In this episode, I interview Ryan Jones, the marketing manager at SEOTesting, about SaaS content marketing. We discuss the definition of SaaS and how marketing for SaaS differs from traditional marketing.
Ryan shares his experience of increasing organic clicks by focusing on content, educational blog posts, and building customer relationships. We also talk about the different stages of the marketing funnel and the importance of top-of-funnel content.
Ryan emphasises the need to talk to customers, build relationships with others in the industry, and continuously test different strategies.
*As a reminder, you can now also get this podcast in video form, on both Spotify video, or YouTube.*
Listen/watch now, right above the subscribe button, or pick your favourite listening platform from this list:
Spotify: Click here
Apple Podcasts: Click here
YouTube: Click here
Use a different listening platform? Choose it here.
As always, if you enjoyed this, and previous episodes, please like, rate, share, and subscribe to the podcast – it all helps!
Useful Links
Podcast page: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/azeemdigitalasks
My Twitter page: https://twitter.com/AzeemDigital
My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azeema1/
My website: https://www.iamazeemdigital.com/
Ryan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-g-jones/
Episode Transcript
Azeem (00:01.124)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Azeem Digital Asks podcast. Really excited for this episode today. We’re gonna be talking about all things SaaS content marketing. And I can’t think of anybody better to discuss this with than my amazing guest, Ryan Jones, which is who you are here to see and hear from. So I’m gonna shut up, but before I do, as always, please like, rate, share, subscribe, tell a friend, tell a friend.
knock on your next door neighbour and tell their dog to have a quick listen as well. Thanks very much. Ryan, welcome to the show my friend.
Ryan Jones (00:37.438)
Thank you very much, Azeem. It’s good to be here, good to finally be on. I’m a regular listener, love season one and love the first episode of season two as well. yeah, well up for
Azeem (00:48.884)
him to say that but thank you very much. So for the people who are listening and watching who shamefully may not know about yourself would you mind just giving a quick intro to you who you are what you
Ryan Jones (01:04.078)
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, as Azeem mentioned, I’m Ryan. I’m the marketing manager at SEO testing. So joined just over a year ago. was April, 2023 that I joined to help scale the marketing operations. And yeah, to talk about all things SAS, all things testing. I love chatting, chatting all about that stuff on Twitter. I don’t know whether I can swear or not. I was about to say my usual phrase, but just about held it.
Azeem (01:31.223)
You can, absolutely. I’m the boss, so feel free.
Ryan Jones (01:34.638)
In that case, like chatting shit on Twitter about all those kinds of things. yeah, it’s side to be chatted to
Azeem (01:43.93)
Good, good. Right, let’s just dive right into it then. We’re talking SaaS and we’re talking marketing. But let’s start from the very beginning. I’m conscious that I’ve got a handful of listeners who are very new to the industry. So for those who don’t know, what is SaaS and how is marketing SaaS different to traditional marketing?
Ryan Jones (02:05.068)
Yeah, so SAS stands for Software as a Service. So the kind of top level of overview is if you’ve got a business and you have any kind of like online software that you’re selling, whether you’re selling it generally like one time basis or the most usual case is subscription base, which is the same as what SEO testing is. But if you run online software and you’re selling that in any way, shape or form, at least in part, you operate a SAS business.
which is, it’s different in some senses to traditional marketing and different and the same in other instances. I think the key difference is that SAS is, given that it’s almost always subscription -based, there’s a heavy focus on different KPIs rather than what you might look at in traditional marketing. So there’s a heavy focus on the number of leads that you’re getting, what your customer lifetime value is, so how much you’re making money -wise.
for each of your customers and then churn rate. how often obviously people are leaving and getting rid of their subscription. Whereas businesses that operate on like a one time purchase model. your biggest example is like Econ, for example, then they’re mainly focused on driving those like initial sales and then more and then like building customer relationships from there. So just like focusing on the customer relationships obviously for SAS, there’s a big focus on
engagement in the first sense, but then we also have to place a massive focus on keeping our customers happy like before they join us and whilst they’re with us and then even after they leave as well because there’s always a chance that they’re going to come back. Whereas some businesses might be more sort of focused on just getting as many people as they can in and they’re just keeping that funnel going with like the number of new people as possible.
Azeem (03:59.387)
Yes, that’s super important. think quite often people focus on the new, new, new, new, new without forgetting the people that they’ve already got. I am curious to pick your brains in the form that you filled in for the show. You mentioned that you increased organic quick organic clicks, I should say, by quite a huge amount. So it’s about two point three K to almost 11 K in just over a year. First of all, congratulations. That is seriously impressive, especially within such
Ryan Jones (04:28.686)
experiments.
Azeem (04:29.352)
around as well. So tell us all about it, how did you do it, what strategies really worked for you do you think?
Ryan Jones (04:37.614)
Yeah, when I first joined, yeah, to give a bit of context, yeah, obviously when I first joined in April, 2023, think the number of organic clicks we had in that month was I 2 ,383. And then last month, which was obviously June, 2024, we did actually cross the 11 ,000 barrier, which obviously I’m very impressed by and give him my ego boost as a marketer. I’m always up for that kind of stuff.
But yeah, going back to how we accomplished it, my first initial meeting with Nick on joining the business, Nick’s obviously the founder. We went through one of like the main marketing strategies for us is maybe trying to go against the grain of other marketers in a sense. And you mentioned it as well in the last point is getting excited and focusing on like every new and shiny thing that comes along. Whereas we we wanted to really drill down and focus on what works and double down on
So for us, we found that content was a big win, even with the limited content that was going out on the site before I joined. It was a massive win. There’s still lots of like high performing blog posts that we’ve got that Nick’s written and Tiago’s written before I joined. So there was a massive focus on increasing publishing cadence. I think our core values helped as well. We try and be a bit different. I’m not saying all businesses do this obviously, but one of our core values is
teach everything we know. So we don’t really, we don’t wanna try and gatekeep any information and we try and make sure that comes across in blog posts that we do. We’ll always mention that there are other ways to do so. So if we’re talking about like how to do a certain thing within SEO testing, we’re not just going to say that you can do it this way in SEO testing. We’re also gonna say that you can actually do this completely for free in Google Search Console. Your only problem
If you use Google Search Console to do it, might take you four hours. Whereas in SEO testing, it’s going to take you five minutes. And that’s where we draw in our sales, but we want to give access to as much information as possible, even if it means people just going and using Search Console on the initial basis. And then the hope would be from there, they realize how much time they could save by coming to us. Given that we’re in SEO.
Ryan Jones (07:00.642)
Given that we’re an SEO testing tool, obviously testing as well is big for us, testing what works and then again, doubling down on it. So a key example is we found that for our site, adding embedding videos in from YouTube really helps with increasing average position, click through rate, that kind of thing. So we now try and put a big focus on every sort of big blog post that we do. Tiago, who’s a bit of a video wizard, he’ll create a YouTube video for each of our blog posts that we’ll then embed.
And then I think an underrated one is relationship building as well. So you’ll be familiar with obviously a lady. We’ve got like a nice relationship with her. She shares a lot of our stuff just naturally, which can help purely from like an SEO perspective of like when she shares it on SEO FOMO and that kind of thing, we get a nice little backlink, but
Azeem (07:38.085)
Hmm, yep.
Ryan Jones (07:54.818)
organically taking, making use of her list as well as our list and that kind of thing for that stuff. think building relationships is a big win as
Azeem (08:04.611)
No absolutely and the point you made about time -saving is such a huge thing I’m conscious not
Deliberately ask a motive question. Does I I work in SAS as well? And I don’t want to add my you know own thoughts on this I’m keen to hear from you and that’s why the people are here, but the idea of time saving is Massive like literally if I’m looking for something for myself or anything Time has to be first. I want to be able to do what I do Faster than how I would normally do it because then I can focus on all the shiny stuff But anyway too much about me. Let’s go
to you so you mentioned there about your approach and a couple of things that you did I’d love to dive into that so how would you say that the approach is different when you’re talking about content marketing for SAS how would you say that’s different to other industries for example
Ryan Jones (08:59.67)
Yeah, yeah. So when I think about it, I think there’s probably sort of three main areas where it might be slightly different. One being the fact that with SaaS, as you’ll know, there needs to be a massive emphasis on educational content. So we need to educate our, basically our customers are gonna have a range of complex problems that they wanna solve. Obviously time saving being one of them. It might be stuff that current software that they’re using
isn’t doing the job. So we need to make a big part of our content and focus it on how customers can solve the problems that they’re gonna have by using in our case, obviously SEO testing, but like competitors of ours will do the same thing as well. So educational blog posts, like those traditional like how to guides, webinars as well. And then I think there needs to be an emphasis on
the actual benefits that you can get and use cases as well. So we will draw that down into ours, obviously time saving being the number one, but another big one is we feel like SEOs can feel a bit undervalued sometimes and maybe they struggle to show the actual value of our work. So obviously being a testing based business, we can allow customers to do SEO tests and then say, hey, I did this and it resulted in this very easily, especially when you KPIs
organic traffic and that kind of thing. But then for that kind of stuff, like to show the benefits, that’s where it then jumps into like customer success stories, case studies, obviously the traditional feature pages that all SaaS businesses need to have. And then personalization as well. Given that if you were to compare SaaS to e -commerce, for example, I always go back to e -commerce because I worked in e -com before. whereas like if you’re an e -commerce business selling, I don’t know,
home furniture or something, you’ve got this massive rate, like customer base that could be anyone. Like you do like customer buyer personas, you could have anyone from like a single homeowner earning 30 grand. Like they could be one of your customers. then it could be like a 60 year old who earns 790 grand or whatever. Whereas for SaaS, there’s probably a more specific.
Azeem (11:16.271)
Mm -hmm.
Ryan Jones (11:22.434)
customer base that you need to focus on. So for us, it would be like agency clients, in -house SEO executives, consultants, and then that’s who we generally try and focus on. So you need to then work on personalizing the content to suit that type of customer.
Azeem (11:43.194)
Yeah, absolutely. Personalization is key and I think…
a lot of people in the SAS game maybe skip over that part for various reasons. One of the things I’m keen to learn from you about is different stages of the funnel, I should say. And I’d love to start with the top of funnel content, something that you mentioned in the form before we spoke.
was about top of funnel content. Why do you think that’s still important in your marketing strategy for top of funnel content?
Ryan Jones (12:23.406)
I the easiest thing to say is because for us it works still. actually had a minor sort of LinkedIn debate with, you might be familiar with, Guitardo over in the States. He’s quite big on LinkedIn and Twitter and that kind of stuff. And he put out a big LinkedIn post saying that top of the funnel content doesn’t work anymore. So naturally I had to disagree with him. I mean, we track, I like disagreeing with people occasionally.
Azeem (12:51.131)
Hahaha
Ryan Jones (12:53.518)
Yeah, we track the attribution for all of the people who will sign up for a trial of SEO testing. It’s a little bit messy, but one of the things we can see is, so anyone who signs up for a new trial will generally be able to find out what page they first visited on our site. Not necessarily the page that they were on before they clicked sign up, but the actual first page that they visited.
And we can see plenty of examples where they’ve clicked on a blog post that we’ve written that we’ve written exclusively for that kind of top of the funnel market. So a couple of examples of, we have a guide on some of the top browser extensions that you can use for SEO. So it’s like, it mentions our Chrome extension, but I think there’s a big list of 25 tools, I think maybe off the top of my head that we write about. And
Yeah, we got a lot of traffic and leads coming from there, but other examples include we’ve got like this massive library of GSC based content, given that we are to use GSC’s API. We’ve got like an article on keyword cannibalization tools that we can use. And in all of those articles, we mentioned SEO testing, but we also mentioned other tools as well. But yeah, I think it all just goes back to top of the funnel being important because it works.
