{"id":1576,"date":"2022-03-21T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/?p=1576"},"modified":"2022-03-21T02:11:11","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T07:11:11","slug":"3-most-effective-content-marketing-pages-for-early-stage-startups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/3-most-effective-content-marketing-pages-for-early-stage-startups\/","title":{"rendered":"The 3 Most Effective Content Marketing Pages for Early-Stage Startups"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Knowing exactly what sort of pages to create when you&#8217;re in the early days of your content marketing can be really hard. So in today&#8217;s article, we&#8217;re going to be digging into three types of pages that an early-stage SaaS company should focus on when it comes to starting out their content marketing efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the end of this article, you&#8217;re going to have a clear understanding of three types of pages is that you can use to start actually getting traffic while also getting conversions for your business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe width=\"700\" height=\"395\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pWc5SqZiemw\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-vivid-green-cyan-background-color has-background\" href=\"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/digital-marketing-jumpstart\/\" style=\"border-radius:5px\">Get my Free Digital Marketing Jumpstart Kit!<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Content Page #1: Alternative pages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Digging right in, the first type of page that I recommend you create when you&#8217;re in the early days of your SaaS&#8217; content marketing efforts is alternative pages. What you&#8217;re essentially doing in this situation is you&#8217;re creating a series of content that will target the other brand phrases of competitors in your space. So if, for example, you were selling a CRM, you might target things like Salesforce alternative or Pipedrive alternative, or Zoho alternative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And essentially what you&#8217;re looking for are the sorts of phrases that people are looking for when they are evaluating different CRM solutions and trying to find the best one for their business. The reason why these particular phrases are so effective is because they are often searched for whenever it comes to a high ticket purchase item like a SaaS tool, such as a CRM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I&#8217;ll show you an example as I jump into my computer here in which we can actually look at the example of an email marketing solution, like EmailOctopus. When I search for EmailOctopus alternative, I can see one of their competitors taking this exact strategy. On the left hand side below the G2 response you can see that EasySendy has a page on this, and so does bigmailer.io. And as I click into these pages, I can zoom in here. And what I can see is that EasySendy is trying to position themselves as an EmailOctopus alternative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And what I can do is I can search on this phrase and look at where EasySend is referencing EmailOctopus as well as how they&#8217;re comparing it. So this is a very standard alternatives page. Pretty much you&#8217;re going to have a header section in which you&#8217;re going to break down some sort of reference to your company being the alternative to your competitor. And then what you&#8217;re going to want to do is you&#8217;re going to want to provide some sort of breakdown feature comparison of exactly why your product is better than your competitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the case where you&#8217;re struggling to think about ways that your product is better than your competitors what you might have some work to do on your product side of things. But that said, what you can also do is you can create very specific definitions that your product qualifies for that your competitor doesn&#8217;t. That can be a clever way in terms of positioning the tables to work for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But as you work your way through this page, what you&#8217;re seeing is essentially that there&#8217;s going to be a decent amount of content on the page. You need to have a couple different headers and different types of headers. And then you&#8217;re gonna want to also break down things like comparing reviews and more objective ways that people might be evaluating solutions. But what you&#8217;re going to want to do is you&#8217;re going to want to create this for a number of your competitors pages, not just one, but probably the five or seven biggest competitors in your space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I promise you that this will get you traffic because I&#8217;ve done it in the last six months alone for the business I work for. And you&#8217;ll see the same approach taken with BigMailer here. So on the right hand side, you can actually see that BigMailer has their compare pages of BigMailer versus SendGrid, MailGun, EmailOctopus, Sendy, and MailChimp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then you&#8217;ll also see all the specifics as to what makes BigMailer different than their competitor in this case, EmailOctopus. So how do you go about creating this first type of page? It&#8217;s actually not as hard as you think. All you need to do is create a free account to your competitor&#8217;s site and then dig around the site and do some product research. In the case where you can&#8217;t create a free account, you can always try to learn more from their marketing pages and try to compare as a, honestly as possible your product and their product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And in the case where you can even get a paid account or you just want to pay them for a month in order to do a truly