Build a SaaS Content Marketing Machine in 8 Steps

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

Does your marketing team create content in a one-off, ad-hoc way and want to move to a more structured approach?

In this article, I’ll share how you could build a simple content strategy with a regular cadence.

It will cover everything from what type of content to prioritize, the frequency of delivery, and the KPIs you want to track.

You can build your content machine based on this strategy and once it hums (generates positive ROI), pour some gas on it.

Scale baby, scale!

Why should you trust this plan? Two reasons:

1. It’s inspired by the best practices from content marketing guru, Emilia Korczyńska, Head of Marketing at UserPilot. With her content strategy and ops framework, she helped the SaaS startup go from writing 4 blogs per month to 40 while 10X-ing monthly traffic, leading to incredible revenue growth.
2. The plan includes actual tactics and strategies the team and I implemented at Dragonboat.io, which helped to increase organic website traffic by 146% and MQLs by 281% YoY.

Okay, on with it!

Here are the steps you can take to build your company’s content machine:

1. Set Content Goals and KPIs

Before getting started, it is crucial to start with “why.”

Get the team together to brainstorm and align on the goals and desired outcomes from your content.

You’ll need to understand for which company-wide metrics your content can help move the needle.

You could have many objectives for your content marketing. To determine them, ask these questions:

• Is our content primarily for lead gen or demand gen?
• What about customer retention?
• Do we need content to help with employer branding?
• Do we want to outrank competitors?
• All of the above?

Depending on your objectives, you might want to track any of these KPIs:

Revenue Metrics

• Demo sign-ups
• Inbound opportunities/SQLs
• Meaningful conversations

Website Strength Metrics

• Domain rating
• Page authority
• Backlinks
• Referring domains

Organic Traffic Metrics

• Ranking keywords
• Keyword position in the SERPs
• Featured snippets
• Organic traffic volume
• Top pages
• Time spent on page

Employer Branding Metrics

• Job applications submitted
• LinkedIn follower growth
• Careers page visitors

To set realistic goals, audit your existing content and look at the current average monthly traffic and conversion rates. You can use this information as a benchmark.

Then, conduct a traffic forecast based on how many posts you plan to create per month.

Based on the main objectives for content and the budget allocated, propose SMART goals for your content for the next 90, 180, and 365 days.

For more on traffic forecasting and setting realistic goals for your content, check out this article.

2. Map a Content Hierarchy & Plan Keywords

The second step in building your content marketing machine is to create a content hierarchy map and plan your keywords around it. (I learned everything in this step from Emilia’s book!)

What is a content hierarchy?

A content hierarchy is a way to organize web content for Google’s crawlers and visitors.

It answers the question, “Where to start?” and helps to prioritize content and build topical relevance. It informs the content plan, which could then be scaled infinitely.

Your content hierarchy should look like a pyramid with your home page at the top.

The next layer would contain the solutions, product, and role-type pages.

The third layer of the pyramid would be pillar content (i.e. The Ultimate Guide to Talent Management). These long, in-depth resources should link back to solutions pages and relevant blog posts (portions of the guides can even be re-purposed as new blog posts).

Then, at the bottom of the pyramid lie individual blog posts.

Make sure to link between all relevant pages. This helps Google decipher what you’re the expert on and builds up “link juice.”

Next, you will want to plan your keyword strategy based on your content hierarchy. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as you think!

How to plan your keywords from the top to bottom of your content hierarchy:

1. Pick a non-branded target keyword for your home page that describes your product category.
2. Next, decide on the “head terms” that reflect the problems your SaaS solves (ie, talent discovery, talent management). You can find these keywords from your solutions, product, and use-case pages.
3. With your head terms in mind, do keyword research for your solutions and pillar pages (in-depth resources) using a tool like Keywords Explorer by Ahrefs. Create an extensive list and then narrow it down by the ones with the highest search volume and the lowest keyword difficulty, as they’ll be the easiest to rank for and drive traffic.
4. Research further ideas or themes for your pillar pages. You can use Surfer SEO for this. For example, if you’re writing “The Ultimate Guide to Talent Discovery” — what sections should it contain? You might add sections like “What role is in charge of talent discovery?”, “What tools exist for talent discovery?” etc.
5. Conduct long-tail keyword research for blog posts, looking at what people are searching for and what competitors are writing about.

Once you have your content hierarchy and keywords list, you’ll want to make any necessary changes to the main website navigation, resource hub, and blog architecture to support it.

3. Conduct a Content Audit

Before you decide where to go with your SaaS company’s content, if you’re unfamiliar with what content it already has, then it’s time to dive in!

In this critical step, audit all of your company’s existing content across all formats (both internal and external facing). I find it helpful to create a content matrix to catalog content by topic, buyer persona, funnel phase, and format.

Here is an example of a content matrix I created with Miro, looking at our existing content for specific buyer personas:

The rows represent the funnel stages while the columns represent each persona. I identified pillar vs. additional content in each square. I also noted the keywords that we already covered and which ones we were missing.

