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At least 70% of the posts I’ve written for clients and this blog are long-form content.
This translates to hundreds of long-form blog posts.
Some of them were bad, some good, and some great.
I’ve worked with clients whose SaaS content strategy was “longer content than our competitors.”
On the other hand, I’ve worked with clients who wanted to create comprehensive and helpful content for their audience.
And I’ve written long-form posts for this blog.
During this process, I’ve learned a thing or 2 about writing engaging long-form content that achieves results for SaaS companies.
In this guide, I’ll share some things I learned from experience and experts who create world-class content for SaaS companies.
You’ll also see examples of SaaS blogs creating successful long-form content.
What is long-form content for a SaaS company?
Long-form content for a SaaS company is the type of content that’s longer than the typical content piece on SaaS websites.
Now, the question is: what qualifies as long-form content?
Unfortunately, you’d have to do an average of content pieces on all SaaS websites to get a mathematically correct answer.
That’s almost impossible.
To put a value, I’d say long-form content for a SaaS blog is any content piece longer than 2,000 words.
Since SaaS topics are usually complex, the average SaaS blog post is longer than 1,000 words.
So, I think 2,000 words as a threshold makes more sense.
That said, the long-form content concept can get problematic because it only defines length.
It doesn’t define quality.
This means a content piece can still be long-form rubbish.
But if you’re committed to quality, should you put effort into long-form content?
Is long-form content always necessary for your SaaS blog?
Let me start with this quote:
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – Mark Twain
Sometimes, publishing long-form content can be because of laziness to remove the fluff from it.
It can be a race to write something longer than HubSpot just to compete favorably.
Brevity in your content means you’re helping your audience without wasting their time.
Now, to answer the question.
Sometimes, long-form content is necessary to cover all the aspects of a topic.
For example, if you want to write about “How to do SEO for your website,” that will naturally be long-form content.
Because no matter how brief you want to be, you can’t cover that topic properly in under 2,000 words.
However, short-term content works fine in some cases.
For instance, a glossary page about “keyword difficulty” can be about 1,000 words.
On the necessity of long-form content, I’ll advise that:
If a content piece requires 3,000 words, don’t write 5,000 words, as you’ll waste your audience’s time.
At the same time, don’t write 1,500 words, as you’ll rob them of critical information they’re looking for.
In the end, people read a page to find information that’ll solve their problems.
So, take the right number of words to provide that information.
Generally, though, a SaaS blog will need to create many content pieces in the long-form content category.
For example, if you want to create topic clusters (which you should), your pillar page will at least be long-form content.
In fact, I’ve not seen a successful SaaS blog that doesn’t publish lots of long-form content (if you know one, please tell me in the comments).
So, to grow your SaaS blog, you have to master the art of writing engaging and helpful long-form content that builds trust with your audience.
Why create long-form content for your SaaS blog?
It helps to build trust with your audience
If visitors get all the information about a topic, they’ll put it into action to solve their problems.
If you create detailed content that helps readers solve problems, they’ll trust your business more.
And hopefully, this trust can translate into buying your product.
You can naturally showcase your product
If you’re running a SaaS blog today, you should be creating product-led content.
That is content that showcases how your product can solve problems for prospects.
Showing how your product solves problems can add a few hundred words to your content.
And you only have this allowance when you write long-form content.
Breeds content ideas
Naturally, a long-form blog post contains many subtopics you may want to expand on in a separate blog post.
Sometimes, just reading through a long-form blog post will give you ideas on other topics to write about.
For example, in a long-form post about how to do SEO, you can find other content ideas like keyword research, link building, internal linking, image alt text, and meta description.
Provide internal linking opportunities
Long-form content, because of its length, provides more opportunities to link to other blog posts on your website.
So, you can find phrases in your content that have been explained in another blog post.
Also, if you plan to create topic clusters, you’ll need pillar pages. And pillar pages are naturally long-form content.
From these pillar pages, you can link out to other cluster pages.
While linking to another page, remember to use anchor text that closely matches the content on the destination page.
Can improve search rankings
If you create comprehensive content that provides more relevant information than other pages, your page will have a better chance of high search rankings.
Of course, rankings don’t depend on that alone.
So, creating long-form content doesn’t automatically mean higher rankings.
But content quality is one of the most important search ranking factors.
According to Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, Andrey Lipattsev, the top 3 Google ranking factors are content, backlinks, and Rankbrain.
How to create SaaS long-form content that achieves marketing goals
Keeping your audience’s attention for a tweet is easier than for a LinkedIn post.
