A B2B Marketer's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) for SaaS Blogs

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) doesn't just apply to your landing pages.

As a B2B SaaS marketer or CMO, you've got to make sure that every touch point on your website is optimized for maximum conversions — including your blog posts. But the thing to keep in mind is that most people who come across your blog posts are finding you through search engines, which means they're mostly looking for information. That makes conversion rate optimization infinitely more challenging.

Luckily, product-led content can help you not only to improve conversions for your blog content but also to differentiate your content from other search results for higher rankings.

In this guide to CRO optimization for SaaS business blogs, we'll go over some key strategies for leveraging product-led content to drive conversions using your blog posts. We'll talk about what it means to create product-led content, discuss how to develop a product-led content strategy, and discuss some key tips to help you optimize your content based on your product offering.

Interested? Keep reading!

What Is Product-led Content?

So, what is product-led content? If you've been in the B2B SaaS marketing space for any amount of time, you're probably familiar with the concept of product-led growth. It's the idea that you should use your product’s value proposition to drive user acquisition and user retention, rather than relying solely on traditional marketing.

Product-led content does the same thing for your blog. It's content that showcases how your product can help solve customer problems. That way, when someone is trying to find a solution to a problem, buying your product becomes the obvious next step in their customer journey.

Take a look at Mint for example. They use their blog to create detailed guides about finances and budgeting. Their content also offers tips for managing your money smarter and more efficiently.

In addition to writing blog posts, Mint also creates webinars, video tutorials, and case studies that offer money management hacks for modern consumers. All of this ties back to Mint's core offering: a personal finances app that helps you track expenses.

Developing a Product-Led CRO Strategy for SaaS Blogs

Strategy is one of the key differentiators that separate company blogs from personal ones. Creating a product-led content optimization strategy means doing proper customer research, coming up with keyword ideas that feel relevant to your product, and developing an editorial calendar to drive your content efforts.

Here's a step-by-step framework to help you get started with CRO in SaaS content marketing:

1. Start With Customer Research: Figuring out your audience's wants, needs, and pain points is essential to creating successful content that drives conversions. Focus on understanding the “why” behind what your clients are looking for and use that knowledge to create customer-centric content tailored to their needs.
2. Identify Keywords: After you understand your customers' needs, use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to identify words related to those topics that people are searching for online. Then, create a spreadsheet that maps out relevant keywords that you can target within your content, along with any relevant performance metrics.
3. Develop an Editorial Calendar: An editorial calendar will keep you organized and help you plan out your content in advance so that it aligns with other campaigns or initiatives scheduled for a given period. As you add content to your calendar, be sure to include a list of keywords that you want to target with each piece.
4. Create Content: Now it's time to create the actual content. Keep in mind that product-led content should focus on customer needs, not just the features and benefits of your product. Show how your product addresses those needs and provide practical examples that tie back to your product's use cases.
5. Measure Performance: Once you've created the content, measure its performance over time using pre-determined KPIs. Check metrics such as page views, click-through rates (CTRs), conversions, and time spent on page to determine what resonates with your audience and what isn't performing as expected. Make adjustments to ensure that your content is meeting customer needs.

How to Optimize SaaS Content for Maximum Conversions

Let's take a look at all the ingredients that make up a good piece of product-led content.

Here's an example from Vidyard — an online video recording, hosting, and managing platform dedicated to marketing and sales teams. Vidyard's recent article called "How to Start Using Video Prospecting for Outreach" is a great piece of product-led content that uses a sales-specific use case to illustrate the benefits of its product.

Here's how it works. The article begins with a lede that uses a relatable sales example to empathize with the audience's perspective. It then goes on to show how one of the most common use cases of Vidyard's platform, video prospecting, can help sales teams generate more leads.

What follows is a detailed deep-dive into the use of video in sales prospecting, with lots of relevant statistics and figures to keep the reader engaged. At each step of the way, Vidyard cleverly inserts its own offering into the narrative to show how useful it is. It even showcases the video templates it offers to make video prospecting easier for sales teams.

Apart from the article itself, there's also something to be said about its backlinking strategy. Vidyard links to a good chunk of its own content wherever it makes sense to do so. The idea is to create a network of interrelated articles that showcase the platform's benefits to potential customers in the sales space.

Finally, the article ends with a prominent and contextual call to action (CTA). It succinctly tugs at the reader to take things to the next level by signing up for a free trial of the video platform.

There are lots of other examples of great product-led content to be found in the SaaS space. Superhuman and Wistia are two other examples that immediately come to mind, both with extraordinary content teams nailing the product-led strategy from behind the wheel.

8 Powerful CRO Tips for Product-led SaaS Blogs

Optimizing your SaaS company blog for maximum conversions is not a one-time process. Here are a few strategies that you can implement regularly to ensure that you're making the most out of your product-led content initiative.

• Personalize Your CTAs: When it comes to getting people to take action, personalization goes a long way. Personalize your call-to-action buttons and messages to make them relevant to the content in question. Your call-to-action buttons should be integrated naturally into the content instead of being a forced afterthought.
• Use Urgency and Scarcity: Urgency and scarcity can be powerful CRO tactics when used correctly. By adding a sense of time sensitivity and situational urgency to your content and CTA — you can encourage more conversions and engagement.
• Leverage User-Generated Content: User-generated content is an excellent way to showcase the value that existing customers find in your product and build trust with potential prospects. Collect feedback from your customers and repurpose it into content ideas. Or better yet, launch your own user community and encourage them to submit content to your blog.
• Apply A/B Testing: A/B testing is a great way to optimize your content and understand what works best with your audience. By running experiments and observing the performance of different versions of the same page, you can quickly identify what resonates more.
• Make Use of Heatmaps: Heatmaps are invaluable when it comes to understanding user behavior on your site or blog. By leveraging heatmapping tools like Hotjar, you can visualize how each element on a given page performs in comparison to others and make necessary adjustments for better results.
• Utilize Exit-Intent Technology: Exit-intent popups are an effective way to keep visitors from leaving your website before they've had a chance to convert. By providing helpful information like discounts or offers, you can entice them to stay on the page long enough to read through your entire content.

Hire an In-house Content Partner to Take Charge of Your SaaS CRO

Are you tired of seeing your SaaS blog fail to live up to its true potential? Need help developing a product-led content marketing strategy that drives conversions?

Hi, I'm Ritoban — a tech journalist turned content marketer who specializes in working with SaaS startups to improve their content's CRO. I've worked with brands like Superhuman, Kubera, Sendbird, ZoomInfo, Glide, and 7pace — helping them scale their content efforts and drive increased revenue using a variety of conversion strategies.

Want to learn more about how product-led content can improve your SaaS conversion rates? Fill up this quick form to schedule a free strategy session!