saas marketing – Mike Khorev – SEO Consultant https://mikekhorev.com Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:44:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6.17 Inbound Marketing for SaaS Companies: Your Ultimate Guide https://mikekhorev.com/inbound-marketing-saas-companies-ultimate-guide Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:28:00 +0000 https://mikekhorev.com/?p=10904 Inbound marketing has been the buzzword of the digital marketing world during the past couple of years if not longer. In the SaaS environment, where SaaS content marketing is deemed integral, inbound marketing methodology is not a luxury, but a necessity. However, how can we actually implement the inbound marketing methodology to our SaaS business? While we can be all technical and answer it with complex techniques, SaaS inbound marketing is actually quite simple. Here, we will learn all about it. Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue. How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve: Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion Protects: 5,000,000+ websites #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO Year over year growth: 100% Learn more How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now: Revenue: 7 Figure Company Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month Learn more How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate: Revenue: 7 Figure Company Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO Revenue growth: 10% MoM Learn more Before we begin, however, let us discuss a bit about the inbound marketing concept so that we will start on the same page. What Is Inbound Marketing? There...

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]]> Inbound marketing has been the buzzword of the digital marketing world during the past couple of years if not longer. In the SaaS environment, where SaaS content marketing is deemed integral, inbound marketing methodology is not a luxury, but a necessity.

However, how can we actually implement the inbound marketing methodology to our SaaS business? While we can be all technical and answer it with complex techniques, SaaS inbound marketing is actually quite simple. Here, we will learn all about it.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

Before we begin, however, let us discuss a bit about the inbound marketing concept so that we will start on the same page.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

There are two main ways to attract anyone: push or pull. You can “push” out information about your business, product, and/or service to as many people as you can, or, you can create something attractive and “pull” people towards you.

This idea of push-pull marketing is probably as old as the history of marketing itself, and in this modern digital era, we have new jargons that are technically replacing the term “push” and “pull”: outbound and inbound.

Inbound marketing, in its purest sense, is about creating attractive content to pull your audience inwards. While some might argue that inbound marketing is not exactly pull marketing, the basic idea remains the same, it’s about attracting your audience inbound.

Most of us are more familiar with traditional—pull or outbound— marketing: TV advertising, billboards, or even more recently, ads when we are watching YouTube. However, in this age of modern internet and social media, traditional marketing is now facing various challenges:

  • The costs to place your advertising are continually increasing. Even if online ads are generally more affordable than, say, TV ads, they are getting more expensive.]
  • On the other hand, people are getting more resistant to advertising. Even if they are not using Ad-blockers (which now comes built-in in some smartphones), there’s a thing we call banner-blindness, where users actively ignore advertising all the time.
  • People trust their peers on social media more than advertising. Even when you spend billions on advertisement, when a major influencer spoke badly about your SaaS product, it’s going to be a tough battle.
  • Influencer marketing, a relatively new outbound marketing tactic that was once thought to be the next holy grail, is also getting more expensive and the effectiveness reduces. People nowadays understood when an influencer is paid to promote, and thus resist the message.
  • Nowadays, if you overspent on traditional advertising, it can be counterproductive. Ever stumbled upon an unskippable ad on YouTube over and over again? Did the brand annoy you? Would you buy from the brand? If the viewer is not already loyal to your brand in the first place, most likely the answer is no.

This is where inbound marketing fills in: since you are “pulling” customers with attractive things—and especially content—, there will be less resistance.

The focus of inbound marketing is to provide value with each interaction, establishing relationships and trusts, and in the end, converting the audience into actual customers.

There are four pillars of inbound marketing:

  1. Your Website
  2. Third-party platforms where you can publish your content: blogs, YouTube, Spotify for podcasts, etc.
  3. Google and other search engines, which will be the main way to promote your content through SEO
  4. Social media platforms

The Marketing Funnel

To truly understand how inbound marketing works, we must understand the concept of a marketing funnel.

The idea of the marketing or sales funnel is that the buyer’s journey the process every audience went through until they become your customers will resemble a funnel shape: there will be more people in the previous steps, and fewer people will actually buy the product/service.

Typically there are three, or four, major stages in a marketing funnel, especially for the SaaS industry.

  • Awareness: the prospect becomes aware of a product/service, or becomes aware that they have a specific problem and in need of a solution.
  • Research/consideration: the prospect considers the different options available on the market. The prospect might also research for possible solutions for their problems.
  • Decision: self-explanatory, the prospect finally decides on a solution and purchase a product or service.
  • Delight: technically, the purchase decisions happened in the third stage and the marketing funnel is done. However, there can be a fourth stage where the customer is delighted with your brand and is converted into an advocate.

Inbound marketing is based on this funnel, where the inbound marketing methodology is designed to attract customers at each stage.

Inbound Marketing Methodology for SaaS

One of the uniqueness of SaaS marketing is the relatively short sales cycle.  For SaaS products priced below $2,000 annually, the buyer’s journey from where they are aware of your SaaS product until they made the purchase typically lasts only 14 days.

This is why inbound marketing and SaaS are like a match made in heaven. With inbound methodology, we can effectively engage prospects during each stage of the funnel.

For example, let’s say we are a SaaS company selling productivity software. In this case, these are the inbound marketing efforts we can try for each stage of the customer’s journey:

  • Awareness stage: we provide content about productivity, so when people realize that they have productivity issues, they might stumble upon your content. You can also offer content on how your service can help solve their productivity problems.
  • Consideration stage: content like “what to consider when looking for SaaS productivity software”, content comparing your software with your competitors’, etc. The idea is to inform users of the unique benefits of your product.
  • Decision stage: case studies, facts-rich content can help convince your prospects to make the purchase.
  • Delight stage: how to use your software better, various tips on productivity, etc. The idea here is to offer continuous support and service excellence to encourage loyalty.

As you can see, implementing inbound marketing for SaaS doesn’t need to be complex with a simple basic idea: provide content pieces that are going to be valuable for your audience. Below, we will discuss how to effectively plan and execute an inbound marketing strategy for your SaaS business.

SaaS Inbound Marketing Strategy

SaaS inbound marketing can be very complex with all the technical jargon involved. However, it is actually relatively simple, and will only involve three key areas: content development, content promotion, and conversion rate optimization of your content. Below, we will discuss them one by one.

1. SaaS Content Creation

Content in SaaS inbound marketing must be customer-centric. Meaning, they are developed according to the customer’s—or prospect’s— needs, problems, and behaviors.

To do this, the first essential step is to understand your audience.

SaaS User Research

The most common—and effective approach— here is to develop a buyer persona(s). A buyer persona is a hypothetical model of your ideal audience, and there are two key questions to answer:

  • Who do you think is your ideal audience?
  • What are their problems that my SaaS product can solve?

For example, let’s use the example that you are a SaaS company selling a keyword research tool. Then:

  • Who do you think is your ideal audience? SEO experts, digital marketers, marketing manager
  • What are their problems that my SaaS product can solve? Keyword research, topic suggestions, SEO tactics, etc.

With only these two questions, you already have a basic buyer persona. Then, ask more questions, conduct more research using various tools, and confirm the validity of your buyer persona based on your existing customer database (whether your hypothesis is correct). You can use this guide by Search Engine Journal for more about this aspect.

Keyword Research

There are two main ways we might stumble upon a content: via Google (or other search engines) search, or when someone else shared the content via social media. Here, we will address the first.

To make sure our content is discoverable, we have to target the right keywords so people can find the content on the search engine.

We can use various tools to help with this aspect. There are free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or UberSuggest, or there are also paid, more advanced options like SEMRush (also check SEMRush alternatives) or Ahrefs.

There are only three key principles to a proper keyword research:

  • Find keywords that are relevant and valuable for both your business and your audience.
  • Find keywords with high enough monthly search volume, yet manageable competition (some keyword research tools might display this as “keyword difficulty”)
  • Find keywords that you can expand into a topic, and thus an actual content.

Social Media Trends Research

By developing content according to topics that are trending in social media, you can improve its shareability. Tools like BuzzSumo (and BuzzSumo alternatives) can help with this aspect, and the basic principles remain similar to that of keyword research above:

  • Find trending topics that are also relevant for your business. You can combine this with keyword research above. For example, you can check whether a target keyword has enough buzz on social media.
  • Make sure you are able to develop relevant, valuable content out of the topic.
  • Always check whether the competition is manageable. If it’s too saturated, it’s probably not worth pursuing

Developing High-Conversion Content

First, we have to make sure our content is discoverable by the audience, and the easiest way to answer this is to observe the market. That is, what’s currently ranking on the search engines.

