Content marketing is about communicating, meeting, engaging and retaining users at various stages of their user lifecycle and moving them from one stage (i.e., engagement) to another (i.e., user).
Unlike transactional businesses such as e-commerce, SaaS relies heavily on customer retention, recurring revenue, and lifetime value. Content marketing plays a crucial role for SaaS business model, it is especially effective in attracting, engaging, converting, and retaining prospects throughout the user lifecycle.
How should we create a content strategy if we don’t know whom we target?
Here’s what you can do:
Form a focus group—your early adopters, a tiny group of 1-10 people. Engage with them as it’s your only job and you have nothing else to do.
This will help you find common points and insights about your users. You need to learn and understand what they want to achieve (with/without your product), what are the problems they are facing, and what are the solutions they are looking for (most of the time they don’t know the solution). For this, you should be actively engaged in customer support.
Next, start crafting content to keep them engaged and retained and let them flow from one stage to another.
Talk about their problems so when the time comes you can offer your solutions.
You start by focusing on a small, targeted group of prospects to deeply understand them (going deep, vertically) and create content tailored to this group. This content could take the form of an email newsletter, support articles, YouTube videos, webinars, blog posts, or a community for your product—anywhere you can communicate with your customers. As you grow and expand horizontally, you can adjust your content marketing strategy accordingly.
IN SHORT: If you want to sell (through blog post, email, podcast, direct call), you should know whom you’re selling. So you can meet them where they are and offer your solution at the right time. And, this all starts with customer development.
You might also like to read: marketing for early stage products.