B2B SaaS Marketing – Turn content into a powerful revenue driver

B2B SaaS marketing teams create and publish a lot of content. But how can you make sure that the content you’re creating is getting results in terms of driving business leads, and ultimately, revenue?

Hey everyone, I’m Keirra Woodard, and today I’m going to show you a method for using content marketing as a powerful revenue driver for your B2B SaaS business.

Typical B2B SaaS content creation process

So here’s the typical process of creating and publishing content:

First the marketing team sets up a publishing schedule. Often, this is a calendar they’re using to create and publish a certain number of blog posts, social media posts, etc. every week, month, or quarter.

The content produced as a result of following this publishing schedule typically targets multiple different audiences. For example, business-to-business SaaS companies typically have several different subscription tiers: they might have one tier for small to medium-sized businesses, and they might have a different tier for enterprise companies.

Each of the different businesses you’re targeting as customers will require targeting a different persona within that company. For example, some of the blogs that you’re producing on your website might be targeting VPs or executives at a company, whereas some of your blogs might be targeting middle managers.

As a result of this process, the business leads that are generated tend to be pretty unpredictable every quarter.

There are lots of different types of content — there are blogs, there are white papers, there are case studies, there are webinars — and they’re all bringing in website traffic and leads of varying numbers and varying quality, all from various target audiences. That makes it very difficult to track, measure, or improve lead generation results over time. 

So what can we do about that?

I’m going to show you a way to systematically figure out what content is the most important to create to drive high-quality business leads and ultimately revenue.

Identify target audiences that drive revenue

The first thing you want to do is identify the target audiences that are going to drive revenue for your business. So maybe for example you’re a SaaS company and you’re selling marketing automation tools or software.

Maybe you have two main audiences:

• Perhaps one subscription tier is targeting small businesses. So within those small businesses, a lot of the time you’re talking to marketing managers and they’re the ones making the purchase decision.
• Maybe you’re also targeting larger enterprises, and you’re marketing to marketing VPs that are higher up on the executive level.

Set traffic and lead goals for each target audience

The next thing you want to do is figure out exactly how much web traffic and qualified leads that you’re going to need for each audience, to reach your business revenue goals.

Example: Selling to small businesses

For example, the goal for your company is to get 20 sales each month to small businesses, and maybe the audience that you’re targeting within those small businesses is marketing managers.

So you would need, based on your historical customer data, about 40 qualified leads to get to 20 sales per month. To get 40 qualified leads, maybe a benchmark you can use based on other companies’ typical conversion rates is that for every 4000 website visitors, you’re going to get 40 qualified leads.

So you put out your content for this audience of marketing managers and you get 10,000 website visitors and five qualified leads specifically from marketing managers at small businesses.

So what do you do? You don’t need to create more top-of-the-funnel content for this particular audience of small business marketing managers. You’re already getting more website visitors than you thought you would get.

The issue is, it’s not enough qualified leads. So, what you would need to do in that situation is create more bottom of funnel content — more case studies, more webinars demoing your solution, more calculators — whatever it is that’s going to move this audience from following your content to buying. 

Example: Selling to large enterprises

Let’s look at another example. Maybe your goal is to get two sales a month from large enterprises, and the audience you’re targeting within those large enterprises is the marketing vice presidents.

You need about five qualified leads from those marketing VPs to be passed to the sales team.

To get those qualified leads, you need about 500 website visitors from this audience per month.

So what you got was 100 website visitors from marketing VPs. But, you only got one qualified lead at the end of the month. So, what do you do in that situation?

Well, you got the ideal conversion rate. There’s one qualified lead for every hundred website visitors, so the conversion rate was ideal. You don’t need to create more bottom of the funnel content for these marketing VPs.

You need to invest in more top-of-the-funnel content like more blogs or white papers because you want to attract more marketing VPs into your marketing funnel.

Making your B2B SaaS content marketing systematic

With this system, you’ll know exactly what piece of the marketing funnel to focus on to get more leads. You’ll know whether to use top-of-the-funnel content like blogs and white papers to attract new people from a particular audience, or whether you need to focus on converting them. You’ll also know how to break that up and segment that for each audience. 

The performance of your content is telling you exactly what you need to create next to get more leads.

Before, we were just creating content to fill the calendar. We were brainstorming content for all the different audiences at one time, and the leads we were getting were inconsistent.

But now, with this system, your content creation will be directly tied to generating revenue.

You will be creating content only for the specific stages of the buying funnel that are tied to bringing you more leads and more revenue.

And you’ll never waste time creating any content that isn’t going to be directly tied to you getting more leads right now.

Want more tips on B2B SaaS content marketing?

Ready to put your content strategy together?