How To Research Content That Drives $2M+ in Sales (for B2B SaaS)

2,000,000+ 

That’s how much we generated from our library of B2B case studies, including Canva, Masterclass, Hootsuite, and Capterra. 

Not to mention the organic traffic, social shares, partnerships, and backlinks these blog posts still generate from different distribution channels. 

That’s what happens when you prioritize research—you find ideas and unique angles your audience will love and create content that constantly resonates with them. 

This guide breaks down five ways we research content at Foundation. 

You will learn how to use these to spot topics, trends, and unique angles that resonate with your target audience. We also included tools to gather the insights you need faster. (Yeah, we don’t ignore the value of AI. You shouldn’t either 😉). 

Let’s skip to the good part. 

5 Ways to Research Content for Your B2B SaaS Blog

1. Use Audience Research to Identify Topics Your Audience Cares About

Many B2B companies learn more from competitors than they do from their audience. 

Don’t get me wrong. 

Competitor research plays a role in your research process. However, learning about your audience takes priority. You miss quality opportunities to attract and connect with prospects when you ignore or deprioritize audience research.

Audience research reveals your target audience’s interests, pain points, goals, sources of influence, and how they feel about existing solutions. You can use these insights to create content that resonates with your readers. 

So how do you conduct audience research? 

First, define your target audience. You can’t create content that resonates with your audience if you don’t know who they are. 

To define your audience, answer these questions: 

• What is the single most important problem your product or service solves? This clarifies the main value you offer users. 
• Who will benefit most from using your product or service? This tells you who your ideal audience is—their role and jobs to be done. 
• What are their major pain points? This tells you the main frustrations they have. 
• What is keeping them from purchasing your product or service right now? This tells you the main obstacle keeping them from using your product or service.
• What websites, social accounts, and communities do they engage with most? This tells you who has your ta audience’s attention and influences their decisions. 

You can use these answers to create marketing personas that will help your team know what topics and content to create for your audience.

Webflow’s SEO strategy is built around helping its personas create great custom websites with no friction.

The team first focused on making Webflow useful for the freelance web designer who needs everything from hosting, design flexibility, multiple pages, CMS, and more. Right now, its persona library includes freelance and in-house designers, marketing teams and agencies, and solopreneurs. 

Webflow creates blog posts, templates, and tutorials to satisfy its personas’ search intents. Like this one on web design inspiration:

Webflow’s personas looking to build a website from scratch would find this piece most helpful. No wonder the blog post ranks on Google’s page 1 for the query web design inspiration and drives 15,000 sessions each month.  

The secret here is to keep learning about your audience so that you can create content they will find valuable, even after creating your personas. People and situations change, and you should be ready to go with the flow before competitors swoop in 😉. 

Using AI tools saves you time and gives your team the insights they need faster. Semrush, SimilarWeb, and BuzzSumo are other examples of tools you can use. Audiense also allows you to learn about your audience demographics, top brands, websites, influencers they follow, and other important details.

For example, we analyzed Foundation Marketing website and got this result:

The data helps us understand who we should be targeting, potential partnerships, and topics that will resonate with our audience.

You can also gather audience data by doing these: 

• Monitor social media and online communities to see what people are saying about your industry and what kind of content they engage with.
• Survey or interview readers to ask them about their pain points, preferences, and what kind of content they would find valuable. 
• Use Google Analytics and Hotjar to see where your website visitors are coming from, what pages they are engaging with, and understand their experience.

Pro Tip: Audience research is an ongoing process. You should always be curious about what your ideal readers are giving their attention to. When you gather and analyze insights about your target audience consistently, you will create content that speaks directly to their interests, needs, and pain points and drives leads and conversions.

2. Use Customer Research to Learn About What’s Working and What Isn’t

Audience and customer research aren’t the same, even though we sometimes use these words interchangeably. 

Audience research focuses on those most likely to consume your content or buy from you, while customer research focuses on those who have already bought from you. Both give a holistic view of your target market to improve your strategy.

Customer research helps you understand your customers’ needs, pain points, and preferences. These insights help improve your content marketing strategy to upsell or cross-sell to existing customers and attract new ones. 

So how do you conduct customer research?

Start with third-party review sites. 

Third-party review sites like Capterra, G2, and Trust Radius are a goldmine for B2B SaaS companies. They are filled with insights from real people who use your products and competitors’. You can use these reviews in many ways:

Generate new content topics

Review sites tell you about pain points, challenges, and common questions real customers have. For example, if you notice a recurring problem while reviewing a competitor’s reviews, you can create content that addresses their pain points.

