Why SaaS is Moving Upmarket, and How Content Can Follow
Changing market dynamics are pushing SaaS companies upmarket. We break down what's driving the change, and how content strategies can adapt to support enterprise products and buyers.
B2B SaaS has become more challenging. TAMs are being reached, markets are becoming increasingly saturated, all while investors have flipped sentiment from "burn cash for growth" to "show me the money NOW".
What's changed?
If we were to jump on the hobby horse, we’d primarily answer with 5k words on ZIRP and its perils since 2008, but we’d like to maintain our click-through rate, so we’ll mostly talk about its downstream effects on SaaS investment dynamics.
How have companies adapted?
One response we've seen across our own clients and the broader B2B market is an expansion upmarket to provide value for the enterprise. Longer contracts with higher dollar values, alongside lower relative acquisition costs, both make enterprise solutions valuable.
As a company shifts and expands upmarket, what role should content marketing play?
Can your content strategy complement an enterprise product and generate revenue like it does for a freemium, SMB, or D2C solutions?
If you trust a subset of the collective hive brain on LinkedIn, you’ll often hear refrains of “SEO is dead!”, “You need to go programmatic!”, “Organic just doesn’t work for enterprise!”.
Instead, they’ll say companies need to slash and shuffle budgets to accommodate an army of AI SDRs and Account Executives. Otherwise, pipeline will disappear.
We disagree.
Yes, your sales motion should evolve to accommodate longer deal cycles, multiple decision-makers, higher contract values, and complex deals.
But, as you move upmarket, your content program can also adapt to connect with those stakeholders, across different distribution channels, and in unique formats before (and after) the first form fill.
ZIRP - no free lunch
First, a quick jump onto the hobby horse to talk monetary policy and how it’s affected SaaS markets, and well, pretty much everything else over the last two decades (sorry, we’ll keep it short).
From 2008 until 2022, federal short-term interest rates held at, or near, zero, otherwise known as ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy). Primarily a response to the financial crisis, for tech companies and investors, this meant borrowing and investing money was effectively risk-free.
From post-COVID to today, as lending rates and subsequently the cost of capital increase, high-burn, low-margin customer acquisition strategies no longer make sense.
Snap to 2025, investors are increasingly prioritizing efficient growth models and profitability. As a result, companies have had to find different ways to generate cash efficiently and predictably to secure funding.
Enterprise Advantages
What specifically is so efficient and predictable about enterprise software relative to SMB or D2C?
When a company moves upmarket, product features naturally adapt to solve more narrow and/or specific business use cases.
The more use cases the product solves in a specific business environment, the more leverage that company has to keep that customer around. After all, they may have the only product uniquely solving the specific problem for that industry, segment, or business.
This kind of specialization leads to less competition. Barriers to entry are higher (SOC2 cert anyone?), and similar products often don’t have direct parity. There may be overlap in specific features between competing products, but there are often different focuses on varying verticals and customers.
The end result is a SaaS product with more pricing power, a deeper moat, stickier customers, and, if it continues to be differentiated, more reliable revenue.
Take Zoom. Starting out as a mostly out-of-the-box PLG offering for SMBs, during COVID, they quickly expanded their feature set and acquired multiple companies to accommodate larger businesses across more verticals operating remotely.
Building in enhanced security, higher meeting capacities, and specific features for healthcare (HIPAA compliant conferencing) and even entirely new products (Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Events), all enabled Zoom to become stickier than its competitors, or, more often, they were the only solution for these customers.
Enterprise Adaptations
Beyond the forcing functions and benefits behind the upmarket shift, there are still barriers to successfully transitioning. Enterprise companies have a different approach to choosing new solutions compared to SMB:
Complex buying committees span manager to C-suite levels, including legal, procurement, and compliance stakeholders — purchases often require 14+ people across multiple departments to sign off
Extended sales cycles feature more decision points, higher contract values with longer terms, and varied evaluation processes — 6-9 months is normal for an enterprise sales cycle compared to 30-90 days for SMB deals
Risk-averse buyers are common and are resistant to changing current infrastructure, require budget approval, and demand proven ROI before making a purchase
How can companies respond to these challenges via content? Better yet, how can you support the sales team further down the funnel?
Leveraging Existing Inbound Value as You Move Upmarket
We’ll often partner with companies as they’re gaining an initial foothold with their enterprise offering, but before they have a reliable pipeline of leads for the sales team to engage with.
To help them bridge that gap, we don’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, we’ll leverage the existing inbound motion that’s already working by refining and repositioning existing content.
