Terra Higginson
Marketing Research Director
SoftwareReviews

Globally, B2B SaaS marketers without the ability to consistently produce and activate quality content will experience:

• High website bounce rates and low time on site
• Low page views
• A low percentage of return visitors
• Low conversions
• Low open and click-through rates on email campaigns

Marketers struggle to create content that quickly engages the buyer because they lack:

• Resources to create a high volume of quality content.
• True buyer understanding.
• Experience in how to align technical messaging with the buyer persona.
• Easy-to-deploy content strategy tools.

By applying the SoftwareReviews’ message mapping architecture, clients will be able to:

• Quickly diagnose the current state of their content marketing effectiveness compared to industry metrics.
• Compare their current messaging approach against the key elements of the Message Map Architecture.
• Create more compelling and relevant content that aligns with a buyer’s needs and journey.
• Shrink marketing and sales cycles.
• Increase the pace of content production.

Globally, B2B SaaS marketers without the ability to consistently produce and activate quality content will experience:

• High website bounce rates and low time on site
• Low page views
• A low percentage of return visitors
• Low conversions
• Low open and click-through rates on email campaigns

A staggering 60% of marketers find it hard to produce high-quality content consistently and 62% don’t know how to measure the ROI of their campaigns according to OptinMonster.

SaaS marketers have an even more difficult job due to the technical nature of content production. Without an easy content development strategy, marketers have an insurmountable task of continually creating interesting content for an audience they don’t understand.

• Leaders will measure content marketing performance against these industry benchmarks.
• If your content performance falls below these benchmarks, your content architecture may be missing the mark with prospective buyers.

Mistake #1

Content suffers a low ROI due to a myopic focus on the company and the product. This self-focused content fails to engage prospects and move them through the funnel.

Mistake #2

Content never answers the fundamental “What’s in it for me?” question due to a lack of true buyer understanding. This leads to an inability to communicate the value proposition to the prospect.

Mistake #3

Marketers often guess what kind of content their buyers prefer without any real understanding or research behind what buyers would actually want to consume.

• While outdated content, poor content organization on your website, and poor SEO are additional strategic factors (outside the scope of this research), poor messaging structure will doom your content marketing strategy.
• Leaders will be vigilant to diagnose current messaging structure and avoid:
  1. Making messaging all about you and your company.
  2. Failing to describe what’s in it for your prospects.
  3. Often guessing at what approach to use when structuring your messaging.

• Lost sales: Research shows that B2B buyers are 57-70% done with their buying research before they ever contact sales.(Worldwide Business Research, 2022)
• The buyer journey is increasingly digital: Research shows that 67% of the buyer's journey is now done digitally.(Worldwide Business Research, 2022)
• Wasted time: In a Moz study of 750,000 pieces of content, 50% had zero backlinks, indicating that no one felt these assets were interesting enough to reference or share. (Moz, 2015)
• Wasted money: SaaS companies spend $342,000 to $1,080,000 per year (or more) on content marketing. (Zenpost, 2022) The wrong content will deliver a poor ROI.

50% — Half of the content produced has no backlinks. (Source: Moz, 2015)

Content matters more than ever since 67% of the buyer's journey is now done digitally. (Source: Worldwide Business Research, 2022)

• Create highly personalized content. Content mapping helps marketers to create highly targeted content at every stage of the buyer’s journey, helping to nurture leads and prospects toward a purchase decision.
• Describe “What’s in it for me?” to buyers. Remember that you aren’t your customer. Good content quickly answers the question “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) developed from the findings of the buyer persona. WIIFM-focused content engages a prospect within seven seconds.
• Increase marketing ROI. Content marketing generates leads three times greater than traditional marketing (Patel, 2016).
• Influence prospects. Investing in a new SaaS product isn’t something buyers do every day. In a new situation, people will often look to others to understand what they should do. Good content uses the principles of authority and social proof to build the core message of WIIFM. Authority can be conferred with awards and accolades, whereas social proof is given through testimonials, case studies, and data.
• Build competitive advantage. Increase competitive advantage by providing content that aligns with the ideal client profile. Fifty-two percent of buyers said they were more likely to buy from a vendor after reading its content (1827 Marketing, 2022).

“… Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer. (Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion)