The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

What to Expect from a B2B SaaS Content Promotion Program

by 

Alan Silvestri

Last updated: January 29th, 2024

​​If your content isn’t getting as much traffic as you want, producing more content won’t solve the problem.

Instead, you can boost share of voice of your existing content by promoting it through digital PR campaigns.

The problem is that many SaaS companies we talk to have tried digital PR strategies without success. They spend thousands of dollars on link-building campaigns and receive only a few links that barely improve rankings.

However, content promotion does work – you probably just need a different approach and strategy.

To help your content earn more high-quality traffic, we’ll discuss how to successfully collaborate with a marketing agency and the key differences between an average content promotion strategy and the top performing content promotion strategies.

Do you need help with your content promotion strategy? Reach out today to get your Free Marketing Plan.

Mistakes To Avoid

While it’s your marketing agency’s responsibility to produce results that drive revenue for your business, there are a few mistakes we often see clients make that can hinder the success of the content promotion strategy.

Here are the top mistakes to avoid to ensure the marketing agency can deliver the results you’re paying for.

Expecting Instant Results

All organic marketing strategies take time to generate an ROI, and content promotion is no different.

In fact, there are a few reasons why it’s a red flag if a marketing agency promises instant content promotion results:

1. They aren’t allocating time to establish processes, meaning they’re likely using a random collection of hacks and tactics without any real strategy.
2. They aren’t allowing for time to iteratively test different approaches to identify what works for your target audience and maximize results.
3. They may be earning low-quality links from link farms that don’t drive real results (and can actually hurt your brand in the long run).

However, we also realize it’s risky to blindly trust that your agency is doing a good job and will eventually produce results.

That’s why we create forecasts for each of our clients, and they can track small wins and KPIs as we build out the strategy.

They should also be able to explain their content strategy and have proven systems and processes that generate consistent results.

Poor Communication

Another key reason many digital PR collaborations fail is because the client and marketing agency have poor communication.

Understanding the market and target audience is key to any successful marketing strategy. As marketing agencies don’t know your audience and market as well as you do, you’re setting them up for failure if you don’t work with them to fill these knowledge gaps.

Therefore, each marketing campaign we run at Powered By Search is a collaborative effort with our clients.

While we have the expertise and experience for running marketing campaigns, we’ve found that our most successful engagements are with communicative clients who provide input when necessary.

Chasing Shiny Objects

Finally, you’ll probably hear about plenty of new tactics at conferences and events, and while it might be tempting to try them out, deviating from the initial strategy laid out will only hinder your growth in the long run.

Constantly changing tactics makes it difficult to iteratively test and identify what works, and without testing, you can’t improve your strategy.

Additionally, a core part of our predictable growth methodology is building a flywheel that produces compounding results. If you’re always changing tactics, you won’t have a solid foundation that you can use to build out the rest of your marketing strategy.

How We Approach B2B SaaS Content Promotion For Long-Term Success

Supporting your marketing agency is essential for a successful collaboration, but the marketing agency must also have a proven system that consistently delivers excellent results.

Here at Powered By Search, we have an entire team dedicated exclusively to content promotion, and here’s the exact strategy we use to generate long-term results.

Identify The Right Content To Promote

Many content promotion strategies focus on driving links to the homepage, which can help incrementally increase the authority of your website’s domain.

However, this isn’t the most impactful link-building strategy, as the page receiving the link will receive the most direct benefit.

Therefore, the first step in our process is identifying the best pages to promote. To answer this question, we look at two factors:

1. The page’s value: We prioritize pages and blog posts that produce the most high-value sales.
2. Ranking improvement potential: We also prioritize blog posts and pages that are already on the first or second page and that have a good chance of rising in the search results based on the competitiveness of the top ranking pages’ backlink profiles.

This criteria ensures you generate the maximum ROI possible for each link earned.

Objection: What if I want my homepage to rank higher?
Depending on the business and its goals, it is sometimes worthwhile to boost the homepage. If this is the goal, we aim to help the company be featured in listicles, or articles mentioning similar companies.

This may not provide a drastic boost in rankings, but it can improve referral traffic, which is great for sales.

Identify The Right Backlinks To Build

Not all links are equally valuable, and some can even harm your brand.

Many marketing agencies use domain authority (sometimes referred to as “domain rating”) as a metric to measure link quality.

Yet domain authority isn’t a sufficient metric as some low quality websites that exist specifically to sell links (often referred to as “link farms”) have figured out how to game the system. While they may have a high domain authority or rating, these websites still aren’t high quality and therefore aren’t worth targeting.

Additionally, even if you earn a link from a credible, high-quality website, its impact varies depending on two factors.

• Topical relevance: If you have a SaaS product in the healthcare sector, a link from a website like Hopkins Medicine will be much more impactful than a link from Tripadvisor because Hopkins Medicine is related to healthcare.
• Traffic: Even if the linking domain is high quality and has a lot of traffic, the link will be less impactful if the specific page that links to your website has no traffic. Ideally, you want the page linking to your website to have high quality, relevant traffic.

Therefore, we have a proven criteria when evaluating linking domains that consider not just the domain’s authority, but also topical relevancy, the authority of the specific page we’re targeting, and whether the link will be follow or no follow.

Using A Proven Outreach System

Not every person you contact for a link will say yes, so the more people you reach out to, the more links you’ll likely earn.

However, sending thousands of generic emails daily to earn a handful of links can be disastrous for your brand’s reputation, as some people will likely mark your emails as spam.

The good news is that you can significantly increase your response rate if you make a few small adjustments to your outreach campaign.

At Powered By Search, we have a proven outreach system that allows us to consistently earn above-average response rates.

Specifically, we ask the following three questions before sending a single message:

1. Who is the best possible point of contact? (Writer, editor, marketer, owner, etc.)
2. What is the best medium to contact them at? (Email, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)
3. What is the value proposition that would make it beneficial for them to link to us?

Finally, we use dynamic personalization to make each message feel like it was written specifically for that individual.

This process ensures that your brand always appears professional and courteous. However, we still set up alternative email domains (e.g., “.co”) so that in the off-chance that someone does mark the email as spam, your brand won’t be affected.

Our email:

The reply:

Results From This Content Promotion System

While this strategy may seem promising, the real question is; does it actually work?

We implemented it for UpLlead and it helped them increase web traffic by 1,400%.

When they first approached our team, UpLead had a small library of quality content, but they needed a boost in the search results to increase rankings, and ultimately, traffic.

Rather than earning random links to random pages, we implemented our strategic approach by first identifying one specific page that was already driving plenty of sales.

For the next two months, we focused all of our efforts on driving more links that met our specified criteria to that top article.

Over the course of the partnership, UpLead earned over 300 backlinks to its content, which significantly increased its domain rating and aided their top-of-funnel marketing and sales efforts:

• Organic web traffic increased by 1,400%
• Free trial sign-ups increased by 213%

When Should You Start Your B2B Content Promotion Program?

Content promotion is often an afterthought, but you’re wasting money if the content isn’t getting traction. Unfortunately, producing quality content isn’t enough to rank first on Google in today’s competitive content marketing landscape.

Additionally, it may take months for the impact of links to pay off and boost your content in the search results, so it’s better to start sooner rather than later.

If you want a team of experienced marketing professionals that consistently help SaaS companies earn more traffic to their existing content, contact Powered By Search today. The first step is a free consultation where we’ll identify low-hanging fruit and map out a long-term strategy.

Reach out to us today for your Free Marketing Plan to boost your content with a promotion program.