Check how the content was developed: its structure, its content, keyword optimization, etc. This content is your competition, and there are two different approaches you can try:

  1. Making a better content: bigger, more in-depth, updated with newer information, better user experience, and so on.
  2. Taking a different angle and be unique: you can approach the keyword from a different angle, and be unique.

In most cases, being unique is the easier approach (but it’s not saying it’s easy). For example, if your target keyword is “digital marketing strategy” and you can provide a totally unique (and working) strategy that has not been covered anywhere else, you have a better chance to rank and get more readers.

Getting your content discovered is one thing, but your content must also be able to deliver value, engage the audience, and persuade them to convert. To do this, there are three different approaches:

  1. Appeal to the audience’s logic

By providing solid facts and evidence, you can provide value for your audience and establish trust. The challenge with this approach is that your content might get boring, but when done right, can be very effective. This is especially useful for B2B SaaS companies where technical content is expected.

  1. Appeal to the audience’s emotions

By relating to the audience’s problems, you can effectively persuade them to trust you. For example, if you are selling a productivity SaaS tool, you can address common productivity issues and provide actionable tips. Generally, more effective for B2C SaaS products, but not always.

  1. Using our credibility

If we are already a trustworthy brand, it’s easier to engage and persuade our audience. However, even newer brands can use this approach, for example by using user testimonials and case studies.

You can combine all of the approaches above within one content, or focus on just one or two.

Utilizing Various Mediums

Content is not only limited to textual form, as there are also images, infographics, videos, and even podcasts.

There are two ways you can utilize various forms in approaching your content marketing game:

  1. Combining various forms within one content: can be effective, depending on the type of content. For example, images like charts and infographics can help explain facts and data. Videos can also be effective for certain content.
  2. Releasing various content forms in various channels. You can, for example, re-use textual content as a video. This approach can be effective to address various stages of the buyer’s journey. For example, a short video about your product might help in the awareness stage, while a more in-depth textual content about the topic can be more effective in the consideration stage.

2. Content Promotion

How you promote the content is just as important as the quality of the content. Remember that no matter how good—or unique— the content is, there’s no use if no one is actually reading it.

Above in the content creation section, we have briefly discussed the importance of SEO. Indeed, SaaS SEO services will be the primary content promotion method in inbound marketing.

SEO Optimizations

SEO by itself is a pretty broad subject, and you might want to check out the SaaS SEO guide.

However, there are several key areas to focus on when optimizing your content for SEO:

  • Make sure the page is mobile-responsive and is fast enough to load (3 seconds on standard 4G connection is your upper limit)
  • Use your keywords naturally, and combine semantically-related words. Don’t overthink this and focus on developing content that is natural to read for human audience.
  • Make sure your content is well-structured and free of typos and grammatical errors.
  • The key to SEO, however, is backlink. It’s important to note that nowadays, the quality of the inbound link is more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many backlinks at one time—even if they are authoritative—, can get you penalized. Aim to get 2 to 3 high-quality backlinks each month.

Aiming for more backlinks will be the core of your content promotion strategy. That is, with every other content promotion effort, you should aim to get high-quality backlinks.

Social Media Promotion

There are two different aspects of content promotion in social media: organic and paid. Organic, is when you grow your own social media followers—and thus, your organic reach—, so when you share your content in your social media profiles, you’ll reach a lot of people.

Paid, as the name suggests, is when you invest in social media advertising. For example, you can use Facebook’s Boost Post feature to promote content you’ve posted on Facebook.

This is the case of cost VS time: organic efforts are affordable—if not free—, but you will need to invest months or even years. On the other hand, paid options will guarantee quick results, but can be very expensive. The key is finding the balance.

Email Marketing

Sending your new content to your email and text blast subscribers can be very effective, especially in the consideration stage for lead nurturing content. How do we build a growing email list in the first place? Also via content, and we will discuss this further below.

Influencer Marketing

When an influencer—or a reputable site— recommends your content, you can reach their followers. The key here is finding the right influencer according to your SaaS niche, and find ways so you can get them to mention your content.

For example, you can mention (or even link) an influencer’s content within yours, and then reach out to the influencer that you’ve mentioned them. In some cases, they might be willing to share your content to their followers (assuming your content is high-quality).

Sometimes, however, an influencer outreach email is all it takes.

Guest Posting

When done right, guest posting is still a very effective way to promote your brand, your content, and get those valuable backlinks. Reach out to reputable sites and blogs in your SaaS niche, and pitch a guest post idea.

The key here is building your credibility (through your content), and build relationships. Sometimes, you will need to pay some money to get these opportunities, but it can be worth it in the long run.

Content Syndication and Content Community

Content syndication is essentially re-publishing your content on third-party sites. So. it’s quite similar to guest posting but you don’t have to create brand new content.

When content is syndicated to another site, it can be published as it is or slightly edited (usually to a shorter piece). But, wouldn’t syndication get us penalized due to duplicate content? You might want to check out this article by Neil Patel on the truth about duplicate content penalty.

There are also content community sites where you can share and promote your own content. For example, Hacker News is a community to share tech-related content. This can be a good place to share your content, but don’t be too self-promoting. Engage with other users, promote other’s content, and build relationships.

3. Optimizing Conversions For Your Content

Now that you’ve got a lot of readers/viewers to your content, how can they bring value to you? The answer is conversion.

Let’s go back to the marketing funnel discussed at the beginning of this guide:

  • Attraction: here, our aim is to convert content readers into leads
  • Consideration: we filter out marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), nurture them,  and convert them into prospects
  • Decision: we convert prospects into customers
  • Delight: we convert loyal customers into advocates

As you can see, it’s all about conversion.

However, your content readers won’t usually convert by themselves, and they will need a little push. More specifically, here are the common conversion steps in SaaS inbound marketing. Again, let’s use the example that you are a SaaS company selling productivity tools.

A user, Mr.X, realizes he had productivity issues, and went to Google to search for productivity tips. He stumbled upon your content “Top 10 Tips To Increase Productivity Without Willpower”. In the middle of the article, you offer him an ebook for more in-depth productivity tactics that he can download for free in exchange for his email address. He went on to download this ebook.

Let’s pause a bit. The ebook here is an offer we call a lead magnet, which essentially, something valuable that we give for free in exchange for their contact information. When they gave their contact info (mainly email address), we effectively converted them into a lead.

Now, we can follow-up with an email marketing campaign to nurture Mr.X as a lead. Email marketing is an important aspect of inbound marketing as a lead nurturing effort.

Let’s say that Mr.X continued to consume your content (which he became aware of via your email newsletter), and now he’s aware of your SaaS product. He researched for your product and stumbled upon your competitors’. After comparing his options, he decided to sign-up for your free trial. Here, we effectively converted Mr.X from a lead into a prospect.

During the free-trial period, we continued to send email newsletters, but now we sent tutorials about our product, tips on how to use our product, and other product educational content. We also offer customer service excellence during this period, as an attempt to turn him into a purchasing customer. Finally, he decided to purchase the product, and now he is effectively converted as a customer.

However, our job is not yet finished. We continued our inbound marketing efforts by sending more content and continue to provide great service. We do this to prevent customer churn, so that Mr.X won’t cancel his subscription, and also to turn him into an advocate. Turns out he is very happy with our product (and service, remember that service is an important aspect of SaaS), and he started recommending our product to his peers. Finally, he is converted into an advocate.

As you can see, your content should be optimized for conversion according to the various stages of the buyer’s journey. The most important factor, however, is having strong lead magnets to convert readers into leads. You might want to check out this huge list by OptinMonster listing 60+ lead magnet ideas.

End Words

Marketing for SaaS, software, IT and Tech companies relies on three key points: developing high-quality and relevant content, figuring out strategies to promote the content, and optimizing your content for conversions.

If you can do all three properly, you are set with your SaaS inbound marketing strategy, and start to build a long-lasting, sustainable source of leads. The key here is consistency in both quality and quantity.

