If I Started SaaS in 2024, Here’s My B2B Content Strategy for $1M ARR

even if you aren't doing content marketing this talk should and will apply to you even if you're doing outbound sales and you have a sales funnel where there is no marketing per se it's not inbound down towards the latter two stages of the five you need content even if you don't think about it as content marketing and so I'm going to tell you what the five stages of awareness are I'm going to walk through um how to figure out where people are approximately and then I'm going to talk through B2B examples of this so even

if you're not doing content marketing you should still get something out of the talk I want to tell you a story 2012 2013 Mr Derek Rymer and I are breaking ground on this code Base called they later became drip at the time it was velvet mail velvet mail.com baby this was before chat GPT could help me name things so I was like all right Derek you write code and stuff and I'm going to go start the marketing engine because you're supposed to start marketing the day start coding which we did and so I believe I

forget the number but it's like five ,000 $6,000 I paid a riter to create a bunch of content because we were going to do content marketing again this is 2012 13 this is 11 12 years ago before I really knew what I was doing and it was a lot of money right I was bootstrapping this thing so to spend five grand before we launched um and then to launch all this content over you know the first six months it was out and then it was basically crickets the content marketing effort did not work and the

reason it did not work in retrospect is because I didn't have any type of plan or strategy or framework work to how to prioritize what content should we do because if you look at the names of these things seven email marketing myths a beginners got email marketing five things to know about email marketing they're very general General they're very top of funnel and in this talk I'm going to talk about how you would do it you should do it differently than I did so if we Flash Forward from that 20123 time to 2023 I was

at a Tiny Seed kickoff we had a new batch of companies and there were a bunch of conversations going around and a Founder said um I need uh uh how should I grow this company and people were like content and they threw out all these ideas and he wrote down 15 different you know blog post ideas basically and when everyone walked away he looked at me panicked and was like what do I do first I don't know what but how do I prioritize any of this and I said you know what we really need a

framework for this why is there no framework so of course this is in London that's the Dixon hotel that is the basis of this talk and it's the basis of what I started teaching tiny St companies of how to Priority St prioritize um content which is to take the five stages of customer awareness which is a concept that's been around since the 60s I believe and to apply it to content marketing but not only do that because you may have seen that before but then take it to a B2B thing because often times it's it's

done B Toc and I realized that you know there's often prior art that I probably wasn't the first person to come up with this and so I did go out and Google five stages of awareness applied to content marketing and they're a handful of smatterings a lot of it is BC focused um but I did notice no that this microf talk from Malta 2 years ago actually had about 5 minutes of the similar content but he didn't go as deep as I wanted and he had B Toc examples and so that's Mark Thomas he's a

great guy um so with that that's what today's talk that frames today's talk and as always my talks are in three acts the First Act is I'm going to talk about the stages of customer awareness before we get going who here Knows by heart the five stages of customer awareness oh yeah oh this is amazing okay my worst nightmare is I come in here and everyone raises their hand and they're like yeah and I already apply it to content marketing idiot but there were literally two hands in here so that at least I will teach

you something today the first something is value your relationships over everything else second thing is going to be the stages third thing I'm sorry yeah I guess the third thing is uh three ways to identify which stage a prospect is in it's a little Loosey Goosey but we try and then the last thing is look at examples B2B examples of people and companies in our bootstrapper community and some larger companies that do this well and go through the stages and say oh this is something you should do at this stage so with that let's dive

in Eugene Schwarz in the 1950 60s said that there are five stages of customer awareness and he was an ad Mogul like mad like if you watch Mad Men He was one at that that type of of role and so he wrote very much about consumer awareness selling Gillette razors or selling you know uh paper towels or something but they apply pretty well to B2B as well so the first stage top down five stages first stage is people who are unaware so your prospect doesn't realize they have a problem they don't know there's a way

to improve their current struggle you can imagine this B2B unaware is actually kind of dangerous if people are unaware they even have a problem often times you rather inventing a category or it's all outbound and it's education right it's like they don't know they have a problem so they're not going to Google they're not talking about it in Facebook groups they don't even know where they have problems so not only are you cold email and cold Outreach cold l in but you're like you're like hey did you know you have this problem really really hard

so we won't spend a ton of time on it on on unaware because in B2B you really kind of don't want to be there um so that's like an example of this I'm going to do one example as I walk through a B2B example of like imagine realtor a realtor who eventually purch just signs up for MailChimp right signs up for an email marketing platform well in the unaware stage they literally have no idea that they even need more leads they're unaware of it so you would have to email them or reach out and be