Keeping it for a LinkedIn post is easier than for a short-form blog post.
Keeping it for a short-form blog post is easier than for a long-form blog post.
And on and on.
In an age of addictive 20-second TikTok videos, it takes a lot of skill to keep people reading at 2,500 words.
Here are 5 tactics you can use to engage your audience:
1. Tell stories in your content
Our lives are literally stories.
When you get home from work and your partner asks, “how was work today?” they don’t expect to hear, “I talked to 15 customers today.”
They want to hear about that specific nasty customer who was furious even after getting her problems solved.
They want to hear about how this customer later broke down into tears and admitted she was suffering through a divorce after her husband cheated on her with her best friend.
I bet your partner will pay attention to every word even though this story is 10 times longer than “I talked to 15 customers today.”
That’s the power of stories.
It’s like experiencing someone else’s life.
Using stories in your long-form content will help you hold your audience’s attention.
Another benefit is that stories help to create unique and outstanding SaaS content. Nobody else can have your experience the way you went through it.
Stories let you put your unique spin on a topic.
For instance, I started this guide with a story about my experience creating long-form content.
Here’s another example from Ahrefs:
Si Quan Ong tells this story to explain how Ahrefs ensures its marketers understand its product deeply.
Now, stories in your SaaS content can come in many ways:
- A literal story: here, you’ll tell a story of what happened to you. This story should be relevant to your blog post.
- Experience performing a task: what goes through your mind when performing a task? What do you experience that’s different from a popular cliché? You can mention this whenever you write about that task.
- Observations in your industry: what insight did you find from observing a trend in your industry? There are many observations lying around if you pay attention to them. You can create a note to jot them down. And then state them in a relevant content piece.
People seek novelty.
Stories can help you say something different while staying on the topic.
2. Understand your audience
Think of that friend you can talk with for hours about a topic that will induce other people to sleep.
And whenever you meet, you find new things about this topic to talk about.
For example, I can talk about Arsenal FC and cryptocurrencies for hours with one of my close friends.
If I talk to him about marketing, I’ll probably use Arsenal to make an analogy.
Because it’s a mutual area of interest.
Meanwhile, I don’t discuss these topics extensively with my wife.
Understanding your audience means you have to know what matters to them. This can be a hobby, problem, frustration, or even an ambition.
When you understand your audience, you’ll use the right examples, analogies, and mention the right problems.
In other words, you’ll connect better with them and keep them reading your blog post longer.
How do you understand your audience?
The first step is to perform user research and organize your findings in a buyer persona.
Beyond that, you can write a summary of the ideal reader for each blog post.
- Who is the ideal reader for a blog post?
- What’s their job title?
- What problem do they want to solve in the blog post?
- Which of your product features will solve their problems?
You can place this summary at the top of your blog post outline.
Here’s an example from a blog post I wrote on this blog:
This will keep you focused on the ideal reader while creating a long-form content piece.
3. Structure your blog post for easier reading
Structure is important, whatever the length of your blog post. But it’s even more important for long-form content.
Proper structure makes your blog post easier to read, even for people who want to skim through it.
I’d say structure for your blog post can be in 2 ways:
- Physical appearance
- Chronology of information
Your blog post should have both structures.
Physical appearance
Think of a book published in 1935 with a single paragraph on a whole page. How many of those pages can you read before falling asleep?
Sometimes, seeing a text dump will discourage people from reading your content.
It’s just too stressful.
You can make your blog post more attractive by:
- Using headings and subheadings
- Writing short sentences and paragraphs
- Using bullet points
- Adding images and videos in between texts
- Using a table of content for easier navigation
For example, you can use this blog post as a reference in structuring yours.
Getting the physical appearance right will compel visitors to read what you have to say.
Chronology of information
Chronology simply means the order of information in your content piece.
If a piece of information is a prerequisite to understanding other information in your content, put it first.
For example, if you’re creating a content piece about building a house, it makes sense to put “draw your architectural plan” before “paint your house.”
Of course, chronology isn’t critical to every blog post.
But when it’s critical, ensure to arrange information in your post for a better reading experience.
Overall, structure your long-form content to make it easy for readers to navigate.
4. Add images and videos
Images and videos are visual content that readers can absorb faster than text.
And they can keep visitors longer on your page.
They also break your content to make it easier to read.
How do you go about using images and videos?
Whenever you explain a task in your product, take screenshots to show readers how to execute those tasks.
This also works when providing examples or statistics in your content.
Ahrefs regularly features images and videos in its blog posts.
These visual content pieces usually show readers how to use the SEO tool to improve search rankings.
