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The guide to better SaaS content marketing

Words: Duncan Begg – Founder

Category(s): Branding, Campaigns, Content, Positioning

Date: 6th May 2025

How to create strategies, stories and campaigns that actually work

 

Contents

 

 

Foreword

The importance of quick B2B SaaS content-marketing wins

Let’s start with a story that is relevant to all SaaS start-ups and scale-ups looking to get better at content marketing.

Beneath is a B2B marketing agency that has become recognised by search engines and LLMs all over the world for its brand-building and positioning expertise.  But here’s our dirty secret: we are primarily a content-marketing agency. Around 90% of our revenue comes from content marketing – activities like copywriting, SEO, campaign creation etc.

So why did we decide to become famous for brand and positioning? Why did we almost exclusively focus all our content creation efforts in this area for three years? A few reasons.

  • From a B2B marketing strategy POV we knew that we had significant expertise in this area.
  • We also knew that companies that want new B2B brand strategies and positionings inevitably need help with content soon after.
  • We knew that it would be hard to cut through the content-marketing noise. There are lots and lots of B2B content-marketing experts out there. There are far fewer positioning experts.
  • The type of customers that buy from us (B2B heads of marketing, content-marketing managers etc) already have good content-marketing knowledge, and would have niche content-marketing problems to solve. It would have taken a long time to cover enough niche problems to see demonstrable results.

But here are the most important reasons for focusing on positioning:

  • Our target customers don’t know much about positioning, brand strategy and branding in general. Sometimes marketing leaders will only be involved in two or three of these projects in their entire careers.
  • The people searching for this term will often have a strong intent to buy – i.e. a positioning project they need help with.

In summary, we identified an area of marketing in which we had expertise our audience could benefit from, and created content that would be likely to be consumed by people/companies who are actively looking for a marketing partner.

So effectively, we identified a bottom-of-funnel content area that opened up immediate sales opportunities. It was a play designed to get people emailing or calling us for immediate help rather than just signing up to Beneath’s newsletter on B2B marketing. We wanted to find people who were in market to buy now. We now get organic positioning leads every week.

A key content marketing takeaway for SaaS companies

As a SaaS company, it makes sense wherever possible to focus on content and keywords that have a high chance of being consumed by people who are looking for a solution your product offers. Arguably, you should prioritise this low-hanging fruit before focusing on higher up the B2B content funnel.

Conventional wisdom in B2B content marketing has been to focus on the top of the funnel before the bottom to ‘make some noise’ and ‘get our brand out there’. This is fine. But there are almost always quick wins to be had.

Why did we start off this marketing article with such specific tactical advice? Firstly, because quick wins are what you need as a B2B SaaS startup or scaleup, or frankly, a SaaS company of any size in any sector. Secondly, it’s a good example of thinking strategically and practicing B2B marketing effectively. And that’s what this article is really all about.

Section 1

Who this SaaS content-marketing article is for

The fact you’re reading this article probably means you already know a lot about content marketing. So we won’t focus on any back-to-basics SaaS content-marketing discussion. If you feel you need this, we recommend this guide to content-marketing strategy by Velocity Partners – an agency our founders once worked at. It’s over a decade old but still relevant.

In simple terms, B2B SaaS content marketing is about providing your customers and prospects with interesting, useful information that wins their attention, helps them get better at their job, keeps them up to date with what’s happening in their industry and, of course, educates them about your SaaS products – ultimately increasing the likelihood that they’ll buy from you.

Simple, right? Yes. But in reality, most B2B SaaS brands struggle with their content-marketing operations. There tends to be a few key reasons for this:

  • Too many don’t have a compelling, relevant point of view to bring to their market.
  • Too many spend too little time on the strategy that should precede campaign execution.
  • Too many don’t know enough about their buying audience.

But we’re here to tell you that all SaaS brands have the potential to be good at content marketing. It doesn’t matter how noisy the market is, how average your company’s SaaS solution might be, or how bad your product-market fit is. The secret is to find the right stories to tell your audience, then to tell those stories where your target market tends to hang out. Of course, there’s a bit of work to be done in between to make this possible…

Section 2

Good SaaS content marketing starts with a good story

Brand storytelling is an inestimably important skill for SaaS brands. But too many SaaS brands (especially those in the B2B space) don’t have the confidence to tell emotive, powerful stories. Some default to the cold, hard facts – the tech and specs. Others do attempt to have fun with their brands, and do talk to their audience in friendly ways, but in reality have very little of consequence to say.