Once you have the matrix, pull Google Analytics data for every page slug to see which pages perform best and worst.

For pages that are performing the best, make a note to prioritize them when it comes to updating and refreshing content. Additionally, this is an excellent time to determine which pages are the “low-hanging fruit” for optimization; any page with a high-priority keyword that currently ranks within positions 4-12 in Google, for example.

After creating this matrix, you should be able to see which pages need to be interlinked. For example, a top-of-the-funnel article on DEI should link to a middle-of-the-funnel piece on the same topic, and that piece should then link to a bottom-of-the-funnel, DEI-focused case study.

This matrix will also become a handy resource for sales or customer success so they can easily find the right content to share with prospects and customers.

Here is a cleaner version of the matrix that you could create for your colleagues (template via Product Marketing Alliance):

4. Get to Know the Audience

Whether you are new to your role or have been working at your SaaS for a while, before you create any more content, learn as much as possible about your audience and ideal customer profile (ICP).

Why? You might be making assumptions that could cost your team a lot. By doing your research, you can avoid this mistake.

For example, maybe your company is targeting HR Directors and you’ve assumed they like to read in-depth guides. Perhaps, upon further research, you discover that traditional HR publications are declining in popularity while podcasts are becoming their preferred medium.

There are several ways you can learn more about your ICP. At Dragonboat, we set out to create content for product operations (product ops) professionals. As I was new to the company and we were new to the audience, I decided the best way to learn about product operations was to interview as many product ops folks as possible.

I added dozens of them on LinkedIn and asked them if they wouldn’t mind telling me a little bit more about what they do (Hint: a little bit of flattery goes a long way!).

In the interviews, I asked questions like:

• What is the mission of product ops in your company?
• What does your day-to-day look like?
• Where do you learn best practices from?
• What are some of your biggest challenges?
• What does maturity in your role look like?
• Are you a fan of any communities, podcasts, events, blogs, etc?

This was hugely successful because I gained valuable insights to inform our content strategy, including not only how to produce content, but also where.

While it’s essential to create content for your owned media (SaaS blog), a great content strategy also encompasses earned media (i.e. bylines, podcast appearances, etc.).

But that wasn’t the only good thing to come out of these interviews.

These market research interviews also helped sow the seeds of our product ops community and, by giving everyone my Dragonboat elevator pitch, we even triggered some demo sign-ups!

5. Establish a Cadence

Your content marketing strategy should have a cadence that takes into account three crucial pillars of your content plan:

I. New Content (~60% of Effort)

At the end of each month (or quarter), host a meeting with your team to review new content ideas and the backlog. The content planned for the next period should include a mix of pieces that fall into your different pillar topics, across varying personas, formats, and funnel stages. Depending on your content marketing’s goal, bottom-of-the-funnel content could be prioritized first, for example, or any content missing in your matrix.

Below is an example of a content cadence. Yours will depend on your budget, number of writers, overall marketing strategy, content goals, etc.

New Content Cadence

• Webinars — 1 per month (Trending ToFu and MoFu topics)
• Thought leadership article — 1 per month
• SEO-driven/viral article — 1 per month
• Product-Related article — 1 per month
• Contributed Content / Earned Media — 2 per month
• Case studies — 1 per month
• Pillar pieces — 1 every 6 weeks
• Press Releases — As needed

II. Content Refreshing (~20% of Effort)

Pumping out new content regularly does not always guarantee increasing site traffic over time. Blog posts that once ranked and achieved lots of organic traffic can decay. It’s essential to monitor the performance of older posts and set up a way to systematically review them over time.

An example cadence for updating content could be two posts per week, starting with the highest priority URLs (best performing, keyword importance, etc).

It shouldn’t take more than a few hours to update your content and help it maintain its position in the SERPs. The following is a list of things you should do to refresh your content.

Checklist to Optimize Older Content

✅ Optimize the headings

✅ Check the alt texts for target keywords

✅ Make sure outbound links don’t point to a competitor

✅ Update for recency (ie, if the title has the year 2021, change it to 2022)

✅ If you cite an old research study, replace the statistic with a recent one

✅ Use a tool like Surfer SEO to audit the post and improve it

✅ Add internal links from other blog posts

✅ Add relevant tweets or quotes from a recent webinar, influencers, etc.

III. Backlinking & Outreach (~20% of Effort)

Last but not least, each piece of content should have some backlinking effort to help it rank and garner more traffic.

The more backlinks your content receives, the better the domain ranking, and the higher Google will rank ALL your pages for ALL of your target keywords.

Using the tool, Ahrefs, build backlinks for every new post and for existing ones that convert the best.

If your marketing team has relationships with other vendors with the same audience that are not competitive, start by reaching out to them for backlinks. You could also use Backlink Manager to streamline link building.

At Dragonboat, I received this backlink outreach email sent on behalf of another company, and it totally worked! We accepted their backlink proposal.