5. Use lots of proof
Even if you’re a subject matter expert (SME) on the topic you want to write about, you don’t know everything about the topic.
Worse still, some of your readers don’t know you as an expert.
In this case, using lots of proof can help you build credibility with your audience.
So, whenever you make an important point, you can deliver proof through:
- Examples
- Statistics
- Case studies
- Expert quotes
Here’s an example in this blog’s post about SaaS webinars:
This statistic supports my point about getting quality leads from webinars.
By doing this, you sound like an authority, and readers want to read more of your writing.
You essentially show them that you understand the topic you’re writing about.
Examples of SaaS blogs that create engaging long-form content
Semrush
Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools online.
This means the company has to create a lot of content about how to achieve higher search rankings.
But beyond that, Semrush has to create many long-form content pieces on its blog to address often complex SEO topics.
And the company does it well.
Many of its content pieces rank on the first page for search terms related to SEO.
Blog post examples
SEO Strategy: How to Create One for 2023 (+ Template)
How to Write SEO Headlines That Rank (+ 9 Powerful Templates)
How to Optimize for Google Discover in 2023: 5 Smart Tips
Close.io
Close is a sales CRM software product for businesses.
Because of this, the company creates many long-form blog posts about topics related to sales, acquiring customers, and retaining them.
Apart from its blog post, Close creates long-form ebooks that work as lead magnets on some of its blog pages.
So, Close also uses long-form content to acquire leads that can become customers down the line.
Blog post examples
How to Close a Sale: 15 Sales Closing Techniques, Tips & Questions to Close Deals Faster
Want to Improve Customer Retention? Check Those 8 Strategies for Long-term Success
Objection Handling 101: Your Guide to Overcoming 40+ Sales Objections
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools.
This means it has to create topics about social media channels and how to run successful campaigns on them.
Hootsuite does this well by creating long-form blog posts about relevant topics for its ideal users.
Blog post examples
25 Social Media KPIs You Should Be Tracking and When
How to Use Social Proof to Fuel Engagement and Sales
Social Selling Explained: A 2023 Guide to Social Media Sales
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a marketing calendar tool that helps businesses organize various aspects of their marketing strategy.
So, CoSchedule blogs about many marketing topics. And most of their blog posts are long-form content.
On these blog pages, the company also generates leads with its templates.
Blog post examples
How To Create A Content Marketing Editorial Calendar In 2023 (Template)
Marketing Request Forms: How to Create One Your Team Will Actually Use
Marketing Checklists: How To Complete Work Right In The First Iteration (Examples & Templates)
Ahrefs
Ahrefs blog is one of my favorite blogs online.
And for a good reason.
Ahrefs is an SEO tool that helps businesses rank higher on search engines.
That said, Ahrefs qualifies to be a content marketing company based on just its excellent product-led content.
Due to the complexity of SEO, Ahrefs has to write many long-form content pieces.
The company usually features images and videos in its content. Even better, the images are designed and branded in Ahrefs style.
Blog post examples
Master E-commerce SEO in 2023: Beginner’s Guide
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners: What It Is + How to Succeed
White Hat SEO: How to Rank Without Breaking The Rules
Conclusion
Writing long-form blog posts for your SaaS blog requires a lot of time, research, and effort.
But it’s worth it.
If you want to run a SaaS blog, why not create one that can be a lifesaver for your audience?
It will grow your authority and draw customers to your business.
If you have writers who write your blog post, you can use this guide to understand what to expect from your content.
But what if you want long-form content for your SaaS blog but currently can’t create it?
This may be because of a lack of time, indifference towards writing, or other factors.
As a SaaS writer, I can take the work off your hands.
Reach out and let me know your content needs and goals.
Samuel writes long-form guides to help businesses and entrepreneurs achieve better results from their marketing activities. He also writes for marketing and SaaS companies that want more leads and customers. Get in touch with him to discuss your content needs.
Insightful take on the importance of long-form content for SaaS! How do you measure the success of your long-form articles?
Hi Al Amin,
Thanks for your comment.
For my articles on this blog, I measure success through traffic and conversions.
However, for articles I write for SaaS clients, success depends on each client.
Some clients use organic traffic to measure success.
Some create KPIs according to the search intent of the target keyword. So, they can use organic traffic for posts targeting informational keywords while using conversions for posts targeting commercial keywords.
Some clients think a content piece is successful if it was viewed during the conversion journey.
The reality is that measuring success for content is hard. So, different SaaS companies use whatever works for them. Or measure success based on the goal of running the blog.