like did you know that you need more leads than you could get them online like what an education process right so that that's an example of unaware second one is problem aware your prospect knows they have a problem they're unfamiliar with possible solutions they may not completely understand the problem so this is when they realize oh I need more I have a problem I don't have enough buyers and sellers so how do I go about doing that do I go to Google do I ask in Facebook groups how are other people finding it right they

start listening to podcast reading books whatever so at least now they know they have a problem um the thing is they're not searching for MailChimp because they don't even know what that is in fact they're not even searching for email marketing software because they don't know what that is in fact they're not even searching for email marketing because they don't know what that is they're still at I have a problem but I have no idea what to do next right solution aware is stage uh and I'll make all these slides available probably post them in

slack after um this is where your prospect knows about Solutions like yours but they don't know about specific products so this might be where they realize oh there is a category marketing automation email marketing uh I kind of get that you send email to people and maybe there's software to help you do that and then product aware this is where they start learning they may know of your product they're still comparing it to the competition they're not sure if your product is the best solution for them right so this is where they might be saying

oh okay so there's MailChimp what's the difference between MailChimp and clavio MailChimp and active campaign active campaign and drip and then we get to the point of most aware this is where someone has really educated themselves on the market they're probably close to making a purchase um maybe they've even made a purchase and now they're telling their friends uh and other Realtors on Facebook or whatever other group they're in so those are the five stages and I kind of gave you a B2B example as we went through it to illustrate it yet again I'll do

a quick B Toc example so this one always happens to me I'm often unaware that I need say a new Dice Tower for my Dungeons and Dragons game until I see the deal of a day on Amazon and I realize it's 50% off or buying shoes for instance I there was an Amazon Prime deal day or prime Day deal and I wear I actually wear A6 I have for a long time because I fit my feet and I hadn't even thought about buying new running shoes in a I bought them a couple years ago right

but I saw Prime deal day and they were doing a bunch of shoes I was like oh this is so interesting and so I went off and Googled that reminds me I need to buy shoes I actually didn't buy them through Amazon but I went and Googled best running shoes what what best running shoes what are people Mak in these days so this is where I I become aware that I do have a problem I'm starting to research that problem right and then I started realizing you know what Nikes and asex probably going to be

my one and two I've always worn as6 I wore Nikes in college my coach was sponsored by them so we wore them so I was like I want to hear today you know 20 something years later what that's like by the time I get to product aware I'm literally looking at model numbers I started realizing the Nike streak fly and the A6 gt2000 were probably going to be something that applied to me and in the end I realized you know what I'm going to stick with my tried and true my as6 and so then what

I what do I start googling at that point buy as6 gt2000 cheapest as6 gt2000 uh some people just go straight to Amazon but most aware I'm ready to buy you can see the keywords and the progression in the BC example the whole point of all this is that this is a screenshot from wordstream if I were to go in as a marketer as a founder of an email marketing software package you can type in keywords and you get this huge list and the idea is how do you prioritize these how do I pick which of

these I should go after and that's where the five stages line up and the next section of the talk brings us so much like attribution it's not 100% in fact if you get to 80 75% attribution meaning where do all of our new customers come from you're doing pretty well these days it's a lot harder given that Google does not provide keywords uh the keyword not provided stuff uh people come from random places there's no refers whatever you're just kind of you do your best that's how finding out which stage a prospect or a group

of people are in that's how it is it's it's good enough you do the best you can it's not 100% there's three ways that I've seen people figure out okay if I have an individual I'm talking to on a sales call or if I have kind of a cohort or a group if I'm you know if you have a low touch funnel you're not talking to individuals you're looking at groups there's three ways the first way is why you should ask on your sales calls when do you plan to make a purchase are you comparing

us to other products which other products this will tell you a lot because think about the from the top down of the as6 versus Nike Point uh the thing you know the BTC example I just did you can map it pretty quickly to if I'm going to make a purchase very soon well I'm probably at the fourth third fourth stage of awareness if I I'm comparing you to mailchip and clavio we're probably at the fourth or the fifth stage at this point or if it's um yeah I mean you can really start to get a

feel for it in fact if I had a CRM these days and I was doing SAS sales in addition to you know budget and timeline which is I think a common thing you put in I would probably start including a a guess at the stage that they were at last time I talked to them to figure out if they're moving along and if like I'm just in preliminary research I haven't talked to anybody else I haven't thought about anybody else it's like okay they're probably at stage two maybe three and you know you might leap

