing and publishing content you think your ideal audience will love.

But there’s a problem.

Your blog has hit a plateau traffic-wise, and you just can’t push the traffic up.

Or people read your blog posts without taking action towards signing up.

Or people have little awareness of your product despite reading several blog posts.

I won’t tell you these problems are easy to solve. And you should be skeptical of anyone who says otherwise.

However, with the right strategy, effort, and time, you can get your SaaS blog to a point where it converts leads and customers consistently.

In a moment, I’ll show you strategies to drive signups through your blog. You’ll also see examples of SaaS companies getting it right.

Growing your SaaS blog isn’t just about traffic

To many people, growing a blog = increasing its traffic.

And this assumption has gotten so popular that people rarely question it.

This is like a malnourished person who thinks their way to good health is increasing their daily dose of pork sausage, doughnuts, and Coca-Cola from 2 to 5.

Of course, the quantity of traffic can matter more than the quality for some blogs. For example, entertainment sites like TMZ or BuzzFeed will gain from more traffic as they run ads.

In such a case, any traffic is likely good traffic.

However, that assumption wouldn’t necessarily work for every blog since monetization models may differ. 

Can you grow your SaaS blog by just bringing in more people?

No.

Your SaaS blog will only grow if you can attract more of the right people to it.

Think about it, which would you prefer?

1,000 visitors that lead to 5 product signups or 500 visitors that lead to 10 signups?

You and I know which one you’d pick.

Now, let me tell you why this is important.

The SaaS content strategy to get just any type of traffic differs from the strategy to get traffic ready to sign up for your product.

So, I’ll dwell more on strategies that can help you attract people who have problems your product can solve.

How to attract valuable visitors to your SaaS blog

1. Explore your product features to find topic ideas

If you don’t understand your product deeply, how can you market it effectively to a potential buyer?

Whether you believe in Product-led growth or not, exploring your product features can help you understand the problems your product solves and how it goes about it.

After all, your product elements exist to help users execute important tasks.

To find topic ideas, look at each major product feature and list 5 or more problems it can solve for users. After going through this process, you should have at least 15 to 20 topic ideas.

That said, we all have our blind spots when we examine something we’re so involved with. So, you may likely miss out on some things because this is a product you see every day.

However, you can look at what your users think to find even more ideas. Read user reviews on review sites to see features users like best and the problems they solve.

Using your product features to generate topic ideas will help you create content that naturally showcases your product.

Now, let’s look at SweepWidget as an example.

If you go through creating a giveaway, there’s a login form that helps you generate leads from your giveaway.

This can inspire a blog post title like “How to generate leads with social media giveaways.”

If you think more about your product features, you’ll generate several post ideas.

2. Listen to your current customer complaints for ideas

A customer complaint is an unmet expectation.

A customer complaint itself is nothing to panic about. But if left unresolved, you can lose a customer.

And beyond the customer churn, the complaint can find its way into a product review and prevent potential customers from signing up.

Now, how does this relate to finding content ideas for your SaaS blog?

A customer complaint is usually about using your product to perform a task or missing features, which means they can’t solve critical problems.

If it’s missing features, you can use these complaints to improve your product by adding relevant features.

On the other hand, difficulty performing tasks can be a call to create more helpful content.

To do this, reach out to your customer support reps and collate common complaints they receive from users.

From this list, you can find blog post ideas.

Apart from that, you can also read customer reviews to see what they hate about your product. 

I found this complaint on a Pipedrive review in Capterra:

From the complaint, Pipedrive can create content about its automation workflows.

Unfortunately, you’ll still miss out on some complaints if you only check these 2 channels.

One thing I see regularly are users who would rather tweet something negative about your product than engage your customer support rep. And before you know it, the post has gotten 98 likes and 63 retweets.

This can be just as harmful as a negative review on review sites.

You can find these mentions with a listening tool. Apart from responding to these complaints, it can be a source of content ideas.

It gets even better.

A listening tool can help you track what people say about your brand, competitors, and industry. So, you can get many content ideas when people talk about their problems online.

A product like Awario helps you track important terms for your business. So, you can keep up with important terms and create content when necessary.

3. Begin with a list of vital topics at the bottom of the funnel

While you can collate tens of topic ideas for your SaaS blog, it’s a bad idea to start writing blog posts on all of them.

