Content Marketing Strategy for SaaS: Defining Goals & Objectives

Content marketing focuses on creating, publishing, and sharing content all about your SaaS product. It's an excellent strategy for driving interest in your platform and converting website visitors into software users.

For content marketing success, you must have a plan. And two key elements of that plan are your goals and objectives. In this guide, we'll help you define your content marketing objectives and show you how to map content to your goals.

Table of Contents

• Content Marketing Objectives: A Definition
• Why Goals Are Critical to Any SaaS Marketing Strategy
• How to Define Your Content Marketing Goalssome text
  • Define Your Key Objectives
  • Select Content Marketing Metrics
• Mapping Content to Your Goals

Content Marketing Strategy for SaaS: Defining Goals & Objectives is the second part of a series all about content strategy for SaaS. Check out Part 1 now, and stay tuned for Parts 3, 4, and 5.

Content Marketing Objectives: A Definition

Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant content. Why create such content? Businesses engage in content marketing for various reasons. These reasons are the business’ content marketing goals or objectives, and reasons typically vary according to a brand’s business growth stage.

For instance, a SaaS startup may engage in content marketing to spread brand awareness, while a business in the growth stage may want to drive traffic and generate sales. On the other hand, businesses in the maturity stage usually launch content marketing campaigns to retain existing customers and acquire new ones.

Your business needs clearly defined content marketing objectives because they provide a foundation for building your content marketing strategy. Clearly defined objectives support your team in understanding what you want to achieve through content and what steps are required to get you there.

Why Goals Are Critical to Any SaaS Marketing Strategy

Besides guiding your strategy and team, having clearly defined marketing goals is crucial for several other reasons. For example, marketing goals:

• Guide content creation and distribution: Content marketing is important for boosting your brand awareness, brand perception, lead generation, and online authority. However, content marketing can only deliver these results if you create the right content. Your goals will help you determine the content required for connecting and resonating with your target audience to achieve your objectives.
• Measure performance and success: Effective content marketing requires you to measure content performance. However, without goals, you can't truly know if your marketing efforts have achieved your desired results. For instance, if your goal is to generate a thousand new leads, your campaign is successful only if it reaches or exceeds that goal.
• Provide a content roadmap: Your content marketing goals will provide a roadmap for creating and distributing content. For instance, if your goals involve reaching an audience that engages most with visual content, video content marketing may be your best choice for optimal engagement. Your roadmap will spell out the steps you must take to create the content and the best platforms to publish it to.
• Improve resource allocation: Once you have your goals, you can prioritize and distribute resources like your budget more effectively.

How to Define Your Content Marketing Goals

Now that you understand the importance and benefits of having goals, you only need to learn how to define your content marketing objectives. It’s a simple process that you can complete by following a couple of steps.

#1. Define Your Key Objectives

The key objectives of your content marketing strategy are the goals you hope to achieve by the end of your marketing campaign. Objectives typically vary between businesses, and your specific objectives will influence your content marketing strategy.

The first step to defining your key objectives is evaluating where you are currently. Evaluating your current situation involves comparing the status of your company with what you want to achieve. You can then develop goals that will take you from where you are to where you want to be.

For example, if your ultimate goal is to increase your annual revenue, you may want to drive potential customers to your website. And if you currently receive less than ten daily website visitors, your objective may be to gain a hundred daily visitors.

Your initial assessment can also provide insights into gaps and opportunities you can dive into to reach your goals more efficiently.

Remember, when creating objectives, a well-defined goal must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound):

• Specific means you know what the goal is and how to achieve it.
• Measurable means that you can track and measure how well you’ve accomplished the goal.
• Achievable means the goal is realistic or doable.
• Relevant means the goal matters to your company and aligns with your overarching business objectives.
• Time-bound means your goal must be achieved within a specific period.

With SMART content marketing goals, you'll have an easier time focusing on achieving your objectives effectively. Examples of SMART content marketing objectives typically set by SaaS companies include:

• Increase leads: Social media content and high-quality content that appears on the first page of Google are excellent for generating quality leads. Generating more leads will connect you with more people who may convert into paying customers. Even if a new lead does not convert, it’s still a win because one more person knows about your brand.
• Build brand awareness: People can't fall head over heels for your brand if they do not know it exists. Building brand awareness involves bringing your brand to the attention of more people. For example, with a social media content marketing strategy, you can bring your brand to the attention of billions of people who use social platforms daily.
• Increase website traffic: Content marketing can help you drive more traffic to your website. The traffic can become leads that convert into paying customers. Several content marketing strategies drive traffic, such as social media marketing and email marketing.
• Grow brand loyalty: Loyal customers are more likely to support, defend, and stick with a brand. In fact, 60% of loyal customers purchase more frequently from brands they like. Posting content that engages customers and solves their problems can help foster loyalty and increase customer retention. A 5% increase in customer retention can boost profitability by 25%.
• Build online authority: You can create and publish content that establishes you as an authority within your industry. Achieving this goal will turn you into your target audience’s preferred source of information. Besides making you more trustworthy, it can generate website traffic that turns into leads.

#2. Select Content Marketing Metrics

Remember that one of the qualities of a SMART content marketing goal is that it's measurable. Measuring your progress toward reaching a goal requires the use of metrics that provide insights into your strategy's performance.

Examples of content marketing metrics used by SaaS companies include:

• Engagement rate: Businesses use engagement rate to track how many users engage with their content. Engaging with content involves viewing, commenting, liking, sharing, or interacting with content in some other way. Content that engages viewers is more likely to convert viewers, and highly engaged viewers buy 90% more often.
• Website traffic: The metric helps identify how many people visit your website daily due to your content marketing efforts. It’s a crucial metric because it reveals if your content marketing is generating enough of the right type of traffic. Ideally, your content marketing strategy should generate website traffic consisting mainly of people most likely to convert.
• Bounce rate: Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who viewed your website page or social post without visiting any other content or engaging in any way. Understanding your bounce rate can help pinpoint content that isn't relevant or valuable to your audience. As a result, you can better optimize future content.
• Conversion rate: Conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who take a desired action after viewing your content. The desired action may be to buy your product, sign-up for a free trial, call for a consultation, fill out a form, or do anything else you want.
• Impressions: Impressions refer to how many people come across your content or the thumbnail of your content. Tracking impressions can help you measure brand awareness.

Tracking and analyzing these metrics (or other metrics relevant to your content marketing goals) will give you insights into your content marketing performance.

With these insights, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your strategy and deliver better results. However, note that you will only get relevant insights if you measure metrics that align with your marketing objectives.

Mapping Content to Your Goals

Once you have your content marketing goals, you can begin mapping your content to your goals. Doing so ensures that your content creation aligns with your content strategy, eliminating the risk of publishing content that serves no purpose.

For example, if your content marketing goal is to increase brand awareness, create and distribute social media content that introduces your brand and software platform to your target audience.

Or, if your goal is to drive website traffic, create and publish video tutorials on your website showcasing your platform, and then share them on social. The opportunities for content creation are limitless.

Create Content Simply With Cohley

After you successfully define your marketing objectives, you're one step closer to creating content that inspires and converts. If you're struggling to find high-quality content for your SaaS business, Cohley can help.

We offer a platform that features thousands of vetted content creators who can develop content that matches your unique brand style and marketing goals. We work with SaaS companies in various industries and can help you supercharge your brand visibility, trust, and authority.

To learn more about how Cohley can help you reach your content marketing goals, book a free consultation today.