Position your SaaS product better

Customer reviews reveal what competitors are doing better and where they are failing. It shows how customers perceive your brand or your competitors. You can use these insights to improve your product offerings or specific features to differentiate your product and give users a better experience. You can also use them to build stronger cases for your SaaS comparison pages, build guides that address users’ pain points, and more. Three are many use cases for using reviews to improve your strategy.

For example, Pipedrive is a popular CRM tool with a 4.2-star rating on G2. Most customer reviews about the tool are quite positive. However, one user shared a pain point in his review:

Dylan’s pain point is that Pipedrive isn’t easy to use for first-time users. 

Pipedrive can solve this problem by reviewing its academy and webinar library to see if the tutorials for new users are beginner-friendly content. Are the tutorials built for those with previous experience with other CRM tools, or does it address those without experience? These questions will help Pipedrive figure out its next steps.

Pipedrive can also review its academy, webinar, and help pages to see how they perform. The academy page, for example, has less than 500 monthly visits. That’s low for a resource center. Webflow university drives almost 80,000 monthly sessions. Its users rely on those resources to use the tool effectively. 

Of course, Webflow is no Pipedrive—the former is quite technical so they provide resources to help those with no coding experience. 

Perhaps the majority of Pipedrive’s users already have experience with CRM and don’t need the tutorials. Or maybe they are like Dylan who are starting out. Whichever it is, the best approach for Pipedrive is to review its analytics and use the insights to make its tutorials more useful for beginners and save time for users like Dylan.  

Pro Tip: Some review sites may not always be unbiased, so you should gather data from multiple sources and use your judgment to evaluate your findings. Use tools like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or Typeform to survey or reach out to customers directly for interviews. 

Improve your website and product messaging

The best way to gain trust is to speak in your audience’s or customer’s language. That means using their own words in your copy or content to show them how your product can help them achieve their goals. 

Social proof

Customer reviews also serve as social proof—a way to improve your landing pages and blog posts’ conversion rates. You are more likely to win customers when you show them how your product or service helped other users achieve their goals. 

You can use these reviews on your landing pages, blog posts, case studies, and other marketing materials. 

For example, Hotjar weaves reviews into its blog posts to help readers see how the tool has helped other users achieve their goals. Its Google Analytics comparison guide has a whole section dedicated to customer reviews from third-party websites:

Including these reviews helps to build trust and credibility so that you can better connect with your audience and inspire them to take action.

3. Use Keyword Research to Create Content for Every Stage of the Buyer Journey

Keyword research is useful for creating content that delights users at every stage of their journey. They show the words and phrases potential customers use to search for products or services like yours. You can use the data to create content that addresses different search intents to attract more leads and customers.

How do you use keyword research to create relevant content?

Focus on search intent. Search intent is the reason people search for certain words and phrases. There are four types of search intent:

A person with informational intent is looking to learn more information about a topic (e.g., “What is NerdWallet?”). One with commercial investigational is trying to compare assets (e.g., “Bankrate vs. NerdWallet”). For navigational intent, the searcher is looking to get somewhere specific (e.g., “Personal Finance Budget Template”). And transactional intent means they are looking for an asset to buy, use, or download (e.g., “NerdWallet Pricing”). 

Each intent determines the kind of content you create and what stage of the journey your target audience is at. 

Take NerdWallet, for example. The website drives 21 million monthly sessions by targeting high-value niche keywords and mapping them to the customer journey. 

Take this blog post, 13 Best Cash Back Credit Cards of April 2022, for example.

This page ranks number 1 in Google’s SERPs for the commercial keyword “best cash back credit cards”, outranking authority sites like Forbes and Bankrate.

Over 32,000 people search for this term every month. The page is worth $1.2M in traffic value, with more than 79,000 people landing on this page every month. 

What makes this page so great is its usefulness for someone in the decision stage. A person who wants the best credit card for themselves can easily navigate and choose based on the format NerdWallet uses.

Credit card companies can leverage NerdWallet’s comparison pages as a part of their BOFU content mix, especially because people trust NerdWallet. And it’s a win-win for NerdWallet, as they operate an affiliate commission business model. 

That’s what happens when you use keyword research to create content that your audience finds so relevant that it becomes a revenue stream for your company. 

