Finding strategic opportunities for content strategy

For the past while, I've been looking for a way to analyze the opportunities for content as a growth channel in SaaS.

Part of that is thinking researching what different markets are doing and how the companies in each market are taking a different view.

I couldn't find a way to think about this in a smart and systematic way, so I created my own framework for it.

Here are the main components:

Know what affects content strategy in B2B SaaS

There's a bunch of factors that play a part in why and how customers buy your product. For B2B SaaS, here's a list of factors that are important (obviously there could be more but for the majority, this is what matters):

• A company’s business model – How do you make money? Do you have a free trial to work around? Is it freemium? Charge by usage? Consultancy plus SaaS? Paid only? Annual or monthly?
• Maturity of product category – Are you creating a class? Or are you entering a well populated one?
• Industry complexity – What does the industry you are selling into look like? Is it simple, complex?
• Product complexity – Is the product easy to understand?
• Pricing model – Is the purchase a significant financial commitment for the customer?
• Complexity of end user organisation – How complex is the organisational requirement for the end user of this product? Who else is involved?
• **Frequency of end usage **– How frequently will this product need to bring a user back?
• Duration of set up for end usage – Is it one time or do new ‘set ups’ need to occur regularly
• **Customer lifecycle **– What the customer lifecycle looks like and the challenges faced at each stage of that
• Competitor strategy – What is your competitor profile? How are they marketing? This will have a huge impact on your own product.

By thinking about these, you can get a good idea of what the marketplace is like. But that doesn't give you a practical way to assess your own strategy for growth.

What's the shape of content strategy?

Content can be a tough growth channel because the feedback loops can be so long. So going into it without any strategy is understandable (because hey, we like experimenting and we're naturally curious, right?) but also super dumb.

I've been experimenting with this system instead:

1. Analyze your competitors based on 5 factors: depth, volume, frequency, value and conversion value of content
2. Visualise this on a radar chart – giving scores to each competitor for all 5 factors allows you to do this (albeit a little subjectively)
3. Look at the different 'shapes' to try to build a unique and competitive strategy
4. Use that to develop tactics that you can use to implement the strategy

I actually did a case study of how this works in practice and used Zapier, Integromat and a fictional new product in the automation market demonstrate. If you're interested in how that gets implemented, here's a link.

Looks like this when it's done:

I'd love to know if this is a useful framework for you.