If you are in the SaaS industry, you might feel that it is sometimes difficult to write about your services and make them exciting or engaging to your audience. You may be so familiar with what you offer that you struggle to find new angles and walk in your prospects shoes. Maybe you have lost your motivation and find it hard to believe anyone finds what you write about interesting?
If this sounds familiar, here are three ways to make your content work and get you back on track.
Tell a good story
Too many blog posts are just dry, factual articles about some feature of the software or some new development of the service. Or worse, they are a rambling collection of selling points and features. This approach will never engage an audience, never persuade them to spend their valuable time reading the content, and never convert leads to customers.
The way to draw people in and get any message across is to tell a compelling story. A good story has a protagonist, a problem, a battle and a solution. A well-written case study is essentially a story and has proven to be one of the most persuasive types of content there is:
- It starts with a set-up – the situation the customer is in at the beginning of the case study
- In the middle section, there’s a struggle – overcoming the challenges and issues arising from changing processes and workflows
- And it should finish with a happy ending – conquering the dragon and living happily ever after – sorry, I mean successful implementation of the project using software and services supplied by you.
And don’t just launch into an article, write a carefully constructed opening paragraph that lays out the basics of the story, highlights the benefits to the reader of reading to the end, and teases some of the best bits – just like a good movie trailer.
Be human (think B2H not B2B) and know your audience
Research shows that personal value will provide twice the impact that business value will on a B2B purchase. That requires a deep level of understanding – which is where buyer personas come in.
Buyer personas are representations of your target customers based on real-world information and educated guesses. Their likes, dislikes, habits, behaviours, motivations and concerns, as well as their job function, where they spend time online, decision criteria, and more.
Add a personal touch in your writing, talk about things other than the product, and relate them to the fears, challenges and aspirations of your buyer personas. Yes, you can relate these stories back to your SaaS offerings, but give the content a human touch. It’s very effective to feature real people in your content, whether that be profiles of your employees, customer stories or yourself. A personal touch gives the content character, makes it more interesting, and making real people the focus will help your audience identify with the piece.
Tell them something they don’t know
People like to be inspired, educated and helped. And if you can enable them to work faster, better or more efficiently, they will appreciate it.
So, if you can write good educational content, inspiring articles or customer support posts, then there is a clear incentive for your audience to engage with them. SaaS, in particular, has a great need for clear explanatory articles about how it works, what the benefits are, what it can be used for, how it can be implemented across an organisation and so on. There really should be no shortage of ideas for educational content or indeed formats to publish it in, with videos, slide decks, podcasts, webcasts, white papers and newsletters, all proving very effective.
Yes, creating content for SaaS marketing is about generating leads – but overly promotional or dry writing will not engage the reader enough for them to take it any further. So be subtle with any promotional or selling messages – but do include a Call to Action (CTA).
Telling a good story, engaging with a human touch and educating your audience will all help to create that all important emotional bond between them and your content – and ultimately, your products and services.
