Content is the unique signature of any enterprise looking to make a distinguished online presence.
And, when there are tons of competitors looking to woo the same audience as yours, your content marketing has to be immaculate, engaging, and valuable!
For SaaS companies looking to promote their solutions and products, content marketing becomes the core growth-driving factor in the chaotic online paradigm.
But why should SaaS companies focus on Content Marketing at all?
The rationale for investing in content marketing is simple. For SaaS companies, good content translates into;
- 30% Higher growth rate
- Up to 10% better user retention
- A mind-boggling 640%+ ROI
Now that you know what good content marketing can do for your SaaS enterprise’s growth let’s talk about making it happen.
You can either foster an in-house team or outsource your content marketing to a reliable partner.
What should you do to optimize your content operations?
Let’s begin with the comparison fundamentals!
Cost of Content Marketing
Creating good quality content requires domain expertise and digital marketing skills. That means your blogs, guest blogs, eBooks, and other marketing collateral must be composed, edited, and designed by resources possessing these two qualities.
This is where you must factor in the cost of content work vis-a-vis quality.
Cost of In-house Content Team
Depending upon how much content you need to create for branding, marketing campaigns, and promotion, you can calculate the number of resources that must be hired. For startups, a Content Writer, Conversion Copywriter, Copyeditor, Social Media Manager, and Designer are often sufficient to build initial traction through valuable content.
The cost factor, in this case, can be broken down to;
- Salaries of in-house resources
- Cost of Human Resources & Hiring mandates
- Cost of Content, Publishing & Collaboration tools (Like Notion, Grammarly, Figma, GSuite, etc.)
Cost of Outsourcing Content
If you choose to outsource your content scope to an experienced agency, you can save much of these overheads and recurring costs. For instance, you won’t have to pay the salaries, subscribe to expensive cloud tools, and bother hiring. All you need is to raise content requests, approve the content and publish it.
Your cost factor for outsourcing content can be broken down to;
- Per piece Content Delivery cost/hourly charges (depending upon the service model of the agency)
If you go for monthly retainers, the cost will plummet even further!
Edge of Cost: Outsourcing Content Marketing
Content Strategy Perspective
Your content strategy will decide the ROI and impact of your SaaS products/solutions online. A good content strategy includes;
- Assessing end-user queries and problems
- Domain knowledge
- Company/Product/Solution’s market positioning
- Competitors analysis
- Meticulous content calendar & publishing schedule
- Creating Content Marketing funnels (TOFU, MOFU & BOFU)
- Understanding User journeys
While an in-house team can be trained upon all these points, it helps a lot if your content marketers are adept beforehand regarding these technicalities.
Content Strategy and In-house Team
Your in-house team can give you inputs based on their understanding of your SaaS products. You can add a more valuable perspective to refine the strategy. However, you stay limited to a ‘siloed’ thinking when it comes to strategy. What kind of blogs should you write? How often should you publish? How will you measure the ROI? All such questions might or might not get answered.
Though, collaboration is superior with an insourced team.
Content Strategy and Outsourcing Partner
Your outsourcing partner can do all that your in-house team can, and then some. Besides giving you valuable insights from their experience with other clients and industries, they can also recommend you to piggy-back on ongoing content trends.
However, on-demand collaboration can be a little tedious with agencies.
Edge of Strategy: In-house team (for collaboration) and Outsourced team (for value-added recommendations).
Scaling Content Operations
As much as it is crucial to create spot-on and engaging quality content, you’ll need to scale it with time.
That means more blogs, guides, tutorials, videos, guest posts, infographics, and whatnot!
You can either juice out your internal content team to do more with consistent quality (an impossibility in the real world) or ask your partner content agency to add more dedicated resources as you grow.
Scaling Content with In-house Team
A straightforward solution is to hire more writers, editors, and designers to scale your content operations. But, that won’t be cost-effective in the long run for your enterprise. For instance, if you decide to 3x your Content publishing, you can triple your initial small team’s overheads – even more if the operation needs to be highly streamlined.
Scaling Content with an Outsourced Team
Not only you’ll get consistent quality (as per the contract ;-)), but also superior scalability. Since content agencies can add talent resourced on-demand, you’ll only be paying for the dedicated resource and not any other overhead as you grow.
Edge of Scale: Content Outsourcing
The Verdict
As a growing SaaS company, you must strike a balance between in-house resources and outsourced teams.
Having some in-house resources will always be helpful in terms of collaboration, brainstorming, and quality approvals. However, an outsourced team will act as an extension of your content marketing operations. You can strategize and pump quality content at scale.
Finding the sweet spot between the two is up to you!
Keep growing 🙂
