After Product-Market Fit, Find Your Content-Market Fit

Are you a SaaS company with a satisfied customer base that swears by your product? Well, Congratulations! You can cross off ‘achieve product-market fit’ from your to-do list.
Your next goal is achieving content-market fit. 

For the uninitiated, having the content-market fit means that you are connected with the right people, through the right channel, and with the right content in the right format. 

What does ‘right’ mean here? How do you know when you have achieved content/market fit? How to devise a successful content strategy for this goal? 

Let us try to answer these questions. 

Why Content-Market Fit Matters for SaaS Companies

If you think that achieving product-market fit (PMF) is enough and you don’t need to work on your content strategy, think again.

Creating and distributing content via inbound marketing strategies is important for SaaS companies. It is the best way to:

• Draw potential customers’ eyeballs to your product
• Convince people to take a product demo, one word at a time 
• Educate people about what you offer and how it benefits them
• Keep in touch with people who have shown interest in your product
• Keep in touch with people who have purchased your product
• Establish a brand presence

What do all these scenarios have in common? 

Well, in each scenario, you will achieve success only when people actually read your content. And people will read your content only if they get some value from it. (How many times have you heard, ‘Create valuable content’ from marketing gurus?)

As a SaaS company, not only should your product satisfy your target market, but your content also needs to deliver value. 

Let us take this statement one step further. 

Think of Your Content as Yet Another Product

Going back to the OG definition of product-market fit: 

“Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” 

A good market is a market where there is demand for your product, which you can harness and quantify in profitable ways. 

Now, let us try to modify this definition and apply it to content-market fit. 

“Content-market fit means connecting with your customers on the right channel with valuable content in suitable format that satisfies those customers.” 

Content-Market Fit is, Ultimately, Content-Customer Fit

As always, the customer is key to understanding the concept. This is why content-market fit is also sometimes referred to as content-customer fit. 

• What is your audience like? 
• What are their needs? 
• Which channels do they frequent?
• Which format do they want to consume content in? 

Once you answer these questions, you can take the next step to achieving content/market fit. 

Before Moving Towards Achieving Content-Market Fit….

“Achieving content-market fit is a journey, not a destination.” – Some wise guy on LinkedIn, probably. 

Having content-market fit means that your content is aligned with your customers’ needs in terms of information, channels, and formats. But here’s the catch: These factors aren’t always defined. 

1. Customers’ needs and expectations change with time. Your competitors may start offering something new or a new technology update may disrupt the market. You will have to realign your content strategy to keep up with these changes. 

2. A single content format may not work every time. Let us take a very basic example. Suppose you have a software product. You have been publishing long articles that take the user through your product’s features in a step by step manner. And so, they work well for people who want to know how your product works in detail.
   Now, can you create similar long-form content for your website’s FAQ section? Try doing it and you will see very high bounce rates. This is because people who visit your FAQ page want quick answers to specific questions. 

3. Similarly, your audience might not be present on all channels. You may take great pains to create content for Twitter. But if most of your audience is on LinkedIn,  you’ll only get lukewarm impressions. 

The Key to Achieving Content-Market Fit

The most straightforward way is to experiment till you get there. But you don’t need to resort to trial and error. 

As a marketer with good product-fit, you already have these in your toolkit: 

• An existing audience
• A customer base that uses your product regularly
• A good awareness of what your customers need

Now, all you need to do is leverage them. 

#1 Ask Your Customers What They Want to See

You can reach out to your customers directly and ask them what they would like to see. You can ask questions like: 

1. Do you find x content on our blog helpful?
2. Do you want to see video tutorials of our product? 
3. Would you like to follow us on social media for product updates? 
4. Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter? 

#2 Understand How Your Customers Discover You

Thanks to digital marketing methods, you can understand where you get most of readers from. And how much time do they spend reading or watching what you put out. You can take note of metrics such as: 

1. Organic website traffic, session length, and bounce rates via Google Search Console. 
2. The breakdown of total website visits via different channels. Visitors can arrive on your website via organic search, social links, ads, newsletters, and promotional emails. 
3. Number of social media impressions, clicks, saves, and shares.
4. Average watchtime on YouTube. 

#3 Know What Formats Work Well 

You can start by comparing the performance of different content formats for the same information. 

Suppose you have a tutorial blog. You have repurposed the same information in a full-length tutorial video. Later, you created carousels and short-form videos with the same content. After a few weeks of publishing, analyse which one performs better in terms of impressions, shares, views, likes, clicks, and website visits. 

The winning format should get the most of your creation and marketing time. 

#4 Peek at What Your Competitors Are Doing

The world of B2B SaaS is highly competitive. Sometimes, it helps to take a leaf from a rival company’s book. Look at what they are doing, how much are they succeeding, and how you can do it better. 

(Psst…Need some inspiration to create your next blog post? Check out our post on “How to Never Run Out of Content Ideas for Your SaaS Blog.”)

#5 Monitor the Results of Your Content-Market Fit Efforts 

Set goals for your content marketing strategy and always keep an eye on how your content is doing across channels, formats, and over time. Capture and apply the feedback to content next in line for publishing. 

Keeping your approach agile will help you keep your strategy aligned with the market. 

The Bottom Line

With every successful content marketing strategy, you will find that the content is aligned with the customers’ needs, their preferred channels, and the suitable formats. Go ahead and dissect any content marketing case study and you will observe that at the core of the success story lies a good content-market fit. 

Once you understand how content-market fit works in the context of your company, make it the only goal of your content strategy!