a stage as you go through but the idea the idea holds this so that's the first one if you're doing High touch it's asking people even though sometimes it can feel a little um I don't know it's a sales call right you kind of ask for their budget and you feel awkward asking so salesy this is the same type of thing but it's really really helpful the second way is to look at actual keywords you saw in my example with uh the Nike A6 purchase as well as the email service realtor that certain keywords can

trigger you uh into a certain stage or can indicate you're at a certain stage and this is from semrush and they talk about how there are navigational informational commercial and transactional and these Loosely apply there's not five of them but they do lose the apply like informational is probably a a stage two maybe stage three commercial inv investigation certainly is stage three and four transaction will become stage five right so you can look at specific keywords like these that they listed in their article I listed at the bottom but navigational informational look at the commercial

best top review you will see best email service providers best email marketing software best electronic signature software top 10 electronic signature software review of XYZ signature software comparison compare MailChimp versus clavio they want you you know the web to do the work for them this versus that and then transactional is when they get right down to and if you ever see someone searching for a coupon code for your software which is unusual in SAS but you know that they are ready to buy so purchase buy discount coupon cheap etc etc so this is the second

way again do a 100% of buyers go through this EXA no they don't is this the best you can do it is is it good enough probably so navigational informational commercial and transactional the interesting thing I didn't realize that there are a couple tools so this is the second way second way is looking at keywords you probably already know for your own business if if there are certain keywords that lead to people buying but this can get you up further up in the funnel but then there are two tools that do this and I didn't

realize until I started researching this that if you look at semrush their dashboard they actually have an intent and the C is for commercial the T is for transactional the n is for navigational and the eyes for informational they actually will tell you based on the best of their ability and all their AI That's running in the background what each keyword means so T is going to put you deep in the funnel I will be a little bit before that Etc and so that's the third way uh the other way similar web is the other

piece of software should have highlighted this first second third four the fifth column that says uh intent has nav transact local so it is a relatively standardized thing which is funny that I hadn't heard of it before Googling but um so those are your three ways right it's you ask you look at keywords people are coming in on or you use sem rusher s similar web or another tool I'm sure there are other tools that do it to find out what stage might someone be at in a minute I'm going to dive into real examples

of B2B SAS companies using this content marketing framework but if you're getting value from this talk you should consider joining us at our next in-person microcom event not only do you get to see talks like this live in person but you get to be in the room with more than 200 other SAS Founders who are all working on the same problems that you are trying to grow the business business our next event is in New Orleans from March 16th to the 18th 2025 and our lowest priced tickets are on sale now we just wrapped up

our event in Dubrovnik it was an amazing experience that event sold out and our New Orleans Event will sell out as well so if you want a ticket you want to be in the room with two 250 of your best bootstrapped sasf founder friends head to micron.com us all right let's get back to the talk third section we're going to now talk about we're going to take what we've looked at and we're going to apply it to B2 funnels and originally when I wrote this talk you should start at the bottom is what you should

do you should start at stage five at the most aware stage all right problem is is if the I wrote the whole next section of starting from the bottom and going up and it was like watching momento if good movie very confusing because everything's backwards so I'm actually going to start it unaware because it just makes sense to do the progression but uh you'll get the slides and you'll get to see like really if you have nothing if you have none of this I would start at that most aware stage creating the content examples I

give there and I would work my way backwards so unaware y'all are familiar with this this is the hardest one with B2B because again it's just not something like if someone's completely unaware that they even need email Market how do I how do you even Market to that you can do highle stuff so YouTube videos 10 email marketing tips email marketing full course assum as they kind of know what email marketing is um there is session lab is a European startup and they help folks uh organize Workshop schedules you can see they have really high

level Stuff how to use room setup Styles how to become a great Workshop facilitator online energizers more engaging meetings I mean they're really going they're about Workshop agendas and this is the ne the high next higher level up I'm sure they have a lot of search traffic to these but they're so high in the funnel that it's going to take folks a long long time to get down that's why I say start at the bottom if if if you're in doubt so really we get to problem aware all right a whereare folks arew they have

