In 2017, I put together a huge study on SaaS content marketing.
I’ve now updated and expanded it for 2019. I analysed 500 SaaS companies’ content marketing efforts, to understand exactly how content marketing works (or doesn’t) in SaaS.
There are two parts to this study: part 1 revisits the companies I looked at in 2017, to see how their approach to content marketing has changed over time; part 2 compares the content marketing strategies of these established SaaS companies with a similar-sized list of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, to see how SaaS companies at different stages approach content marketing.
Does content marketing work for the biggest and best SaaS companies? Check out 'The State of SaaS Content Marketing 2019' for new SaaS content marketing statistics Click To TweetContents
- Methodology
- Part I: SaaS Content Marketing in 2019 vs 2017
- Part II: How SaaS Content Marketing Differs Between the Biggest and Fastest-Growing Companies
- Statistics Summary
- Closing Thoughts
Methodology
I have expanded upon the 2017 study I did with Cobloom, and updated it for 2019.
The Montclare SaaS 250 was the starting point for my analysis: the same set of companies I looked at two years ago. This is an index of the world’s most successful SaaS companies based on revenue, funding, growth and company size.
In addition, I took the top 250 companies from the SaaS 1000, a list of the fastest-growing SaaS companies based on growth indicators including hiring trends and number of employees.
This meant I could see how SaaS content marketing has changed between 2017 and 2019, and also the differences in performance and execution between the biggest, established SaaS companies and the smaller, fast-growing companies.
If you’re short on time, click here to skip to the statistics summary at the end, for all the key content marketing stats, updated for 2019.
With 500 companies to look at, I compiled a massive spreadsheet of content marketing data. I analysed everything from how much organic search traffic a typical blog generates, to what types of call-to-action companies favour.
All of this comes together into SaaS-specific insights on blogging, link-building and social sharing, to help you benchmark your own company’s content marketing efforts.
Tools used:
- Ahrefs for the numbers
- Google Sheets for pulling all the data together
- My eyes for on-page qualitative research.
Part I: SaaS Content Marketing in 2019 vs 2017
To start with, let’s look at the Montclare SaaS 250 – the world’s biggest SaaS companies. Has their approach to content marketing changed since 2017, and how is their content performing?
Content Marketing Strategy
As the starting point, I looked at some of the key elements that form the foundation of any content marketing strategy:
- Do enterprise SaaS companies use blogging as part of their content marketing strategy?
- If yes, what do they use these blogs for? What types of content were they publishing?
- How has this changed since 2017?
This gave me a high-level understanding of how the world’s biggest SaaS companies approach content marketing, and how this has changed over the past couple of years.
15% of SaaS companies don’t have a blog (up from 11% in 2017)
My results found that 38 out of the 250 biggest SaaS companies in the world don’t have any sort of blog presence. In 2017 this was only 27 companies, and while it’s still a small percentage of the companies on the list, it represents a 40% increase in just two years.
Is it time up for SaaS blogging? I doubt it – but let’s see how things look when I revisit this in 2021!
For now, I’ve considered these companies to be outliers. The rest of this post looks at the vast majority of SaaS companies that do invest in blogging as part of their content marketing, with a defined strategy and an active blog.
So let’s look at the rest of them.
54% of SaaS companies use WordPress (down from 68% in 2017)
In 2017, WordPress was the most popular content management system for these leading SaaS companies. In 2019 it still holds the top spot, but there’s a definite shift taking place, with far fewer companies choosing WordPress as their CMS.
Drupal was the second most popular choice, used by 12% of the list (a tiny decrease from 2017). Interestingly, there’s less variance: in 2017, these 250 SaaS companies were using 20 different content management systems, but this has dropped to 16 in 2019.
In the second part of this study, I look at 250 of the fastest-growing SaaS companies. Click here to see how their choice of CMS compares to these established companies.
36% of SaaS companies blog to educate
Of the SaaS companies that do have a blog, I identified four different use cases:
- PR, self-promotional content: these blogs only focus on the company and its products
- Educational content: these blogs share helpful content that is designed to solve problems and provide value to the reader
- Both of these two types of content: the company shares all its press and educational content in one place
- Engineering content: there were only a couple of these, which shared technical content – written by developers and aimed at other developers.
Much like in 2017, the ‘mixed’ approach was most popular, adopted by 51% of the companies I looked at (up from 45% two years ago). It offers a platform for product updates alongside their educational content that’s designed to help customers benefit from using their product, or learning more about the problem their products are aiming to solve.