It’s not an understatement to suggest that content-marketing deficiencies like this can be disastrous for the prospect of any SaaS brand. No matter how good your product, or how well your product fits its intended market, long-term brand-building is essential. You need to keep capturing the attention of new potential customers, then holding their attention, so you can earn the right to let them know about your product’s evolving features and USPs.

Many studies have shown that buyers tend to make subconscious, emotive buying decisions, subsequently justifying them with logic. This is the case in both B2C and B2B contexts. By leading with a compelling story, you can seamlessly integrate product information into the broader narrative.

It’s worth remembering that great stories and great content marketing aren’t just for winning attention and moving prospects down the marketing funnel. The right stories and content can help you in all kinds of ways: like customer retention, partner marketing, sales enablement, pitching to investors, attracting talent… the list goes on.

Finding the right story for your B2B SaaS brand

Every SaaS brand has a core story that should be the foundation on which all its content marketing should be built. This story will convey the fundamental reason for its existence, a distinct value it offers to the world, and more precisely, a distinct value it offers to a specific type of customer with a particular need.

In this sense, storytelling is a strategic marketing capability. It can lead to content marketing that delivers a compelling ROI and a decisive competitive advantage.

So the question is: How do you put in place the strategic foundation for good storytelling and effective content marketing?

Develop the right narrative for a strong B2B brand and better content marketing

It’s all about developing a strong brand narrative rooted in a thoroughly researched and clearly differentiated positioning. Then it’s a matter of consistently bringing this narrative to life.  Firstly, ensuring that every visual and verbal element of a SaaS brand aligns with the story and reinforces it in the minds of target audiences. Then using this story to help achieve your marketing objectives.

This is particularly critical in B2B SaaS markets, where products and solutions are often complex, and purchasing decisions may span months or years, involving extensive evaluation by large, cross-functional committees. In this environment, superficial narratives just don’t cut it.

B2B SaaS content marketing requires compelling, coherent, and credible stories – narratives that not only establish a clear trajectory for growth but also endure intense buyer scrutiny and foster collective alignment among decision-makers.

The next section sets out how to arrive at a story that works hard for your brand.

Section 3

SaaS content-marketing strategy: Segment, target, position

As we set out in section 2, good SaaS content marketing draws audiences in with a story and slips product information in as part of the plot.

But before investing resources in this pursuit, we need to identify which audiences our SaaS solution is right for – making sure they’re likely to be interested, and have the budget to pay for it.

So we segment the market into groups of buyers with relevant familiar traits. Then we target the groups that are right for us. Then (as Al Ries and Jack Trout set out in the 1960s) we position our brand or product in their minds, with a message that resonates.

First, define the parameters to inform your marketing strategy

Both targeting and positioning are strategic activities that require us to define certain parameters – like who or what we’re competing with, what our differentiators are, and what type of value our SaaS solution provides for our exact target market.

Often we’ll need an overarching positioning for a brand or product, then several others for each target segment (depending on the brand in question and its offer).

Either way, this type of knowledge should be in place before any type of marketing execution begins – whether that’s creating a new brand narrative, a content-marketing campaign, a sales strategy, or a piece of content.

Without solid segmentation, we can’t effectively target. Without accurate targeting, we can’t successfully position our brand or product. Without appropriate positioning of our brand or product, we won’t be able to come up with ideas and stories that connect with our buyers.

Dive deeper into the story

In our guide, Storyful brands and how to build them, we explain how positioning relates to vision, mission, strategy, messaging and other types of jargony B2B marketing activities. More specifically, we set out how a brand narrative — in other words an overarching story for a product or brand — can be created using all the elements defined in the positioning process. Get this right and you’re ready to roll out your story and wider messaging.

 

Prepare for SaaS brand-building and lead generation

The raisons d’etre of B2B SaaS marketing departments can be fairly – if a little reductively – thought of as longer-term brand building combined with shorter-term lead generation and sales-activation efforts.

Brand building is about developing a brand image and reputation that your target audience notices and remembers. On the other hand, lead-generation efforts tend to be about persuasion – setting out reasons to buy now. In section 5, we discuss this more deeply.

For now it’s worth noting that, as different as these two marketing activities can be, effective segmentation, targeting and positioning of a brand and its products will power success in both.

Section 4

Customer research: the key to SaaS content marketing success

Shine a light on your buyers

The art of gathering information about markets is ignored by so many content-marketing practitioners. This is a crying shame. All that unplucked low-hanging fruit. All those unenjoyed quick wins.

