How soon is “too soon” to implement a content marketing strategy?
Content marketing is often left as an afterthought for SaaS brands because it is commonly believed you can only invest in content after you have a product or the first few customers in through active outbound sales.
Well, allow us to debunk this content marketing myth by showcasing how content marketing is an excellent way to validate your startup product idea!
About the SaaS product
The company is an email marketing tool that enables eCommerce stores to create and send emails & SMSes at scale using advanced workflows to set up automation. They aim to help eCommerce businesses turn emails into a sales channel by taking into account changing consumer behavior, using strategic follow-ups, dynamic content, and other tactics.
The Challenge
The email marketing industry comes with very high competition. With solutions like MailChimp, Klaviyo and Active Campaign, the company wanted to first validate the need for advanced email marketing automations for eCommerce businesses before building out the entire product.
Since their target audience resided in the US and Canada, they needed to become a go-to source of information on email marketing to explain the difference between the status quo and what their product could enable.
This required them to use their logical workflows as frameworks that could be added on top of the existing email marketing solution used by the business – similar to a template. So we built out a B2B content marketing strategy that focused on putting forward their USP instead of over-promising a solution!
Our Approach
Once we understood the product and the potential use cases, we altered our approach to B2B content marketing, and instead of competing with the top brands in the market, we chose to leverage product-led storytelling.
The first step was creating content pillars aligned with the product’s unique features/ workflows and the pain points of their target audience with the current automations. This included approaching each type of email marketing campaign for eCommerce businesses with more depth and examples.
We used each email campaign type as a pillar in our B2B content marketing strategy, tackling the following:
- Abandoned cart emails
- Welcome emails
- Win back emails
We took on one pillar each month, creating 8 pieces of long-form content with complete depth on the topic. For instance, when we created content on “Welcome emails,” our content clusters and topics were based on the following topics:
- What are welcome emails?
- Welcome email examples for *industry name* brands.
- Why opt for welcome emails?
Each content piece was focused entirely on solving the target audience query, narrowing it down to make it as relevant and contextual to their industry, use case or problem. This helped us propose the new frameworks and automations enabled by the product more naturally, leading to us quickly becoming a go-to source of information for eCommerce email marketing.
on a discovery call!