It’s a difficult time for everyone.
The world has been flipped upside down and the feelings of sadness for everyone being impacted by COVID-19 is a shared feeling. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen the world shaken up so quickly or rally together against a common threat like we’ve witnessed over the last few months. It’s been a wild and emotional journey.
Yet amongst the chaos…
Marketers and companies are continuing to try and maintain some sense of normalcy by serving customers and clients. Many SaaS brands have an increase in adoption and demand due to COVID-19. SaaS brands working in verticals like electronic signatures, web conferencing, telehealth and antivirus protection have done extremely well despite the economic downturn and crisis impacting millions of people around the world.
Marketers working at SaaS companies across all industries faced a difficult challenge over the last few weeks of determining what their content mix should look like. Some marketers suggested that SaaS companies should pause their content while some (me included) suggested that brands continue to create amidst the crisis.
We wanted to analyze and understand how the crisis would impact SaaS marketing activities and for the most part there was little change. We identified more than 1,900 articles published between Feb 1 and April 10 by SaaS brands ranging from Hubspot or Salesforce to Monday.com and Convertkit. Across multiple industries only 8% of the total posts published between Feb 1 and April 10 were related to the crisis:
The brands that did publish about COVID-19 on average posted 1 or 2 articles yet some brands had published more than 10+ posts referencing COVID-19. One content strategy that became clear as we dove into the sites with more than 5 posts about COVID-19 was the use of content repurposing.
Four SaaS companies had repurposed old content on their blog and updated these posts to include references to COVID-19 or the sudden rise of people working remotely.
So how did these articles perform?
It’s still to be determined but one of the most fascinating insights we gained from this research was surrounding what content generated links from high authority sites and what didn’t. The average SaaS blog post discussing COVID-19 amongst this batch of content on received between 0-10 backlinks. While many of these posts did well on social media these articles were rarely linked to by media or other sources.
The content that generated the most links were posts that announced a SaaS brands response to helping their clients or the world at large during the crisis. For example, these four posts stood out as some of the most successful SaaS assets referencing COVID-19:
The media resonated most with those who gave back the most.
Lots of SaaS marketers took the time to try and really help people with their content. Assets were developed helping people understand how to work from home, how to sell during a crisis, how to use their solutions from home or just some tips and tricks for staying sane amidst the chaos. All of these assets were valued by readers but the assets that generated the most results appear to be those that you couldn’t identify through a keyword research tool. The assets that generated the most results were those that put people first and prioritized offering selfless service and support.
