Back in 2015, Eleken was a full-service app development company working with all sorts of clients. Just like many others in the software development industry, they solved the same problems in pretty much the same ways as everyone else, and were trying to reach a broad range of businesses with their marketing efforts.
"Where your ideas evolve into products," read the message on their homepage.
With this positioning, Eleken was uncertain about what path to follow. They couldn't choose a direction. This uncertainty often leads companies toward mediocrity.
But then Eleken made a decision. They stopped offering software development services and focused on design only. They also shifted their target from everyone to SaaS.
This shift has given them something valuable... They knew what to do. They knew what’s right and what’s wrong. What will work, and what won’t.
They didn't have to compete on costs or spend more on marketing. They didn’t need to work harder. Now they could work differently.
That’s when they met me. I am the founder of Zmist & Copy. At that time, I was the co-founder and Content Director at Kaiiax. They asked for my agency's help in creating a content marketing strategy for their new business.
Three months after launching their redesigned website with the new positioning and content, Eleken started generating over 20 monthly leads and ranked in Google’s top search results for over 30 relevant keywords.
Want to know how they did it? Keep reading to find out.
Pragmatic design agency for SaaS
Eleken realized that to truly connect with SaaS businesses, they needed to be like SaaS. So, they began offering full-time product designers for a predictable monthly fee, mirroring the SaaS pricing model.
By providing UI/UX designers on-demand and cutting out slow processes, hidden costs, and complex collaboration, Eleken set itself apart as a pragmatic UI/UX design partner for SaaS.
We chose the word "pragmatic" to capture Eleken's point of view and made it the main message on their homepage.
Now we needed to develop a content strategy that would work effectively within the existing market challenges.
Market challenges
Oversaturated UI/UX design market, selective entrepreneurial audience, no marketing team ‒ our content strategy needed to work within these limits.
Oversaturated market
Like any new player, Eleken had to build trust with their SaaS audience. With so many UI/UX design services out there, their content strategy needed to highlight their expertise and credibility in the SaaS world.
Selective entrepreneurial audience
Eleken's target audience – people who make decisions about partnering with designers – are SaaS company leaders, so our content had to be relevant to this audience. People with strong entrepreneurial backgrounds are skeptical of the content that comes from a company they have never heard of. We had to focus on high-quality business content to deliver valuable and engaging information to our target audience.
No marketing team
Moving to a brand new field means starting over from square one. In Eleken’s case, we’re talking about everything: new website copy, new blog posts, new team ‒ quite a hard nut to crack – which made the process even more exciting for us.
After multiple discovery sessions, we came up with a content marketing strategy to help Eleken attract the right audience and conquer the SaaS market. Here’s what we did.
Our content strategy to attract SaaS leads
We built a content strategy that helped Eleken attract the desired audience. Here are the core principles we followed to achieve this goal.
Target decision-makers with business content
Our first tactic was to create content that addressed the needs and pains of SaaS decision-makers. Our content roadmap included topics such as:
- 10 Reasons Why Products Fail (So You Can Prevent It)
- Roles in SaaS Company: Who You Need to Start Hiring When Your SaaS is Growing
- How to Price Your SaaS Product? Guess Less, Ask More
"Product life cycle," "Team," "SaaS business model," – these were the categories in our content roadmap. We wanted to create content that would signal Eleken’s understanding of the SaaS audience and their specific needs.
Target technical audience with design content
Our customer segment was well-defined: we were going for SaaS companies. Our personas included three crucial roles within that segment:
- Decision-makers
- Product designers
- Product managers
Product designers and product managers might not make the final call about partnering with a design agency but they do influence this decision. To attract these specialists, we created blog articles like:
- Compelling Design Takes More Than “Making It Like Stripe”
- Should Your Productivity Tool Also Look Like Notion?
- How to Сonduct a UX Audit: 5 Essential Steps
Pick the low-hanging keyword fruit
To bring in the audience that is ready to buy, our team created landing pages that addressed specific search queries related to purchasing SaaS design services. We used keywords with transactional intent, even those with zero search volume, such as "SaaS design agency" and "SaaS web design," to increase visibility and reach a narrow audience of potential clients.
Target high-volume keywords
To reduce the risk of our niche promotion not delivering the expected results, we created landing pages targeting high-volume transactional keywords like "UI/UX design services" and "web app design." This strategy allowed us to attract leads to Eleken's website from a wider pool of potential customers.
Result: 20+ SaaS leads within the first 3 months
We put a lot of effort into helping Eleken reach their business goals, but the key to our success was focus. By zeroing in on a specific SaaS niche, we achieved impressive results in a very short time:
Key outcomes:
- 20+ monthly MQL within the first 3 months
- 25K organic traffic in 2 years
- Eleken’s design team grew threefold
Also, Eleken content got great organic exposure, popping up several times on design platforms like UX Magazine, which has over 600,000 readers. It also caught the eye of influencers like Vitaly Friedman on LinkedIn, racking up 563 reposts and 2,690 likes.
Read also:
