10 Powerful Content Marketing Examples SaaS Companies Can Learn From
Content marketing is intensely competitive, but it is also equally fascinating. Every once in a while we come across some very inspiring content marketing examples that leave us wondering – why couldn’t we think of something like this?
There’s so much you can learn from just looking at what your others in the SaaS industry are creating. After all, if you’ve come across content that you remember long after and refer to often, it is probably a great example to follow and implement in your own content strategy.
Content marketing examples that inspire
When looking for content marketing examples that can inspire your own content strategy, it is important to know what good content marketing looks like. Does the content have to be written in flowery language, espousing complex philosophies? Does it have to be packed with facts and figures and data? Probably not.
Good content marketing usually revolves around content that anyone can understand and benefit from. Not everyone in your audience is familiar with industry jargon or complex principles. Successful content marketing involves explaining complex concepts in simple language and delivering enough value for your audience to want to see more from your brand.
In other words, great content marketing examples worth following should be:
- Engaging and useful for the target audience
- Comprehensive and concise
- Easy to read, but still authoritative
- Trustworthy and fact-based
- Relatable and practical
Still not quite sure what that should look like? We’ve listed some of the best content marketing examples from some of the best businesses in the SaaS, tech, and digital marketing industries. Hope you’ll find some value in each of these.
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Blog content marketing examples
Your blog is the face of your business. It is representative of your brand and the values that it stands by. So blog content is undoubtedly one of the most important marketing assets you have. Most successful SaaS businesses also have an equally successful blog. You’ll often find them sharing highly informative and authoritative blog posts that both new and old readers find equally useful.
Here are three of our favorite blog content marketing examples.
1. The HubSpot blog: audience segmentation and original data
If you’ve been doing your research on content marketing, HubSpot is probably a name that needs no introduction. For any topic on digital marketing, there is usually a HubSpot blog post in the top search results. And HubSpot has indeed earned this position with some great content marketing ideas.
If you go to the HubSpot blog, the first thing you’ll probably notice is how well it is categorized for its different audience segments. HubSpot’s target audience includes people in marketing, sales, and service, as the platform offers various tools for these areas of business. The blog clearly segments the content for these different niches, making it easier for their audience to find content that’s relevant to them.
When you navigate to one of these categories, you will see a lot of educational content on the blog. HubSpot shares a lot of actionable steps, guides, how-to articles, templates, and original research reports in its blog content. This is one of the primary reasons why most content marketers turn to HubSpot not just for content marketing tools but also for gathering knowledge.
Here’s an example of a blog post sharing original research data by HubSpot.
The HubSpot content marketing case study by Narrato discusses the HubSpot content marketing strategy in much more detail, as well as sharing some key takeaways on how HubSpot manages to create such valuable content at scale.
2. Narrato’s content marketing: repurposing for impact and reach
Narrato’s blog is another good example of driving content marketing with effective repurposing. When you create a blog post, a lot of effort goes into research, planning, and creation. So publishing the content on just one platform is almost a waste of all that effort! There is so much opportunity to expand your content’s reach by simply repurposing it for other channels. Which is exactly what Narrato does.
Narrato is a content planning, creation, and workflow platform. So its target audience includes content creators, content marketing teams, content agencies, web design agencies, and so on. It has a content marketplace as well, for which the target audience are entrepreneurs, SMB owners, and affiliate marketers, to name a few. To capitalize on this, the Narrato blog publishes blog posts relevant to all their audience personas. But they don’t stop at that.
Each of Narrato’s blog posts is repurposed into slideshows, videos, carousel posts, and other formats to be distributed on multiple channels. Here’s an example of how Narrato repurposed one of its blog posts on product-led content marketing into a YouTube video, and embedded it in the blog post as well. This is done on almost every blog post.
Why? Because it helps their audience quickly skim through the blog post’s content in less than a minute. It also helps drive traffic to Narrato’s YouTube channel, increasing their following on both platforms.
This isn’t the only place Narrato uses video, either. This video on Narrato’s LinkedIn feed is repurposed from their post sharing SEO content planning secrets from 30+ marketers. For social media, they have converted the blog content into multiple short 30-second videos that are easy to share and consume.
Videos aren’t the only visual content Narrato uses. Another good example of blog content repurposing is this infographic that sums up a blog post on how to build an effective content creation process.
Infographics like these are easy to share on social media, especially on image-first platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, to drive more traffic to your blog. Narrato often embeds such infographics with their content, and shares them on other channels too.
