Challenging SaaS Behemoths
Yaag shared how he built a challenger B2B SaaS content strategy that challenged, is still challenging, and helping Avoma eat into the market share of behemoths.
Unseating a B2B SaaS category leaders is hard.
What’s worse?
Hoping to grab market attention and win customers when there are 3-5 known brands already dominant in a niche your B2B SaaS operates in.
“Plug their site into Ahrefs, scrape top-ranking keywords, create 10x content, build backlinks, outrank them, and you’ll win.” Says the SEO expert who assumes your competitors are just going to seat there waiting for your startup to ascend over them.
It’s rarely the case.
This isn’t to say you can’t —or shouldn’t try to— outrank competitors. The reality is that outranking competitors is but one piece of the puzzle. Your content marketing strategy must do something much more important to challenge behemoths and win a reasonable share of buyers in the market.
Yaag (short for Yaagneshwaran) knew this when he joined Avoma.
So he didn’t start by obsessing over keywords, SEO, or outranking behemoths like Gong, Chorus, and others who were already dominating their niche. He began by helping to nail what made Avoma different.
Hear it from him:
I learned so much from Yaag.
As the clip shows, I took notes almost all through our conversation.
Yaag shared that to build the content marketing strategy that helped Avoma challenge behemoths like Gong and Chorus, they started with a story. Not keywords. Not SEO. A story that positioned Avoma differently.
As a result, the startup have climbed steadily and have been slowly eating into the market share of their niche. Heck, I’ve even seen random people share LinkedIn posts of how they prefer Avoma to behemoths like Gong who dominated the market for long.
You can trace some of this success to the challenger content marketing Yaag helped to build. Once Yaag had the overarching story nailed, three other things he focused on doing with their content execution were:
1️⃣ Focus on unique perspectives:
Rather than imitating competitors, aim to establish a different position in the market. Strive to offer something unique and valuable to your audience. 🎯
2️⃣ Understand customer needs:
Dive deeper into your customers’ needs and desires. Don’t just listen to their feature requests, but seek to understand why those features are important and how they fit into their workflow. 💡
3️⃣ Balance pain points and aspiration:
Content marketing should not only address pain points but also be aspirational. Find the right balance between guiding your audience through pain points and inspiring them towards their goals. ✨
Most important, when it came to the actual execution of the strategy he helped build, Yaag leaned on telling product-led stories.
He shared how he did it:
You’d learn so much from my conversation with Yaag.
Crafted in VEC Studio
In November 2022, Equals, the spreadsheet software that connects data to live dashboards, went the freemium, PLG route. If the acronym doesn’t ring a bell, PLG stands for Product-Led Growth.
Seven months later, in June 2023, they killed it, returning to their initial, SLG acquisition strategy. Pardon me if you’re also not familiar with the SLG acronym. It is short for Sales-Led Growth.
Bobby Pinero, their CEO, wrote:
Here’s what they didn’t kill.
To acquire users on both sides, PLG and SLG, Equals created content showing (not just telling) readers and potential customers their product’s value.
Take their ‘How to Establish Your Core Funnel’ piece published in April 2023, months after they went the PLG route:
Returning to the SLG acquisition strategy, people needed to see value enough to key in credit card numbers for a trial. Equals is ticking that box by creating more story-driven content showing (not just telling) how their product solves problems. One, out of many, example is their ‘Because the World Needs Better Dashboards’ essay.
In it, they don’t just educate readers about dashboards, they share the story of how they build dashboards… with Equals:
The lesson?
Equals validates that content showing (and not just telling) people how to solve problems with your product drives acquisition. Craft them with stories target buyers can resonate with, and it’ll enable your freemium or sales-led acquisition motions.
Want to learn more about this content execution approach that works for acquiring customers, whether you’re running a PLG or SLG strategy?
Thanks so much for reading.
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Enjoyed this one? 🙏🏻…
When you’re ready…
Two ways we can help:
Chat with VEC Studio to design and execute a story-driven, product-led content [aka, Product-Led Storytelling] strategy to grow your B2B SaaS.
Arm yourself (or team) with the frameworks for crafting story-driven, product-led content that earns mindshare and drives growth.