And then at the same time is in order to start moving people through the funnel, you still need to bring in those people at the top of the, at the very top of the funnel and, then focus on it from
Azeem (14:33.274)
Yeah, absolutely. And no names mentioned because we don’t throw shade on this podcast, but that’s a very big point you made there. But when you’re talking about different options for things, not putting yourself first and also listing others is a really big point. Again, I’m speaking from my own behavior, but if I’m looking for.
anything and it happened upon a list. I’ll always look at who wrote it and see if they put themselves first because for me immediately that’s not objective. I want to see a list of everything by someone who does include themselves, which is fine, but not putting themselves as like number one. Let’s move on. Let’s talk about the rest of the funnel. You talked about the top. How do you adjust your tactics for them? Different stages of the funnel further down or in the middle? What do you do that’s different?
Ryan Jones (15:18.05)
Yeah, so we don’t necessarily change anything when it comes to different funnel styles or parts of the funnel. if you work in that sort of traditional, maybe not top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, but if you break it down into, I think it’s HubSpot’s model originally of awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy. If you kind of use those…
as you sort of starting points, you’re aware the stage is going to be stuff like your content marketing, social media, paid ads, even podcasts, obviously is a good example considering we’re here on a podcast now. And then from there, obviously consideration, it moves into webinars and demos that Nick does on like a weekly basis, case study stuff, email marketing, like we’ve got a big email list of current subscribers, as well as people who have obviously used SEO testing in the past.
and then have maybe left the tool, but still have been on the email list and then working towards them sort of making that buying decision. So that’s when like the free trial model comes into play, which is why it’s still obviously used by almost every SaaS business. Personalized demos, if it might be a bigger customer, extended trials. So like in certain instances, if I’m at an event or something, I might put on my LinkedIn.
saying I’m here and if you can come and grab me then you can get maybe an extended trial and then sort of obviously your sales follow -ups and then your sort of retention -based stuff, onboarding programs, customer support, we’re small team. There’s all of us who chip in on support on a daily basis, check -ins with people who, even if they’re just on trials, just like a check -in after a week or something and saying how are you getting on? Is there anything we can help with? Which I guess…
becomes more difficult as obviously you get bigger, but we’re still at the stage where we can do that sort of stuff. And then moving into different things as well. Like, so trying to gain that advocacy. One of our big ones is the affiliate program that we have, which obviously works and we get a lot of leads coming through from there. But so I don’t necessarily say we change it depending on which stage people are in. It’s just, have, we just make sure we cover every area.
Azeem (17:35.269)
Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. So let me dig in then because you talked a lot about your content marketing. What makes a successful piece of content marketing for you? What metrics are you looking at specifically to say, right, that was a success for us?
Ryan Jones (17:50.22)
Yeah. So that kind of splits into two things because whilst I don’t know, I’m trying to remember who I actually said this to originally, but I did make a comment once that whilst I am technically a marketing manager and sort of I’m the one responsible for different stages of I am still an SEO at heart. I think I may always be an SEO at heart, but yeah, my, my KPIs and the KPIs that we track are split into two. So we have
Azeem (17:58.458)
Yeah
Ryan Jones (18:19.692)
obviously purely SEO based KPIs. And then we have more sort of business orientated ones as well. So clicks, impressions, CTR, keyword rankings for different keywords that we might be tracking that kind of thing. That’s all, that’s all looked at. if it’s a specific piece of content that we actually put out, we maybe want to be able to look at it the next quarter and say, well, it was, it’s been published now for three months. It’s had this many people visit
It’s had this many referring domains. We’ve had a referring link from HubSpot or whatever it is. And that kind of thing. So we track that, but then we obviously naturally have to track the business stuff as well. as a more sort of bird’s eye view, we track obviously MRI or the actual number of people that we have subscribed, customer lifetime value. And then I think the big one for us is obviously churn is trying to keep our churn low.
Azeem (19:13.383)
Yeah, no, that makes sense. I’ve got a curve ball for you before we carry on. There are people who I’ve spoken to in the past who work in businesses and places where they want to see an immediate result from a piece of content that they’ve put out. So they’ll say publish a blog post. And then within a week, they’ll hear, right, what we how is this doing? Are we ranking? Why not? Why is it not success straight away? I wanted the success yesterday.