It’s a lovely feeling to gradually sketch a detailed picture of an audience in your mind, and to feel the ideas effortlessly sparking as you build a deeper understanding of them. When you understand your target audience, you’re in a better position to develop distinct and emotionally-driven creative, which, according to various studies, increases the likelihood that your brand is remembered in a buying situation.

So – just as a landscape painter seeks inspiration in their surroundings long before picking up a paint brush – it can be helpful to consider the research stage of marketing as part of the creative endeavour. We’re looking for our ideal customers and searching for ways to move and motivate them. By letting our curiosity lead us, we’re better able to put aside our preconceptions and biases, and find out more about our customers.

Here are some of the most important ways of doing that.

Look within the organisation

An obvious place to start your research phase is to look to see what your predecessors or colleagues have already done. You might unearth a long-forgotten piece of research into your SaaS product, a positioning document, a ditched brand strategy, or unpublished content. Don’t be afraid to reach out to predecessors on LinkedIn to find out where the bodies (of work) are buried.

Get searching

A couple of days of Googling, Binging or ChatGPTing nowadays can unearth deep and broad insights. Look for research projects, industry articles and third-party reports.

Cheat with proxy data

Find proxy data online. For example, if you want to discover which competitor has the most engaged audience, look for social media data such as Likes. Or for share of voice in your market, find out the share of search on Google: simply measure the total organic searches made for a specific brand, and divide it by the total number of searches for all brands in that category.

Speak to the board

Book your time with leaders and use it wisely. These are the people that should know the market and your company strategy better than most. It’s also your opportunity to secure leadership buy-in for your strategic brand work. When it’s done right, this stuff doesn’t just live in the marketing department – it steers and accelerates the overall company journey. So your leadership team has to be involved early and often.

Leverage departmental knowledge

Conversations with the sales, product and customer-success teams are essential. But also look to other departments in your business for their unique perspectives.

Interview loyal customers

This is arguably the most high-value form of research you can do. No matter what your sales or accounts team say, no matter how little time you have, do everything you can to sit down for 30 minutes or an hour with several customers who love you the most and/or pay you the most money. Learn about their pain points, and why they rely on your brand or product. You could open an invaluable roadmap to attracting similar buyers. And you might find they have views you didn’t expect about the primary strengths and weaknesses of your brand or product – or even its fundamental purpose.

Observe customers in action

Watching different customers actually use your product can give you insights you wouldn’t be able to pick up in interviews. Setting up site visits could pay off big time.

Do a brand survey

Conducting research on a specific segment or segments of a market is easy nowadays. Research companies like YouGov, Kantar, Nielsen and Ipsos can help you recruit a representative sample of your target market – for example, senior accountants in agricultural equipment manufacturers.

The questions you ask should be split up into three types:

  1. Demographic and firmographic – such as age, gender, employer size, location etc.
  2. Attitudinal – such as perceived benefits of relevant technology, competitive alternatives, standard of service etc.
  3. Behavioural – such as buying behaviour, and whether buyers would recommend a particular solution.

Test with focus groups

As useful as focus groups can be, they won’t be cost effective or feasible for many SaaS content-marketing research projects. But at the very end of a strategy phase they can be invaluable. Put together a focus group for each of your target segments, then test whether you have chosen the right segments to target, and whether your positioning ideas work.

Section 5

The SaaS content-marketing dilemma: Long-term brand building versus short-term performance marketing

The 95:5 rule was put out there in 2021 by Prof John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. He made the argument that only 5% of B2B buyers are ever in the market for particular brands. Of course this means 95% are not.

It follows that B2B SaaS content marketers must focus on staying in the minds of the 95% with emotive brand-building advertising. So when they are looking for a solution (i.e they have become part of the 5%), your SaaS brand comes to mind.

You probably should think about this less as a definite rule, and more of a general mental model. (If you know the average time it takes for customers in your category to replace their solutions, you can probably come up with a more accurate rule.) But the takeaway is the vast majority of your potential business customers aren’t looking to buy right now. But when they are, you should be ready.

SaaS brand-building versus lead-generation

Marketing effectiveness gurus Les Binet and Peter Field have provided compelling evidence that investing in long-term brand building is necessary to ensure short-term sales activation efforts remain continuously effective. In other words, without brand equity to leverage, your lead-generation efforts will eventually slow.

Brand building is about developing a brand image and reputation that your target audience notices and remembers. This could be anything from thought leadership content to a simple advert. On the other hand, lead-generation and sales-activation efforts tend to be about persuasion – winning attention, then building an argument as to why someone should buy from you. (In other words, any activity that aims to get an immediate response – like watching a demo or emailing one of our experts.)