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]]> B2B SAAS Marketing Strategy in 2024: Planning, Execution, Evaluation To Achieve Rapid Growth https://mikekhorev.com/saas-marketing-strategy-planning-execution-evaluation-achieve-rapid-growth https://mikekhorev.com/saas-marketing-strategy-planning-execution-evaluation-achieve-rapid-growth#comments Thu, 20 Mar 2025 18:43:44 +0000 https://mikekhorev.com/?p=11312 B2B SaaS marketing strategy is tough. Not selling a physical product already possess its own challenge, but the recurring revenue model—that is not familiar to many people— can further complicate things from conversion to cash flow management issues. Not to mention, SaaS marketing can be very demanding, where not only growth but rapid growth is the requirement to stay in business. With that being said, in this guide, we will discuss all the ins and outs of SaaS marketing strategy for B2B companies in 2024. Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue. How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve: Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion Protects: 5,000,000+ websites #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO Year over year growth: 100% Learn more How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now: Revenue: 7 Figure Company Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month Learn more How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate: Revenue: 7 Figure Company Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO Revenue growth: 10% MoM Learn more   The Uniqueness of B2B SaaS Marketing B2B SaaS marketing, in many ways, is unique and in some cases, more difficult than other types...

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]]> B2B SaaS marketing strategy is tough. Not selling a physical product already possess its own challenge, but the recurring revenue model—that is not familiar to many people— can further complicate things from conversion to cash flow management issues. Not to mention, SaaS marketing can be very demanding, where not only growth but rapid growth is the requirement to stay in business.

With that being said, in this guide, we will discuss all the ins and outs of SaaS marketing strategy for B2B companies in 2024.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

 

The Uniqueness of B2B SaaS Marketing

B2B SaaS marketing, in many ways, is unique and in some cases, more difficult than other types of marketing.

This has a lot to do with the nature of SaaS business itself, and so let’s briefly discuss the concept of SaaS.

SaaS, Software as a Service, is essentially businesses selling cloud software over the internet, where the user wouldn’t need to install the software. SaaS businesses typically adopt a subscription-based, recurring revenue business model.

This will mean that the financial aspect of the SaaS business is significantly more complicated. Let’s say your software is developed with a cost of $20,000, and you are selling the software with a subscription fee of $9/month (discounted for $100 if paid annually).

In this case, let’s say that you have 100 active users that paid the annual subscription, for the sake of simplicity. Then, you have recouped $10,000 of the cost— or $10,000— lost. This will obviously be more complex when some customers are subscribing to different plans or when some of them are cancelling mid subscription. The bottom line? Your cash flow can be more complicated.

This will translate into several unique requirements of SaaS marketing, such as:

 

1. Maintaining customers long-term is the secret to growth

It’s a fairly new insight that maintaining existing customers turns out to be more profitable than acquiring new ones. This is even more prevalent in the SaaS environment where, as discussed, a customer’s monthly subscription fee is usually only a fraction of your software production cost. Meaning, it will take a long subscription commitment—or a long time— before you make a profit from a customer.

So, maximizing customer retention is an integral part of SaaS marketing, and should be emphasized more than acquiring new customers. It is also worth noting that new customer acquisition is significantly more expensive than retaining existing ones.

To summarize, customer retention should be the focus of B2B SaaS marketing.

 

2. Unique sales process

What is the typical purchase decision process for a SaaS product?

If it’s a B2C product, for example, DropBox, it’s usually like this:

  • We learn about DropBox from somewhere (recommended by friends, through an article/video, advertisement, etc.)
  • We signed up for the free trial
  • We decide whether to buy or move on

With B2B products, it’s slightly more complicated but quite similar

  • Someone in the company is looking for a solution for a specific problem and stumbled upon your product
  • They signed up for the free trial
  • They presented the product to other decision makers on the company if they liked it
  • If the stakeholders agree, the purchase happened

So, the lead nurturing process is usually non-existent replaced by the free-trial period. The sales process is very transparent and in most cases, the sales cycle is relatively short.

How will this translate to our marketing approach? First, there’s no workaround to a bad product (and customer service as a part of SaaS). Second, you will need to provide as much information without overwhelming the prospect and convince them as best as you can within the short time-frame.

On the other hand, it will be very hard to convince a prospect that simply didn’t like your SaaS product. In this case, if you can generate sufficient leads, move on to the next.

 

3. Content is king

While content marketing is definitely very important for any business, it is one of the most important parts of SaaS marketing strategy for B2B.

When we take a look at most of the biggest players in the SaaS industry, they all have one thing in common: strong content marketing game. Buffer, a SaaS leader in the social media tools niche, is famous for its blog as one of the best resources for social media marketing. The same can be said with HubSpot or Moz in digital marketing.

Your content marketing should encompass two things: educating your audience on how to use your product better, and establishing your position as the thought leader of your niche.

This will extend to your approach in social media marketing: aim to provide information and establish your position as the expert.

Credibility and trust are very important assets in the SaaS industry, and you can get them not by keeping—but spreading— valuable information.

 

4. Free stuff is the way

Again, this is something contradictory to the traditional marketing practice: in the SaaS business, giving away your product (and even your full product) for free is the norm.

Free-trial in its several different forms is the core of SaaS marketing. However, this doesn’t mean we should go blindly without any strategy.

Optimizing the conversion rate within the free-trial period should be the focus of any SaaS marketer, and this will also mean one other thing: your product must be good.

Also, since there’s the service aspect of SaaS, the free-trial period is also the chance to showcase your customer service excellence, which we will discuss below.

 

5. Product and service as a package

Remember that the service is also a half of the SaaS business. In fact, it’s often that the service aspect is even more important than the software product.

This is not saying that your software is not important, as we have discussed above, it’s virtually impossible to sell a flawed SaaS product due to the transparency of the free-trial period. However, service quality will often be the decisive factor in determining a purchase.

This will include excellent and fast-responding customer service, frequent updates so your software can stand the challenges of time, resources and training to help customers with the learning curve, and other services.

 

Developing a B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy

Due to the uniqueness and complication of SaaS marketing, developing a proper marketing plan and strategy is necessary for success.

In developing a SaaS marketing strategy, there are four key areas to focus on:

 

1. Your Audience

A proper marketing strategy for SaaS must be customer-centric, that is, all the included aspects must be planned with your audience’s needs, behaviors, interests, and problems in mind.

This will start by defining your audience, which is done via proper market research and developing a buyer persona(s). The more specific you can define your audience, the more specific you can plan a strategy that can capture them.

There are four key considerations in this aspect:

  1. The specific problem they are trying to solve

Your SaaS product is a solution to a problem. The successful ones are the ones that can alleviate a huge problem (quality) or a problem that is affecting a lot of people (quantity). Figure out the problems that can be fixed by your SaaS, and find the audience that is most likely to have this problem(s).

  1. Their buyer process

There are various different factors that can affect the purchase decision. B2B purchase decisions will usually involve several stakeholders in the company (we will discuss this below). Your price tag, as well as the pricing model will affect how your SaaS product will be purchased and thus should affect your marketing approach. Design your pricing plans according to your audience’s preferences (and your competitors’ approaches)

  1. The key features of your SaaS product that will interest your audience

Identify how your buyer persona will relate to specific features of the product. For example, if you are selling a cloud storage software, a buyer persona might be interested in huge storage space. On the other hand, another buyer persona might be interested in a good mobile app.

  1. Their potential obstacles in choosing your product.

What are the potential objection points for every buyer persona? It can be your high price tag, it can be a lack of certain features/technologies compared to your competitors, and so on. If you can define these potential obstacles and find ways to convince your audience over these, you’ll get a higher chance of success.

It’s also important to define different buyer personas for different types of stakeholders if you are a B2B SaaS business. For example, if you are a tech-based SaaS software, these stakeholders might include IT officers/managers, finance managers, and CEOs. Each of them might have different needs and behaviors based on 4 factors above. So, adjust accordingly.

 

2. Define Your Goals

Effort without the right direction is meaningless. So, defining clear and realistic goals is the key to successful B2B SaaS marketing.

Your goals should be specific and measurable:

  • Figure your overall business goals. For example, to achieve revenue growth by X%. The idea is that your marketing goals should align with these business goals. For example, we can achieve this growth by increasing leads by 30%, which will be the responsibility of the marketing team.
  • It is also important to figure out how the sales and marketing team can align to achieve the organizational goals. For example, the marketing team must commit to deliver 200 sales-qualified leads to the sales team. This way, we can also figure out how many salespersons/account executives will be needed.
  • Find out how each marketing goal can be measured by assigning KPIs and key metrics. Also, determine the way(s) to measure these metrics (i.e. by using a certain analytics tool, will be discussed below).
  • It’s better to set realistic, attainable goals. Goals that are too hard to achieve can hurt your team’s morale. You can break down bigger goals (and company mission) to smaller, more realistic milestones to tackle this issue.

 

3. Define Tactics To Achieve The Goals

Based on your SaaS marketing goals, and your audience’s behaviors, devise the right tactics to achieve your goals.