thorough, deep dive of your platform, that can be a great way for you to do market research as well. What you&#8217;re going to want to do is you&#8217;re gonna essentially want to create a Google sheet or an Excel document where you&#8217;re going to list out all the key features and then map out exactly what&#8217;s going to go on this alternatives page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When you&#8217;re ready what I recommend is that you create a master hub page for where all of your alternative pages are going to live. And then what you&#8217;re going to want to do is then create the subpages to that master page. In this way, you&#8217;re going to have a hub page that&#8217;s going to talk about all the very unique things that your product does followed by all of these spokes that are going to connect to your hub that are all the alternative pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-vivid-green-cyan-background-color has-background\" href=\"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/digital-marketing-jumpstart\/\" style=\"border-radius:5px\">Get my Free Digital Marketing Jumpstart Kit!<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Content Page #2: Series pages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>So once you&#8217;ve created that page, that leads us to the second type of page that you&#8217;re going to want to create for your early-stage SaaS business. So the next sort of page that you&#8217;re going to want to create is a series page. And these are the sorts of pages in which you identify some sort of content series that you can create at scale. What&#8217;s really important here is that you&#8217;re thinking about how you can use programmatic SEO or aspects of programmatic SEO in order to create a ton of pages at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>An easy example to show you this is going to be looking at BannerBear. They&#8217;re run by an indie hacker who&#8217;s recently been scaling up his business and he is doing over 300K in ARR. So as we take a look at BannerBear here, what I&#8217;m going to show you is how they&#8217;re using series in order to scale their content marketing. Remember, this is run by one guy for the most part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He&#8217;s obviously scaling out his team these days, but for the most part, he has done all of the marketing himself, and what you can see here in the top are the things that he&#8217;s created in terms of series. So he&#8217;s got something around image generation API, multi-image generation API, video generation API, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And these are all landing pages that probably follow a very similar structure. They&#8217;ve got a key header. They dig into exactly how he addresses this particular problem. They even give an example so that you&#8217;re able to play around with his actual tool. And then what he does is he essentially creates this over and over again. Here, we&#8217;ve got the multi image API and he takes this same approach here, except this time covering multi images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this sort of approach is really powerful for a number of reasons. The first reason is if you&#8217;re using a website builder like a Webflow, you can actually create a collection in which you can reuse that collection and then create a ton of different pages using the same base layout like this. So that&#8217;s essentially more or less what he&#8217;s probably doing to some extent on this page for BannerBear, and you&#8217;re able to just spin up all these different phrases. And the reason why that&#8217;s valuable is because in the case where I just want to go ahead and search that on Google, I can see that he&#8217;s probably ranking somewhere on the page. You can see right here, he&#8217;s ranking around in the middle to the end of page one, just for this sort of generic page that he&#8217;s come up with. And you&#8217;ll see this tactic used by a lot of businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just to show you another example, you can take a look at a company like Venngage in which if you go to Venngage and you go to their footer, you can see all their different templates as well as Venngage versus everyone. So those are those alternative pages, and they&#8217;re essentially just repeating this sort of process over and over again with their template pages in which what they&#8217;ve done is they&#8217;ve thought about how they can integrate their product into a series of templateized pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this case, we&#8217;ve got infographic templates, but we&#8217;ve also got different types of infographics within that, as well as presentations, business cards, reports, human resources and things like that. Tons of companies take this approach. And the reason why is because it just works, it gets you a ton of pages. It allows you to really nest all of these pages as well. And you don&#8217;t have to focus as much in terms of the content quality, because you&#8217;re able to just create these pages in bulk and then see what actually ranks and then what doesn&#8217;t as well..