If you’ve been in that situation, what advice would you give to somebody who’s listening or watching right now is in that situation thinking, right, it sounds great so far, you’ve talked about three months, we’ll review it, but I work in a business where my boss or the CEO wants to see results like 20 seconds after I hit publish. What advice do you have for people in that position?
Ryan Jones (20:04.952)
Yeah, and I have been in that position before actually, one of my first agencies that I worked at, obviously not mentioning any names, but we were in that position quite obviously recently and it was, we published this and we need to see this much traffic in this amount of time, otherwise it’s a failure. And I think from my point of view, it comes down to maybe sort of a re -education.
of it and trying to educate whether it’s clients or live managers and that kind of thing and saying, look, we’re, we’re, we are right now just not in a position where we can publish a piece of content and have it rank in, in position one to three or whatever in that space of time. And I think unless you’re lucky to be in one of these like massively well -known industries with like, like websites with millions of using
And they’re lucky enough to publish a piece of content and they have that authority to have it ranking like kind of straight away. I think for almost every other business out there, it’s just not possible. So for us, may be, yeah, it’s about maybe education and saying, well, we don’t necessarily have to track traffic straight away from Google or Bing or whatever it is, but we can get, we can get, certainly get eyes on the piece of content.
And one of the models we try and follow is, I’m sure you’ll be familiar is someone I respect very much is Ross Simmons with his create once distribute forever model. And that works in obviously two ways. It’s you say you can have a blog post and then you can turn that blog post into, I don’t know, five LinkedIn posts, five tweets. You can do like a Twitter threads. I still call it Twitter and not X. will never change.
Azeem (21:50.343)
Same.
Ryan Jones (21:53.25)
But, and then you could do a YouTube video, you could do a podcast based on this blog, like a podcast episode based on the blog post. And it’s, you can get eyes on content without necessarily getting eyes on the content. If that makes sense, you can get eyes from other methods whilst that content takes the time it needs to rank to get backlinks, to do all that kind of stuff that needs to happen in the background.
Because even for us now, we might be like a highly authoritative company in the sort of very niche market of SEO testing, but it still takes a while for our content to rank. But whilst we do that, we make sure it’s shared in other places, on social media, we do our YouTube videos about it and that kind of
Azeem (22:42.587)
Yeah, no, that makes sense. Thanks for sharing that. A couple more before we unfortunately have to part ways. I think we’ll end it on the SAS points. It’s one of the focuses of the episode. Many certainly feel that SAS marketing, it’s a long game and it takes probably even longer than several disciplines to see any meaningful results. I’ve deliberately included that subjective part.
What would you say to people who think that is such a long game? What would you say to that?
Ryan Jones (23:15.02)
I have a tendency to agree with them. I do agree with them. do agree with them because we obviously we talked about it a little bit earlier. We’ve had this nice sort of traffic growth curve that all SEOs want to see almost like if you look at it from certain perspectives, it can almost look like that hockey stick growth in terms of the actual clicks that we’ve been getting. But and whilst the whilst the actual business metrics are going up as well, the business is making more money and that kind of thing.
Azeem (23:17.35)
Yeah
Ryan Jones (23:45.196)
that’s a slower process. So I think you can look at it from two perspectives. So if there are people out there that says SAS is a long game and it takes a long time. And when you said meaningful, that’s where I then focus on the actual business metrics. So MRI, ARR, lifetime value, all that kind of thing. Because that, think, is the longer game. There’s different things that play into that. SAS has maybe a complex sales cycle or a longer sales cycle than certain things, especially
you’re at that higher price point. You need to do all this work on building trust, making sure that people realize that you know what you’re talking about and you need to spend time educating potential customers on obviously how to use the product and what the benefits are. Then you’ve got to go through like customer onboarding and all that kind of thing. And sometimes that might happen even before anyone’s actually signed up and put any payment details in. But whilst it is in my opinion, a longer game, I think
I there’s benefits to that. I think you can develop stronger customer relationships. You can have that chance to build a higher customer lifetime value, a chance to actually build a bit of market leadership if you really invest in all your time and effort into becoming one of the sort of authorities in your niche. And then obviously with the better customer relationships comes obviously the chance to improve your product as well. One of our big examples
We have a Slack group of all our customers. So obviously one of the main goals in there is, they can ask other customers, Hey, we have this problem. How are we solving it? Or I’ve done this test and seen these results of anyone seeing anything like different or has anyone seen the same thing? And then a big part of the, as of the Slack group is we can release new features and do beta tests is we can release features to certain customers and say, say in that Slack group, we’re releasing this soon.