It’s a smart move: you teach your readers about a problem they’ve got, and in the same place have content positioning your product as the solution to that problem. No wonder more companies than ever are adopting this approach to content marketing, rather than keeping different types of content siloed in different channels.
Interestingly, while there was a fairly even split between educational and PR-style blogs back in 2017 (24% and 20% respectively), there’s been a significant shift in 2019.
36% of companies provide educational, value-based content compared with just 12% sharing press releases and broadcasting about their company. That’s a win for valuable content… but the news isn’t all good.
Educational blogs receive half as much organic traffic as PR/News-focused blogs
As you’d expect, for both styles of blog, there is huge variance in the levels of organic traffic they receive each month. At the low end, organic traffic levels are similar for PR-focused and educational blogs:
- 24% of PR style blogs receive fewer than 500 visits per month from organic search
- 26% of educational blogs receive fewer than 500 visits per month from organic search.
At the higher end, the results were more surprising: 8% of PR-focused blogs are generating over 100,000 visits from organic search each month, compared with just 4% of educational blogs.
And on average, educational blogs are receiving half as much organic traffic as PR focused ones.
On the plus side, both styles of blog are seeing much higher levels of organic traffic compared with two years ago. Educational blogs are getting around 2x the amount of organic traffic, while PR style blogs have seen their organic traffic grow 5x compared with 2017.
Content Design Insights
Once I had a high-level understanding of how these enterprise SaaS companies approached content marketing, I wanted to look in more detail at their blogs, what they looked like, and whether they were used as a lead generation channel or just for sharing information.
- What did these blog posts look like? How important was design and imagery?
- What was the purpose of these blogs? Were they used to generate leads, build an email subscriber list – or something else entirely?
As you’d expect, there were lots of different approaches to this. Some companies clearly invested a lot of energy in the design of their blogs, making them easy as well as interesting to read. Others… not so much
76% of blogs use stock photography for featured images
This a fair increase – up from 65% in 2017. Interestingly, there has been a drop in the number of blogs with no images at all – this has halved from 16% to 8%, suggesting that many companies who previously didn’t use any images in their blogs have switched to using stock photos instead.
What this meant was that so many of these blogs looked the same. I saw a lot of the exact same stock images crop up several times.
If you want your content to stand out – particularly on social media – invest in custom artwork for your blog posts.
Even just using your own photos rather than stock images will make you stand out! Otherwise you’re using the exact same libraries of images that everyone else is using, so your content will look just like everyone else’s.
Only 16% of blogs don’t have a call to action
To me, this shows big progress since 2017, when 36% of blogs had no call to action – no way for these SaaS companies to encourage their readers to further engage with their business.
42% of blogs have a ‘subscribe’ call to action
In 2019, as well as more companies using calls to action, I saw more variety in terms of calls to action: not only are companies building subscriber lists and offering downloadable content, they’re also sharing related content and offering product demos. Many companies had multiple calls to action on a single post:
It was interesting to see 25% of companies sharing other, related pieces of content as calls to action on their blogs – something that I didn’t see at all when I did this research back in 2017, and now it’s the second most popular style of call-to-action for these enterprise SaaS companies.
This suggests that time on site and pages visited per session is becoming more important to these companies. Perhaps a Google algorithm update has given additional weighting to sites with longer times on site, or perhaps it’s simply that these organisations have realised that a one-time site visit isn’t that valuable; it’s returning visitors that ultimately progress through the sales funnel and eventually become customers.
Content Marketing Performance: Benchmarking Overall Blog Performance
Next, I turned my attention to what really counts: how these blogs are performing. This would give me insight into how effective these top SaaS companies’ content marketing strategies are, and whether they’ve improved since 2017.
When assessing the performance of these SaaS blogs, I was looking at three main criteria:
- Number of visitors the blog received from organic search each month
- Number of backlinks
- Number of referring domains the blog had.
Organic search was the primary measure by which I assessed the success of their content marketing efforts: it reveals whether they’re creating useful content that addresses topics people are searching for, as well as whether their content is ranking well in relevant search results.
And while numbers of backlinks and referring domains are closely linked, I recorded both separately to see if either has a particular impact on organic search visitor. It also provides more detail about where each blog’s traffic is coming from: were blogs receiving backlinks from lots of referring domains (indicative of it being seen as a valuable reference or resource), or are they only linked to from a handful of other sites?
1800 organic search visits per month
Across the full list of the Montclare SaaS 250, I found that the average blog receives 1800 visits from organic search each month. This is a marked increase from 2017, when the average blog received 573 visits per month.