Take this pillar piece from Workvivo. It’s at the top of the SERP, has strong conversion elements, is a high authority piece with time and attention put into it, and includes real interviews with multiple CEOs.
However, the content (at the time) didn’t speak to the specific HR manager audience Workvivo identified as a primary decision maker as they shifted up the market.
Instead of creating a net-new piece of content and waiting for it to be indexed, we applied a comprehensive update to the existing piece to better reflect the HR audience and provide information they want to be educated on.
We then scaled this approach across their content library - updating, consolidating, and connecting different URLs to weave in changes to the Workvivo product and how it can help their enterprise customers.
Existing long-form blog content isn’t the only lever to pull, either.
Improving product documentation can serve a similar purpose for technical enterprise SaaS products—those with a CIO or IT manager on the buying committee.
Improving on-page elements and indexing a documentation portal serves as a lower funnel conversion layer. Technical buyers want to know how the software works and how to implement it before engaging with sales.
Adjacent to documentation, enterprise solutions often have multiple integration pages that can be updated to focus on non-brand queries.
Often, we work with clients across all three parts of their marketing site to connect existing content with new buyers.
Content Diversification
When building initial strategies for three or four months of content, think hard about what kinds of content are created, where that content can be found, and who should find it.
Most companies coming from PLG or SMB motions are usually stuck in one or two content formats.
Building another SERP-crushing pillar post on “What is X” or “The Definitive Guide to X, 2025” is enticing, but may not influence enterprise buyers to take action.
Instead, allocate resources to crafting a vertical-specific case study, thought leadership, or a quarterly research report. This expands the surface area of your content program and provides multiple touchpoints for your audience to engage with:
Case studies prove that you are who you say you are as a company. Incorporating a customer interview, a cohesive narrative, and concrete business impacts builds real trust in enterprise buyers' minds.
Research reports support building authority up-funnel, provide useful data that can be used across multiple other pieces of content, and can also become email collectors for retargeting.
Thought leadership can take many forms. CEO influencers on X and LinkedIn, company podcasts, and newsletters are all viable
Ten Speed builds Authority Content across multiple enterprise clients. We’ll interview the VP of Product to extract their unique POV on an important industry topic, create long-form written content, and then redistribute it across various channels.
Thought leadership should increase authority and communicate the expertise and opinions of the company and the people behind it. It creates trust with enterprise buyers by providing a nuanced POV on a subject they think about often and/or care about deeply.
SEO for Enterprise
Content teams often play the same game: create upper funnel blogs to mostly drive traffic volume and pray that visitors click “book now” on the floating header.
This approach can work for low-friction SMB and PLG offerings, but it seldom converts enterprise prospects because it fails to trigger the crucial "This solution addresses my specific business challenges".
Instead, understand who you’re trying to reach across the buying committee, then research those topics and scale them across multiple stakeholders.
A few examples of this approach from an enterprise product targeting dev and finance audiences:
https://www.prosperops.com/blog/finops-lifecycle/
Lower-funnel brand comparisons are also still effective. Dedicated “X vs. Y pages” or “Y Alternatives” pages leverage common SERP queries to help buyers directly compare features between competitors. It puts your brand in the conversation, and the content should find buyers after they’ve already interacted with your company.
Beyond optimized blog content, specific solutions and industry pages can latch onto core non-brand search terms and become conversion areas for the audience.
Integrating Enterprise Content Motions
Calling back to increasing the surface area of the content program, each of the content types above - case studies, newsletters, thought leadership, alongside a more focused organic strategy - shouldn’t stay siloed. They all can and should be consistently repurposed across other channels, inside and outside the marketing motion:
Inside the marketing motion:
Organic blog content can be repurposed to LinkedIn and can bring audiences to the site beyond search.
Authority Content can be distributed via PR, and repurposed to X or LinkedIn from the CEO/CPO’s POV.
Newsletters can redistribute blog content, case studies, thought leadership, or serve as roundups on product features, etc.
Paid search can also overlap with organic content through landing pages and mixed intent keywords.
Outside the marketing motion:
Case studies, research reports, and blog content can be used as sales enablement.
Documentation and research reports can augment customer success and customer marketing.
Sales can also leverage content libraries during an active deal. As a sale progresses, more of the buying committee is involved, and the salesperson has a captive and engaged audience to redistribute relevant content to directly.
Landing the plane
Hopefully, we’ve convinced you that turning off content isn’t a real solution when moving upmarket.
However, what works for mid-market won’t necessarily work for enterprise.
Adapting your content strategy to serve the enterprise buyers you’re trying to reach, through format, messaging, or channel, will help fuel your sales team while also expanding the surface area of your marketing program before (and after!) that first form fill.