3. Shopify’s blog: diverse content for all audience personas
Shopify is a big name in the world of SaaS. And, as a major ecommerce platform, their blog focuses on ecommerce marketing, news, and best practices. Creating content in huge volumes within a limited niche is not an easy task. It is common for marketers to run out of content ideas and for blogs to run dry after a certain time.
But that is a challenge the Shopify blog has met by continuously creating engaging and relevant blog content for its audience. How do they do this? By understanding their diverse user base and finding new ways to address their various pain points. All kinds of big and small businesses host their ecommerce stores on Shopify. This gives Shopify innumerable opportunities to create content that can help. The content marketers at Shopify have identified the target audience personas, understood their pain points, and used this information to fill the content gap that exists in their niche.
And, like Hubspot, the Shopify blog is also categorized into different segments like Business Ideas, Product Updates, Founder Stories and so on.
But it’s the content that steals the show. If you look at the blog home page, you will find at least four very different article themes each somehow related to online businesses.
Here’s a screenshot of the Shopify blog home page, where you’ll see one post on online teaching, one on wine ecommerce, and one on selling clothing online.Very different themes, but both fit perfectly into the overall framework of the blog.
In other words, there is something for everyone on the Shopify blog. And that’s not all! The blog also shares some very inspiring stories of small businesses on Shopify that can inspire other prospective business owners.
Here’s an example of one of their founder stories that talks about how a small business succeeded at delivering products country-wide using Shopify.
Case studies and stories like these also help build a case for Shopify themselves, encouraging more aspiring entrepreneurs to try out the platform.
Visual content marketing examples
Visual content is a key element in any content marketing strategy. Whether it’s tweets with visual content getting 10 times more engagement, or the fact over 500 million users are active on Instagram everyday, it’s clear that this is the best method to engage your audience.
Yet there are challenges in creating visual content. Creating videos or graphics that can engage your audience in today’s content-heavy world of social media and marketing is not easy. If you’re not doing it right, people will just scroll past your content because there is someone else who is doing a better job.
But here are some examples of visual content marketing you can’t ignore.
4. AppSumo: YouTube channel
AppSumo is a marketplace for digital tools and online services that offers daily deals too. They also create great content. Their video content on YouTube in particular is something that all marketers can learn from. AppSumo’s YouTube channel is full of valuable content for its audience, sharing interesting tips for various business processes and activities. They cover everything from the best SaaS tools to handling customer support. Plus, they’ve recently started making great use of the YouTube Shorts format.
Being an app deals website, this also gives them an opportunity to promote their own platform where people can find and purchase these tools. Every video has AppSumo links to the products they promote, in the description.
Most importantly, their videos deliver value to the audience. They have content for everyone, from entrepreneurs to content creators to social media influencers and more. All of their videos have a human touch as there is always someone on-screen, presenting. This helps build credibility for the content and makes it more relatable for the audience as well.
The channel posts webinars, product review videos, tutorials and so much more. Pick any video, and it could be a great video content marketing example that you can draw inspiration from.
5. SEMrush on social media
Visual content can be incredibly engaging, but it has to look good in order for people to show interest. Not everyone can tell a story through visuals , but one brand that is filled with great visual content marketing examples on social media is Semrush. Be it on LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter, visual content by Semrush is always on point.
Their memes are both funny and relevant to their audience, which makes them all the more relatable.
This one from the Semrush LinkedIn page is a perfect example of what relevant, contemporary, and humorous content on social media should look like for a business.
Their infographics are concise and packed with information, giving their audience quick, bite-sized nuggets of knowledge they can easily consume on social media. Here’s an example of an infographic from their Instagram feed. The infographic itself is minimal yet informative, while the rest of the details are taken care of in the caption.
Semrush is catering to everything a prospect or customer would want to see from a brand. They understand that the audience’s attention span is short, which is why they rely mostly on visuals that are self-explanatory and comprehensive. This is what good visual content should look like.
Product-led content marketing examples
Product-led content marketing is a genius strategy that has always been in use, but it is only now that SaaS companies are acknowledging its power. Product-led content marketing is where you very skillfully weave your product into your content’s narrative (hopefully!), without the audience even realizing that you’re marketing it.
Whether you’re using your product to demonstrate a solution to a particular problem, or to illustrate a point made in your content, it shouldn’t be salesy or overly promotional. However, when done well, your audience will come away knowing that you have the right tool to solve their problem. Some brands have been doing it exceptionally well for a long time.
6. Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign
Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign is probably one of the best examples of product-led content marketing. For this campaign, Apple gathers user-generated content (UGC) in the form of photos or videos shot on an iPhone. Not only do they give users a chance to showcase their skills in photography, but also demonstrate how powerful the camera on the iPhone is.
