As you may know, the Anything as a Service (XaaS) space is extremely crowded right now. The market is forecast to grow some more, at an expected CAGR of 12.5% until 2031.
Right now, if you need something done in your business, there’s a XaaS for it. And most often there are several you can choose from.
This is where the problems start for my agency’s clients. Their industry is filled with opportunities, but also with competition. One of the ways they have chosen to stay ahead of the competition is through (SEO) content marketing for XaaS. This is our turf. We’ve helped quite a few companies get solid, scalable, and long-lasting ROI through content.
If you’re in the XaaS industry, you may want to steal some of our trade secrets. I’m happy to share – you’ll find them below.
Case Study 1: How to Get More Leads and Better Rankings as an iPaaS
One of our oldest clients is an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) company that caters to other businesses who need to break down data silos and get more out of the solutions they use. For instance, if someone uses Salesforce and Constant Contact, bringing the data from the two platforms together will give them new, actionable insights.
This is what they do and they do it well.
My agency’s job was to help more businesses learn about our client. To do that, we’ve focused on a few things:
- Educational content to attract new users: blog posts explaining the value of the service in general (without sales pitches) and how iPaaS/integration can have an outstanding ROI.
- Educational content for existing users: blog posts that go in-depth about our client’s solution and offer tips and tricks on how to leverage it better. Better yet, we have created a huge knowledge hub for them, with content pieces that go beyond their industry and offer turnkey marketing/sales strategies and tactics that their subscribers can get inspiration from. This also helped with bringing loyal customers closer to the brand and getting them to share the content we created and recommend our client’s solution to their peers.
- SEO: right now, more than 80% of our client’s traffic is organic – it comes from search engines without paid ads. This offers them a great opportunity to convert readers to leads (since we already know what they are interested in through their search query) through carefully crafted CTAs that my team sprinkles throughout the blog.
- Premium content: eBooks, whitepapers, and research reports to help our client establish their brand as an authority in their industry. Whether it was gated content or free to read for everyone, each piece made a difference in their conversion and retention rate.
- Web copywriting: we regularly review and tweak the copy on their mission-critical pages to improve the conversion rate and to add more clarity to each message.
The result? Our client’s conversion rate improved by 25%, while the lead generation rate spiked by a whopping 50%.
Why does this approach work?
Briefly put, because it’s based on what their customers need. Our client serves a wide range of businesses of all sizes from all the corners of the world. So each content piece is created with a certain audience in mind – it’s not for all their subscribers or potential subscribers. But each of the segments of their audience finds something relevant in their content hub.
Moreover, all the content we create is free of jargon or technical terms. Even if our client sells a tech solution, their subscribers are not techies, so we cut down on the jargon and explain every technical term we can’t avoid in a way that’s practical and intuitive.
Case Study 2: How to Generate More Traffic as an eCommerce SaaS
Our client is a local eCommerce SaaS platform (think Shopify, but with a more localized audience). Their goal was to build a knowledge hub that keeps their existing customers engaged with the platform and attracts new leads and more traffic. Since awareness was important for them, we helped with:
- SEO-friendly blog posts to attract more traffic through their blog. We focused on optimizing for long-tail keywords so we can aim for the right search intent.
- Helpful, educational blog posts also search-optimized, these were however targeted to their existing audience. Since a lot of their subscribers are new to the eCommerce space, these blog posts helped them plan their marketing campaigns better and learn how to scale their business in a sustainable manner.
- App descriptions and micro copy: as any other eCommerce SaaS, our client also sells various apps and add-ons the subscribers can purchase to improve their online shop. Apps to manage affiliates, various cross-sell and upsell plugins, or wallet features are a few examples. To improve their conversion rate and to help their subscribers understand how each product can help them, we wrote their descriptions and micro copy. The result? Fewer customer support inquiries as soon as the changes were published.
After working with them for a year, our client now gets more than 26% of their traffic from organic search.
Why does this approach work?
Our client’s primary target are small-to-medium eCommerce companies. These are entrepreneurs that wear multiple hats, so when they read about a new way to promote their shop, that content needs to go straight to the point. Unlike our strategy for our iPaaS client, this one relies on shorter blog posts and fewer in-depth guides. Instead, we offer smaller, easily digestible nuggets of information that their subscribers can apply even with a small staff.
Case Study 3: A Highly Technical SaaS Solution (Visual Regression Testing)
Not sure what visual regression is? No worries – it’s important that your web developer/QA tester does. Our client sells a SaaS product that, unlike the examples above, is created for a very technically-inclined audience.
In this case, our strategy is very different from the two above. We still work in a lot of search engine optimization, but since the audience is completely different, so is our approach. First and foremost, we work with highly specialized technical writers (to me, at least, half the things they write for this client is unintelligible).
Our approach:
- In-depth technical articles and guides (often 4,000+ words) about visual regression testing. These guides are created for beginners in testing, as well as for experienced professionals who want to explore new/better ways to do visual regression testing.
- Solution comparisons: the in-depth comparisons between our client’s solution and their competitors’ help potential subscribers make the best choice. Of course, we’d like to say that our client is always the best choice, but in this field, even a seemingly tiny feature can make a world of difference in their audience’s work, so transparency is key.
With this approach, our client sees an uptick in organic traffic every time a new piece of content is published. They also get fewer support questions and their sales department has an easier time converting leads thanks to the in-depth comparison guides.
Why does this approach work?
The one thing this strategy has in common with the two above is the fact that it’s tailor-made for our client’s audience. When speaking to a highly technical audience, we shift gears and use as much jargon as possible. A subscriber of an iPaaS doesn’t really care what’s behind the platform that handles their integration. But for a visual regression testing tool, this matters. So the content is tailored to answer different needs and reduce their overhead.
Want to chat more about XaaS content strategy and/or how you can create your winning tactics? Get in touch!
