Blog marketing for SaaS brands

Blog marketing for SaaS brands helps drives loyalty, retention and conversion rates.

SaaS brands need to employ strong content strategy and blog marketing to attract and convert customers. One of the most vital parts of acquisition marketing for SaaS brands is to provide the right information, resources, stories and content to influence potential customers. Blogs can be a powerful tool within a SaaS marketing strategy.

The selling point for many SaaS brands is the potential to reduce IT costs, improve ease of use, offer on-going updates, increase device access points and offer an on-demand value proposition. Blog content can offer insights into each of these value propositions--providing context and examples.

Blog marketing tips for SaaS

• Viral content. Blogs give SaaS brands freedom to explore social trends within their content. Leverage trends and wildly interesting themes to propel content into content sharing networks like StumbleUpon, Google Plus, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Reddit.
• Make blog content attractive and sharable. Add media to make content on your SaaS blog more attractive. Attractive content is inherently more shareable than blandly styled content. Invest a little in the media within your blog articles, and your readers will be significantly more enticed to stay and share.
• Be helpful. Your brand blog can provide resources, tips and how-to guides. Being helpful to prospects, leads and customers wins their attention and loyalty. Users will appreciate helpful resources that are not obvious sales-pleas. Do not give in to the temptation to sell your product within this content. Feel free to include examples of how to use your product to solve problems, but self-promotion can drive away some prospects.
• Calls-to-action. Your blog will be part of both your nurturing and your acquisition strategy. Use strong calls-to-action within your blog to drive conversions and leads. Make sure that the prospect understands how to engage with your brand and encourage it with clear calls-to-action. Don’t hide the call-to-action amidst the assortment of other content, images and navigation items. Let your calls-to-action stand out clearly.
• Incentivize email sign-ups. Email marketing can be a powerful way to grow relationships with your brand. Provide incentives to grow your email list, and use your email list to deliver meaningful resources, tips, ideas, reports and data to help your prospects and leads solve everyday challenges. Email content can reference and link to your brand blog themes. By connecting your email marketing and blog marketing efforts, you can re-engage leads and drive them into a conversion. Often prospects need time before they convert. Email marketing and blogging go hand-in-hand.
• Offer free trial or demo links from the blog. Provide free trial or demo links from your blog. Your SaaS brand blog may acquire more traffic than the rest of your entire website. This is not uncommon. Experiment with the ideal placement for converting blog visitors into the sign-up process.
• Increase blog page views and prevent drop-off. For content websites and blogs, acquiring web traffic is not enough. Work hard to increase page views, sharing and click throughs. Use recommendation tools to encourage visitors to explore more content in your blog. Interlink posts to improve SEO and provide context to blog articles. Here are a couple hints on how to increase pages views in a blog.
• SEO-value of blogging. Improve the SEO value of your blog by improving the layout, format and visual qualities of your business blog content. More visual posts will make your content more socially shareable, thus increasing the number of tweets, shares and links, which help search visibility. Remember to improve page titles for SEO, by including relevant keywords and search phrases. Align your H1 title tag with your page title, and include structured and style mark-up within your content. Use style elements like bold, links, bullets, H1s, H2s and italics.

3 reasons why SaaS companies should blog

1. Blogging generates traffic. Fresh content increases the interest of search engines to a website and expands the opportunities for acquiring new leads.
2. Blogging can make a SaaS company more accessible and likable because blog content can be less formal and corporate feeling. Blogging can infuse life in a SaaS brand.
3. Builds loyalty and nurtures relationships. Blogging has the potential for exploring more themes and subjects than other sections of a SaaS brand promotional website. Use this freedom to be helpful and entertaining to prospects, leads and customers. By doing so, your brand will earn their attention, interest and loyalty--driving up retention rates.