4 Content Marketing Tips To Improve B2B SaaS Sales

B2B SaaS companies face significant sales challenges. These four content marketing tips can help solve them.

Imagine working tirelessly for six painstaking months to achieve an outcome that never happens. And not just once. But many times. If you run a B2B SaaS company, this doesn’t sound like theory to you, but the reality of your sales process. And you’ve likely heard about the promising effect of content marketing on sales:

• 90 percent of buyers say online content has a major effect on their purchasing decision
• 47 percent percent of buyers say thought leadership made them discover and purchase from a company not among the established leaders of a specific niche
• 30 percent higher growth is achieved by companies that prioritize content marketing

Still, you know just “doing” content marketing won’t bring you better results. So, whether you’re new to it or already have an established program, here are four content marketing tips that can help lead to more predictable and reliable sales.

1. Develop content that offers customers clarity and confidence

You know B2B sales is hard, we’ve covered that. But many of your prospects feel similar about B2B purchasing.

A Gartner study found that most buyers feel overwhelmed by the amount of information they encounter in their purchasing journey. Another one by LinkedIn-Edelman discovered that 71 percent of decision makers believe half or less than half of thought leadership content offers valuable insights. 

The problem isn’t buyers’ interest in content. Most decision makers report spending more than an hour each week reviewing thought leadership. Instead, the problem is their ability to efficiently find what makes them smarter. 

So it’s no surprise that when a business can solve that problem, they’re rewarded for their efforts. 

Take HubSpot for example. If you need an inbound marketing solution (whether you know it or not), you’ll likely find yourself relying on this content behemoth for information. The B2B SaaS company offers three separate blogs and countless templates, insightful research reports, guides, whitepapers, and more. Rather than making it harder for buyers to learn about inbound marketing, HubSpot teaches them its importance and equips them to become more effective at using it to drive desirable business outcomes.

And buyers have rewarded them for it. Since 2005, HubSpot has grown from a scrappy startup to a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of $13.76 billion at the time of this writing.

That brings us to the first content marketing tip: Create content that offers customers clarity and confidence. Assuming you know your audience and what they would find valuable, the following actions can help make your buyers smarter and more empowered in their journey:

1. Conduct primary research. Run a survey or study that examines your buyer’s problem and/or solution and make the key insights the focus of your content offer. 
2. Make your content research-based. Support your objections and claims with compelling and credible research from trusted, independent third-parties.
3. Leverage trust signals. Use customer testimonials and industry awards throughout your content offers — e.g., website, social media, blog, gated collateral, etc. 
4. Share customer case studies. Prioritize the creation of customer case studies that illustrate the “before” and “after” your solution. 
5. Focus on earned media to scale your credibility and reach. Invest time in byline articles, speaking engagements, and guest media appearances to drive awareness and engagement from established audiences.

2. Give your sales team a convenient way to access and share content

Sales enablement — or equipping the sales team with content and resources to succeed — continues to gain importance in B2B. In fact, most Chief Sales Officers call it a critical priority. As buyers demand and consume more information than ever before, sales teams need a fast and easy way to share content, which calls for an organized library.

In my experience, the most effective content libraries provide company-wide access to all marketing collateral and make it easy to find, download, and share. One team manages it, handles the versioning control, and retires outdated collateral, which makes the library the single source of truth for what you want the public to see.

Importantly, a library enables the sales team to work more efficiently and productively. And it solves a key point of friction between sales and marketing: it discourages sales people from creating their own content, which keeps messaging and branding consistent. It also solves a key challenge within marketing: it decreases the chances of duplicating content by making it easy to audit what you have and what you need. 

To take advantage of this content marketing tip and build your library:

1. Choose your library. Pick where to store your content, making sure you choose a cloud-based medium that makes it easy for you to upload, download, and manage assets, and others to access the resources they need.
2. Organize it well and logically. Classify your library by collateral type or use case so people can use it fast and easily. 
3. Pick an owner. Choose one team or person to (1) upload new content, (2) retire outdated content, (3) alert the company when new content becomes available, and (4) manage the library.

3. Create a diverse content offering to appeal to unique tastes and learning styles

It’s easy to think of “content” as limited to a handful of assets. But in reality there are at least 100 different types exist to engage your audience. Probably more.

The best content marketing approach finds a healthy balance between using content that works most effectively for a target audience, while also diversifying it to maximize engagement and interest. In other words, our third content marketing tip says you should use content that resonates, but not to the point it turns into noise or becomes intrusive for your audience.

Remember how you watched your favorite movie too many times in a row? Did you continue loving it? Or did you stop watching it because you couldn’t stand it anymore? That analogy applies to your content marketing program too.

To diversify your content fast and easily:

1. Identify your best performing content assets. Assess content performance by format, channel, and topic. For your best performing formats and channels, plan to use them regularly. With your topics, explore new ways or angles you can cover them. 
2. Set your rhythm. Develop a consistent cadence for developing specific types of content including format and channel.
3. Create your recipes. Develop formulas for repurposing content from one format to another. 
4. Build toward diversity. Look to diversify your content offers so they appeal to multiple learning styles, while still giving greatest priority to what performs the best for your buyers.

4. Create content to engage your existing customers

In the effort to win over new buyers, you may lose sight of existing customers and your source of renewals. Fortunately, content marketing provides an effective vehicle for nurturing existing relationships without significant effort and expense. Our fourth content marketing tip, it can provide an effective way to retain existing customers, generate referenceable accounts, benefit from cross-promotion, and much more.

Zendesk recently launched its inaugural Zendesk Community Day. The event brought customers together to network, learn more about the Zendesk product, and attend an awards ceremony where customers received honors across a number of categories. The company created a wide range of content to engage its customers before, during, and after the event. 

As a result, they likely helped their customers become better Zendesk users, strengthened their engagement, and increased their loyalty — all important to keeping them happy and more likely to renew. 

To create content that engages your existing customers:

1. Recognize them. Turn your customers into evangelists by launching a periodic awards program that highlights their achievements and creates the incentive for them to share with their audiences. 
2. Tell their story. As mentioned previously, offer to write case studies that celebrate your customers’ heroic journey. 
3. Give them a platform to tell their story. Empower your customers to participate in a webinar and talk about their “before” and “after” experience using your product.
4. Celebrate their wins. Share any customer announcements about awards they’ve won, clients they’ve earned, publications they’ve produced, etc. Do this especially when it has nothing to do with your product.
5. Partner with them on thought leadership. Offer your customers the opportunity to partner in producing earned or owned media, such as a byline article or cobranded eBook.

Let content marketing do the heavy lifting

By applying these four content marketing tips, you can create the conditions to make next quarter’s sales smoother than this one’s.

To be clear, content marketing can’t fix a sales problem resulting from an undesirable product or ineffective sales team. But it can improve your sales if the main reason your prospects say “no” is because you didn’t help them clarify or trust their buying journey. 

So, let content marketing simplify the sale and purchase for you and your prospects, respectively. Start by having your content marketing team read this, or if you don’t have one, ask me to point you in the right direction.