By investing in long-term brand building you will ensure short-term sales activation efforts remain continuously effective.

Brand v lead gen: the importance of pragmatism

In many senses, SaaS content marketing plans should be thought of as two-pronged, with two distinct strategic approaches:

  • Brand-building content and campaigns will tend to be targeted at all prospects and customers.
  • Demand-generation content and campaigns will tend to zoom in on particular groups of this target audience.

You should be clear about strategic objectives for all your campaigns. However, your thought-leadership content should help to fuel your demand-gen campaigns as well as build your brand. Your demand-gen content should also contribute to brand-building.

Cast your mind back to the foreword of this article. It’s worth thinking hard about how you can target that 5% from the get-go, while building your long-term SaaS brand and optimising for search at the same time. Think creatively and smartly.

Section 6

How to measure SaaS content-marketing success

There’s a marketing adage: What you measure is what you end up managing. In other words, marketing teams tend to prioritise and optimise their behaviour based on the metrics they are held accountable for.

But many SaaS content marketers are measuring the wrong things, which means their content-marketing activities will be misguided and often not fit for purpose. For example, too often, SaaS content marketers focus on surface-level signals instead of true business outcomes. They don’t align marketing activity with business goals such as growth, profit, market share, or competitive advantage.

Content marketers have a habit of walking around with proverbial hammers looking for nails to bang. They start by deciding what metrics they can easily track – think impressions, email openings, clicks, and social media likes – instead of asking the all-important question: What is the business trying to achieve, and how can marketing contribute?

For example, a SaaS brand’s objective might be to grow its business app through word-of-mouth market share among young, junior business users in the finance world, who will then pressure their bosses to approve the app business wide. In this example, success shouldn’t be measured by total ad impressions or video views, but by actual changes in awareness and usage among that demographic.

Metrics should be based on business goals.

Sales are clearly an awesome metric. Few marketers ever got fired for sending sales soaring. But solely tracking sales won’t tell you whether awareness about your brand is building in your target markets (among the 95% not currently in market). Similarly, if you only track awareness, you won’t be working hard enough to convince those in market to buy.

Legendary marketing Professor Mark Ritson (several of us at Beneath have been on his marketing and brand MBA courses) uses a ladder metaphor: Tactical metrics are rungs that take you to the ultimate destination strategic success.

Balance short-term and long-term content-marketing metrics

Referring back to the landmark research of Les Binet and Peter Field, short-term metrics include things like immediate sales uplift, conversion rates, and customer acquisition. Meanwhile long-term metrics include things like brand awareness, brand equity, customer loyalty and pricing power.

As we’ve discussed, both are essential. While sales activations deliver immediate lifts in results, brand building creates resilient, compound growth over many years. So SaaS content-marketing measurement should reflect this balance.

How to measure SaaS brand strength

If you have sufficient marketing funds in place, annually tracking your brand could give you some crucial metrics. A good brand-tracking survey of your total target market should tell you about:

  • Awareness: Do people know your brand exists?
  • Consideration: Would they consider buying you?
  • Preference: Would they choose you over competitors?
  • Usage: Are they actually buying and using your product?
  • Advocacy: Would they recommend you?

Perfect is the enemy of good in SaaS content-marketing attribution

It’s worth noting that attribution in marketing is fiendishly hard, especially in B2B SaaS marketing. Human behaviour is complex. Your market is constantly changing. The world of your buyers is always in flux. It’s impossible to come up with a model that captures journeys from awareness through to sale. But there are plenty of trends and signals out there that you can pick up, and use to inform your content-marketing activity.

Following this line of thinking, it’s impossible to make exactly the right choices when it comes to your content-marketing activities. This truth should free you. Marketing is all about making informed, sensible bets with your budget.

 

Section 7

Choosing the right channels for SaaS content marketing

SaaS content marketers often have a set of channels or tactics they favour using. If you’re a B2B SaaS content marketer, you might be in the habit of automatically designing all your campaigns around the usual suspect B2B channels: email, Google Ads and LinkedIn – perhaps with some YouTube thrown in for brand building.

But here’s an important point: Your choice of channels in a particular campaign should be made after your strategic work is carried out.

As we’ve seen in section 3, first, you define your target market: Who you are trying to reach? Where do they spend time? What are their needs? How do they make decisions? Next, you must clarify the story you want to tell them, and set campaign objectives. Then it’s time to decide which channels to use.

As discussed in section 5, your channel mix should align with your campaign objectives. If you’re building long-term brand awareness, then advertising on podcasts, TV or YouTube may be appropriate. If you want to secure demos or free trial signups, then email or highly targeted digital ads that link to a landing page or digital information hub may be favoured.

