A Beginner’s Guide to SaaS Content Writing 2023

What is SaaS Content Writing?

SaaS content writing involves creating content that educates users about your solution, positions you as an authority in your niche, shows how your product works, and finally nudges those readers to opt for a free trial or paid subscription.

For example, a company like Canva may create content based on design solutions and how the tool helps streamline the designing process for different segments like freelancers, agencies and businesses.

In a nutshell, SaaS content writing boosts brand awareness, increases conversions and grows business revenue.

The most common types of SaaS content are blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, FAQs, and video content.

Here’s how SaaS companies create content for different marketing funnel stages.

What makes SaaS Content Writing Different?

There are four key differences between SaaS content writing and other forms of content writing:

• More complex. With so many different features and functions, SaaS content writing needs a clear purpose so readers don’t get confused or overwhelmed.

• Often deals with multiple target audiences. Most SaaS tools cater to different segments. For example, Canva can be used for personal as well as business use. Your SaaS content creation should take this into consideration.

• More focus on the features and benefits of the product. With so many competing tools, your content should be more product-led and thus focus on the different things you offer.

• Equal focus on acquisition and retention. For SaaS companies, retention is equally important as acquiring new users. Your content should thus engage prospects as well as existing customers.

Importance of SaaS Content Writing

Take any famous SaaS company, like HubSpot, Canva, or Zapier, and you’ll notice that each of these companies has one thing in common — they prioritize content writing.

Here are five key reasons why they do that:

• Generate leads. With informative and engaging content, you can gently introduce your tool as a solution to the readers and generate leads.

• Portray yourself as the authority leader. You can create authority and trust in your SaaS brand by creating data-backed and powerful articles in your niche.

• Boost awareness about your product. SaaS content writing helps convert leads into paying customers by providing precise and valuable information about your product and its features.

• Provides results for a long time. A great blog piece or an ebook can fetch valuable visitors and potential customers even after a long time.

• Fetches a better ROI than other channels. HubSpot blog currently ranks for 1.3 million keywords on Google, which attracts 8.4 million visitors every month. If they had to pay to get this traffic via Google ads, they’d have to spend around $16.8 million monthly.

Essential Tips to Start SaaS Content Writing

SaaS content writing requires a lot of research and specific writing skills to get the results you want. Here are six tips to get you started.

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Before you start jotting down content ideas, you must clearly understand your ICP.

Knowing your target audience will provide you more insights into what kind of content to include in your content marketing strategy, the most suitable platforms, and the content types that will be more popular.

To define your ICP, you’ll have to gather data to answer several questions:

• Who is my target audience? Does my tool cater to a specific segment or multiple segments?
• What are their biggest challenges or needs?
• What alternative solutions are they using?
• What are they trying to achieve? 

You can use customer interviews, Google Analytics and social media to find the answers to these questions.

2. Conduct a Comprehensive Keyword Research

If you want to make your SaaS brand noticeable on search engines like Google, you must understand the common keywords your target audience searches for on Google.

Here are a few ways to conduct this keyword research:

• Create a list of seed keywords. These are words or phrases that you can use as a starting point to find more keywords. For example: “project management” for your project management software
• Find the keywords your competitors are using. With the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool, you can plug in the competitor's website and see the list of pages getting the most traffic and the targeted keywords for those pages.

• Use keyword research tools to find more ideas.

You’ll also have to analyze the keywords for keyword difficulty, search intent, and volume to prioritize them.

3. Set SMART Goals

Without proper goals, your content marketing strategy won’t get you results.

Creating SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) content goals is necessary to achieve what you want easily, determine whether your content is getting the desired results, and measure success effectively.

For example, a SMART goal for your project management blog could be:

“Achieve 100 trial signups via blog CTAs by creating 20 powerful blogs on project management within two months.”

4. Build Your Content Calendar

Once you have researched your keywords and finalized the article topics, you can create a content calendar to maintain consistency and track things easily..

This content calendar should denote the article/content topics, deadlines, assigned SaaS content writer and relevant details that content managers and your freelance SaaS writer requires.

Here’s how we maintain a content calendar in Trello

This also allows our team at MADX to understand better how long it takes to create different forms of content and how we can optimize our content schedule moving forward.

5. Maintain Consistent Tone and Branding in Your Content

Brand associations are important for any SaaS business, as it helps the reader/visitor recognize your brand through simple elements or signals.

That’s why you should focus on consistent tone and branding throughout your content deliverables, from the articles on your blog or the graphics on your social profiles.