But does anyone want to be a beta tester first and that kind of thing. And that’s been really advantageous for
Azeem (25:50.588)
Yeah, absolutely, I love that. I love the fact that you’ve built a community of your users and allow them to sort of talk to each other. think very few people I can think of are doing that, so it’s great to hear that’s success for you. Last one for you before you give me the all important details about where people can find you and whatnot.
There are people listening and watching this and they want to improve their SAS marketing strategy. What advice do you have for those people specifically? What can they do, let’s say for example, tomorrow morning after hearing this episode or straight after they press stop, what can they do to be better?
Ryan Jones (26:30.488)
think the biggest one is if you’re not currently doing it, you should start talking to your customers. That’s it, that’s a big one for us. Whether I’m at an event or on a Slack group or something, if I can have the chance to talk to one of our customers, then I will. Because at the end of the day, your North Star metric of are people gonna be happy when they sign up? Because they can tell you exactly how they’re using the product, exactly.
what problems they’re having that you can then work and solve. think your customers are definitely the biggest point. One of the things we try and do as well is, and we have a bit of a, a memorable random kind of name for it is we call them Sparkle crews. But essentially it kind of just means try and build a network of other people in SAS. Obviously I’m not necessarily talking about like competitors or anyone like that, but people who are in a similar space in SAS space
Azeem (27:22.674)
Hmm, yeah.
Ryan Jones (27:28.578)
just build that relationship so you can, like, if it’s WhatsApp or messaging them on Twitter and saying, hey, I’ve got maybe this problem, do you have any time to like jump on a quick call or have you seen this before or whatever? And you can ask them what they’ve been doing that’s working, which I’ve found a lot of people are more than happy to be in on that, especially if you’re not a competitor and there’s, for all the negativity that there is in sort of SEO, Twitter and whatever.
There’s a hell of a lot of positivity too. And people are all about building people up and, and, everything like that. And if someone has five minutes to help you, then they will. And I’m going to bring it back to testing because I work for SEO testing is, is keep testing different things. If you have ideas, it could be like the smallest thing, like it all, like the biggest, one of our biggest content wins is obviously adding videos into, into our blog posts. And that came almost on, on a whim.
and we did like a small scale test, realised it had positive results and now that’s like one of the staples that we do. just, if you have an idea, test it and if it works, then double down on it until it doesn’t work.
Azeem (28:42.441)
Yeah, no, absolutely. That’s a great piece of advice and testing is something that I don’t think people do enough of. So it’s a great view to end on that point. So yeah, look, thanks very much Ryan. This has been a fantastic episode. Before you go, can’t let you go without sharing like all the important details. Where can people find, follow, connect with you on social media?
Ryan Jones (29:05.762)
Yep. Two biggest ones, Twitter and LinkedIn. can find me. Twitter is at Ryan Jones SEO and LinkedIn is just, think forward slash Ryan dash G dash Jones. but yeah, as, as long as you’re not confusing me with the SEO of the same name in America, can me, you can find me pretty easily on, on, on social platforms.
Azeem (29:22.406)
Ha ha ha!
Azeem (29:27.826)
No, I’ll add those links into the show notes. And yeah, guess all that’s left to say is look, please do give Ryan a follow, connect with him, say thanks for sharing his knowledge and wisdom with you all. Please do like, rate, share and subscribe. We’re on Spotify video, which is where a lot of you seem to enjoy the video version. We’re also on YouTube as well. We’ll be back for another episode real soon. But once again, thanks for listening and we will see you soon.
Peace.