Building a content engine for early-stage SaaS

Whether you want to create an investor's pitch,

or a product demo video,

or a landing page,

or the copy for Facebook ads,

or cold email for sales,

or a Twitter thread introducing the pains your business solves,

or a case study highlighting a client's success,

or a thought leadership blog post,

or content for SEO,

or a value proposition guide to help referral affiliates,

You need a solid content strategy for insights, messaging, brand guidelines, and more.

A cohesive content strategy shows you a clear path to achieving short-term and long-term goals with available resources while boosting productivity and profits.

Without it, random actions lead to wishful thinking, hope-marketing, and chaos.

As I discussed in the mega SaaS content strategy research, the subject of a successful content strategy is not your product - it is your target market.

Start researching your market and competitive landscape and create an insight bank. Use these insights to craft a content strategy that should include:

1. Ideal client profile and personas
2. Market and competitive insights
3. Goals
4. Positioning & messaging
5. Brand guidelines
6. Keyword research
7. Key content themes
8. SEO strategy
9. Channels
10. Distribution
11. Analytics

In addition, you need an editorial calendar for planning and to keep your content activities in sync.

A solid content strategy is necessary but not enough for strategies work only to the extent of their execution.💡

The truth is, a grand strategy that you can't execute is worth nothing.

And during the early stage, you can't afford to do things that don't bring in results.

Thus, building a high-impact content engine for early-stage SaaS needs a good content strategy, thoughtful planning, and flawless execution.

The secret to flawless execution is a well-designed system.😎

A system that keeps you in touch with the strategy and plan while making it super easy to create, edit, and publish content.

And since early-stage SaaS needs agility, the system should scale with your needs.

A barebone system should include:

1. A place to store all data, e.g., Google Drive or Dropbox
2. A place to save the strategy, e.g., a Word doc, Google doc, or Notion
3. A hub for all insights and content ideas, e.g., a spreadsheet
4. A calendar for planning, e.g., a spreadsheet or a Google Calendar
5. An editor where you will write your drafts, with the ability to share them with your team for feedback, e.g., Google doc
6. A way to schedule and publish content, e.g., scheduling tools like Buffer
7. A place for swipe file to save interesting content that you find on the internet for inspiration, e.g., dropbox or Google Drive

And you need a project management tool to bind everything together.

Working with freelance content writers is a good idea during the early stage as it lets you quickly respond to changing needs without fixed costs. So you need a way to add them to this system with appropriate rights like viewing and editorial rights.

Allow freelance writers to view content strategy for guidelines and standard operating procedures.

As a founder, you are likely a domain expert, and depending on your team size, you might have more domain experts on your team. Each domain expert should invest some time to add deep insights and ideas in the ideas hub so writers can use them to create quality content.

Managing such a system is full-time work.

You have to ensure everything works for all team members and that the execution is in line with the strategy, as strategies that live in docs are not actionable. There is no way to verify the synchronization between independent tools.

As you can guess, this ad hoc system is a good start but is susceptible to inefficiencies and bottlenecks.

For this reason, I am transitioning Thoughtlytics from a consulting business to a service-supported software platform - a complete organic growth engine for early-stage SaaS.

It offers a place for detailed ideal client profiles, actionable content strategy, a calendar for planning, and a well-thought-out content creation system, all natively working together without the need of management.

It helps you manage teams, share drafts for feedback, and get update notifications on your plan via email.

Strategy, planning, and execution, all in one place.