The Type of Content To Produce At Every Lifecycle Stage (Part Two)
February 21, 2020
Editor’s Note: This article is Part 2 of a 3-part series covering content creation at three different lifecycle stages. You can check out Part 1 here.
As we did with companies belonging to the previous lifecycle stage, we’ll explore some of the characteristics of SaaS companies that are establishing product-market fit. Some of the most prominent markers include the following:
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- You can present your product as the solution to what people are searching for
- You have a widespread set of customers who like using your product
- You have the resources and capabilities to invest in your content efforts
- You know what features provide users with the most value
- You know the best use cases of your product
- Your website has a higher domain authority
- People trust your brand
- You have a growing audience
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In general, things are better for SaaS companies at this stage. Of course, if you ask any SaaS founder what it’s like getting there, you’ll most likely hear that it’s actually one of the most difficult things to do. However, once you do get there, you have to start thinking about the next stage: scaling.
Based on the facts that we’ve outlined, we’ll explain what kind of content SaaS companies should be publishing and why.
1) Present Your Product as the Solution
At this point, your product is considered a solution to a certain problem by a growing number of users. You’ve probably also now managed to increase your domain authority, which means that you can start ranking for more competitive terms—terms that are directly connected to your customers’ problems and pain points.
Let’s assume you run an online course builder—a software that helps users create and sell their online courses. A good opportunity here would be “how to create an online course,” since it’s a term that may have informational intent but might also include commercial intent.
If you were to search for that term online, you’d see that one of the top results comes from the online course creation software, LearnWorlds.
If you go a step further and click the link, you’d notice that this an in-depth guide with more than 5,000 words that covers every aspect of creating and selling your own online course.
Of course, at some point, there is a mention of the product as well. The reason is obvious: LearnWorlds wants to explain how the product adds value within the context of this guide without being too sales-y.
What’s interesting here is that this term is somewhat competitive.
So why bother in the first place? Don’t forget that by this stage your overall domain authority is higher. This means that you can target more competitive terms and potentially rank for them. It also means that your overall visibility—based on your current status—is higher.
At this point, you should be creating and publishing content that connects problems to solutions while also mentioning your product.
2) Feature-focused Content
A very interesting aspect of content creation for SaaS companies that have found product-market fit is that they can (and need to) create content that’s relevant to their features.
To do so, you have to search for and find how people are looking for your product features. Back to our online course creation software, some ideas could include the following:
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- Online course builder
- Online training software
- Online course creation software
- Learning management system (LMS)
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You need to find which of those are relevant and make sense and then create content pages—or in some cases, feature pages. The more your product evolves, the more content you’ll be able to create around your features. Hopefully, your features will at some point gain a considerable search volume on their own, regardless of what’s been happening with the product itself.
3) Comparison Guides
At this point, your competition most likely knows that you exist. The same applies for your target market. People know that you and other solutions exist. And what do people do when they know there’s more than one solution on the market? They start to compare.
Of course, there’s a brand issue here as well—do you want to actually mention your competitors? Will this be good for your brand? These are questions that you should answer before considering creating such content.
A company doing this the right way is Chanty, a team communication software. Through valuable and actionable content, Chanty gets organic traffic and visibility for terms that are relevant to their competition (e.g. Slack alternatives).
The truth is that there are two ways to do this: the right way and the wrong way. In my experience, there’s usually nothing better than healthy competition. As long as you’re respectful and your opinion is unbiased, this can certainly contribute to your overall content efforts.
You now know what kind of content you should be creating in the product-market fit stage. In the last part of this article series, we’ll discuss the third (and final) stage, which is all about scaling your SaaS company.