why you need a vertical content marketing strategy (and how to do it right)
If you’re not sure whether your SaaS content strategy needs a vertical approach, here are some tell-tale signs:
- Your blog gets decent traffic, but low conversion rates
- Sales says leads are unqualified or “just browsing” despite high content engagement
- Your support team spends lots of time explaining how your product solves industry-specific problems
- Your competitors’ content looks eerily similar to yours (same topics and angles)
- You’re ranking for broad keywords, not the specific terms your ideal customers use
Sound familiar? You need to get industry-specific.
Generic content does not generate specific buying intent, regardless of how much work your content team puts into creating it.
The good thing is that a subtle pivot to verticalize your SaaS content marketing strategy can make all the difference, and this article will show you why it’s important and how exactly to do it.
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What happens when content marketing gets specific
Vertical content marketing reflects who exactly your content is for, no matter how feature-rich your product is.
Here’s how going vertical can drive real business results.
1. You stand out in a crowded market
A generic CRM is nice, but a CRM for auto dealerships that handles trade-in appraisals, inventory, and service reminders? That’s gold. It positions you as an expert and opens the door to high-value referrals and partnerships.
A SaaS company that does this well is Rippling.
As a result, they’ve built a reputation as the go-to platform for companies with complex operational needs.
Standing out means being specifically relevant. When a prospect feels like you’re speaking directly to their industry challenges, they’re far more likely to see you as a potential solution provider rather than just another SaaS company.
2. Your product feels more valuable (without changing a thing)
Eugene Leow Zhao Wei, Director at Marketing Agency Singapore, shares a strong, compelling case study:
“We worked with a SaaS client offering general CRM tools—great product, but a generic pitch. We convinced them to create a vertical SaaS marketing campaign aimed solely at dental clinics. That meant tweaking messaging, use cases, testimonials, and even feature names to sound like they were built just for dentists.”
The results were remarkable.
“A 42% higher conversion rate on landing pages and more meaningful demo calls because prospects felt like we ‘got’ them. Compared to the broader campaigns, the vertical approach gave us tighter feedback loops and faster word-of-mouth within that niche. It wasn’t just a change in targeting, it made the product feel more valuable without changing the product at all.”
When your marketing addresses an industry’s specific challenges in their own language, your product feels more specialized, even if competitors offer similar features. It pre-sells the idea that your solution perfectly fits their needs.
When your marketing addresses an industry's specific challenges in the prospect's language, you pre-sell the idea that your solution perfectly fits their needs.
3. You get better leads (and shorter sales cycles)
Prospects who engage with vertical content, like an industry-specific article or landing page, tend to:
- Ask more specific, relevant questions
- Be less price-sensitive
- Move faster through the sales process
This means your content strategy is doing more than building awareness—it’s qualifying leads and moving them through your marketing funnel. The ripple effect: your sales team spends less time educating and more time closing deals.
4. Your SEO gets a serious boost
Here’s where things get interesting.
Industry-specific keywords are often less competitive (and more valuable) than the broad stuff everyone else is fighting over.
Let’s say you sell project management software.
The term “Project management tools” receives 74,000 monthly searches on Google, which means it’s incredibly competitive. Meanwhile, “construction project management software” gets only 8,100 searches but has a higher purchase intent and less competition.
By targeting industry-specific keywords, you start ranking for high-intent searches.
You might see lower traffic, but it’s more qualified. That’s better than high traffic with rising bounce rates because people don’t see what they’re looking for.
How to find the right verticals for your SaaS marketing
Finding the right verticals for SaaS content marketing isn’t just about picking industries where your product could theoretically work. You also need to consider factors like market trends, buying patterns, market size, and whether you can really meet their needs.
Here’s how you can begin:
1. Analyze your existing customer base
As Ashley R. Cummings, Founder of Searchlight Content, puts it: “The smartest way to choose verticals is to figure out where your highest-intent audience lives, and how they spend their time online. Start with your own data. Look at your most valuable customers—the ones who pay the most, stick around the longest, and actively engage with your product.”
For example, if a tech company analyzes its customer base and discovers that a significant portion of its highest-paying clients are in the healthcare sector, it can focus its content marketing efforts on creating articles, case studies, and white papers tailored to healthcare professionals.
“When choosing verticals, you need to look at buying patterns and who you’re selling to. Most importantly, consider the size of the market. If the market is too small with only a few players, and you can’t land them, it’s a total waste of resources,” explains Seth Werlinsky, Founder of BlueHarbor GTM.
So don’t overthink this. Your best B2B verticals are probably hiding in plain sight:
- Pull a list of your 20 most profitable customers
- Look for patterns in their industries
- Note which ones have the lowest acquisition costs and a considerable market size
- Identify which ones have been easiest to retain
- Check which verticals have the highest expansion revenue
- Analyze which industries have the shortest sales cycles
- Determine where you have the strongest competitive advantage
What’s particularly powerful about this approach is that you can validate vertical SaaS marketing opportunities before investing significant resources. Create a simple vertical scorecard (1-5) with these criteria:
- Current revenue from this vertical
- Growth rate within this vertical
- Sales cycle length
- Churn rate
- Expansion potential
- Competitive landscape
- Content gap opportunity
Score each potential vertical, and focus first on those with the highest total scores. This data-driven approach prevents you from chasing verticals that seem exciting but don’t align with your business realities.
