Content Strategy For Saas – Useful Tips

Are you a  vendor of IT solutions for businesses and you have questions about the content of your communication? This article is made for you. Developing a good content strategy can be a real asset in helping you achieve your business goals. For this, it is necessary to understand the specificities of your communication and to know what are the best practices to implement. This is what we will see in this article.

Next, we will determine why the bounce rate is important to help you analyze the quality of your content strategy and the performance of your website.

Why a content strategy?

Communicating regularly with your customers and prospects is good. Providing them  with quality content that will meet their expectations and needs is better. This is why setting up a  content strategy  is important. First of all, you must understand the reason, the purpose behind your content strategy. The latter can  help you achieve various essential objectives  for your business, such as:

• Take care of your brand image,
• Increase your notoriety,
• Attract qualified traffic to your web platforms,
• Increase your sales.

Once you have clearly defined the why, you need to think about the how. To do this, you must ask yourself various questions, in order to determine which media to use, what type of content to write, what tone to use or how often to distribute your content.

You see, developing a content strategy takes some thought. But, well thought out, it can be a great relationship marketing tool. Indeed, it allows you to create a commitment to your brand but also to better understand your targets and their interests.

How to define your content strategy for SaaS?

Before addressing the question of the content strategy itself, a small clarification is in order. As a vendor of IT solutions for businesses, the target of your communication is specific: you are not targeting the average consumer but many other businesses. In professional jargon, we speak of  BtoB (Business to Business) communication. Obviously, this will have an impact on the way you communicate and therefore on your content. Knowing what types of businesses you are talking  to is essential to writing content that they are likely to like and interest them.

A logic-based purchasing process

The B2B buying process is based more on logic than on emotion. This will inevitably have consequences for the content of your message:

• As a vendor of business IT solutions, your primary focus should be on  the logic of your product . Your message should focus on  the many benefits  that your customers could experience if they owned your product. Would they make money? Time ? Human resources ? Or even all of them at the same time? All this information must be found in your communication.
• You must also  be very precise in the explanations  you give about your IT solution: do not hesitate to provide your target with in-depth analyzes, statistics, documented and credible proof of its effectiveness. All the features that make your IT solution great should be detailed as clearly as possible.

Expertise, know-how and skills are your key words

The fundamental mission of content strategy, whatever the business objective you have set for yourself, is to  showcase your expertise in your industry. Let’s take an example: if you are a vendor of computer solutions for car dealerships, your primary objective is to position yourself as an expert in the automotive sector, in order to demonstrate that you have the know-how and skills necessary to may your product be the solution your customers have been waiting for.

Read Also about Boston tech consulting.

Use the lingo of your industry

To demonstrate your expertise, do not hesitate to  use technical and direct language . Of course, your words should be understandable to as many people as possible, but remember that your target is from the same industry as you. She therefore knows exactly what you are talking to her about and what the right terms to use. We have to strike  a balance between professional jargon and popularization . So you can write interesting content that doesn’t risk annoying people by being too technical.

Distribution channels

Which distribution channels should you favor?  Since you are reaching out to other businesses, you need to be present where they are. This means that traditional broadcast channels may be less relevant than others. Why ? Simply because  your target audience is more limited. There is therefore no point in being on mass distribution channels if there are other  more suitable channels where your target is located . For social media, for example: some of them lend themselves much better to a BtoB relationship, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Slideshare.

The formats of an effective content strategy

There are  different very interesting formats  for BtoB communication. The most interesting is probably the blog . You can distribute many different types of content there: news about your business, short articles on a hot topic related to your industry, longer articles in which you provide different tips, etc. Blogging requires a  real investment, both in time and money, however, as you need  to feed it regularly.

Many other formats are available to you. For example,  e-books and white papers, viral infographics, studies, user guides … Each of them has advantages and to know which one to choose, you must base yourself on your goals.

Finding the right keywords for good SEO

Now let’s talk about a much more technical aspect of your content strategy:  the natural referencing  of your texts, articles and others. Interesting content inevitably attracts the attention of the target audience. But above all, it must be accessible. People who search for a topic related to you should easily  find you in search engines . For this, it is necessary to optimize your SEO . How? ‘Or’ What ? First of all, you need to perform keyword analysis  the most used by your target (know what terms they use when performing a search). These keywords must be found in your text. But be careful, not just anywhere! They should mostly be in your titles and meta descriptions.

Analyze your bounce rate to adapt your content strategy

A valuable but difficult to understand indicator, the bounce rate, in English, must be taken into account in any web strategy. It gives an indication of the behavior of visitors to your site and will be useful to you in determining the relevance of the content of your web pages.

What is a bounce rate?

The bounce rate is the  percentage of visitors who see only one page of your site  when they visit it.

This rate varies greatly depending on the nature of your site  : blog, e-commerce site or showcase site … A high bounce rate means that the majority of your visitors immediately leave your site after consulting the page through which they entered. They therefore only visit one page of your site. If it is low, on the other hand, it means that Internet users are visiting other pages of your site after having landed on the home page or the “landing page”. This, also called a “landing page”, is the page that users are referred to after clicking a link.

