This post was written by Accelity Marketing owner, Jackie Steinmetz, for Startup Savant. Read the original post here.

Is your B2B SaaS startup considering diving into content marketing? Good choice. Content marketing is one of the most popular and effective inbound lead generating strategies. Done well, content marketing will bring your business qualified leads at a fraction of the cost of other strategies; done poorly, content marketing will suck time and money out of your company. Use the following tips to ensure your company gets the most out of content marketing.

1. Create content that’s actually actionable.

Your content doesn’t have to be super long or in-depth. It has to be one thing: actionable. Many marketers think that all content published by a company should be a deep think-piece; a thoroughly researched white paper or something of the like. I encourage B2B SaaS startups to think about content marketing in a different way.

How can you use free content to actually help your prospect? Consider the following:

• What does your product do for your customers? What related content can you create to make their lives easier?
• Is there a process checklist that your prospect could use to improve a process within their business?
• When creating a less actionable type of content, like an ebook, what can you include for your prospects to take away and use? This could be a series of questions to use in sales meetings, helpful links to other content, etc.

2. Promote it (over and over again).

So many companies make this mistake: they spend hours creating a content offer, publish it, promote it for the week on Twitter, and then they move on to the next campaign. Does that seem like a waste to you? It should. Promoting your content should take place over a series of weeks after you publish it and then still happen consistently after the “newness” wears off. At Accelity, we constantly promote our content on social media, via email and on our website—just because content may seem old to us doesn’t mean it’s not useful to prospective clients.

3. Partner with industry thought leaders.

This is one of the most important content marketing strategies that we employ at Accelity and suggest for our B2B SaaS startup clients. The more airtime you can get for your content, the more traffic you’ll drive to your site, the more likely leads are getting to know your company; the list goes on. Partnering with thought leaders allows business owners to connect with likeminded people in the industry and has the added benefit of free content promotion.

4. Examine the conversion points on your website.

The point of websites today is to act as a lead generating funnel. Is your website serving this purpose? If not, it’s time to examine the conversion points on your website and make sure you’re giving prospects plenty of places to identify themselves to you. Possible conversion points include:

• Placing calls-to-action (CTAs) on every page with forms
• Creating a resources page or library to house your content offers
• Placing related content offers on every page of your website
• Including CTAs at the end of every blog to lead the visitor to a form

5. Most importantly, pick one strategy. Exhaust it before you move on to the next.

As I indicated in the section header, this is the most important part of a content marketing strategy for B2B SaaS startups. Don’t try every single strategy at once! Choose one marketing strategy and execute it to the fullest, then move on to the next one. For example, perhaps you want to try Twitter advertising to drive visitors to your content. Great idea! Don’t run a campaign for two weeks then decide whether or not it works. At Accelity, we test advertising platforms for 1-3 months then compare the results of each.

If your strategy is working, keep doing it and layer on another. If it’s not, abort! Hanging onto a strategy that’s not working will waste your time and energy. Just remember that once you find strategies that work, you have to continually reevaluate the strategy to ensure it’s still working. Back to the Twitter example, I would write new ad copy and adjust your audience targeting monthly to ensure continued success.

What content marketing strategies work for your company? Let me know what you think in the comments below or contact Milwaukee marketing agency, Accelity Marketing, to learn more.