Why?

Some of these topics may be good for your audience but unnecessary for your business at this time.

If you want to drive signups through your SaaS blog in a short time, you have to focus on bottom of the funnel content.

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) content focuses on providing information to turn a sales-qualified lead into a customer. In other words, BOFU content aims to convince someone who already wants a product to solve problems they understand.

I think it makes a lot of sense to run after these hot opportunities first.

If you want to start creating content from the top of the funnel down to the bottom, it can literally take weeks or months. This is time you don’t have as you need to catch up with your sales targets.

Creating BOFU content helps you convert people close to buying your product.

How do you go about this?

I’d say it’s a straightforward process, but it requires a bit of brainstorming. 

Some common topic templates for BOFU content include:

How to pick a product in your product category 

A buyer who wants to buy a product may want information on criteria to consider before buying. This post will list important criteria and how your product fulfills them. 

For example, if you sell a social media management tool, the topic could be “How to pick the right social media management software.”

Your popular competitor’s alternatives 

Except you’re starting a new product category, there’s likely a product leader in your category. Many times, potential buyers are looking for alternatives due to various reasons. 

For example, if you sell an email marketing product, a topic like “MailChimp alternatives” will help you leverage MailChimp’s popularity. 

Your product vs a popular competitor vs another competitor 

Sometimes, a prospect can be torn between 2 or 3 products. In this case, they’re looking for something that will tip the scale to one product. 

While you should mention your competitor’s strength, the point of the comparison is to show your unique selling proposition and convince the buyer to go for your product. 

An example of this is Userguiding vs Userpilot which was published by Userguiding.

How much a good product in your product category costs 

If I want to buy a SaaS product, I want to know my possible costs. This applies to most people too. 

You can create such posts to educate potential buyers on how much they can spend depending on their needs. Here’s an example for “How much does CRM cost?” by Nutshell CRM.

Best category software 

When people are thinking of buying a product in a software category, they want to know their best options. Creating a list that features your product can convince readers. Naturally, you should take more time to explain the features and benefits that make your product worthy. Here’s an example for best user onboarding tools by Userpilot.

These blog posts can help you quickly take advantage of the ripe opportunities that can become customers in a few days or weeks.

4. Research keywords for your topics

Even though you know the topic you want to write about, it’s still great to create it for a target keyword. 

This will give your blog posts the best chance to show up when prospects search these keywords.

Keyword research is the process of uncovering the terms people put into search engines when looking for a solution.

Sometimes when I want to write a blog post, I discover that the keyword in my head differs from what people are actually searching for.

Another similar occurrence is that your keyword shows a different type of results on Google. 

So, the first step is usually to run a quick search on Google and see current results.

To illustrate from the previous section, the term “best onboarding tools” has different results from “best user onboarding tools.”

That said, Google is insufficient for your keyword research. You need a reliable keyword research tool.

Personally, I use Semrush, but there are other reputable keyword research tools online.

So, what you want to do for a start is put a possible keyword for your topic in the keyword research tool.

Then, the tool will produce metrics about this keyword. Luckily, most tools will show similar keywords, which can provide a better keyword or secondary keywords.

Here, I’ll only talk about keyword difficulty (KD) and search volume, as this is not a keyword research guide.

If you run a relatively new blog, it makes sense to target keywords with low difficulty. For example, keyword difficulty below 30%.

As your website gains more domain authority, you can target more competitive keywords.

Another way I use to judge keyword difficulty is the Moz bar. 

I use it on the Google results page to see how many backlinks point to the ranking pages.

Most times, if 4 (or more) results have few or no backlinks, this is a query you can rank for with better content. You don’t need to build many backlinks to rank for these search terms.

Another thing you want to consider is search volume. While volume shouldn’t be the priority, you also want to ensure people are searching for it.

But what if a keyword lacks search volume?

First, the reality is that if the search volume is too low, say below 10, most keyword tools won’t pick it. So, the volume may just be too low rather than nonexistent.

Second, if it really lacks volume, you can still write about it if you think it’s important to your audience. I believe it’s at your discretion.   

Like many things in marketing, keyword research is both an art and a science. There’s no tight rule that guides your process.

But in all, keyword research should uncover the best keywords for your audience and business. 

5. Create helpful product-led content

To truly grow your SaaS blog, most of your results depend on your content.

