SAAS startups are a huge market for content-writers. Look at the size of the industry:
Can you give me an example of a SAAS startup that you know?
Founders are busy cracking deals with large clients or improving their product.
It can take some time to crack the deal. But once you get a client, it is great because clients pay a recurring monthly/annual fee, and can even renew subscriptions over the years.
So what does a SAAS founder want?
They need content that helps them capture more leads every month, build credibility with them and nurture them over a period of time.
Imagine that you want to do content-writing work for an early stage SAAS startup. What services can you provide them?
If your pitch is around helping them get more clients and retain their clients, it can work.
But how can you accomplish this mission through content writing?
Here are a few things you can do:
1. Create an email funnel
Does the company have an email funnel? Is an email tool such as MailChimp or Active Campaign configured?
Is it properly nurturing leads? As per marketing theory, a lead goes through four stages in his/her journey to purchase – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. Content will have to be appropriately written for each stage of the funnel.
For example, at the “Awareness” stage, you will not be selling the product or service, but simply “educating” the lead about the market and industry trends.
At the “Action” stage, however, you can send content that pushes people to action.
If you send the wrong content at the wrong stage, there will be a problem!
2. Write a whitepaper.
Writing whitepapers is a great idea to educate your prospective audience and create awareness. A whitepaper is a very comprehensive report explaining the problem in a particular industry and the possible solution.
For example, on this site you will find the best technology related whitepapers. Let me show you a whitepaper prepared by Amazon to promote its cloud services offerings for government departments and public sector companies, and one by Microsoft on digital transformation strategy for NGOs.
These are 13-14 page documents, around 3000-4000 words at the most, and are comprehensively offering the company’s solutions to the problems.
Your research and writing skills need to be very good so that you can prepare a well thought out and well presented whitepaper.
Writing effective whitepapers for different audiences can help in capturing more leads and also in establishing high credibility.
3. Prepare case studies of clients who benefited
The best way to persuade a prospective client about a product is by showing them how similarly placed clients benefited from your product. For example, LinkedIn Ads has a customer stories section where you can click on how different brands benefited from LinkedIn ads. Here is the screenshot from Adobe’s page:
It is important to document case studies of similar clients who benefited, ideally, with data.
4. Start/expand the volume of content on their blog
Does the startup have a blog? How frequently is it updated? Are new blog posts sent out to leads through email?
Adding a high amount of valuable content is a very direct way for Google to rank the website higher.
Are they shared through social media handles of the founders and of the startup? If not, you could also do that through the founder’s account.
Most startup founders do not have the time to focus on maintaining their blog.
5. Improve their landing page
Does the landing page explain how the user’s problems are solved?
For example, look at the landing page of Salesforce, which is the world’s most successful CRM company.
Is there some compelling data on the landing page that drives users to take action?
For example, look at the landing page for advertising on LinkedIn:
Does it have a powerful call to action at the right place?
Hubspot’s landing page, for example, has a very clear call to action, which is available on the “first fold” of the website. This helps in signing up more clients to take the free trial and later on convert them through email, one-on-one Zoom meetings/phone calls.
Do you want to learn more about this?
6. Perform on-page and off-page SEO
SEO is a really important skill if you want to learn content writing. I am going to share a few guidelines for SEO for you.
SEO is of 2 types – on-page and off-page SEO. On-page SEO determines what you will rank for. Off-page SEO determines how high you will rank.
#1 – Use a tool such as Google Keyword Planner to identify relevant keywords for which searches are being made
This is important to identify which keywords you want to write on and rank for. It helps to also look at long-tail keywords.
For example, sandals or flip flops may be narrow, but you could choose keywords like “sandals convertible into slippers” which are searched infrequently but by people who are highly interested in buying a product.
It makes sense to rank for these keywords.
#2 – Content selection and creation
A lot depends on what kind of content is posted. The content should solve a problem, it should be interesting to read, it should be focussed on the user, and should be optimized for a frequently searched keyword.
Also, articles should be long rather than short
Articles more than 1500 or 2000 words will rank much higher than shorter articles.
#3 – Add Meta Tags and Meta Description
When you get search results on Google, it shows a headline and a 2-3 line paragraph.
How does Google identify what content should show there? The meta tag and meta description is what tells Google what to show.
#4 – Avoid creating duplicate content and other malpractices
Lot of people perform unethical practices such as putting links by commenting on random blogs to get backlinks, or writing keywords in the colour of the background so that Google ranks them (called keyword stuffing). This can penalise the site.
Also, creating duplicate content is not advisable. Use the same keyword but create content from different perspectives.
There are a variety of other tools and techniques, but we have limited time, so I can only discuss this much here.
#5 – Review AI-generated content to ensure that it is not verbose and genuinely adds value!
Google is finally updating its search algorithms to penalise AI-generated content which does not add material value.
While AI is great with generating topics and structures, ensure that the finalised output has high quality standards.