This is a hugely important statistic for SaaS companies: organic traffic can be a powerful source of qualified leads, as visitors to your site from organic search have sought you out – or found your blog as an answer to their specific search query or problem.
With organic search visits having trebled since 2017, it suggests blogs can be a valuable and predictable source of new leads and revenue that compounds over time – especially when combined with the wider variety of calls to action, showing that companies are looking at new and different ways to convert blog visitors into leads and prospective customers.
But the averages don’t tell the full story:
| Organic Traffic | All Websites | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| 2019 | 1,800 | 104,000 | 29 |
| 2017 | 573 | 45,700 | 7 |
As in 2017 there was huge variance in levels of organic traffic. The gap between top performers and those receiving the lowest levels of organic traffic was astounding – and even wider than in 2017. The top 10% of blogs receive 104,000 visits each month from organic search – and the top-performing blog receives 5 million visits a month! At the other end of the spectrum a handful of blogs don’t even get ten visits from organic search each month.
To give you a better idea of what this looks like, here’s the full spread of sites. As the variance was so huge, the only way to plot this was on a logarithmic scale:
A note on HubSpot
In 2017, HubSpot was the top-performing blog by far, generating 1.8 million visits per month from organic search. In 2019, their traffic levels are even more astounding: 5 million visits every month from organic search – twice as many as Zoho, who came second on my list with 2.6 million.
There were just a handful of blogs receiving more than one million visits each month, so outliers like HubSpot and Zoho skew the averages quite a bit!
5800 backlinks from 378 referring domains
Backlinks and referring domains are two of the most important factors that have been proven to directly influence search engine results. So let’s take a look at the backlinks profiles of these 250 enterprise SaaS companies:
| Backlinks & Referring Domains | All Websites | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| Backlinks 2019 | 5,800 | 1,360,000 | 89 |
| Backlinks 2017 | 6,055 | 167,000 | 217 |
| Referring domains 2019 | 378 | 14,300 | 18 |
| Referring domains 2017 | 267 | 4,630 | 15 |
The average SaaS company in this data set had 5800 links back to their blog, coming from 378 referring domains. This marks a big change from 2017: while there was just a small (4%) decrease in backlinks in two years, there was a huge increase (42%) in referring domains.
I saw a similar trend at both ends of the performance spectrum: the bottom 25 SaaS companies saw their backlinks drop from 317 to a meagre 89, while at the same time seeing a slight increase in referring domains, up to 18 from 15 in 2017.
As for the top 10% of SaaS blogs, they saw increases across the board. And not small increases either: 1.36 million backlinks, up from 167,000; and 14300 referring domains, up from 4630. These ‘big name’ companies are clearly regarded as reputable sources, frequently referenced and linked to by other companies, blogs and websites – and reaping the benefits.
Correlation with organic search
Unsurprisingly, the companies with the highest levels of organic traffic generally had the most backlinks and referring domains.
That suggests the more backlinks and referring domains your content has, the more likely it is to rank well in search results, and drive organic traffic to your site. At least, that’s what I found in 2017:
In 2019, my findings were similar: the number of referring domains is still a significantly stronger predictor of organic traffic than backlinks. Search traffic and referring domains still have a strong positive correlation (r=0.66, compared with r=0.72 two years ago), and search traffic and backlinks still have a weak correlation (r=0.29 compared with r=0.26).
The correlation between search traffic and referring domains has weakened slightly, while it’s now a little stronger between search traffic and backlinks.
But if you’re looking to grow organic traffic to your site, there’s one area with a much stronger correlation: keywords (r=0.96).
The link between keywords and organic traffic ties in to the popularity of so-called ‘skyscraper’ content – posts that aim to be bigger and better than competing articles. One of the hallmarks of skyscraper content is length, so they can target lots of keywords within one article.
So if you want to grow organic traffic to your blog, first focus on creating content that ranks for lots of keywords, then look to generate backlinks from as many websites as possible as a second step.
Content Marketing Performance: Benchmarking Top Post Performance
As more and more companies have found success with content marketing, the more companies try their hand. Blog posts, infographics, guides and opinion pieces are created faster than ever – but for most companies, it’s only a handful of articles that see any measure of success.
But what does a successful blog post look like? What are the hallmarks of a piece that performs well?
To understand this, I identified the top-performing blog posts for each company on the Montclare SaaS 250, based on three different criteria:
- Social media shares
- Backlinks and referring domains
- Monthly visits from organic traffic.
