If you're gonna do content marketing, please don't just 'educate users'. You'll end up like this startup: 300k page views, 59 conversions

A couple of weeks ago I did a content audit for a 3-year old SaaS company who reached out because their content wasn't working. They said it's the only thing in their marketing strategy that's not working, so I was curious to see why.

I detailed some parts of the audit here, if you want to see steps and numbers.

In big lines, their profile and approach to content:

This company has huge competitors, who rank for most of the broad keywords already. They're relatively young compared to the established players, so going after the broad search terms is a bit unrealistic.
Their content is mostly educational, beginner level articles. Most of it it's written for people who are starting to learn about digital marketing. So they're not focusing on their niche only, because they believe anyone who does marketing can benefit from their tool.

While this might be true, having no focus in their content lead to 770+ articles, 300K page views and only 59 conversions in 3 years! That's one of the worst conversion rates I've seen in a long time. It's less than 1% CR.

They never stopped to think why their content is not working. Never thought of doing an audit, because nobody in the team had time for it. Their content strategy is "posting x articles/month", and their key metric is organic traffic. So it's easy to see why they thought they were doing well for a long time.
They get most of their clients through cold outreach and word of mouth, but their tool targets enterprise clients.

With Corona and everyone working from home, their sales were affected, so they started looking at ways to decrease the CAC. That's how they came up with the idea of putting more effort into content marketing, and that's why they decided to finally take a more data-driven approach to it.

Most of their content is top of the funnel, awareness type of articles. Conversions are poor throughout the funnel, as said, but the types of content that are a bit better targeted do get some conversions. Unfortunately, that's less than 20% of their total content.
They choose their topics based on what the team thinks would work and based on traffic volume. This is why they go after super broad terms that are not specific enough for someone who's in the niche for long, works in a big company and knows the basics.

So the key takeaways for you:

If you're gonna start doing content marketing, please, get to know your customer first. Talk to 2, 3, 5 people, see what tools they're using already, how they're using them and what frustrates them about those tools.
If your potential clients ask questions, address exactly those questions in your content. If they ask "I only have $1000 to spend on marketing, where should I start from?", write about that, don't write generalities about "how to set a marketing budget".
If you create 2 in-depth pieces of content per month, and you go into specific details, that's much more valuable than 10 articles/month that say nothing new. Your clients are not stupid, so when you start writing a headline or intro for an article, ask yourself if you would click it and read through for more than 5 seconds. If you wouldn't, don't post it.
Last, please stop from time to time and analyze your content. You don't need an agency for this, or a "specialist". You can export your GA reports, add some simple charts that show you in big lines where the problems are, and then dive deeper into the areas that you can fix with the resources that you have. Sometimes all it takes is optimizing the old content for the right angle or intelligence level.