🗞 What's New: Content strategy lessons that even ChatGPT doesn't know

Content strategy insights from nearly 30 SaaS companies uncovered some gems:

• Focus your content around the market, not your product. When it comes to visual content, high-quality doesn't necessarily mean high-impact.
• Our brains are wired to process visual information quickly. Use compelling, shareable visuals to increase your social media engagement.
• From laid off to $8K MRR six months later. Anthony Riera built an all-in-one productized service management platform after seeing a need.

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by Ankur Tiwari

A few months ago, I decided to research the content strategies of as many SaaS businesses as possible to discover insights and patterns.

Here's a summary, and key insights from the complete research!

The summary

1. Content is still king: 24%-30% of total web traffic comes from content.

2. The foundation of your content strategy shouldn't be the product, it should be the market.

3. You have multiple formats at your disposal. Use them.

4. Content strategy is not limited to acquisition. It can impact the complete customer lifecycle: Acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and referrals.

5. B2B content strategies should target multiple personas.

6. Align the content structure and scope with the market's information consumption pattern.

7. Improve retention and acquisition through two-way communication: Customer interviews, success stories, forums, and communities.

8. Your content strategy should be based on the context of your business.

9. Positioning and messaging evolve with time, with the target market, and with the product. Position your business for the current target market.

10. How you articulate ideas matters.

11. When it comes to visual content, high-quality doesn't necessarily mean high-impact. A thoughtfully crafted message goes a long way.

12. Keywords are important for search engine ranking and establishing the search intent. Early-stage companies can get quick results by ranking for specific long-tail keywords, even at low search volume. Keyword clustering works wonders.

13. Create content around key themes.

14. Build use cases for each target customer persona.

15. Thoughtfully position your business against an enemy your market is struggling with to establish trust and rapport.

16. Target niche communities with native, candid content.

17. Content-led community, community-led growth: Build private communities around exclusive content to support your business.

18. Create content to enable customers to be advocates. Help them sell for you.

19. Go big with independent content websites. Their non-commercial vibes can help build a revolution around your product.

20. Product education hubs go a long way in improving activation and retention.

21. Create cross-channel leverages where your content can support your other channels.

22. Own your distribution. Even the best content will not help your business grow if no one reads, watches, or listens to it.

Tactical insights

1. Paid traffic needs its own content: Ad copy, landing page copy, whitepapers, etc.

2. Interview internal and external subject matter experts to gain deep insights for creating quality content.

3. Create a brand origin story to build affinity with your market.

4. Lead from the front: Write a personal blog about your domain, guest on podcasts, etc.

5. Share momentum to build trust: Write about a new funding round, a new logo client, a favorable analyst report, etc.

6. Help users find answers to their biggest questions quickly by making the most of premium real estate on your website.

7. Improve SEO with internal linking.

8. Set up Google Analytics, or something similar, for analysis and attribution.

Discuss this story.

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by Thomas Griffin

Your competitors are targeting the same audience as you are. Here are a few tips to get more engagement on your social media content!

Know your audience

To make your content stand out, tailor it to the needs and preferences of your target audience.

Catering to their pain points, desires, and questions can help you get more eyeballs on your content.

Select the right channels

Being active on all social media channels is almost impossible. If you choose to do it, you are likely to overwhelm yourself. Each social media platform supports different content formats. Plus, the platform dynamics vary.

Most importantly, your target audience may not even be active on all social media platforms. Identify the channels that your audience prefers. Sharing content there will likely boost your engagement, and help you capture quality leads for your sales funnel.

Create shareable content

Make your audience like your posts so much that they can't help but share them.

Our brains are wired to process visual information more quickly than text. All it takes is 13 milliseconds for our brains to process information illustrated in the form of an image.

So, leveraging visual content is key to making your posts shareable, thus getting more engagement.

Leverage content curation

Content curation allows you to leverage third-party sources to gather information, and speed up the process of sharing relevant posts.

Here, you don't have to create content from scratch. You use information already put together by others, add value from your end, personalize it to your audience's interests, and credit the sources.

This makes it easier for you to be more active on social media, and increases your chances of generating traction.

Post at the right time

It's a no-brainer that knowing when your audience is most active on social media, and scheduling your posts accordingly, is an excellent growth hack.

If you are just getting started, try sharing your content at different times and assessing the performance of your posts.

Use eye-catching headlines or captions

Create headlines and captions that will grab people's attention. Making them intriguing or compelling can help you get more engagement.

Discuss this story.

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by Anthony Riera

Six months ago, I was all-in on the crypto wave. I was working hard, feeling like I was on the cutting edge.

Then, the market crashed. I was out of a job.

How it started

With all the massive tech layoffs, I knew I needed to diversify my income. My flatmate told me about Brett Williams from DesignJoy, and I took Brett’s course and joined his community. I wanted to create my own productized service.

But, getting started wasn't a walk in the park. As a software engineer, seeing that I'd need to connect a dozen different tools together to run my agency was unthinkable.

I decided to make this process easier and more accessible to all by building Breeew! It helps founders create and manage productized services, essentially reproducing DesignJoy's workflow, but from a single place. Everything is automatically managed for you.

How it's going

I got my first customers from Brett's Discord community. On there, a lot of people were struggling with their setup, so it was perfect for me.

Also, every time Brett posted on X, I posted a meaningful reply. Some of those replies brought 3K unique viewers to my website, just because people were reading the comments!

I actually started my own productized service, Liberto, and now generate $8K MRR. I've learned to charge more, and to carefully pick my clients.

I'm currently about to onboard a second client, and will stop there. Neither of my clients have immediate or urgent needs, meaning that I can manage my time without pressure.

I know a lot of you out there are hustling hard, maybe feeling a bit stuck, or looking for a side gig that could turn into something more. You've got the skills! Just put them out there in the right way.

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Ankur Tiwari, Darko, Thomas Griffin, and Anthony Riera for contributing posts. —Channing