And since you want to sell a product, your content should showcase this product.

This is why creating product-led content is vital.

Product-led content is the type of content that weaves your product into your content. It shows how readers can use your product to solve the problems they want to solve.

Product-led content can result in many benefits for your SaaS blog.

First, it can build product awareness for new visitors.

Second, it can convert prospects into customers after demonstrating how your product solves critical problems.

Third, it can retain current customers who learn how to get more value from your product.

But how do you create helpful product-led content for your SaaS blog?

From the list of topics you’ve compiled, identify topics that readers will need your product to execute.

For a landing page tool, this could be a topic like “how to design a landing page.” 

Here, Unbounce shows an example of SaaS content marketing done well.

Once you have a list of topics that allows you to show your product naturally, let’s move on to the next step.

Now, you have to create quality content.

If you ask 120 marketers what quality content means, you’ll likely get 120 answers. Despite that, quality content should serve your audience and your business.

If you look around, many content creation frameworks exist to guide the writing process.

I like to use the what-why-how content framework because it’s straightforward.

What-why-how content framework

The what-why-how content framework aims to answer what a topic is all about, why the reader should care about it, and how they can execute it.

For most SaaS content pieces, I believe your audience will get the information they need if you answer these 3 questions.

• What: this defines the topic you want to address. It explains what the reader needs to know about the main concepts.
• Why: this explains why a concept is important to your readers. Here, you want to explain the benefits readers will gain from the content piece.
• How: this explains how readers will execute tasks to gain benefits. This is usually where you can mention your product naturally and show how it helps users solve problems.

Some content pieces may dwell more on one of the questions than the other. You’ll deduce this based on the nature of your topic.

Beyond your overall topic, you can use this framework for each heading (H2 or H3) you write in your content.

Of course, you can add more layers to this, but I think it’s a good foundation to create product-led content your audience will love.

And if all these look like too much work for you, a great option is hiring a SaaS content writer to do it for you.

6. Move on to other topics in the sales funnel

After exhausting topics at the bottom of the sales funnel, you want to move on to topics in the middle and top of the sales funnel.

While these topics may not convert a customer in 5 days, they can build awareness and interest in your product. And this will keep your product on top of their minds when they need it in a few months or even a year.

At the top of the funnel, you can create content for an audience who lacks awareness about their problems and your product.

For instance, if you sell heat mapping software, you can create content about how to increase website conversions. Someone reading this page may lack the awareness that they need a heat mapping tool to understand visitors’ behavior.

Of course, this same topic can work for an A/B testing tool, a popup builder, a landing page builder, and more. That’s why it’s at the top of the funnel.

A single topic at the top of the funnel can work for many product categories.

At the middle of the funnel, the reader is aware of your product and their problem but needs more information to increase their interest in your product.

So, for a heat mapping tool, this can be a topic like “How to use heat maps.”

You can create these content pieces to bring in more traffic to your website. 

Even in these content pieces, ensure you find a way to mention your product naturally.

7. Exploit different SaaS content types

Blogs used to be only text.

But today, that has changed. And you need other content types in your blog posts to keep your audience engaged.

In some cases, your audience may need other content types to save time or consume your content while doing something else.

Some common SaaS content types to use include:

Text 

This is the default content type for blogs. Apart from your blog posts, you also use written words for ebooks and white papers. These assets can help you capture more leads.

Images 

Most content pieces need images to illustrate statistics, tutorials, and more.

Videos 

This is highly visual content that can help your audience understand your topic better. When you embed videos on your web page, you can increase engagement and time on page. 

Beyond that, these videos can also boost your YouTube channel. Ahrefs embeds videos in its blog pages, which is an excellent SaaS content marketing example. 

Another dimension to videos is running SaaS webinars to explain important topics.

Audio 

For people who want to listen to your article during a drive or workout, having an audio version meets this need. 

In addition to that, you can host industry experts on podcasts. This makes your blog attractive to podcast listeners.

Interactive demos 

To create truly product-led content, you want visitors to see your product. Not just that, you want them to feel it. Interactive demos let you achieve this. 

With embedded interactive demos, visitors can navigate your product and see how it executes tasks. These demos move prospects towards the sale as they already understand your product. 

Read my Supademo review to see how interactive demos work.