a problem this is where in my example earlier of your realtor looking for email marketing might search for how do I send bulk email what is email marketing how do I do email marketing email marketing templates okay so a couple examples of folks in the microcom community who are doing this well Sewell is really good he the bulk of of sewell's traffic is uh organic Google organic he's great at putting out contract templates and agreements because this from 25,000 sales documents this is an amazing step or stage two uh approach because it is when people

know they have a problem and they don't know that they need electronic signature yet but the problem they're trying to solve just now is they need a template so he gives it away it's a high search term and then he works them through the funnel again start at the bottom he's up he's up that high because he you know has has a lot of other content down below session lab again revisiting them Workshop templates so they do they had the stage one stuff I showed you already this is more stage two templates things to solve

specific problems or needs for folks coming in user list as uh oh I'm sorry Ved v.o the co-founder of Ved spoke at microcom Europe a couple years ago and shortly thereafter they raised a kajillion dollars from a major VC fund coincidence I don't know but they do a really good job with SEO um you'll see the tools add image to video add music to video add text to video add subtitles to video people are aware they have a problem they don't know that they need vs video editing software and have compared it to it they

don't they type into Google add subtitles to video and they SEO the out of it and you wind up here so then you pull them through the funnel probably with a freemium offering if I were to guess and user list many folks here familiar with Benedict and Jane what is user onboarding The Ultimate Guide for SAS companies um again it's it's something that's Tire up in the funnel people where they have a problem they don't know how to onboard it'll get them down there eventually and more from user lless all right so that's our stage

two which is product aware once folks become solution aware so you can still see it's really General stuff it's contracts it's blog posts nothing specific to your product um and that's again why I say start at the bottom solution aware they know about Solutions but they don't know about specific products so this is where that Realtor might search for email marketing software best email marketing software what is email marketing software what's interesting is Google is still a great source for this often they wind up on Capa G2 Reddit and Kora so Capa and G2 depending

on the way to figure this out is you go into an incognito browser search for best whatever your category is top whatever your category is and see which rank's higher Capa G2 or there's the other one source Forge I think is another one hopefully it's Capa because frankly they're the easiest one to work with an advertise on but you can buy ads and Capa and they're highly highly qualified folks that are already kind of become they're people who hit Capa are usually at stage three or four so they're deeper in the funnel so even if

you're PL paying quite a bit per click on Capa the conversion rate can be really good if you test it out if you search Google I'm sorry search YouTube for capterra sth marketing and my name uh I interviewed a Founder about it who is crushing it with CAPA and he just basically opens a Kono and shows everything he's doing for free um red people often wind up on Reddit and Kora as well I personally for like microcom and Tiny Seed I of course have the same thing you know think about folks just becoming aware of

Entrepreneurship and then making their way down the stages so I monitor these things I use two tools for this there's F5 bot and then cin which I'll show in a second these are helpful for monting Reddit Hacker News Twitter lobsters look at that I have no I've been using I bought for like six years 5 years I don't know what lobsters is at all but you know a couple times a week three times a week I get pinged with an email or in slack and it's like hey someone's talking about you or your book or

micr comp or tiny scene obviously you would put your own SAS product in there you could pop pop in you can weigh in or not of course but these people are usually asking what do you think of product they are product aware so what is that third third stage um four stage yeah four stage uh so people who are mentioning you by name or your product by name like are pretty deep in the funnel so engaging with them can be helpful and I think uh this is Siffin and I think Siffin must be breaking some

type of to because I think they crawl private slack channels which is fascinating yeah and stack Overflow you look at it Indie hackers all this stuff so this allows you again if people mention your product name Google Alerts I don't know for anybody else but for me it's useless these days it's what I used to use and it's these two tools now that get me into that if they mention my name their product aware by definition so now I have a a stage four person and a conversation around my company so examples of stage of

uh uh of examples of uh content in the stage SAS email marketing strategy everything you need to know user list puts this out you can see we're getting now deeper in the funnel it's not about onboarding it's specifically about email marketing uh Ruben does a good job here with electronic signature because people come in oh I'm still trying to solve a problem um and he guides them in three steps through a premium funnel of what is an electronic signature the next step when they click through is how would you like to create your own so

it's an engineering is marketing that's the next thing oh yeah I guess now that I know what it is maybe I'll create my own and then when you after you draw the signature you click and it's oh by the way you have this e signature easy and free E signatures for all of your documents so he almost walks them through those three screens from stage two stage three stage four you know he walks them through and it's a decent funnel that is working for him all right product aware um uh yeah which I now realize