Feel free to use this backlink outreach email for inspiration:

Hello Dragonboat Team,

I’m X from the Chameleon content team, dropping in to say great work on the article https://dragonboat.io/blog/product-prioritization-frameworks/

We recently published a guide on 30+ Product Management Frameworks — it showcases methods, loops, scores, and models for goal setting, decision making, problem-solving, roadmapping, and more! I believe it would be a valuable additional resource for your readers.

Would love you to have a read and see if it’s something your audience would enjoy!

If you’re open to a mutually beneficial, indirect link exchange collaboration, we’d gladly link back to your website in one of our blog posts (find them all here). We have ~18,000 monthly blog pageviews and our DR is 71.

Looking forward to hearing back from you.

All the best,

X

6. Set Up Processes and Tools

Once you have a plan for your content strategy, it’s time to build the infrastructure with the right tools and processes.

Thanks to the MarTech explosion, there are hundreds of tools you could consider to help build your content machine. Luckily, you don’t need too many, and you don’t need to overcomplicate your stack.

Here are some of the tools I recommend:

Asana for Workflow Management

Asana (or Trello) is an excellent tool for setting up your workflow because you can set up kanban-style boards.

One board could be used just for managing the content refresh process. Make three columns that represent three levels of priority.

Then create a separate task for each post that needs to be updated and place it in one of the lists given the priority level you give it.

Each card should have a checklist of subtasks and a due date.

You can also set up a content update tracker to see if the updates worked.

Then, set up another board in Asana for new content.

The board could consist of different columns for each content topic with individual cards for the content pieces.

The cards must have a content brief or an outline and a due date. Each card should also contain a task checklist (writing, proofreading, search engine optimizations, creating images, etc.).

To track progress, each card should go through various stages that you set up in Asana using the tags feature.

Create a tag for:

• Writing
• Needs Review
• In Revision
• Awaiting Approval
• Ready to Publish
• Published
• Backlinking, Sharing, and Distribution
• Needs a Refresh
• Refreshing

Analytics and Optimization Tools

In addition to Asana, I’d recommend using free tools by Google and, optionally, some paid tools to power your content marketing machine:

• Google Analytics to measure content performance and trends
• Google Tag Manager to easily manage and track conversion events
• Google Search Console to understand what keywords your site ranks for
• Google Data Studio for creating a visual content marketing metrics dashboard
• Ahrefs for keyword research and discovering backlink opportunities
• Surfer SEO for comparing your content with top-ranking pages for a specific keyword and obtaining a helpful “content score”
• StoryChief for editing, formatting, and distributing content seamlessly
• Backlink Manager to streamline the process of managing and obtaining backlinks

7. Create and Amplify Content

You should now be able to create your first month’s content calendar based on your content cadence.

Depending on your content goals and budget, you might have several roles involved in your content machine. You could have multiple in-house and freelance writers, editors, graphic designers, etc.

Or you might have a mighty team of 1… Either way, it’s entirely possible to get the machine going! The key is to simply start and learn from every result and mistake along the way.

When it comes to content, more does not always equal better. By sprinkling more content into the mix, you do not automatically get more website visitors or trial sign-ups.

You might have the best content in the world, but if no one finds it, all that effort will be for nothing.

Make sure to have a plan to amplify each piece of content by repurposing it repeatedly.

Divide and conquer if you must.

For example, other members of the marketing team, like your social media and email campaign managers, can do their part to distribute the content in new ways.

If your company has a Product Evangelist, you should be working closely with them to distribute content as well.

Here is a 5-step plan to re-purpose a webinar featuring a customer advocate:

1. Create a blog post with the 5 most important takeaways from the webinar
2. Turn the blog post into carousel slides for a LinkedIn post
3. Turn the carousel slides into a text-only LinkedIn post and ask your Product Evangelist to share it
4. Develop a case study from the webinar
5. Make graphics that cite customer quotes and share them on Twitter and link back to the case study.

8. Measure the Results and Iterate

Each month, review the progress made towards your goals. You could make a small deck and share it with your team on Slack. You could even create a dashboard in Google Data Studio to keep track of KPIs.

Then, every quarter, review your content strategy and keyword list to ensure they’re still aligned with the company’s broader goals, as they may change over time.

After looking at the data and reflecting on the plan and operations, you might conclude that you underestimated the time it would take to write each post.

Maybe a certain topic was not as favorable to the audience as you assumed. Or maybe the process has some inefficiencies to eliminate.

By continuously analyzing the data and KPIs, you can quickly update your strategy and pivot as needed.

Once the machine is “humming” and delivering a positive ROI, you should scale it, increasing content production and growing the business.

More Resources

• Check out the book, Content Operations: How to Build and Scale Your Content Ops by Emilia Korczyńska.
• Read the Ercule blog.
• Follow these content marketers who post helpful nuggets on LinkedIn: Jess Cook, John Bonini, and Ben Goodey.

That’s a simple strategy to take your content marketing from disorganized to operationalized!

Are there any other steps you’d add? Have you created a content marketing machine with success and took a different approach?

Let me know in the comments!