These are a few content types you can start integrating into your blog posts. This will keep visitors longer on your page and likely to take your intended actions.

8. Publish quality content consistently

Publishing quality content once in a while is good, and everyone can achieve that. But publishing quality content consistently is what separates successful SaaS blogs from mediocre ones.

Let’s be honest, consistency is difficult to pull off.

Even on this blog, I sometimes struggle to publish content consistently. This especially happens when I have to write a lot of content for clients.

But no matter how difficult it can be, it’s what needs to be done.

Publishing SaaS content consistently doesn’t mean you have to publish every day. It just means you have to stick to any frequency you decide on.

So, you can publish blog posts twice a week, weekly, or twice a month. 

Publishing content consistently ensures you can cover many topics in a short time. Not just that, but you can also encourage readers to keep coming back to your blog.

Even more importantly, consistent quality content will turn you into an authority and attract more traffic from search engines.

To keep yourself accountable, create a blog content calendar. Filling up the calendar and completing each post will give you a sense of accomplishment before you start driving traffic and signups.

And the beauty is that your calendar can be just a simple Google sheet.

Your blog content calendar will contain details such as:

• Headline
• Target keyword
• Date to complete first draft
• Date to be published
• Promotion schedule

The content calendar can be as simple or complex as you need. It’s better to do whatever works for you.

You can have sheets for different months. And if you work with a team, it’s easy to see the progress of content pieces.

Remember that consistent content is never an excuse for low-quality content. Create helpful content consistently so prospects can see you as an authority in your industry.

9. Promote content on your audience’s favorite channels

Even if you write the best blog posts in your industry, it will only convince eyes that see it.

Not just that, but the right eyes.

As I said earlier, getting blog traffic is not only about racking up the numbers. It has to be visitors who can become paying users.

This is why you need to promote your content in the right channels. Content promotion means getting your content in front of ideal readers.

I’ll say there’s no single best way to promote your blog posts. It depends on your audience and where they spend time every day.

But before you promote your post, it’s important to perform audience research and know your customer’s favorite promotion channels.

One place to look is your customer support channels.

How do users reach out to your business? Emails, chat, or social media?

This can give you a clue on the best channels to reach them.

Let me talk about 3 common marketing channels that SaaS companies use to promote their blog posts:

Email newsletters 

People only sign up for your emails when they want to hear from you. So, you can share your blog posts with them. 

But beyond that, you can use your blog posts as part of personalized email nurturing sequences. 

In this case, you’ll share blog posts with subscribers based on their interests. This will likely get them to click through to your blog posts.

For example, Zapier regularly shares its blog posts through emails.

Forums

Forums attract people of common interests. This means there’ll be many questions related to your expertise. 

This even gets better if a user’s question has been addressed by one of your blog posts.

Navigate to a relevant forum in your industry and search for questions related to your blog post. Quora is a popular option, but there are other options.

You can answer questions and then link to your blog post for more information.

Social media

People visit social media daily to connect with friends and brands. You can share your blog posts on your audience’s favorite social media channels.

LinkedIn is one popular option for many SaaS companies as it hosts professionals.

For example, Gong writes LinkedIn posts about various concepts and then links to their blog posts for people who need more information.

With successful content promotion, you can get your content in front of people who need it.

10. Track results and optimize your content strategy

Whether you want people to talk about your brand on Twitter or sign up for your pro plan, there’s a marketing goal you want to achieve with your blog.

Tracking results helps to understand if your blogging strategy is working or not. And this knowledge will help you optimize your blog for better performance.

But to track results, you have to first define important metrics according to your goals. Then, find the best tools to measure these metrics.

Personally, I use Google Analytics to track blog analytics. It works well to provide traffic data and track conversion goals.

However, software like Mixpanel and Amplitude will also work well, especially if you need product analytics.

Conclusion

Your SaaS blog is a critical aspect of marketing your product.

If I have to put a number on it, I found at least 60% of the SaaS products I know through their blogs.

And the same applies to many of your potential customers.

Thousands of potential buyers don’t even know your product exists.

It’s your duty to show up with helpful content when these prospects start asking questions about problems your products can solve.

But what if you’re busy and need an expert to write content pieces that will position your blog as an authority in your industry?

Or content pieces that will endear you to your audience?

Please reach out to me and let me know your content needs. 

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