Content marketing is a winning strategy to get more customers. It is well-proven to work, except when it doesn't.

Nothing is more frustrating than investing time and money to create content and don't get the excellent results so many marketers rave about.

What do you do wrong? Here are 7 content marketing mistakes that can stop your SaaS MRR from going up to the moon.

1. You don’t have a content marketing strategy

"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." — Benjamin Franklin

Defining a strategy for your content marketing is essential, and you prepare yourself to lose time and money if you don't.

A good content marketing strategy follows these steps:

1. Define your goals
2. Research your audience and competitors
3. Research the topics and keywords
4. Plan your content according to your funnels and the research

The rest is execution (content scheduling, creation, distribution) and analyzing (tracking, reporting).

The problem comes when you focus on the execution part without preparing your strategy. The content won't be aligned with your goals, your audience, or ignore the competitive landscape.

2. You are not doing enough research

SaaS companies that don't do enough research before creating content don't send the right message to their audience. They struggle to attract new customers and retain existing ones.

Remember, content marketing is not about you. It's about how you help your customers and prospects.

To create the best content, you need to know what they want to read and what they are interested in.

Keyword research helps you find answers to these questions.

It also helps you find your competitors' content gaps and outsmart them with high-quality content. That's why every SaaS company should focus on keyword research before writing a piece of content.

3. You don't do any funnel development

You have a clear business goal and know your audience inside out, but you don't have any strategy for content creation, how and where to distribute it, or how to structure it and map it to your customer journey.

This is what funnel development is all about: creating an attraction field to your brand that your customers will follow without friction.

It ensures that they won't go to another SaaS solution because your funnel with the minimal energy path to solve their problem.

4. You have a bad (or no) content distribution

It is not enough to create helpful and engaging content; you need to put it in front of the right audience.

Choosing the wrong distribution channel or not adapting the format to the platform you are publishing to will hurt your business. You will waste precious resources and get frustrated by the lack of results.

Content distribution is one of the pillars of successful content marketing. It requires thinking about it from the start and tweaking it to optimize it using your analytics.

Don't forget, content ≠ blog post only.

Repurpose it!

Think of other formats, such as videos, audio, images, infographics.

And other channels: social media, emails, YouTube, podcasts.

5. You don't have good content

This seems obvious. Bad content won't attract potential customers or keep your existing ones around you.

But a piece of content can be bad for many reasons, and it takes particular skills to create content that gets the job done. It doesn't mean writing like Shakespeare or creating cinematographic videos.

It means clear and targeted content that helps your audience while featuring your brand somehow.

Hiring an expert can be wise if you are not a content creator yourself. A good writer, video creator, or designer will add a lot of value to your business.

6. You are not using a systemic approach

I don't see many people talking about this one, except André and Shawn at Tinylittlebusinesses, who regularly write about systems in marketing.

The principle is simple: consider your marketing funnel as a whole system more significant than the sum of its parts. This means that the individual components of your funnel, sales page, emails, blog posts, tweets should work together and be optimized not separately but with the intent of making the system better.

You could tweak your sales page headline for days, but if the rest of the copy doesn't engage readers into action, it won't be helpful. Or if you don't get a lot of visitors to this sales page.

Ask yourself: how does changing this detail help the whole system work better?

7. You don't analyze the results

You have defined a clear strategy and executed it for weeks or months. Well done! But do you track conversions? Do you measure the traffic?

If you don't analyze your funnel regularly (every month seems a good frequency), it is like walking in the jungle with a blindfold and hoping to find the exit. It won't be easy.

I am not recommending obsessing with numbers, either.

But you need to check what is going on to adapt or fix issues as soon as possible.

Conclusion

Here are again the seven content marketing mistakes to avoid if you want to grow your SaaS business:

1. You don’t have a content marketing strategy
2. You are not doing enough research
3. You don't do any funnel development
4. You have a bad (or no) content distribution
5. You don't have good content
6. You are not using a systemic approach
7. You don't analyze the results

While you can easily avoid a few of them, others require more skills. It would be more strategic to outsource/hire someone who already hones those skills and go faster on the road to success.

If you want help with your content marketing, contact me and let's discuss your project!