I then averaged these data sets to create clear benchmarks that you can use to measure your own content marketing performance against. For each criteria, I’ve reported on the average across the full data set (all 250 companies), the top 10% (the 25 best-performing companies), and the bottom 10%, creating high, medium and low benchmarks.
Remember: these benchmarks are for the single top-performing posts on each site – it’s unlikely that any of the SaaS companies on this list (yes, even HubSpot) achieves these numbers on every piece they publish.
Now, let’s get into the numbers.
Top Blog Posts receive 214 Shares on Social Media
Social media sites are key channels for content promotion and lead generation, before we even consider the relationship between social media sharing and search engine performance.
When I analysed the top-performing blog post from each SaaS company, I found that the average ‘best-in-class’ blog post was liked, tweeted or shared 214 times. This is a 13% decrease from 2017, when the average was 246 times. But this trend isn’t the same at the extreme ends of the spectrum:
| Social Media Sharing | All Websites | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| 2019 | 214 | 13,000 | 11 |
| 2017 | 246 | 2,100 | 45 |
| Percentage change | -13% | +519% | -76% |
While generating 13,000 shares for a single article may seem like a daunting task, creating a blog post that generates over 200 social shares during its lifetime seems much more achievable. That’s a great indication that your social media is up to scratch.
As for what type of content is good for generating social shares? 4.5% of these ‘best-in-class- blogs were infographics. I wasn’t surprised to see a fair number of infographics in my data set; they’re very ‘sharable’ content. However, more surprising was that 5.7% of these top-performing posts were around mergers and acquisitions.
So if you want to get people talking, tweeting and sharing news about your company… time to get acquired!
Or… maybe just share some infographics.
119 Backlinks and 8 Referring Domains
We’ve already looked at the correlation between backlinks, referring domains and organic traffic, let’s take a look at how the ‘top-performing’ blog posts fare for these.
When I looked at the best performing blog posts from each of the 250 SaaS companies, I found that the average post was generating 119 backlinks from 8 referring domains. This marks a big change from in 2017: now, companies are receiving 3x the number of backlinks (119 vs 38) from half the number of referring domains (8 vs 17).
While the average number of backlinks has grown since 2017, we’re still not seeing huge numbers. This suggests that even a handful of backlinks are enough to offer a significant boost in search engine rankings and organic traffic.
| Backlinks & Referring Domains | All websites | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| Backlinks 2019 | 119 | 7,945 | 5 |
| Backlinks 2017 | 38 | 623 | 8 |
| Referring Domains 2019 | 8 | 304 | 1 |
| Referring Domains 2017 | 17 | 156 | 5 |
While we’ve seen decent growth for the average ‘best-in-class’ post on our list, for the top, top-performers it’s an altogether different story.
As we’ve seen elsewhere, the top-performers are benefiting most from the growth of content marketing and reaping most of the rewards: the top 10% of articles receive an average of 7,945 backlinks from 304 referring domains.
Top-performing blog posts have seen more than a 12x increase in backlinks from 2x referring domains compared with 2017.
This is a massive increase, especially when you consider these numbers are all for single posts!
321 Organic Search Visits Per Month
When we talk about the power of content marketing, organic traffic is the key driver: the ability for a piece of content to attract visitors to your website without any input or additional spend by you.
A strong content marketing strategy will compound over time, with blog posts generating more and more visitors month-on-month, providing a predictable and sustainable source of visitors, leads and customers to your website. But of course, not every article is going to be a runaway success. For every top-performing post, you’ll likely have dozens of middling performers.
But when it comes to driving organic traffic to your site, what is a ‘good’ amount? How much traffic is it reasonable to expect a single post to deliver?
To help answer these questions, I identified each company’s best-performing blog post in terms of the amount of organic search traffic it received each month.
| Organic traffic & Ranking Keywords | All websites | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| Organic traffic 2019 | 321 | 10,789 | 13 |
| Organic traffic 2017 | 77 | 2,514 | 3 |
| Ranking keywords 2019 | 142 | 3,197 | 4 |
| Ranking keywords 2017 | 25 | 401 | 5 |
Across the entire data set of 250 SaaS companies, the average ‘best-in-class’ blog post now ranks for 142 keywords and generates 321 visitors from organic search each month. That’s more than 300 visitors that you can count on, each and every month, just from one post.
On average, top-performing blog posts rank for 142 keywords and generate 321 monthly visits from organic search.
As before though, those figures pale into comparison with the top 10% of companies, with their best posts ranking for more than 3,000 keywords, and generating almost 11,000 monthly visitors from organic search each month. And remember: that’s all coming from a single blog post!
