Be a gardener: improve your SaaS' content marketing strategy

Just like a gardener: tend to your online garden regularly to keep it healthy, productive, and attractive. In this article I explore several gardening metaphors that can help you with your content marketing efforts. For fun, inspiration and to help you explain the importance of content marketing to your team.

1. Soil, sun, water, and nutrients #

These elements play an important part in the overall success of your SaaS’ content marketing strategy.

Soil #

The foundation of your content marketing strategy. It encompasses your target audience, target market, and overall positioning. Your content should be tailored to meet the needs and interests of your target audience and provide value to them in a way that differentiates you from your competition.

Sun #

The sun represents the visibility and exposure your content receives. Including the channels through which you distribute your content, like social media, newsletter, etc. By utilising a variety of channels, you can ensure your content reaches the widest possible audience.

Water #

Water represents the ongoing effort and resources you put into maintaining and growing your content marketing strategy. This includes creating new content, promoting and distributing existing content, and continually refining your strategy based on performance data.

Nutrients #

Keep your content up-to-date, improve it with new insights and fix mistakes.

The soil provides a foundation for the content, the sun helps it reach a wider audience, water helps it grow and maintain relevance, and nutrients ensure that the content stays valuable and appealing, and lasts longer.

2. Planting seeds: Creating a content marketing strategy #

Creating a content marketing strategy is like planting seeds. There are various steps you need to follow.

1. Check your soil: research and understand your target audience. What are their needs and interests. What is the competition doing?
2. Choose the seeds: decide what types of content, topics and themes you want to create and publish.
3. Prepare the soil: set up the infrastructure and tools you need to create, publish, and distribute your content. Set up your Static Site Generator and create an account for Spinal.
4. Plant the seeds: create the actual content. Write blogs, documentation and so on (as always make sure your content is high-quality and).
5. Water the seeds: promoting and distributing your content. Share on social media and include it in your newsletter.
6. Add nutrients: This involves continually refining and improving your content marketing strategy. Monitor your content’s performance, analyse the data, and make changes as needed.
7. Wait for growth: be patient and persistent. Content marketing is a long-term strategy, so don’t expect immediate results. You will see growth in your site’s traffic, over time, as you consistently create and distribute high-quality content.

3. Weeding out the bad #

A gardener needs to periodically remove weeds and prune dead or overgrown branches to maintain a healthy and attractive garden. Also you need to periodically clean up or delete old and underperforming content for your SaaS’ site.

1. Identify the weeds: find old or underperforming content that is detracting from the overall health and appearance of your content marketing strategy. This includes outdated blog posts, low-performing social media posts, or pages on your website that are no longer relevant.
2. Cut the weeds: remove old or underperforming content from your site and other marketing channels. This could involve updating or deleting blog posts, removing low-performing social media posts, or redirecting pages on your website to more relevant content.
3. Prune the branches: periodically review and update your existing content to make sure it remains relevant and provides value. Update blogs with new insights, revising the tone or style, or improving for the new year.

4. Leave room for growth #

It’s important to continually evaluate and adjust your content marketing strategy. Is the soil fertile? Do you have a deep understanding of your target audience and their needs. Have you conducted thorough research on your target audience and analysed their interests and behaviors?

Have you planted the right seeds? Do you create and publish content that resonate with your target audience?

Do you water the plants regularly? Are you distributing your content to reach your target audience. Push it to social media, add it to your newsletter and other marketing channels.

Are the plants getting enough sunlight? Does your content get enough exposure? Are you optimising your content for search engines to make your content more discoverable and appealing to your users?

Do you give the right nutrients? Are you continuously refining and improving your content marketing strategy. Use analytics and data to monitor the performance of your content and make changes as needed to improve its effectiveness.

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Just as a gardener you that continuously tends to their garden, content marketing requires ongoing effort and attention. Seeing your content marketing strategy as taking care of a garden can help you focus on the ongoing and holistic nature of content marketing, and the importance of understanding your audience, promoting and distributing your content effectively, and continuously refining and improving your strategy.

Written by July Forand

Published: 16 February 2023