It started off with Apple encouraging users to share their Shot on iPhone images on Instagram and Twitter. But seeing how popular it got they have now turned it into a contest where renowned photographers will judge the entries. The winning photos will be featured on Apple’s multiple media platforms.
Here’s an example of how Apple leverages UGC to generate brand awareness and market its product. This is excellent product-led content marketing with minimum effort and maximum impact.
7. ClickUp blog
ClickUp is another SaaS brand that excels at product-led content marketing, which is unsurprisingly given it was built on a product-led growth model. They gathered feedback on user experience with their product and identified areas for improvement to ensure that the product was a perfect fit for the market they were targeting.
Not only was this great for their SaaS solution, but it also gave them tremendous opportunities to improve their content. Product-led content marketing requires you to understand customer pain points so that you can find ways to position your product as a solution in the content you create. And they had all that data at their fingertips.
In this blog post on Marketing KPIs, for example, ClickUp seamlessly demonstrates how you can use the platform to track campaign progress and goals.
This is just one example, but almost every blog post on the ClickUp blog has a mention of the product in one way or the other.
If you want to learn more about how ClickUp wins at content marketing with a product-led approach, this ClickUp content marketing case study can help.
8. Canva Learn
Canva’s blog is another great example of smart product-led content marketing. The design platform allows anyone to create stunning graphics without any expertise required. And, to help users along, they share content that helps users learn how to design better. But more than this, in every blog post, they either show you how to achieve an outcome using Canva or share Canva templates that you can use to get the same results.
Here’s one blog post that talks about how to use green screens for your videos, that also shares a Canva template that you can use to finally compile your video.
They also include clear CTAs that will take you to the design template so you don’t have to keep searching. This is how you get prospects to use your product and realize its value, encouraging them to eventually purchase it or sign up.
Social media content marketing examples
Social media marketing is a skill very few marketers have mastered. Everyone creates social posts but only a few grab your attention or bring an involuntary chuckle with their wit and humor. Being consistent with your brand, understanding your audience’s pulse, and knowing when to post maximum engagement are a few things that can bring you success with social media marketing. If you’re struggling, it may be worth working with a SaaS SEO agency, as they’ll already have a strong understanding of what works (and what doesn’t!)
In the meantime, let’s take a look at some brands that have understood this very well.
9. Slack
Slack’s social media content is always related to how people use the platform. Since Slack is a SaaS communication platform that people use for work, they often post social media content that revolves around chats and messaging. But their social media feed is extremely diverse. They have educational short videos, product videos, polls, client stories and so much more. As a result, Slack is able to generate all kinds of emotions in its audience, from happiness to awe to motivation.
Recently for World Emoji Day, for example, Slack put together a survey with Duolingo – the language learning app. They posted several polls around emoji use in online conversations and got a lot of responses.
Slack also posted the results of the survey as an engaging video once the survey was over. This is an excellent example of how you can build a social media marketing campaign around an event or trend that is relevant to your niche and also drive engagement with it.
10. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool. That means it has a lot of pressure to live up to its own claims! But, thankfully, they are doing an amazing job at it. Their social media feed, be it on LinkedIn or Instagram, is full of valuable content for social media marketers and creators.
You will find content of all kinds, from little nuggets of wisdom on Sprout Social’s LinkedIn page, like these:
To elaborate research reports presented in a social media-friendly format, like this reel here:
They’re also great at understanding the differences between each social media channel. You’ll find fewer memes or humorous posts on their LinkedIn feed. On Instagram, though, they sprinkle a few trending reels and repost some of their users’ content from time to time to keep the feed lively and fun.
But overall, Sprout Social is consistent with posting, adds value through its social content, and fulfills the primary purpose of social media marketing – promoting its product through posts like the one below.
In conclusion
Each of these content marketing examples, be it blog content, visual content, or social media content, are representative of the kind of content marketing strategies these SaaS brands have. Achieving success in any industry without the right approach to content marketing is near impossible in today’s world. These SaaS content marketing examples show us what it takes to build a brand and a following in the long run.
A few common traits you will notice in all of these content marketing examples are:
- A thorough understanding of the target audience and audience personas
- Solid knowledge of the product and its value propositions
- Consistency in quality and branding
- Driving engagement through relatable and trending content
- Educational, informative, and customer-centric rather than product-centric content
With these insights, we hope you will be able to refine your content marketing strategy and create exemplary content too. Implement some of these content creation and marketing best practices, and you are sure to see great results in your campaigns.
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Neelam Goswami is a content specialist at Narrato. She has written for several reputed blogs in the digital marketing space, including Jeff Bullas, Neal Schaffer, and others.