Since 2017, the top-performing blog posts have seen increases across the board: median levels of organic traffic has increased by 317%; and the top 10% have seen a similar increase of 329%.
Part II: How SaaS Content Marketing Differs Between the Biggest and Fastest-Growing Companies
Now I’ve looked at how SaaS content marketing has changed between 2017 and 2019, let’s compare two very different sets of SaaS companies: the Montclare 250 and the top 250 fastest-growing companies taken from the SaaS 1000 (note: for simplicity, I’m going to refer to this subset as the SaaS 250).
With the Montclare 250, we’ve got a list of very established, enterprise SaaS companies, compared with this second list of younger, faster-growing SaaS companies. I was particularly interested to see whether there were many differences between how the two sets approach their content marketing, particularly now we’ve seen how the established SaaS companies have made huge gains in terms of traffic, links and social media activity in the last two years.
Are smaller SaaS companies able to use content marketing to drive growth, or are they not seeing the same benefits as established companies who have been investing in content for longer?
Content Marketing Strategy
As before, I started by looking at the key elements that form the foundation of your content marketing strategy:
- Was blogging part of their content marketing strategy?
- If yes, what did they use these blogs for? What types of content were they publishing?
- How does this differ, compared to the approaches adopted by the Montclare 250?
This gave me a high-level understanding of how these companies approached content marketing, and whether smaller SaaS companies are considering content marketing as worth investing their hard-won dollars in.
14% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies don’t have a blog
My research found that 35 of the 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies (14%) don’t have a blog. While this is only a small percentage, I was surprised by how similar was to the percentage of the Montclare 250 who don’t have a blog, which was 15% (or 38 companies).
So for enterprise and smaller, fast-growing SaaS companies alike, content marketing is an important marketing strategy – but it’s by no means essential.
WordPress is still the most popular Content Management System
63% of the SaaS 250 use WordPress as their CMS – most likely thanks to how versatile it can be. This was in line with what I expected; it’s more interesting to look at the second most popular choice of CMS.
For the SaaS 250, HubSpot was the second most popular choice, used by 12% of the list. But for the Montclare 250, the second most popular choice was Drupal, used – again – by 12% of companies on the list.
In fact, across the two lists, HubSpot and Drupal have almost exactly the same total share, mirroring each other across the two data sets. For the SaaS 250, HubSpot is used by 12% of companies and Drupal by 1%; for the Montclare 250 Drupal is used by 12% of companies, and HubSpot by 3%.
| Content Management System | SaaS 250 | Montclare 250 |
| WordPress | 63% | 54% |
| HubSpot | 12% | 3% |
| Drupal | 1% | 12% |
The popularity of HubSpot among these emerging SaaS companies is testament to the work HubSpot has done positioning themselves as the best solution for small-to-medium sized businesses.
Interestingly, among the 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies, there’s even less variance in CMS use than in the Montclare 250 list: across all 250 companies there are only 13 different content management systems in use, compared with 16 on the list of more established companies.
16% of companies use their blogs for PR
As before, there were three common use cases for these SaaS company blogs:
- PR, self-promotional content: these blogs only focus on the company and its products
- Educational content: these blogs share helpful content that is designed to solve problems and provide value to the reader
- A mix of these two types of content: the company shares all its press and educational content in one place
As you can see, the split was pretty similar to the Montclare SaaS 250. However, there’s a slight shift back towards PR content and away from educational content compared with the Montclare 250.
This suggests that either fast-growing SaaS companies don’t have the resources to dedicate to regularly creating educational content, or they believe sharing more content relating to their company, mission and vision is the best way to make themselves stand out in a crowded space.
Content Design Insights
My next point of comparison was to look at these blogs in more detail. What do they look like, are they used as a lead generation channel, and how does this compare with the approaches used by enterprise SaaS companies?
- What do these blog posts look like? Is design and imagery important?
- What is the purpose of these blogs? Are they used to generate leads, build an email list – or something else entirely?
31% of blogs use custom images for their blogs
My research found that the fastest-growing SaaS companies are twice as likely as enterprise SaaS companies to invest in custom designs and imagery for their blogs (31% of the fastest-growing companies compared with 16% of the Montclare 250).
This suggests that design, branding and a strong visual identity are considered important for SaaS companies looking to stand-out against more established competitors.
One quarter of blogs offer product demos as a call to action
(Note: some companies use multiple calls-to-action in a single blog post, which is why there are different variations depending on the combination of calls-to-action used.)