With all the available digital marketing tactics, this can be a very broad subject. However, in general, there are three core tactics you can include to any SaaS marketing strategy:

  1. Content Marketing

As mentioned above, content marketing is very important for SaaS businesses. In 2015 or so, those with strong content marketing game are virtually guaranteed with success. That is no longer the case nowadays as content marketing is now the norm—-no longer the luxury. Think of content marketing as the prerequisite foundation of your SaaS marketing success.

Regarding SaaS content marketing, there are several factors to focus on:

  • There are three different stages in the SaaS buyer’s journey: lead generation, lead nurturing, retaining customers, and delighting them to become your advocate. While you should develop content for each of these stages, you should focus on one or two of these to emphasize your strengths. These examples of 17 SaaS companies with strong content marketing game might inspire you.
  • There are always two different ways you can approach with each piece of content: be the absolute best or be unique. You can for example, develop a comprehensive, in-depth, most informative content about digital marketing, or you can also develop a piece covering a totally unique tactic no one’s discussed before.
  • Remember that content nowadays come in many different forms from a blog post to infographics to podcasts and videos. Diversify your content (or, use several forms in one piece) according to your audience’s preferences. You can also cover one topic in many different forms to attract as many prospects as you can.
  • Use various tools to help you. Keyword research is a fairly standard practice nowadays: aim for keywords with high search volume and yet manageable competition. Tools like BuzzSumo or Uber Suggests can help you find topic ideas, and you can also analyze the performance of competitors’ content to gain valuable insights. SaaS content marketing is already so saturated, so get all the help that you can.
  • Developing good content is important, but it won’t bring you any value if you can’t attract prospects. Promoting your content is just as—if not more— important than the content creation itself. Working with SEO consultants is obviously the best way to promote your content, but you will need to get help from various other promotion channels to get traffic and get those valuable backlinks for your SEO. You can check my guide on SEO strategy for SaaS to learn more about optimizing your website.

The key to successful SaaS content marketing is a proper understanding of your buyer persona (discussed above). The better you can engage your audience (and promote your content to reach this audience), the better you can convert them into valuable leads.

  1. Paid Promotions

Although content marketing is very important (and very effective) for SaaS businesses in generating and nurturing leads, it has one major flaw: content marketing is long-term, and you will need to invest at least 6 to 12 months of consistent content publication—or more— before we can get significant results.

This is where paid marketing channels can fill the gap. If you do have the budget, advertising, paid endorsement of influencers, etc. will virtually guarantee short-term results. The issue, however, is cost, as they can be very expensive if you are not careful: you can get a lot of traffic but not making any money in the end.

So, paid promotional channels and content marketing should work hand-in-hand to maintain cost-efficiency and yet shorten the time required to get results.

While there are certainly many options where you can invest on paid advertising, there are three main channels to focus on:

  1. Retargeting

Retargeting is, display advertising where you only show the ad to those who have visited your website (via content marketing, social media, or other promotional channels). Some retargeting ad publishers (i.e. Google Ads) also allow us to target users that have triggered certain actions like visiting other sites (including your competitors) or searched for specific queries— essentially a more affordable paid search ad.

You can implement retargeting campaigns in Google Ads, LinkedIn Sponsored Updates or Facebook Ads, while there are also platforms like Perfect Audience that can spread your promotions into several different publishers.

  1. Paid Content Promotion

There are various channels where you can promote your content. The idea here is to support your content marketing so that it would take a shorter time to get results by reaching more people. The most prominent channels here are Google Ads and social media advertising (Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads if you are a B2B SaaS company, etc.). Paying for guest posting opportunities (so you can also get backlinks from the site) can be included here.

  1. Paid Influencers

Influencer marketing can be effective for certain niches of SaaS. An influencer can help promote your content and/or your SaaS product.

The key here is obviously to find the right influencer that is relevant to your niche, and various influencer outreach tools can help you in this aspect.

Depending on your niche, working with micro or even nano-influencers might be more effective—and cost-efficient.

Remember that these paid promotional efforts should amplify your content marketing. Aim to get backlinks at every possible opportunity, so you can also generate sustainable results.

 

3. Resources to Execute The Tactics

Now that you’ve figured out the right tactics to achieve the goals, it’s time to consider the necessary resources to execute these tactics.

This, will start with planning a marketing budget:

How much should you spend on marketing? While there are no set rules to answer this, there are several key points we should consider:

  1. SaaS companies typically have low production costs. You don’t have to manufacture a new physical product for each user, so the costs of developing your SaaS product is spread over all your users. This will allow more leniency when it comes to the marketing budget.
  2. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, maintaining customer retention is very important in the SaaS industry. Your marketing budget should reflect this, and you will need to spend more on preventing churn than acquiring new customers.
  3. Since you are not selling physical products, it’s often difficult for customers to differentiate your SaaS product from your competitors’. Extra effort (and investment) is necessary to educate prospects about your unique value proposition.

With those points being said, it’s important to understand that a big marketing budget in a SaaS business is pretty common—if not necessary.

Tomas Tunguz from Redpoint Ventures mentioned in his article that in the first three years, SaaS companies spent 80-120% of its revenue, and this number will go down to around 50% after five years.

In the end, the exact amount of your marketing budget will be up to you. However, in general, every dollar you spend will generate $2.20 in a two-year period. The more you spend (properly), the faster you can grow your business.

Another important consideration is who will execute your SaaS marketing strategy. Planning without execution is—well—, nothing.

In general, you have three options:

  • Building an in-house marketing team (or, you probably already have one and will only need to make improvements.
  • Outsourcing to a marketing agency
  • Working with an expert consultant as a freelancer

Or, any combination of the above.

Also, you might need to invest in digital marketing tools and other assets.

Plan your resources needs carefully while weighing all the possibilities.

 

4. Setting Up an Evaluation Process

SaaS marketing is a long-term game, and we should also consider the fact that the field is rapidly evolving. It’s important to figure out how your marketing efforts will be measured.

Set up KPIs for your goals, and find out how each KPIs can be measured with the right metrics.

Here are some important metrics to pay attention to:

  • Customer churn rate: essentially, the number of customers you’ve lost within a specific time period.For example, if you originally have 100 customers and 10 of them cancelled their plans within one month, your churn rate for that month is 10/100 x 100%=10%
  • Revenue churn: the loss of actual revenue (related to the customer churn above) in any given time. Some customers might generate more revenue than the others (i.e. subscribed to a more expensive plan)
  • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): the projection of your monthly revenue stream. Calculating MRR can be very simple or very complex depending on your pricing model, among other factors. You might want to check this guide for a more detailed calculation.
  • Marketing-Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (MQL velocity or LVR): your growth in qualified leads in a monthly basis. You might want to check this guide for more about LVR.
  • Customer Acquisition Cost: the amount of money you’d need to spend to acquire a single customer.
  • Customer Lifetime Value: the (projected) amount of revenue generated by the average customer during their relationships with your brand.

There are certainly many other metrics you can track to measure the performance of your SaaS marketing efforts. This is a very in-depth guide discussing all the metrics you need to know in SaaS marketing, a good place to start to set up an evaluation system.

Measure your progress regularly and whenever possible, analyze your competitors’ performances. Make your adjustments accordingly.

 

End Words

While SaaS marketing is certainly unique and can provide more challenges than most other industries, proper planning and creating a SaaS marketing strategy can help you in achieving success.

In the guide above, we have discussed several key steps you can take to develop a SaaS marketing strategy, and how you can execute and evaluate the strategy. Executing SaaS marketing strategy can indeed be daunting and tedious, and if you need B2B SaaS marketing consultant, schedule a call with me!

The post B2B SAAS Marketing Strategy in 2024: Planning, Execution, Evaluation To Achieve Rapid Growth appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

]]> https://mikekhorev.com/saas-marketing-strategy-planning-execution-evaluation-achieve-rapid-growth/feed 6 SEO For IT and Technology Companies: Your Ultimate Guide https://mikekhorev.com/seo-tech-companies-ultimate-guide https://mikekhorev.com/seo-tech-companies-ultimate-guide#comments Fri, 07 Mar 2025 22:06:00 +0000 https://mikekhorev.com/?p=11299 Why SEO For IT and Technology Companies Is Unique? Let’s carefully consider three factors: The number of people using search engines is increasing at a rapid rate, each and every year. There are over 3.5 billion searches being made daily. The search engine results page (SERP) has significantly improved since the early days of the internet. In the past, we only get website results, but now we can get various “rich” and interactive results from featured snippets to embedded results from Google Maps, The search engines—and especially Google—is now a very important aspect of our lives. It’s now one of our main ways to find information—besides social media—. It is also one of the primary ways we learn about new brands, products, and services. So, SEO is obviously very important for any industry nowadays, an effective way to get noticed in this very saturated market where everybody got their voice (or rather, noise). With that being said, SEO is even more crucial in IT and technology companies due to several reasons: First,  in the IT niche, more of your competitors know about the technicalities of SEO and already have a strong online presence. In short, you are in the big leagues and the competition is even tighter. Next, your prospects—or leads— are generally tech-savvy. They expect more from your content, and you can’t use gray-hat SEO tactics to get your shallow content to rank. They will notice when your content isn’t well-developed and will be quick to jump to your competitor’s. Last but not least, especially if you are a B2B technology company, SEO is an important but risky tactic that can make or break your business. According to Junto back in late 2017, 57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO for IT and technology companies generate the most leads. On...