This approach separates strategic SaaS content marketers from tactical ones – and ultimately separates campaigns that move the marketing dial from those that move no one.

Section 8

SaaS content-marketing tactics

This article has deliberately steered clear of listing out all the marketing tactics available for you to adopt. If you want these, there are plenty of LLMs out there to ask. For now, here are four important tactical tips we don’t see enough B2B SaaS content marketers following.

1. Productise your business expertise

If you’ve assembled a team of internal SaaS experts, use them. Rinse them for their knowledge and insights. Take them out for lunch. Stop by their desks regularly. They will have intimate knowledge of your solution and your audience’s needs – stuff LLMs won’t have a clue about. Look beyond your brand’s borders, too. Co-authored content and collaborations with external SaaS leaders and industry commentators are great ways of educating your audience and amplifying your brand.

2. Get to know your customers

In B2B SaaS companies, accounts or sales teams tend to own relationships with customers. And they can be very protective about them to the extent that they rebuff requests from marketers to speak with them for customer insight. Do not let your sales and accounts teams do the same. Your best customers are your best chance of getting actionable insights on the type of companies that are likely to buy from you. One of your most important jobs as a B2B SaaS marketer is to get to know your best customers intimately. And guess what? Your customers will more often than not be happy to chat.

3. Atomise your content

SaaS content marketing isn’t just about creating an endless stream of brand-new assets. If a core piece of content has performed well, or has covered a major subject for your audience, release a remix. Release many remixes!  You are not a media organisation that has to change its output regularly. One event or a core piece of high-quality content – be it an ebook, webinar, or piece of original research – can give you a year’s worth of materials and talking points.

4. Beware of gating your content

Gated content is bringing ever-diminishing returns in B2B SaaS content marketing (in terms of leads, MQLs, SQLs and sales). Looking to the future, gating might remain appropriate in some circumstances (for example, events.) But we would recommend reviewing gating across the board.

Alternatives to gating include:

  • The option to submit details on content landing pages (an honesty box approach).
  • The option to submit details throughout and at the end of a content piece. If the content is engaging enough, the audience will be keen to hear more from you.
  • What ungating might cost you in top-of-funnel leads will be made up for by gains in conversions further down the funnel.

Use content funnel principles wisely

The B2B marketing funnel may be a flawed, over-simplistic metaphor and framework on many levels. In theory a large group of potential buyers enters the top of a funnel and you nurture them towards sale. In reality, there are all sorts of ways for people to leak out of a funnel. But even the most simplistic sales funnel can help you plan your content programs, serving the right information and detail to the right people at different stages of the marketing funnel – awareness, consideration and conversion.

It will be even more valuable for you to work out your own content marketing funnel – one that truly represents the buying journey of your customers. It might look like this:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Signed up for a two-week trial
  • Purchased your Software
  • Rolled out your software to multiple sites

A funnel model like this can help you put the right content in place to influence your customers’ behaviour in ways that meet your business objectives.

Conclusion

Moving towards SaaS content-marketing effectiveness

In recent years, senior SaaS marketers have become increasingly aware of a fundamental problem with their marketing. Traditional SaaS content-marketing tactics have been delivering diminishing returns (in terms of leads and sales). This has led to a vicious circle – SaaS brands ploughing more and more into performance marketing to make their targets, while neglecting brand efforts.

But it is possible to get SaaS content-marketing operations back on track – within months rather than years. It starts with a few weeks of intense strategic work: segmenting, targeting and positioning. It requires learning more about your target audience’s needs, motivations and content-consumption habits.

With this is in place, you can start rolling out effective content marketing initiatives. And you’ll always be ready to answer the questions SaaS content marketers typically struggle with – like why you want to go after one segment over another, why you need a certain amount of budget, why your brand narrative has a particular story arc, or even why a shape or shade of colour is used in your brand design.

With your unseen body of work to build on, you’ll be confident about making decisions and applying your ideas and stories to both long-term brand building and short-term sales activation. You’ll find that it’s easy to flex to various contexts, formats and channels. You’ll have an idea about what should and shouldn’t work, and what does and doesn’t align.

Suddenly, your content marketing will start propelling your business towards its goals, and your success will yield insights for further success. You’ll find yourself in a virtuous circle, and that’s a very fun place for a SaaS content marketer to be.

Ready to build a storyful brand? We’d love to talk it over with you. Let’s chat.

For more insights and general musings on all things B2B marketing, sign up for the Beneath newsletter.

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