For example, if you look at Zapier’s blog, you’ll find most of the images they use following the color tone of their brand (orange hues)

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Even their CTA follows the same tone to maintain brand consistency.

You can create a brand style guide for your team and SaaS writers so they can understand the voice, tone, and style they need to follow for each piece.

6. Track and Measure Content Performance

To get consistent results from your SaaS content strategy, you must monitor how your content performs across all channels.

Here are some ways you can gauge the effectiveness of your content:

• Monitor the traffic you get from each blog piece. This data helps you determine what kind of content gets the most reads.
  
  
• While some of your content may get a lot of visitors, others might get fewer visitors but more conversions. Find out which ones are those.
  
  
• Find out what level of engagement you get on each article or social post.
• See which content gets you the most backlinks.

High Converting Blog Formats for SaaS Products

While there are many blog types you can choose from, we have observed that certain blog formats are more effective than others for the SaaS industry and converting traffic. Here are five such formats.

1. Beginners Guide

This format is an excellent way to draw in people who are new to your niche, and with proper nurturing strategies, you can successfully convert them into valuable leads for your business.

One SaaS company that maximizes the potential of this format is Ahrefs. Here’s one example of a beginner’s guide to keyword research by the brand.

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They create topic clusters with this guide that answers any marketer's questions about keyword research.

Marketers can easily jump to any section which automatically has internal linking opportunities for Ahrefs.

Ahrefs gets about 9000 monthly visitors on this guide which translates to about $16,000.

Here are four tips to make the most out of this format:

• Create a title that appeals to beginners. For example, “The Beginner’s Guide to Project Management.”
• Include everything a beginner might want to know. One way to find this is by looking at Google’s People Also Ask box for suggestions.
• Break up the guide into topics that the reader can quickly jump to.
• Use simple language and engaging examples.

2. List Post

Also known as listicles, this blog format contains a list of items such as tips, strategies, products or techniques.

As listicles are easy to read and digest, this format has become popular among SaaS companies.

Below is an example from HubSpot.

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Here are some things to consider while making listicles:

• Add a benefit in the title or relevant power words to make it more compelling.
• People usually skim listicles, so start with a short introduction and include jump links so they can navigate to the tip or product that interests them.
• Ensure that the sub-headings are descriptive and benefit-focused.

3. Expanded Definition

With expanded definition, you start by explaining the meaning of a concept or term before you go into more detail about it.

This is best used for terms that are difficult to understand or relatively unknown. For example, take this article from ClickUp about project milestones.

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It details milestone examples, how to identify milestones and some common milestone misconceptions. But because readers may not know what a milestone is, they defined the term in the introduction.

This kind of blog title often starts with “What is” or “What are.”

After outlining the definition in the introduction, you can answer follow-up questions in the article that readers may have after learning about the term.

4. Step-by-step Guide

You may often have to educate your readers about a process that requires things to be done in a specific order. A step-by-step guide is the perfect blog format for that.

This blog format can earn you featured snippets as Google generally provides a summary process for these search terms.

Here’s how Asana won the featured snippet for their step-by-step process of creating a social media calendar.

One way to nail the introduction for these step-by-step guides is to follow the PSP approach. First, present the problem (managing social media is tough), then give a solution (social media calendar can help you track and manage things in advance), followed by proof (we have got great results by creating a solid calendar).

5. Comparison Posts

If you’re lucky enough, your tool might be the only one in your niche.

Most SaaS companies compete with multiple tools, and when a customer is faced with many choices, they likely go on to Google and search “X vs. Y.”

If your comparison article turns up in that search, you can grab a great opportunity to showcase your USP and how your tool is better than others. (Important note: Ensure you don’t seem too biased or one-sided when creating these posts.)

Take a look at the second result for the keyword “Hootsuite Vs. Later”

While blog posts are great, you can turn these comparison posts into landing pages that feature at the end of your homepage for easy navigation.

Final Thoughts

Many SaaS companies rely on creating SaaS content to get steady leads and provide value to existing customers.

With a successful content marketing strategy, you can position your SaaS company as an expert in the niche and become your target audience's trusted source of information.

We have used these six tips and five blog formats for our SaaS clients and seen great results, so you can start implementing them immediately. If you need help or don’t want to spend considerable resources hiring a content team, reach out to us at MADX. From content strategy to effective content pieces, our experts have experience doing it all.

Read more about content marketing:

Content Marketing for SaaS: The 9-step guide

7 reasons why listicles are a powerful way to drive SEO traffic

How to write copy like a pro?