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]]> Why SEO For IT and Technology Companies Is Unique?

Let’s carefully consider three factors:

  • The number of people using search engines is increasing at a rapid rate, each and every year. There are over 3.5 billion searches being made daily.
  • The search engine results page (SERP) has significantly improved since the early days of the internet. In the past, we only get website results, but now we can get various “rich” and interactive results from featured snippets to embedded results from Google Maps,
  • The search engines—and especially Google—is now a very important aspect of our lives. It’s now one of our main ways to find information—besides social media—. It is also one of the primary ways we learn about new brands, products, and services.

So, SEO is obviously very important for any industry nowadays, an effective way to get noticed in this very saturated market where everybody got their voice (or rather, noise).

With that being said, SEO is even more crucial in IT and technology companies due to several reasons:

First,  in the IT niche, more of your competitors know about the technicalities of SEO and already have a strong online presence.

In short, you are in the big leagues and the competition is even tighter.

Next, your prospects—or leads— are generally tech-savvy. They expect more from your content, and you can’t use gray-hat SEO tactics to get your shallow content to rank. They will notice when your content isn’t well-developed and will be quick to jump to your competitor’s.

Last but not least, especially if you are a B2B technology company, SEO is an important but risky tactic that can make or break your business. According to Junto back in late 2017, 57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO for IT and technology companies generate the most leads. On the other hand—as mentioned above— if your content isn’t powerful enough, these leads simply won’t convert.

Building 7-Figure IT and Tech Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow IT, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

The Future of SEO and The Importance of a Right SEO Mindset

Seemingly each and every year there’s always a piece of news or two stating the death of SEO—like this one.

Here’s the deal, if you think of SEO for IT and technology companies as a tactic, it will always die every couple of years or so.

Think about it. SEO used to be all about keyword stuffing back in the early 2000s. The practice is now mainly dead ever since the introduction of Google’s Panda algorithm update back in 2011, but there are still many marketers and “SEO experts” that are still focused on keyword optimizations and keyword density.

What about link building? Yes, backlinks are still important, but nowadays it’s more about the quality rather than quantity. Think about it. Is there any tactic or strategy that can let us consistently get links from high-quality websites and relevant influencers? None, besides actually producing high-quality content and build your credibility. So, link building as a strategy is also dead.

Thus, before anything else, let’s first change our mindset: SEO for IT companies is not actually a strategy, but rather, a philosophy.

A very common—and dangerous—mistake is to think of SEO for IT and technology companies as a way to “beat” the search engines, as we treat Google and the search engines as the enemies we must defeat.

Instead, a better mindset is to treat Google as a partner, and the job of SEO is to align our online presence—our website, our content, and even our social media presence— with Google’s and the other search engines’ goals.

So, here comes our next focus: what actually is Google’s goals?

What Google Actually Is About?

Let us be clear first. Google today has expanded tremendously as a company, encompassing several different industries outside the search engine focus, from its Android OS to hardware production (Google Home, Pixel Phone, etc.)

Here, we are solely focusing on Google as a search engine.

According to Google Search’s mission statement, we can summarize that their main focus is to: create a better search engine that can deliver the most relevant, reliable, accessible, and useful for the human searchers.

We tend to forget that the end aim of SEO is the human audience, not the search engine algorithm.

Also, we can see again in that mission statement that one of Google’s goals is to help creators succeed. Don’t forget that the search engine algorithm is being updated and perfected not to give SEO marketers a harder time, but on the other hand, to ensure that the best, most relevant content and the best content creators will be the ones found by the searcher/user.

So, to reiterate, don’t treat the search engine algorithm as the enemy you must beat, but a friend you must embrace—or even a lover—. This way, think of SEO for IT and technology companies not as a strategy to help beat this enemy, but as a dating guide to help you get this girl.

Let us finally begin.

Step-By-Step Guide to Building SEO for IT and Technology Companies

Now that we’ve established a better mindset to approach SEO, it’s finally time to start developing our SEO strategy for IT and technology companies.

Although we can always use the complex technical lingo and jargon to describe the process, SEO for IT companies is actually a pretty simple concept—as we’ll learn together—. So, below we’ll break down the process into a simple, step-by-step guide, starting with the first one.

Step 1: Define Goals, Assign KPIs, and Define Ways To Achieve These Goals

In short, have a working strategy. Above, we have stated that one of the most common mistakes is to treat SEO for IT and tech companies as a strategy to beat the search engines, but it’s surprising that even many of these people actually have no working strategy at all.

First, and arguably the most important. Define your SEO goals.

Wait, isn’t the goal of SEO is obvious already? To rank higher in the SERP?

Here’s another common misconception: SERP ranking—and even ranking #1—, is not the end goal of SEO, but rather, a means to an end.

You can, for example, rank #1 on an unpopular keyword quite easily, but that won’t bring any value for your business since you won’t get any traffic, right?

Instead, here are the common objectives of IT and technology SEO:

  • Organic Traffic: simply put, getting more people to click the content and visit your website.
  • Lead Generation: we go a little further from just “traffic for the sake of traffic”, and aim to get some leads by converting some of them into prospects—and in turn, customers
  • Sales Conversion (eCommerce or affiliate marketing): convert those who consume the content to purchase our product/service (or others’ through affiliate marketing)
  • Brand Presence: improving our company’s online presence to increase awareness and perceived credibility
  • Online Reputation Management (ORM): manage your online reputation, for example by preventing negative reviews to rank higher for your branded keywords (and let your own content rank on these positions)
  • Reaching to a Specific Target (Consumer or Company): Difficult, but possible, mainly by targeting keywords that are searched by specific customers. We call this Account-Based Marketing
  • Customer Service: optimizing content that can provide useful information and answer your customer’s specific questions. This can be effective in building continuous engagement with your prospects and customers.

You can define specific goals for all of these objectives. For example, x % increase in traffic, y% increase in lead generation, specific goals in brand awareness, and so on. Or, you can focus on just a select few, or even just one of them.

Nevertheless, make sure to define at least one goal that is:

  • Specific: that is, clear and well-defined
  • Realistic: achievable. If the goal is too big or too long-term, break it down into smaller, more realistic milestones
  • Measurable: fairly straightforward, you should be able to measure the performance by measuring a specific metric tied to a KPI. (i.e. measuring the number of social engagements instead of abstract

Next, develop a clear strategy on how you can achieve these goals. For example, if your goal is to increase organic traffic by 10% in a year, how can you achieve it? Should we develop new content to target a new audience? Should we create new landing pages or even a new site altogether?

No matter the strategy or tactic you choose, the core of any SEO tactic for technology and IT company will revolve around the target keyword(s), so this will be the focus of our next step.

Step 2: Proper Keyword Research

Above, we have established that today’s SEO is no longer about keyword stuffing, but it doesn’t mean keyword optimization is no longer important—we just need to approach it differently, as we’ll learn together further below—.