2. Assess your organizational readiness
“Just adding landing pages and blogs for different industries isn’t what verticalization in SaaS content marketing is all about,” Werlinsky emphasizes.
“We need to make sure that the sales team is equipped enough to handle the bottlenecks of such industries, understands its pain points, and has the capacity to do it properly.”
Before committing to a vertical strategy, honestly assess your organization’s readiness:
- Does your sales team understand the industry’s specific pain points?
- Can they speak the language of the vertical without sounding like outsiders?
- Does your product actually solve industry-specific problems, or would it require significant customization?
- Do you have customer success resources familiar with the vertical?
- Can your organization handle the specific requirements of the industry (compliance, integration needs, etc.)?
3. Listen to your sales and support teams
Your customer-facing teams are goldmines of vertical intelligence:
- Ask sales which industries they find easiest to close
- Review support tickets by industry to spot unique pain points
- Find out which types of customers request similar features
- Learn which objections come up repeatedly in specific industries
- Identify the terminology differences between industries
- Understand the buying committees in different verticals
- Discover which integrations matter most to each industry
“You need to identify where your product naturally fits into an industry’s workflow before investing in verticalization,” says Werlinsky.
“The best vertical strategies amplify strengths your product already has rather than trying to force-fit into markets where you need significant customization. Start by asking where you’re already solving a high-value problem, then deepen your approach there.”
The best vertical strategies amplify strengths your product already has rather than trying to force-fit into markets where you need significant customization.
4. Consider your product’s strengths
Some products naturally solve industry-specific problems better than others:
- Does your software handle unique compliance requirements?
- Can it integrate with industry-specific tools?
- Does it solve a particularly painful problem in specific sectors?
- Are there features that resonate more with specific industries?
- Do certain verticals get more value from your product?
- Is your pricing model more attractive to particular industries?
- Does your UX align better with certain industry workflows?
You don’t need to build industry-specific features for every vertical (though that can be powerful). Instead, identify where your existing product already shines for particular industries, then ensure your content highlights those strengths.
How to adapt your SaaS content marketing for industry-specific impact
Focusing your content engine on specific verticals doesn’t always mean starting from scratch. Instead, you can build on your strongest content and tailor it to fit each vertical.
Here’s how exactly you can do it:
1. Reframe your value proposition
Simply swapping generic terms for industry jargon isn’t enough. You need to reshape your product’s value around industry-specific outcomes that matter to decision-makers.
For instance, when targeting healthcare audiences, instead of saying “improves efficiency,” focus on outcomes like “reduces patient wait times and improves care coordination.” These are metrics that influence executive decisions in that industry.
To find the right value proposition for each vertical, interview customers in your target industry about the results they’ve achieved. Then build your messaging or content narrative around those outcomes.
2. Build a hub-and-spoke content engine
Creating distinct content for every B2B vertical quickly becomes unsustainable. The hub-and-spoke model offers a more efficient approach while maintaining quality across industries.
To do this:
- Identify already high-performing core content that addresses universal challenges to act as the hubs (pillar content).
- Develop vertical “spokes,” a.k.a. the cluster content that customize the core content for specific industries, and link them back to the pillars.
- Build modular content that can be assembled for different industry needs.
- Establish clear guidelines for when to create vertical-specific content vs. adapting existing assets.
This approach allows you to maintain consistency while scaling across multiple industries. It also prevents the content sprawl that often happens when teams create entirely separate content strategies for each vertical.
2. Match your content format to industry behavior
People consume content differently based on their work environments. Recognizing and adapting to these preferences makes for more specific content.
Identify which content formats naturally fit into your chosen verticals and select a few to start with.
3. Distribute where your vertical already gathers
Even exceptional vertical content underperforms when published exclusively through company channels. Each industry has its trusted ecosystems where professionals naturally gather to consume content
The most effective vertical content strategies identify and penetrate these established channels rather than expecting industry professionals to seek out company blogs.
4. Equip your sales team—not just your marketing
Vertical content shouldn’t live in a marketing silo. Equip your sales staff with:
- Industry-specific sales enablement materials
- Vertical onboarding flows
- Custom demo environments with relevant sample data
- Sales training on industry-specific pain points and language
- Battlecards for vertical-specific competitor comparisons
- Industry-specific email nurture sequences
- Vertical case studies and testimonial libraries
Salesforce excels at this. Their industry solution pages have specialized demos and sales conversations tailored to each vertical.
For instance, this industry page for Financial Services has a specific demo with content that appeals to their target audience’s pain points.
5. Track segmented vertical metrics
Don’t just measure overall content performance. Create a vertical content dashboard that tracks how your vertical content performs for its specific audience with these key metrics:
- Conversion rates by industry
- Time-to-close for leads from vertical content
- Retention rates of customers acquired through vertical channels
- Expansion revenue within each vertical
- Content engagement metrics by industry
- Customer acquisition cost by vertical
- Lifetime value by vertical
- Net promoter score by industry
This shows which verticals are delivering the best return on your content investment, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Go from general to specific: Make vertical SaaS marketing a part of your content ops
Going vertical with your content isn’t about abandoning what’s worked before. It’s about adding another layer—one that makes your ideal customers feel like you’re speaking right to them.
If you’re not sure where to start, first pick one industry where you already have a few happy customers. Listen, learn, adapt, and repeat. You might be pleasantly surprised at how much easier everything else becomes.
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