You are young and you are in a highly competitive marketplace. The SaaS model has made technology more convenient, highly accessible, and commercially viable. Both the B2B and B2C world are increasingly adopting SaaS-based products. If you want to get noticed in this world that is increasingly dominated by digital, you have to get to the top of the search results page, because that is how a lot of people are going to be looking for what you are delivering. Getting high search engine rankings has two very clear advantages — it gives a boost to your inbound marketing and it grows the traffic to your website organically, resulting in more higher quality leads who are likely to purchase your product.

A targeted content strategy is the key to unlocking higher brand visibility. Even though this is well understood, there are several issues in achieving this.

• Some businesses actively publish content but it is haphazardly posted without proper research on what to write about or prior planning of keywords
• The content published tends to be generic and does not provide any specific or unique insights
• A single piece is posted as a blog or an eBook and ends up having a low shelf life lasting just a few days

As a SaaS startup trying to gain a serious, sustainable following, you need to make it easier for Google to crawl your website and make your blogs rank higher in search engine results.

Here are 7 ways in which you can improve your brand’s visibility

Set smart, measurable objectives

To begin with, you have to know what is it you are trying to achieve. Deciding to post blogs twice a week might be easy to accomplish but without tying it up with engagement metrics, it might not serve any purpose at all. As a startup, your content marketing goals can vary from growing your list of email subscribers to improving your SEO. Once you have set clear goals you can fine-tune the specific tactics to execute.

Create content that provides answers to the customers’ pain points

Don’t just focus on getting your visitors to subscribe to your product by constantly talking about its features. Instead, look one step further at what really makes life challenging for them. For instance, if your product is designed to make CRM a joy for businesses and ease their operational burden, consider answering questions about lead generation or how they can build landing pages creatively.

Most buyers start their journey by looking for information on how to address a specific gap. Offering the right advice at the right time to the right person will help them get familiar with your brand and build an inherent trust in your expertise.

Leverage Q&A sites

Social media sites like Quora are a great place to look at what people are talking about in your industry. There are questions waiting to be answered and even competitors providing solutions to problems. By maintaining a presence on such platforms and engaging with the community you can hope to give your brand’s visibility a boost and direct traffic back to your website organically.

Partner with influencers

Influencers are well respected within their niche and have a large following. By partnering with relevant influencer you have them share sponsored content about your products within their networks. While it may increase your marketing costs to get an influencer on board, it will also get you more credibility.

Collaborate with industry experts

Talk to industry experts, interview them or invite them to write guests posts on your blog. This is a great way of getting leaders to add value to your content. By tagging them in your posts, you can drive traffic from their professional and social networks to your website. You may even consider doing podcasts and bringing different experts to speak on the show to make your content mix more interesting.

Pool your promotional efforts with viral signup techniques

Get creative with how you get people to sign up for your products. Consider giving free user accounts to bloggers in exchange for coverage about your product on their blogs. You can offer discounts to people for referring your products to others. You can even bundle your product with other SaaS products and offer an attractive discounted bundle of apps.

Atomize your content and repurpose it

This last one is so simple and yet so easy for marketers to miss. A single piece of content is worth at least a dozen more. Gary Vaynerchuk, the social media guru, talks about how he and his team convert a single content asset into 30 content pieces. For instance, if you have just created an eBook, you can atomize it and convert it further into a dozen blog posts, a checklist, a video, an infographic, a couple of tweets and a series of emails.

Content marketing is king for a reason

What makes content marketing so appealing is the fact that you don’t need a large marketing budget to execute it. Ideally, it is the effort of multiple people including a marketing manager, a writer, a graphic artist, an editor, and an SEO specialist but it works even if you have limited resources and just one writer on board.

When putting your content plan into action your aim must be to mastermind sections that increase user engagement. This can mean getting people to signup for a newsletter or encouraging them to link back to your website, earning yourself genuine backlinks which is much respected by the Google search engine.

How people engage with the content on your website, how many links they click or how much time they spend on scrolling a page are also what Google uses to determine your search engine rankings.

Content marketing allows you to gain the one thing that gives new brands a much-needed boost — organic discoverability. That, apart from getting its first users, is the top priority of SaaS startups.