Keyword research remains one of the most important steps in developing an SEO strategy, and here are some key considerations:

  • The first and most important thing here is to define and understand your audience properly, based on the goals we’ve established above. Conduct market research and develop a buyer persona, and the key here is to especially find out your ideal audience’s search intent.
  • In a nutshell, search intent is the reason behind any search query: why the audience is making the search in the first place. The idea here is to align these potential search intent with your SEO objectives—as discussed above—. For example, if your SEO objective for your IT or technology company is to increase traffic, you might want to target keywords related to informational intent. Similarly, you might also want to target keywords related to transactional or commercial intent. You might want to check out a brief guide on the different types of search intent here.
  • Based on these possible search intents, find your target keyword by following these important principles:
    • The keyword must be relevant to your audience. This is commonly identified with a high monthly search volume.
    • On the other hand, the keyword must be relevant to your business. Fairly obvious, but often neglected.
    • The competition for the keyword must be manageable according to your budget and timeline. Some keyword research tools will display “keyword difficulty” or similar metrics to assist with this.
    • Last but not least, after the keyword fulfilled all the three criteria above, is it possible to expand the keyword into a proper content—or better, topics you can create several content pieces from—
  • Use as many keyword research tools as possible (according to your budget). You can use tools like Spyfu to check your competitor’s target keywords, Buzzsumo to search for trending keywords—and topics—, or SEMRush and Ahrefs, among others, for more traditional keyword research. (possible affiliates here)
  • However, even with all the available tools and technologies, sometimes going with your guts and trusting your instinct (and experience) is a better approach. For example, keywords like “slam dunk” might be obvious for us as humans if we are targeting the basketball-related niche, but it might not be noticed by the basic keyword research algorithms.

Make a list of your target keywords and divide them by SEO goals and user intents (as we have discussed above), and divide them by priorities.

Step 3: Starting a Content Marketing Plan

Let’s reiterate what we have discussed further above: as the search engine’s algorithm getting smarter, there’s no shortcut to SEO for technology and IT companies besides actually having high-quality, relevant content that is valuable for your audience.

So, planning how you will approach your content marketing ahead will tremendously help you in the process. We’ll always start, however, with why, which is the searcher’s intents, that should be the main driving force behind the content creation process.

In general, here are several key steps in developing a content marketing plan:

  1. Decide ahead on who is/are going to work in the content development process, which can possibly include:
    • You yourself (if you are willing and have the time, you can do it yourself)
    • Content writer
    • Videographer/filmmaker
    • Voice artist for podcasts
    • SEO marketer and/or strategist
    • Graphic designer
    • Programmer (for web design, technical optimizations of SEO, etc).
  2. Examine the keyword list you’ve made above and expand it into a topic list. If you’ve already published content in the past, you can include them and mark them as (done). In the future, you might decide to update or re-use them in one way or another, so having them on the list might help. Again, structure the list according to objective/search intent, and priority. This is the what.
  3. Decide on possible publication channels—how you are going to distribute the content—, or, the where:
    • Your blog
    • Guest posting opportunities
    • Medium.com and other similar publication sites
    • YouTube
    • Other video sharing platforms (Vimeo, etc.)
    • Email newsletter
    • Podcast publication
  4. Determine the when: when to publish the content, how frequent, and so on.
  5. Also very important, but often neglected: how are we going to promote the content (we’ll further discuss this one in the backlinks section here.)
  6. This is where we can develop an editorial calendar using all of our decisions above. You can create a basic spreadsheet containing:
    • Publication date
    • Who’s going to work on the content (creator/author)
    • Tentative title or just the topic name
    • Target keyword(s)
    • Description
    • Goal(s) for this specific content
    • Planned publication/distribution channels
    • Call-to-action (if any) and lead magnet (if any)
    • References/resources/ideas
    • Development/publication status
  7. Execute, monitor, and evaluate the workflow of your content marketing. This process will include maintaining consistent communication with your team members (if any) about:
    • Your overall marketing goal(s), content marketing goal(s) and SEO-related goal(s)
    • Whether the content is developed with the right tone, whether the quality is up there and whether it’s up to your standards. For SEO purposes, the main benchmark here is whether your content is better than the ranking competitors.
    • Make sure your team member understood your content marketing plan and can use the content/editorial calendar properly
  8. If necessary, adjust your content marketing strategy based on your evaluation, including and especially evaluation on SEO performances (more on this further below, or here)

In SEO for IT and technology companies, the phrase “content is king” can’t be any truer. On the other hand, however, the IT and technology niche is a sector with a lot of opportunities to develop various forms of content from technical tutorials to the latest news in technologies to actionable tips and tricks, among others.

An important thing to consider here is not to focus too much on keyword optimizations. Include your target keywords naturally, use synonyms and semantically related words. Focus on delivering relevant and valuable content for the human audience.

Remember that how good your content is will ultimately be the main factor in deciding the results of your SEO campaign.

Step 4: Proper Link Building

Further above, we have mentioned that today, the quality of the inbound links—backlinks— is significantly more important than quantity.

So, how can we determine the quality of a backlink? While there isn’t any one-size-fits-all approach to answer this, in general, the main thing to consider is that a backlink’s quality is directly proportional to the source website’s authority.

We can use various analytics tools—both free and paid—, to check website authority, for example, Moz’s famous Domain Authority metric, and Ahref’s Website Authority Checker, but there are also various free alternatives available.

The point is, getting backlinks from any high-quality, authoritative sites is going to be difficult, unless you are already a big website or brand in the first place—most of us simply aren’t.

So how can we do it? The answer lies in your content. If it’s any good, someone will link your content sooner or later, especially when your content is a good source of reliable data or unique information.

With the quality of your content as the prerequisite of proper link building, there are still several tactics you can use to amplify the results:

1. Deliberate add something linkable in your content but make sure it’s natural and relevant

What’s our most common reason in adding an external link to our content? It’s to back-up relevant data or to provide information about something—that is indirectly related to our content and usually too long to discuss.

For example, in this article, we might not want to provide the definition of backlinks but it might be useful for you—the readers—, so we can add an external link to content that specifically discusses inbound links/backlinks.

Another common reason is to add references to the data presented in the content to give it some weight. For example, if we make a claim that 50% of B2B technology companies are using Linkedin (it’s just an example), we can link content that provided the original claim.

We can add these kinds of data and information to our content—let’s call it a link hook— in various forms such as:

  • An original research report or case study (white paper, ebook, etc.)
  • Infographics, images, and well-taken photos (makes sure to optimize these images properly so Google can index them as valid inbound links)
  • Data roundup content like this one will always attract a lot of backlink opportunities when done properly
  • Unique information, how-tos, and interesting content will always attract links

Be creative, and don’t be afraid of trial and error. Thankfully in the IT and technology niche, there are plenty of ways to include data, actionable tips, and technical facts in our content. Meaning, many opportunities to get these valuable inbound links.

2. Promote your content to get backlinks

Here’s the deal: we’ve discussed how the quality of your content is very important in getting these backlinks. However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless someone actually notices and consumes the content.

This is where promoting your content has twofold importance:

  1. Getting more organic traffic to the content (which will bring various benefits for your website in general)
  2. Getting more backlinks in the process, which in turn will improve your SEO ranking, generate more organic traffic, and produce even more backlinks. This will create a long-term ecosystem where you can continuously generate traffic and backlinks.

Promote your content using all the available channels, and always aim to get both traffic and backlinks within each promotional channel. Always build relationships with business partners, influencers in the tech industry, and even your competitors. Be generous and link their content first, and they can be valuable sources for your backlinks in the future.

The good news is, you don’t really need to be aggressive in your link building effort.

In fact, building a lot of links too fast might be counterproductive and might get you penalized by Google—especially when you get a lot of low-quality links—. Instead, just aim to get 1 or 2 high-quality links per content, and you should be good to go. You can also check my link building services and consulting if you want to work with a professional.

Step 5: On-Site SEO Optimization (Technical Optimization)

Now that your content has (hopefully) performed accordingly, it’s time to optimize the technical factor and any other aspects of your website.

Optimizations are done outside our site, especially content promotion, and backlinks building, are often called off-site optimizations. Here, we will focus on on-site optimizations, both technical and non-technical.

Non-technical on-site optimizations mainly involve content optimizations like keyword usage, the readability of your content, and so on.

Technical SEO, on the other hand, can be really complex and cover various different areas from improving your website speed to structured data markup.

You might want to check out our previous guide covering a technical SEO checklist here for a better picture. But first, there are two main objectives in attempting technical optimization:

  1. Ensuring Google (or other search engines) can index and understand your website (and all the included pages properly
  2. Providing the best possible user experience (UX) to keep visitors on our site for as long as possible. UX metrics like bounce rate and dwell time are now both indirect and direct ranking factors.

Based on those two objectives, here are some important areas to focus on.

  • Mobile-responsiveness (or at least, mobile-friendliness) of your site. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to check your site’s current condition.
  • Page load speed. Some studies have suggested that 50% of visitors will leave the website immediately if it loads in more than 3 seconds (standard 3g connection).
  • You can follow this guide by Neil Patel for a series of steps to ensure proper and instant indexation of your site.
  • Implement structured data markup properly. This will allow your site to be viable for featured and rich snippets. You might want to check out this guide on how to implement structured data markup for SEO.
  • Optimize the website’s interface (navigation menus, layout, etc.) to ensure your visitor can get the best possible experience—to maximize dwell time—.
  • Optimize all the different elements in your content, including videos and images.
  • Test everything regularly, and test on as many different devices as possible.

Technical SEO optimizations are generally not a one-off thing, but a continuous process where we might need to readjust our approaches and reoptimize different aspects. This is where our next (and last) step comes in.

Step 6: Evaluation and Re-Optimization

This last step is about establishing a system where we can audit and monitor our website and specifically, SEO performance.

SEO for IT companies is—it’s important to note— a long-term strategy where commonly we’d need to spend 6 to 12 months before we see our site on the first page of Google’s SERP. This is why maintaining consistency and performing regular evaluation is integral.

We can use various tools to assist us in this step, from the free Google Analytics to premium tools like Ahrefs/SEMRush/Moz Pro to HubSpot. However, knowing what metrics to track is more important than simply using the most advanced tool out there.

Here are some of the most important performance metrics to pay attention to in an SEO evaluation:

  • Technical side
    • Whether the search engine can index your website properly
    • Loading speed (you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for this)
    • Mobile-responsiveness/mobile-friendliness
    • Title tags and meta descriptions on all pages, and whether they are properly optimized
    • Alt text on images
  • Content aspect
    • Whether your content is free of grammatical and spelling errors.
    • Check the relevance of the information, and whether there’s a more up to date data. You might need to update your content otherwise.
    • Proper internal linking structure
    • Whether the content has fulfilled the intended objective/catering to a specific search intent
  • Performance metrics
    • Traffic from organic search
    • Referral traffic
    • Pages that have relatively low/no traffic
    • Improvements/negative changes in rankings
    • Backlinks profile and its improvements over time
    • Best performing and least performing content
    • Content conversion rate

Based on these metrics, make the necessary adjustments to your SEO strategy for IT or technology business to improve the results.

Schedule a regular evaluation of your overall SEO strategy, and dedicate time to update and leverage existing content according to their performance—as this is often the most time-consuming aspect of the whole process.

End Words

Voila! Your technology company’s SEO strategy is set and ready to execute.

To reiterate, it’s very important to understand that SEO for IT and tech sites is a long-term game and you will need to invest at least 6 to 12 months before you see significant results from SEO services for IT and technology companies. Once your SEO strategy is well established, however, you will get a sustainable source of traffic and prospects that can generate revenue for years to come.

As we can see from the step-by-step guide above, there’s no secret tactic and holy grail strategy for improving SEO for your IT or technology company: it’s all about consistency both in quality and quantity. The quality of your content and quantity in publication. The quality of your backlinks and consistency in growing your backlinks profile naturally, and so on. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Everybody can certainly attempt and execute SEO, the hard part is to stay consistent until the finish line.

The post SEO For IT and Technology Companies: Your Ultimate Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

]]> https://mikekhorev.com/seo-tech-companies-ultimate-guide/feed 4 How to Effectively Implement Content Marketing For SaaS Businesses https://mikekhorev.com/effectively-implement-content-marketing-saas-businesses Thu, 25 Aug 2022 02:06:45 +0000 https://mikekhorev.com/?p=10807 Content marketing is a very important aspect of the SaaS business. In fact, in a SaaS space, probably your content is just as important as your product. So, how can we effectively implement content and inbound marketing for a SaaS business? In this guide, we will learn how. We will divide this guide into three big sections: keyword research, content development, and content promotion. All three are equally important for a successful SaaS content marketing campaign, and let us begin with the first one.   Keyword Research for SaaS Business   1. User Intent Your target keywords should be relevant to your business, or else it won’t bring value. Although there can be many different factors, arguably the most important one is whether the keyword can meet your audience’s specific search intent. Here are some common user intents in the SaaS space, and some examples of the keyword implementations. For these examples, let’s assume we are selling a cloud computing SaaS product: Informational intent: the user is not specifically looking for a SaaS product, but looking for information/answers related to their needs or problems. For example, they might be looking for information about automating their database, and so you can target keywords like “database automation” here. Product research: here, the user is interested in purchase and is currently researching their options. You can target keywords like “your brand name vs your competitor’s name”, “cloud computing tools comparisons”, etc. Navigational intent: the user probably has heard about your product from a colleague, and so is currently searching for your website specifically. Here, you can target branded keywords Remember that the user’s intent will evolve according to their stages in the buyer’s journey. The key here is truly understanding your audience, figure out all possible intents, and target the proper keywords.  ...

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]]> Content marketing is a very important aspect of the SaaS business. In fact, in a SaaS space, probably your content is just as important as your product. So, how can we effectively implement content and inbound marketing for a SaaS business? In this guide, we will learn how.

We will divide this guide into three big sections: keyword research, content development, and content promotion. All three are equally important for a successful SaaS content marketing campaign, and let us begin with the first one.

 

Keyword Research for SaaS Business

 

1. User Intent

Your target keywords should be relevant to your business, or else it won’t bring value. Although there can be many different factors, arguably the most important one is whether the keyword can meet your audience’s specific search intent.

Here are some common user intents in the SaaS space, and some examples of the keyword implementations. For these examples, let’s assume we are selling a cloud computing SaaS product:

  • Informational intent: the user is not specifically looking for a SaaS product, but looking for information/answers related to their needs or problems. For example, they might be looking for information about automating their database, and so you can target keywords like “database automation” here.
  • Product research: here, the user is interested in purchase and is currently researching their options. You can target keywords like “your brand name vs your competitor’s name”, “cloud computing tools comparisons”, etc.
  • Navigational intent: the user probably has heard about your product from a colleague, and so is currently searching for your website specifically. Here, you can target branded keywords

Remember that the user’s intent will evolve according to their stages in the buyer’s journey. The key here is truly understanding your audience, figure out all possible intents, and target the proper keywords.

 

2. Search Volume

Search volume here refers to how many times a target keyword is actually being searched over a time period, usually in a monthly basis. Tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs can effectively analyze search volume, and generally you should target keywords with above 500 searches/month.

 

3. Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is, in a nutshell, how difficult it will be to compete for a certain keyword. The more popular the keyword is, obviously the more competitors you will face. Keyword research tools like, again, Ahrefs and SEMRush usually display Keyword Difficulty (KD) in percentage. The higher the percentage, the more difficult to rank for the keyword.

 

4. Finding The Balance

Here is the thing: we all want to target relevant keywords with high search volumes. However, the more search volume a keyword has, generally the higher its keyword difficulty.

There are only limited spots on that first page of Google search result, and so, the key here is finding that delicate balance between the high search volume and manageable keyword difficulty.

The more you understand your niche and your audience, the better you can find these keyword opportunities.

 

SaaS Content Development Checklist

Now that we’ve compiled our list of keywords, here are some key areas to focus on during the content development process:

 

1. Length

The longer your content, the better. However, maintaining engagement will be more difficult, the longer the content goes. Again, the key here is finding the right balance.

According to a study by Backlinko, the average length for top-ranking textual content is 1,890 words. That can be a good benchmark to start. For other content forms like podcasts and videos, this guide by MiniMatters can give you a clearer picture.

 

2. Uniqueness

When talking about content uniqueness, we are not only talking about passing CopyScape or other plagiarism checker tools. Instead, your content should also be unique in the eye of human readers.

Especially since the SaaS niche is a pretty “small” one, your audience can notice when you are rewriting another site’s content, even after you’ve polished it. Instead, you need to provide a well-researched content with original idea and information.

 

3. Optimizing headlines and descriptions

Most of us find and consume content through a Google search. After we searched for something, we will glance upon the different results and then click on one that gets our attention.

What usually made us clicked that specific content? Generally, it was the headline and/or the snippet. This is why it’s very important to optimize these two aspects.

Your title should include the target keyword naturally. Putting your keyword up-front generally produces better results, SEO-wise. However, your main focus here is to write an interesting and engaging title for your human readers.

We should also do the same with the META description: make sure it is engaging for human readers, and include your keywords naturally. You might want to check out this guide this guide to learn more about this aspect.

 

Content Promotion

No matter how good your content quality is, it won’t bring any value to your business unless you have an audience consuming it.

With that being said, content development is just half the job done, and content promotion is arguably even more important than the development process.

Here are four key areas to consider when promoting your content:

 

1. On-site Technical SEO

Google and other search engines are still the primary way of how people are finding their content. So, SEO is obviously very effective in promoting your content.