Across both sets of companies, it’s been interesting to see companies taking different approaches to generating leads through their blogs.
26% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies have calls-to-action offering information relating to their products: either a demo, free trial or product tour. This is a marked increase compared with the enterprise SaaS companies, where only 10% offer product-related calls-to-action.
This suggests that more of the fast-growing SaaS companies have a product with a low entry point such as a free trial or freemium product offering. Something that means their products are easy for customers to try out and start using, rather than requiring comprehensive onboarding to get up and running.
Also, 40% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies use calls-to-action as a way to showcase related content. This highlights the importance of keeping visitors on-site and engaging with your content, and perhaps points to the increasing competitiveness of organic search: once you’ve got someone on your site, keep them there and keep delivering value, because they may not find their way back otherwise.
Overall, fastest-growing SaaS companies were 1.5x more likely to push related content, and 2.5x more likely to offer product demos than the established SaaS companies – and half as likely to have no call-to-action at all (8% vs 16%).
Content Marketing Performance: Benchmarking Overall Blog Performance
Now, I turned my attention to what I was most interested in: how these blogs are performing. This would give me insight into how effective these fast-growing SaaS companies’ content marketing strategies are, particularly in comparison with the SaaS behemoths in the Montclare 250.
As before, I looked at three main criteria to assess the performance of these SaaS blogs:
- Number of visitors the blog received from organic search each month
- Number of backlinks
- And number of referring domains.
1700 organic search visits per month
Across the list of the 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies, I found that the average blog receives 1700 visits from organic search each month. This is remarkably close to the 1800 visits the average enterprise SaaS company receives each month.
But as I’ve seen throughout this research, the averages don’t tell the full story.
| Organic Traffic | All Websites | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| SaaS 250 | 1,700 | 48,800 | 21 |
| Montclare 250 | 1,800 | 104,000 | 29 |
As expected, there’s huge variance in levels of organic traffic – both between the high and low ends of this list, and compared with the Montclare 250.
The gap between top performers and those receiving the lowest levels of organic traffic is big – though nowhere near as vast as we saw in the Montclare 250. The most-visited blog on the SaaS 250 list receives more than 750,000 visits from organic search each month, while at the other end of the spectrum, six blogs receive less than ten organic visits each month.
To give you a better idea of what this looks like, here’s the full spread of sites. As the variance was so huge, the only way to plot this was on a logarithmic scale:
Interestingly, at the high and low ends of the spectrum, the SaaS 250 are seeing organic traffic levels similar to what the Montclare 250 were achieving two years ago – but on average they’re achieving very similar levels of search traffic to the Montclare 250 today.
Organic search is a hugely important statistic for SaaS companies: it can be a powerful source of qualified leads, and eventually customers. Having seen how organic traffic had grown for the Montclare 250, I was worried that these huge SaaS companies would have established such dominance that the newer, fast-growing companies wouldn’t be able to carve out a space for themselves online.
It turns out that wasn’t the case. While the top performing SaaS blogs in this newer list aren’t reaching the heady heights achieved by the top performers in the Montclare 250, they’re still generating decent levels of organic traffic each month.
This means blogging – a key element of most content marketing strategies – still offers companies the potential of a predictable source of traffic, leads and customers.
2720 backlinks from 285 referring domains
Across the list of the 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies, I found that the average blog receives 2720 backlinks from 285 referring domains.
| Backlinks & Referring Domains | All Websites | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| Backlinks | 2720 | 76450 | 69 |
| Referring domains | 285 | 2040 | 15 |
This means that on average, the fastest-growing SaaS companies receive half as many backlinks as the average enterprise SaaS company.
While backlinks and referring domains used to be closely linked to organic traffic, it’s interesting to see the emerging SaaS companies almost matching the established SaaS companies in terms of traffic, with half the amount of backlinks.
But as we’ve seen before, it’s at the top end where we see the biggest gulf between the established and emerging SaaS companies: the top 10% in this dataset receive around 76,000 backlinks, while the established companies have an average of 1,360,000 backlinks.
Is this because the established SaaS companies have been around longer and so have had longer to accumulate backlinks? Is it because they’re more well-known, so more likely to be considered reputable sources to link to? Or is it something else entirely?
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that there’s a clear gulf between the top-performing enterprise SaaS companies and the top-performing emerging ones.
Additional channel: Conversational Marketing
31% of the fastest-growing SaaS startups use chatbots
Since the first State of SaaS Content Marketing in 2017, conversational marketing has surged in popularity.
