Content has always been a great companion for marketers when it comes to building authority and credibility. For mid-market SaaS companies as well, content marketing serves as a cost-effective strategy to generate high-quality leads and boost visibility in a crowded market.
Publication sites offer greater opportunities to adopt content marketing and establish authority easily. SaaS firms run publications to enable data-driven storytelling about their niche and key technologies to disseminate appropriate insights among the target audience.
According to experts, nearly all SaaS providers have a content marketing framework. Almost 98% of them maintain a blog as part of their content marketing strategy. Additionally, 53% of SaaS professionals believe that content marketing is one of the key growth drivers for their business. A majority of SaaS companies run publications to fulfill their content marketing.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how SaaS brands are using publications for content marketing and building topical authority in the industry. Let’s get started…
Understanding the Importance of Building Authority in SaaS:
Establishing authority is crucial for SaaS brands while intending to gain a competitive edge and sustain business success. It helps in gaining audience trust and boosting brand value. Here are the key benefits of building authority in the SaaS industry-
- Enhanced audience trust and credibility.
- Impactful customer acquisition and retention.
- Significant competitive advantage.
- Positive marketing return on investment (ROI).
- Assistance in boosting sales and leading the industry.
How does Content Marketing Help in Building Topical Authority?
Content marketing is one of the best strategies to build authority in the SaaS industry. It not only helps in constructing topical authority but also gives opportunities for thought leadership. Diverse types of content may include blogs, reports, guides, case studies, success stories, and others.
Valuable content can simplify the demonstration of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) for the search engines and the target audience. Whether it is about making an impact among the target audience or the search engines, creating quality content is a win for SaaS brands in every way.
In short, content marketing offers positive outcomes while establishing authority in the competitive industry. Furthermore, link-worthy content like blogs can also advance lead generation, which can be nurtured and converted into paying customers.
Using Publications to Achieve Content Marketing Goals:
Digital publications work as a virtual repository for vast and complex topics that SaaS brands usually use to educate their audience in depth. Publications offer brands the appropriate platform to promote their niche, attract an audience, and establish thought leadership.
Publications accompany brands throughout the sales cycle of their audience, from the very beginning of the awareness phase to nurture, consideration, and conversion. In the SaaS industry, brands consistently require assets and social proof to create awareness, visibility, and drive audience engagement.
Running and maintaining publications with valuable content can also lead to a higher rank on search engines, generating traffic and high-quality leads. For example, when an audience is planning to integrate a business intelligence (BI) tool for their firm and looks for the same on the search engine.
While creating BI niche-driven content on publications, demonstrating E-E-A-T, brands can rank higher on the search engine, and the appropriate audience will end up clicking on your asset link. In this way, SaaS brands generate high-quality leads through content marketing and running publications alongside building authority.
Step-by-Step Guide to Using Publications for Building Authority
Using publications first requires brands to own an appropriate site that matches their niche. Apart from that, brands can also create a site from scratch, assessing easy UI and site navigation. The following stages include-
Step 1 – Identify Your Target Audience and Their Needs:
Knowing the right target audience is the primary step in using a publication. It gives SaaS brands a clearer picture of how their content strategy has to be planned.
Step 2 – Define Your Goals:
Understanding the exact goals of running a publication is important, as it allows a brand to determine the entire strategy and thoroughly plan content, aligning content creation with audience expectations for maximum impact.
Step 3 – Conduct Keyword Research and Finalize Topics:
After knowing your audience, goals, and niche, it’s time to conduct keyword research to understand exactly what your target audience is looking for on the search engines. Following the research, finalize major topics that match your business expertise.
Step 4 – Select Subtopics and Prepare a Content Calendar:
Distributing the content plan into pillar and cluster format helps significantly in building authority for SaaS brands. Hence, select subtopics of the major topics and prepare a content calendar. The calendar must follow a specific schedule to offer publishing clarity.
Step 5 – Select Content Formats and Types:
Choose content formats to create content on the selected topics, such as blogs, articles, case studies, infographics, whitepapers, reports, glossaries, and others.
Step 6 – Create Content:
Content creation on specific topics requires in-depth research, expertise, and timely information. Hence, hiring a team with the right talent is a priority. Ensure that the content includes timely data and engaging language that attracts readers and target audiences.
Step 7 – Optimize with SEO:
Valuable content with ineffective SEO cannot bring desired results. Therefore, ensure optimizing your content with SEO elements such as maintaining keyword density, internal links, external links, structured data, and others. Make sure that alongside on-page SEO, your off-page SEO is also apt.
Step 8 – Build Internal Links and Acquire Standard Backlinks:
Build internal links that make your content and traffic measurable. Additionally, add contextual internal links that validate your thorough content strategy and build authority.
Apart from that, attain high-quality backlinks. Target is collaborating with thought leaders and pioneering sites that already share a positive reputation in the industry. This will further solidify your approach to building authority.
Step 9 – Promote Your Content on Diverse Channels
Alongside SEO, content pieces on publications require promotion to establish authority and attract a broader audience. Hence, ensure promoting content on various social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and X, alongside social groups.
Step 10 – Monitor and Continuously Update Your Content
Monitor the performance of each content piece. Monitoring helps in understanding how impactful your content creation efforts were. Furthermore, it gives opportunities for betterment. Use appropriate tools for monitoring.
Content topics and the data used to create them can become outdated over time. Continuous updates make your content timely and valuable for your target audience.
Key Considerations while Managing Publications to Build Authority:
- Focus on covering intent-based keywords that audiences actually search for and require solutions to.
- Create authentic and valuable content. Plagiarized content can impact your ranking and authority-building initiatives.
- Be consistent. Develop content strategies and valuable content consistently, alongside publishing the same, following a fixed schedule.
- Make sure your publication site adheres to the regulations of different search engines.
- Make compelling content that is easily understandable and enhances readers’ understanding of certain topics.
- Ensure compliance with the major data privacy guidelines while collecting or using data, including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and others.
- Look for guest collaborations and partnerships to drive increased audience attention and build authority.
Build Authority with Publications and Content Marketing!
If you own a mid-market SaaS brand, your business needs a content marketing plan that not only promotes your solutions but also establishes authority. Using publications, in this regard, can be highly beneficial. Nevertheless, building authority through publications requires a strategic approach focused on consistently delivering high-quality, expert-driven, and audience-relevant content.
Hope this guide on using publications to build authority was helpful for you. Start your journey with running publications with our step-by-step guide today.
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