Although SEO for SaaS is a very broad subject, there are three main areas to focus on:

  • Optimizing your content for the target keyword(s)
  • Getting more backlinks, which we will discuss again further below
  • Optimizing technical, on-site SEO aspects

For technical, on-site SEO, here are a few key areas to consider:

  • Mobile-friendly, responsive design
  • Fast loading speed
  • Headline, META description, images and videos optimizations
  • XML sitemap
  • internal linking

You might also want to check with SEO experts if you need help with on-site SEO.

 

2. Backlink Building

One of the most important aspects of SaaS SEO (and inbound marketing) is building backlinks.

However, while in the past the quantity of backlinks is the most important factor, that’s no longer the case nowadays. Nowadays, having backlinks from high-quality sites is more important, even when you only have 4 or 5 of them. You might want to check out this guide by SEO Mark on determining backlinks quality.

Aim to build 5 to 10 high-quality backlinks consistently.

 

3. Using off-site promotion to gain traffic and build backlinks

When promoting your content off-site, there are two benefits to aim for: getting more traffic through these promotions, and build more backlinks as we have discussed above.

Here are some effective channels to promote your content, and how you can use these channels to get more backlinks:

  • Influencer marketing: influencer often has their own sites
  • Social media marketing: the more people who engaged with your content through paid and organic social media marketing, the higher the chance of getting more backlinks
  • Advertising: similar benefits as social media marketing
  • Guest posting: an effective way to get more backlinks while promoting your brand on high-quality sites

 

Conclusion

SaaS content marketing is not solely about pushing the sale of your product, but nurturing your audience through every step of the buyer’s journey. So, the key to a successful content marketing in the SaaS space (and any industry) is a thorough understanding of your audience: their needs, behaviors, and problems.

A proper content marketing strategy can effectively generate and nurture leads, as well as encouraging purchases in a SaaS business.

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]]> How To Implement Inbound Marketing For SaaS Businesses https://mikekhorev.com/implement-inbound-marketing-saas-businesses https://mikekhorev.com/implement-inbound-marketing-saas-businesses#comments Tue, 07 May 2019 11:58:10 +0000 https://mikekhorev.com/?p=10669 The concept of inbound marketing has been the buzzword of the marketing world in recent years. Yet, what actually is it? To put it simply, inbound marketing is about publishing relevant, valuable content to attract your customers ‘inbound’. The opposite of this idea is what we understood as the ‘traditional’ outbound marketing, where we put our marketing materials outward to disrupt prospects with advertising, cold calls, events, or any other disrupting promotions. As we can see, the key principle is about minimizing disruption, and we have also suggested that the key aspect of inbound marketing will be content. In this guide, we will discuss the ins and outs of inbound marketing, and how we can apply it to SAAS businesses. Let us begin.   Why Inbound Marketing Is Effective The are several clear benefits of inbound marketing compared to traditional marketing tactics: Since the main aim of inbound marketing is about minimizing disruption, there is generally less resistance from your audience. Inbound leads are generally more qualified since they are the ones who come to you to consume your content. Inbound marketing is easier to track with affordable, even free tools like Google Analytics. Inbound marketing is generally more affordable compared to PPC advertising, organizing events, and other traditional tactics. It is relatively easier to start: everybody can start WordPress blog or a YouTube channel. As we can see, there are many benefits offered by inbound marketing. Next, we will discuss the key concept and basic principles of the inbound marketing process.   Inbound Marketing: The Concept In general, there are three main aspects of inbound marketing: Content Development Content Promotion (including SEO for SaaS) Content Leveraging There is a growing assumption that inbound marketing is essentially a modernized SEO, and there is some truth to that statement: inbound marketing...

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]]> The concept of inbound marketing has been the buzzword of the marketing world in recent years. Yet, what actually is it?

To put it simply, inbound marketing is about publishing relevant, valuable content to attract your customers ‘inbound’. The opposite of this idea is what we understood as the ‘traditional’ outbound marketing, where we put our marketing materials outward to disrupt prospects with advertising, cold calls, events, or any other disrupting promotions.

As we can see, the key principle is about minimizing disruption, and we have also suggested that the key aspect of inbound marketing will be content.

In this guide, we will discuss the ins and outs of inbound marketing, and how we can apply it to SAAS businesses. Let us begin.

 

Why Inbound Marketing Is Effective

The are several clear benefits of inbound marketing compared to traditional marketing tactics:

  • Since the main aim of inbound marketing is about minimizing disruption, there is generally less resistance from your audience.
  • Inbound leads are generally more qualified since they are the ones who come to you to consume your content.
  • Inbound marketing is easier to track with affordable, even free tools like Google Analytics.
  • Inbound marketing is generally more affordable compared to PPC advertising, organizing events, and other traditional tactics.
  • It is relatively easier to start: everybody can start WordPress blog or a YouTube channel.

As we can see, there are many benefits offered by inbound marketing. Next, we will discuss the key concept and basic principles of the inbound marketing process.

 

Inbound Marketing: The Concept

In general, there are three main aspects of inbound marketing:

  • Content Development
  • Content Promotion (including SEO for SaaS)
  • Content Leveraging

There is a growing assumption that inbound marketing is essentially a modernized SEO, and there is some truth to that statement: inbound marketing is about publishing valuable contents regularly, and the main way to get those contents discoverable is SEO since the most of us stumbled upon a content through a Google search. Yet, there are other promotion channels we can use to promote our content, and there are also ways to leverage our content to generate even more leads. For the rest of this guide, we will discuss the key areas you should focus on in SAAS inbound marketing strategy:

 

1. Content Development

The core of SaaS inbound marketing is your content, and especially the quality of your content. While SaaS content marketing is a pretty broad subject by itself, here are some of the key principles you should consider:

  • Your content must be unique and valuable. The content must be unique enough so it won’t be flagged by Google, and it must be valuable and relevant to attract your audience.
  • Headings (Titles) and subheadings do matter. Check out this guide by WordStream that might help you further.
  • In general, aim for 1,000 to 2,000 words of content length. The SAAS audience generally appreciate in-depth, data-driven contents, so length is also of import
  • Use various forms of media. Even in a written content, you can use images, infographics, and even short videos
  • Aim to tell a great story even in your most technical, in-depth contents

 

2. SEO

Working with an expert SaaS SEO agency is also one of the most important parts of inbound marketing. If the essence of content marketing is putting your contents out there, SEO is the main way to promote those contents. Almost everything including purchase on the internet begins with a Google search, and optimizing the search ranking is a very important aspect of promoting our content.

There are several key SEO aspects to consider:

 

Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization has been and still the most important factor for SEO. However, it is true that for modern SEO, we can’t simply stuff our contents with the target keyword(s) and hope for the best, since Google also account for the article quality and value for human readers. To ensure this, make sure your keyword(s) occurs naturally throughout the text while focusing on the content’s readability for human readers. Also, use other words that are semantically related to the main keyword throughout the article.

 

Backlinks

Backlinks are also very important for SEO. The idea is, the more people (sites) linking your site, the more credible your site is. Yet, we should also consider the quality of backlinks, as only authoritative sites will be accounted for by Google. In fact, if you have too many links from low-quality sites, you can get penalized.

There are many different approaches we can use in building backlinks. Yet, if your contents are already valuable, naturally there will be people who will link it sooner or later. So, the quality and relevancy of your content are the most important thing to focus on. Other effective ways you can try are influencer marketing, guest posting, and building relationships with authority sites.

 

3. Influencer Marketing

We have briefly discussed influencer marketing above, and in this saturated world of digital marketing, one of the most effective ways to get our voice heard. The idea behind influencer marketing is fairly simple: as the name suggests, we get influencer(s) of our niche to promote our content. Yet, by no means, it’s always an easy process.

Not every influencer will be willing to promote our content just because we asked them. So, there are two main areas to focus on:

 

Finding The Right Influencers

There are many different tools that can help you, including BuzzSumo’s influencer identification tool. Yet, arguably the most effective way is to manually find your influencers by monitoring social media and online trends.

 

Building Relationships

Sometimes, a simple personalized email is all it takes to get an influencer to work together with you. Yet, it’s not always that simple. Build relationships by engaging them on their social media channels, you can mention their contents and how they inspire you and offer them to comment on your content. Join the conversation in their channels frequently by giving valuable information or engaging questions. It will take time, but it will be worth it in the long run.

 

End Words

Inbound marketing is especially powerful for SAAS businesses nowadays, while we should also consider the fact that inbound leads are generally the most qualified. The concept behind inbound marketing is fairly simple: publish your content and promote it to generate leads for your SaaS business. The key to success here is consistency both in quality and quantity: maintain the quality of your contents, and maintain a regular publication schedule.

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