<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just really hit this point home. You can even take a look at a massive site, like Canva, in which in this case, if you just go to their design section of their site, you can see all the different categories in which they are taking this sort of ized approach. You can click on logos, and from here, you&#8217;ve got a logos landing page in which they&#8217;re working in their product, as well as creating all these different pages for queries around logos. And they take this approach over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Content Page #3: How to cancel X content <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>So just to recap, before we head into the third type of a page, you can create when you&#8217;re in your early days of content marketing, in this stage, what you&#8217;re looking for is you&#8217;re looking for phrases like templates or any sort of core page where you can create a collection and then repurpose that collection format over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the easiest ways to figure out the sort of content to create is to look for particular phrases in your space, and then add the word like examples, template, quizzes or things like that. All right. So we come a long way and we now are onto our third type of content. For this particular type of content, what you&#8217;re going to want to create is how to cancel X content. The reason why you&#8217;re going to want to create this content is because you&#8217;re going to be tackling the traffic that is searching to learn about how they can cancel your competitors. So it&#8217;s a variant of the first idea where you were tackling the alternative phrases. But now you&#8217;re going to tackle directly what happens when people are searching for how exactly they can cancel a competitor of yours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reason why this is so important in the early days is because oftentimes you want to get quick wins and high intent in terms of your early efforts in your content marketing. And this is some of the highest intent you can get. Just think about it. If somebody&#8217;s hopping onto Google and searching how to cancel X, Y, Z, competitor of yours, then they&#8217;re probably pretty mad with or dissatisfied with your competitor, and they&#8217;re more than likely to actually want to try out your software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So in this case, as the example, going to look for how to cancel Salesforce, just like my first example in the CRMs I&#8217;m going to remove salesforce.com from the search results. And what I can see is that there are a few different pages around this content. You can see You can see there&#8217;s Zendesk has created a post on how to cancel your CRM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So if I just look at this, you can see that this person from the growth team of Zendesk is essentially talking about all the different ways that you can cancel your CRM. So whether that&#8217;s Salesforce, Copper, Pipedrive these are all competitors to Zendesk. So this is just intelligent content marketing because what this growth associate is doing at Zendesk is he&#8217;s targeting the people that are not satisfied with the competitors and essentially landing them onto their website where from here, what I might do is I&#8217;m might learn a little bit more about Zendesk, where I might click into starting a new trial and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this is really effective targeting because what they&#8217;re doing is they&#8217;re getting some of the most dissatisfied customers of their competitors and directing that traffic away. The reason why this works so well is because oftentimes competitors will nest the ways to cancel their product, &#8217;cause they don&#8217;t want those cancellations or they&#8217;ll have it in a support center that&#8217;s not actually SEO, optimized. So it&#8217;s a really easy term to actually chase after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Bonus tip<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>And as a bonus tip, what you can also do is you can look at what the people also ask phrases are around your competitors when you&#8217;re searching for them. So what I mean by that is if I go back into my search results here for how to cancel Salesforce, you can see there are some other questions like how to cancel formstack, how to cancel Copper CRM, and I can just expand these out, and then right here, I&#8217;ve got more phrases that I can create content marketing around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, what I might do in that situation is I might search for something like how to cancel Pipedrive and then expand out all of the different people also ask phrases, see what&#8217;s relevant for that particular piece of content marketing, and then create a piece of content marketing that answers the key people also ask questions that people are typing in. Things like how do I cancel my Pipedrive description or how long is the Pipedrive free trial, how do I delete a company from Pipedrive and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you liked this article, be sure to&nbsp;check out my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/subscribe\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/subscribe\">YouTube channel<\/a>&nbsp;to get new videos every single week. I\u2019ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to use paint SEO to generate new content ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-vivid-green-cyan-background-color has-background\" href=\"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/digital-marketing-jumpstart\/\" style=\"border-radius:5px\">Get my Free Digital Marketing Jumpstart Kit!<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Knowing exactly what sort of pages to create when you&#8217;re in the early days of your content marketing can be really hard. So in today&#8217;s article, we&#8217;re going to be digging into three types of pages that an early-stage SaaS company should focus on when it comes to starting out their content marketing efforts. By &#8230; <a title=\"The 3 Most Effective Content Marketing Pages for Early-Stage Startups\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/3-most-effective-content-marketing-pages-for-early-stage-startups\/\" aria-label=\"More on The 3 Most Effective Content Marketing Pages for Early-Stage Startups\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1577,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1578,"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions\/1578"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.growwithwill.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}