While conversational marketing isn’t the first thing people will think of when it comes to content marketing, it’s still using content to market to potential customers, by engaging them in a conversation. So I was interested to see how many SaaS companies were using chatbots for conversational marketing.
The fastest-growing SaaS companies are twice as likely as the established SaaS companies to use chatbots for conversational marketing (31% vs 16%).
This shows how smaller, less established companies are more able to quickly embrace emerging technology and marketing trends, and are open to trying new ways to connect with potential customers.
A note on Drift
When you think of the term ‘conversational marketing’, chances are you think of Drift. The Drift team have done an amazing job of creating the category of conversational marketing, and positioning themselves as the leaders in that space.
So it was interesting that less than half the companies using conversational marketing were using Drift.
While 31% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies use chatbots, only 13% of them use Drift, while 18% of them use other tools. For the Montclare 250, 16% use chatbots, with 7.5% using Drift and 8.5% using other services.
Disclaimer: this analysis was done by eye. I’m aware that some companies set up time delays so don’t trigger Drift (or other conversational marketing tools) until you’ve been on-page for a certain length of time. As I was doing this research myself, I was doing so at speed, so it’s likely there’s some sites who were using Drift (or other tools) where I wasn’t on the page long enough to trigger it, or they only had it set-up on a handful of pages, and I didn’t visit the right pages to trigger their playbooks.
Content Marketing Performance: Benchmarking Top Post Performance
Enough about chatbots. Let’s turn our attention back to the blog posts and infographics that are at the heart of companies’ content marketing activity.
As before, I looked at the top-performing articles within three different criteria:
- Shares on social media
- Backlinks and referring domains
- Monthly visits from organic traffic, and number of keywords ranked.
As with the Montclare 250, I have averaged these data sets to create clear benchmarks for you to measure your own content marketing performance against. For each criterion, I’ve reported on the average across the full data set (all 250 companies), the top 10% (the 25 best-performing posts), and the bottom 10%, creating high, medium and low benchmarks. I’ve also compared these numbers (the fastest-growing SaaS companies) to the established ones we saw earlier… Spoiler alert: it wasn’t what I expected.
Now, onto the numbers.
Top Blog Posts receive 297 Shares on Social Media
Is social media the place where emerging SaaS companies have the edge over their more established competitors?
When I analysed the top-performing blog posts from the SaaS 250, I found that the average ‘best-in-class’ blog post was liked, tweeted or shared 297 times on social media.
This means that on average, the top posts by the fastest growing SaaS companies receive 39% more engagement compared with the top posts by the biggest SaaS companies.
| Top Blog Posts: Social Shares | All blogs | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| SaaS 250 (fastest growing) | 297 | 7,400 | 11 |
| Montclare 250 (biggest) | 214 | 13,000 | 11 |
While the top 10% of the best-performing posts don’t quite reach the heady heights achieved by the Montclare 250 (the top 10% receive on average 13,000 shares on social media, while for the SaaS 250 the top 10% ‘only’ generate an average of 7,400 social shares), as a whole, they’re outperforming their more established counterparts when it comes to generating engagement on social media.
If you’re just starting content marketing for your SaaS company, generating 300 social shares on a single blog post may seem ambitious – but not unimaginable. Finally: a realistic target to aim for, as a benchmark for your social media strategy.
And remember: this is for the single, best-performing post by all of these companies. Chances are, each company has a handful of posts that do well, and head towards the 300 mark, while the rest are closer to the lower end, perhaps struggling to get their first five, ten or 20 shares on social media.
81 Backlinks and 9 Referring Domains
Now let’s take a look at how these ‘top-performing’ blog posts fare for backlinks and referring domains.
When I looked at the best performing blog posts from each of the SaaS 250, I found that the average post was generating 81 backlinks from 9 referring domains. This is 32% lower than the number of backlinks received by the top-performing Montclare 250 posts, from a comparable number of referring domains.
| Top Blog Posts: Backlinks & Referring Domains | All blogs | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| Backlinks: SaaS 250 | 81 | 2,370 | 5 |
| Backlinks: Montclare 250 | 119 | 7,945 | 5 |
| Referring domains: SaaS 250 | 9 | 536 | 1 |
| Referring domains: Montclare 250 | 8 | 304 | 1 |
352 Organic Search Visits Per Month
This was what I found most interesting. The top-performing blog posts by the emerging SaaS companies generate, on average, 352 visits from organic search each and every month.