Cen and fbot should be in this section apologies for that but product awars when they know the name of your product uh we have people searching I've already brought this example up right but it's the real there who's talking about MailChimp versus whatever this is where you're going to think about alternative two pages and versus Pages all right and the difference between people think these are the same thing your product name let's say have XYZ product alternative uh sorry MailChimp versus XYZ product my product name only works when I have a brand that people are

searching for if it's the first if I'm the first month or year of my business the odds of someone comparing me to a competitor are very low the alternative two pages work when you are trying to piggyback on the SEO or the brand value of that competitor so are people searching for alternative to HubSpot clavio active campaign MailChimp well yes so then you put those pages in your early in your early days you can still have the versus Pages for the fifth stage when people are actually comparing you and making a purchase sale decision interesting

thing here I searched Google incognito browser comparing clavio and mail champ and these are the two and three results for that so Ma chimp ranks second and clavio ranks third I love the passive aggressive copy MailChimp saying well clavio is laser focused on Ecom MailChimp is inclusive of all businesses ooh jab and then clavio says clavio has no premium add-ons or hidden fees unlike MailChimp which has a whole web pages about each it's like geez guys get a room what the so but I I do think it's funny the interesting thing is think about how

deep in the funnel this is for these two like this is stage five four five it can fit in both right of like oh I've I Now understand these I'm comparing them I'm really close to buying so these are high value leads so they really want to rank number one you know who ranks number one for this for this term zapier zappier and when it what so it's interesting to think about the context for zappier where does this search term where is it in the funnel unaware so I mean it's so far up the funnel

but they don't care zappier HubSpot there's some companies they don't they're like Honeybadger they don't give a because they just want mad traffic right they want huge high value traffic terms and uh it's incredible to me that they outrank mailchip and clavio or at least when I search for this for this term so stage four content ideas of course are your verses Pages if people are searching for it user list has a ton of alternative Pages because you know they're not far enough along that there's that many uh versus versus searches so they do a

lot of alternative two pages um um and this is where case studies come into play so stage four really is about versus alternative to case studies this is where even if you are only doing outbound sales and you're only talking to prospects one-on-one you're not doing any content marketing these things start to become valuable to help you close a sale right that the content maybe isn't marketing now it's just sales literature and that's why I say start at the bottom because it'll help with both sales and marketing last stage is the most aware this when

people are really approaching making a decision they're looking comp comparisons alternative twos and all that this is where you have to break the Paradigm you have to get into features and not just talk about benefits at some point you know it's always benefits not features it's not always it's benefits not features when you're marketing when someone's first finding out about you but at a certain point they need to go a layer deeper the deeper into the stages they go they need to figure out what are your actual features show example of that in a second

your knowledge base being decent at this point people are looking at that thinking do I want to buy from this company is they're documentation good versus Pages I've said long form demos this is where you go from that 60-second demo on your homepage to having a 45 minute demo someone can watch now maybe it's an you know maybe it's one-on-one but maybe it's pre-recorded if I'm ready to buy software I will 100% watch a 30 minute or 45 minute demo of someone going through it at 2x of course case studies I talked about and white

papers which kind of makes me vomit in my mouth but you get the idea um drip actually does a good job I didn't do any of this they did this after I left but drip does a good job of showing you their features not benefits as you dig in uh user list does a great job of this you can see boom you can dig in and see exactly what they're doing so even on their marketing site there's features KB can be super helpful I love user lists KB with all their Integrations listed uh you can

get a feel for the product and then HubSpot who's really really good at all of this I didn't want to I mean I could have used HubSpot for every every stage of this but I wanted to get more bootstrap companies in but HubSpot has their versus right it's salescloud versus HubSpot sales uh as well as case studies and I think the last one here I want to leave you with I love what Ruben did with this on Sewell not something I had thought of but I bet all of y'all get asked a lot about security

and compliance and this alone this piece of content marketing talk about a stage five piece if you're about to buy are you worried about compliance at sock 2 Hippa gdpr Network and security system reliability data of course you are do you give do you care at all about that when you're at stage one or two you don't so this is where bucketing content into these stages can help you build the most appropriate stuff for the bottom of the funnel and work your way back up again if you enjoyed that talk I hope I'll see you

in New Orleans in March check out all the details at micron.com us if you're eager to watch other long form talks like this check out this next video where I go deep on the fun fundamentals of pricing for SAS make sure you're subscribe to this channel for more videos like this and I'll see you next time