Content marketing for B2B technology companies: challenges and indications of successful strategies

• Main Author: Fontoura, Camila Iglesias
• Publication Date: 2023
• Format: Master thesis
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/24824
• topic: Content marketing; B2B; SaaS; Web content; Marketing de conteúdo; Conteúdo web

The business-to-business (B2B) software as a service (SaaS) industry is a growing sector of companies that offer software products to enterprises. In recent years, there has been a significant growth of new companies in the technology sector, which creates a more competitive market with specific buying processes and target audiences. These industry-specific sales and marketing needs result in B2B SaaS companies presenting new strategies, behaviors and trends to generate more leads, increase their brand awareness and sell more. Since content marketing is one of the most easily implementable cost-efficient marketing strategies for all industries and company sizes, it also became a crucial strategy for B2B SaaS businesses. However, due to the novelty factor of this industry and the ever-evolving digital buying process, companies may not be aware of the available content marketing strategies and best practices for their specific needs. Therefore, there is a need to identify what content strategies are being followed by B2B SaaS companies, how they are adapting traditional content formats to their reality, and what industry-specific content types can be identified. This study has the objective of discovering if B2B SaaS companies are investing in web content marketing by adopting an exploratory research methodology, based on a qualitative nature, to make observations about the strategies implemented in the websites of one hundred B2B SaaS companies during the first half of 2023. Its relevance is justified since it enables the identification of industry-specific content marketing behaviors, being valuable for researchers who engage in further studies as well as for the B2B SaaS industry community by helping them make more informed decisions in the future. The results concluded that most B2B SaaS companies do not comply with the main web content marketing strategies suggested by published literature, being blogs as the most adopted content type.