This is 10% more than the top-performing posts from the established SaaS companies.
| Top Blog Posts: Organic Traffic & Ranking Keywords | All blogs | Top 10% | Bottom 10% |
| Organic traffic: SaaS 250 | 352 | 8,655 | 7 |
| Organic traffic: Montclare 250 | 321 | 10,789 | 13 |
| Ranking keywords: SaaS 250 | 206 | 3,521 | 7 |
| Ranking keywords: Montclare 250 | 142 | 3,197 | 4 |
So even though the emerging SaaS companies are generating fewer backlinks than their more established competitors, on average their best posts are receiving more organic traffic.
To refer back to an earlier section, it’s worth remembering that on average these SaaS companies are generating 1700 organic search visits per month – just 6% less than the biggest SaaS companies, in spite of the bigger companies having (presumably) bigger budgets, more established brands and name recognition, and sites that have been around for much longer, with the authority that comes with longevity.
While at the top top end, the Montclare 250 still has a fair edge over the SaaS 250 (their top posts average almost 11,000 visits from organic search, compared with 8,600 – a 20% difference), the gap is far less than I was expecting.
And that’s the power of content marketing. You may not have the money, or the name, or the brand recognition… but you can still compete with the big guys.
Statistics summary
Key content marketing statistics for the world’s biggest SaaS companies
- 15% of the world’s biggest SaaS companies don’t have a blog
- 54% of the world’s biggest SaaS companies use WordPress
- 36% of SaaS companies use their blogs to share educational content
- 12% of SaaS companies only share PR content on their blogs
- Educational blogs receive half as much organic traffic as PR blogs
- 23% of SaaS blogs receive fewer than 500 organic visits per month
- 4% of SaaS blogs receive more than 100,000 visits from organic search each month
- 76% of blogs use stock photography
- 42% of SaaS blogs have a ‘subscribe’ call-to-action
- 25% of companies share related content as a call-to-action
- The average SaaS blog receives 1800 organic search visits per month
- The average SaaS blog has 5800 backlinks from 378 referring domains
- The best SaaS blog posts receive 214 shares on social media – 13% less than in 2017
- The best SaaS blog posts receive 321 organic search visits each month
Key content marketing statistics for the world’s fastest-growing SaaS companies
- 12% of SaaS companies use Hubspot for their CMS
- The 250 fastest-growing SaaS companies use only 13 different content management systems
- 31% of blogs use custom images for their featured images
- 25% of blogs offer product demos as a call-to-action
- The fastest-growing SaaS companies are 2.5x more likely to offer product demos as a call-to-action than the biggest SaaS companies
- The average blog for the fastest-growing SaaS companies generates 1700 organic search visits per month
- The fastest-growing SaaS companies have half as many backlinks to their blog as the biggest SaaS companies
- 31% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies use chatbots
- 13% of the fastest-growing SaaS companies use Drift
- Top-performing blog posts receive 297 shares on social media
- Top-performing blog posts receive 352 visits from organic search per month
- Top-performing blog posts rank for 206 keywords – 45% more than the top posts by the biggest SaaS companies
- Top-performing blog posts receive 10% more organic traffic than the top posts by the biggest SaaS companies
Closing thoughts
As I said at the start, statistics are only useful if you can learn from them, and use them to improve your marketing. So what can we learn from all this data? What does this mean for content marketers in SaaS companies, large and small? Here are my three key takeaways – the biggest content marketing opportunities for SaaS companies in 2019 and beyond.
1) Focus on your customer
If you want to use content marketing to generate sales for your business, offer something valuable in return. Don’t just blog for the sake of it, or to keep your boss happy. Learn about your customers, their problems, and the value they get from your product. Create content that delivers real value, rather than simply using it as an opportunity to broadcast about your company or your products.
2) Be consistent
SaaS content marketing takes time. My content marketing career has spanned 5 years now, across several different industries and verticals. And by far the most important thing I’ve found when it comes to content marketing success is consistency.
3) Be brave
Don’t be afraid to try new tools and test new channels (think Drift or other conversational tools that are becoming more and more popular… what will the next new channel be, and how can your company make the most of the new opportunity before your competition?
And finally…
Everybody blogs. But not everyone does it well.
Almost all the top SaaS companies use content marketing, in some form or another. But as this data shows, it still offers a huge opportunity for smaller SaaS companies to disrupt their bigger competitors.
You can use this data as a simple benchmark, to track your performance and see if you’re on-par with the ‘average’ emerging SaaS companies or their bigger cousins. Or you can view it as a call-to-arms. Average content marketing brings average results. You can do better.