Here are some best practices for conducting keyword research:

• Create a list of seed keywords relevant to your target audience and your business. These can be broad keywords or phrases that describe your product.
• Use keyword research tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz Keyword Explorer to generate a list of related keywords and phrases. You will see the keywords’ search volume, competition, and CPC (cost per click).
• Look for keywords that have high search volume and low competition. These will likely be easier to rank for and drive traffic to your site.
• Also, identify long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases that are less competitive and can still drive targeted traffic to your site.
• Once you have identified your target keywords, optimize your content by including them in your headlines, meta tags, and throughout your content.
• Keep track of your ranking for target keywords. This will help you understand how your content is performing and how to improve it.

As search algorithms change and new trends emerge, make sure to keep yourself updated with the latest best practices and trends in keyword research.

Pro Tip: The buyer journey is a framework for understanding the different stages and touchpoints of the research process. But you shouldn’t rely solely on the B2B buyer journey when conducting keyword research. Instead, combine with other research methods to get the best results.

4. Use Community and Social Media Research to Source Expert Quotes

Subject matter expertise is important for B2B content because it helps to establish credibility and trust with your target audience.

B2B buyers are typically more informed and knowledgeable about the products and services they are considering. If you deeply understand the topic you are writing about, you can create accurate, informative content that speaks directly to them. You gain their initial trust and establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry. 

Using expert quotes in your content is a way to show subject matter expertise. Here are a few tips on sourcing expert quotes using social media and community:

Identify relevant experts in your industry. 

You can use Sparktoro to identify top influencers your target audience already engages with on social media. 

One of the ways we use SparkToro to find influencers our audience engages with the most on Twitter:

We filter the results to find “Only Gems”:

Gems are accounts with the highest potential in terms of engagement and following. These influencers may not be mainstream, but they have a sizable audience who engage with their content.  

You should reach out to these accounts to get quotes for your content or start a mutually beneficial partnership. Look for experts with a strong reputation and a track record of providing valuable insights on the topic you are writing about.

The tool also allows you to run a thorough analysis to identify podcasts and newsletters in your industry niche:

You can use these insights to identify potential advertising and collaboration opportunities in your niche, see what your competitors are creating, see the hashtags your audience follows, and create better content around the topics.  

Reach out to these exports via social media or email. 

You can contact the experts and ask if they would be willing to provide a quote or share their thoughts on your topic. You may get crickets, but you shouldn’t give up. That’s why you should have a list of experts to reach out to. 

Use social and community search

You can use Twitter Advanced Search or LinkedIn search to find experts who have already written on the topic. Quora threads, Facebook Groups, subreddits, and other forums are good places to source expert quotes. 

Use relevant keywords while searching to get more relevant results. This process can be long and tedious, but you might find some helpful quotes eventually.

Also, HARO, Help A B2B Writer, and niche communities are also helpful ways to source these quotes. All you have to do is put out a request and use the most relevant responses that come your way. 

Keep a swipe file 

You can bookmark social media and community posts that resonate with you. Or save the links on Notion, Google Keep, Sweply, Evernote, or any notepad you choose. Organize them according to topics so you can easily find them when needed.

5. Use Social Share Research to Create Shareworthy Content

Distribution gives your content a chance to get more visibility and drive engagement. 

One way to create share-worthy content is to study what’s already driving results. You can use BuzzSumo to do this type of research. BuzzSumo lets you identify the headlines and content that get shared in your industry. You can see:

• Your competitor’s top content.
• What gets shared on social media the most.
• Content types that resonate with your audience.

Use the search bar to enter keywords related to your research topic. This will return a list of the most shared content on social media for those keywords.

Use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to narrow down the results by date range, content type, language, and more. 

Then analyze the results to see what kind of content is performing well on social media for your research topic. Look for patterns in the types of content, the platforms where it’s being shared, and the influencers sharing it. Use the data to inform your own content strategy and to identify potential influencers to work with.

Use Research to Create Content That Shapes Culture

Research is the foundation of great content. When you invest in research, you are more likely to create content that generates millions in revenue. 

Again, here are five ways to research content for your B2B SaaS blog:

• Use audience research to identify topics your audience cares about
• Use customer research to learn about what’s working and what isn’t
• Use keyword research to create content for every stage of the buyer journey
• Use community and social media research to source expert quotes
• Use social sharing research to find distribution opportunities

Always remember to keep your audience at the center of every research process, whether audience research, customer research, keyword research, or social/community research. Use these research ideas to supercharge your content marketing efforts.