How does the bounce rate work?

We consider that the visitor “bounces” in several cases:

• When it is on your page and it closes its browser, its tab or its window directly;
• When the Internet user views the content of your page and clicks directly on an external link located on it;
• When the visitor is on your page but directly enters a new web address;
• When he is on the landing page and clicks directly on “back” without performing any action.

To calculate its bounce rate, divide the number of bounces by the total number of visits over a given period of time. A bounce rate of 50% therefore means that one in two visitors consults only one page (the one where the visitor arrives). Google Analytics  allows you to  measure your bounce rate from several angles . Based on its various reports, it can calculate your overall bounce rate for your site, for each group of channels, for each source / medium combination, and finally, for individual pages.

What is the ideal bounce rate?

There are  no specific numbers  for the best bounce rate to have since it differs depending on the type of site you own.

For example, for online stores , it is preferable that this is  low  since the goal is for your visitors to consult your articles, request a quote and therefore go from page to page. If you find that your bounce rate is high, that is a bad sign. This will surely mean that your visitor did not find what they were looking for when they arrived on your site.

On the contrary,  for informative sites , it is normal to have a high bounce  rate . Indeed, the people who consult these sites need to seek information. Once it is found, they leave.

In your case, your goal being to sell IT solutions to businesses, your bounce rate must be low because your prospects must consult your offers and take action. It is therefore necessary to check your bounce rate and reduce it, in order to capture the attention and arouse the interest of your visitors.

Causes of a high bounce rate

One of the main causes of a high bounce rate is content that is poorly suited to your target audience. If your site and your articles are optimized for keywords that are too general , people looking for something specific will be disappointed to find that your site does not meet their needs. As a result, they will immediately leave the page, without going any further.

But other elements also influence the bounce rate:

• The page load time is too long  : if your pages are not loaded quickly, users will lose patience and will leave your site for a faster one.
• Your page contains too many external links  : if you redirect your Internet users to other pages outside your site, they will not visit others.
• The design and ergonomics are unsuitable  : a design that is too overloaded (too many colors, menus, pop-ups, ads, etc.), old-fashioned, inadequate or lacking in incentive can deter users from continuing to browse.

There are many sources that a high bounce rate can come from, so it’s important to pay attention to these things when building your website.

How to reduce your bounce rate?

It is essential that the content of your website is designed to best answer the questions that your target audience is asking. This is how you will position yourself as an expert in your field and gain the confidence of companies to purchase your IT solutions.

• Write interesting content for your visitors  : your site must interest your visitors so that they do not leave. The more interesting information people find, the more likely they are to navigate to other pages on your website.
• Choose “long tail ” keywords  for your SEO  : as seen above, overly general keywords can lead to a high bounce rate. It is better to focus on more specific keywords. These are more likely to correspond to the request of the Internet user when carrying out his research.

But even very interesting content must be easily accessible and make people want to read it. You should therefore not neglect the optimization of the other elements that come into play in your bounce rate:

• Limit the loading time of your site’s pages  : no one likes to wait. The loading time that exceeds three seconds discourages Internet users and they will therefore turn around, without even having consulted your site.
• Think about the design  : the design of a website is very important. An elegant and sober design will make your visitor want to stay. Also remember to optimize your layout on all the devices used (smartphones, tablets, computers). 
• Add internal links  : this is a good way to encourage your visitors to continue browsing your site. You can therefore insert links in your articles. These can lead internet users to similar articles, contact forms, etc. Likewise, call-to-action is also a good way to redirect your visitors to other pages on your site. Remember to make them attractive for visitors to click on.
• Do not insert too many external links  : links attract visitors and encourage them to click on them and therefore leave your site. Of course you can insert some but always make sure to schedule them to open in a new tab so that they don’t really leave your site.

Bounce rate and SEO

The bounce rate affects the  SEO  of your website. It enables the collection of qualitative and quantitative information. Indeed, it indicates the value of a site in the eyes of visitors, and therefore informs about the quality and relevance of a website, in terms of its content but also of the user experience. This value is taken up by Google, which affects its positioning in search engines. It is therefore necessary to  improve its bounce rate to also improve its positioning . The lower it is, the more it is considered interesting by Internet users and therefore by Google.

Let’s sum it all up

As a vendor of IT solutions for businesses, your target audience is a bit special: you don’t address yourself to Mr. and Mrs. Everybody but to other businesses. This will inevitably impact your content strategy. After defining your goals, delivery channels, and formats, you need to write content that touts your product characteristics by providing accurate information. Everything must demonstrate your expertise in a technical and direct language. It is also important to pay attention to your SEO so that your texts can easily be found by your audience.

Also remember to check the bounce rate of your website because it gives you valuable information on the behavior of your visitors when they visit your site. Therefore, it is also a good indication as to the quality of your content strategy. If this bounce rate is too high, it means that companies looking for IT solutions are not finding enough satisfaction on your website. In this case, you will have to adapt your method to hope to increase your conversions. Remember that the bounce rate also has an influence on the SEO of your site, so you have to take that into account.