SaaS Cancellation Guides Bring Visitors to Mesh’s Website
Mesh Payments is a corporate spend management app that competes with Ramp and Airbase. Like its peers, Mesh helps financial managers control their budgets and spending. One way that Mesh does this is by using transaction classification software to identify recurring SaaS charges. The manager can check the app’s dashboard and see a list of active SaaS subscriptions instead of searching through bank account records to find them. This feature makes it much easier for the manager to cancel unneeded or unwanted SaaS subscriptions. Now Mesh has created a content marketing strategy based on its subscription cancellation service.
Using SaaS Cancellation Guides to Get Targeted Traffic
Mesh has created a series of guides that explain how to cancel SaaS subscriptions. These guides have titles like “Cancel Quickbooks” and “Cancel Xero”, so the titles include branded keywords that are highly relevant to potential customers. Financial managers and business owners frequently look up information about accounting apps and ERP suites. They often search for brand names like Quickbooks and Xero instead of more generic keywords like accounting software and budgeting apps.
These guides cover information that has not been widely covered by other websites. Many publishers aren’t interested in posting an article about how to cancel your Quickbooks subscription. For many apps, the only page that explains how to cancel the service is the company’s website. And the company might not want to make information about canceling the service easy to find. So Mesh has found low-competition keywords that are relevant to accounting software and it can rank highly for these keywords.
At the same time, Mesh has created a content marketing strategy that attracts potential customers for its spend management software. The SaaS cancellation guides discuss commonly used business apps. The company isn’t trying to maximize page views by writing guides that explain how to cancel consumer services like Netflix. Those guides would be popular as well, but they would attract readers who aren’t interested in corporate budgeting software.
Why These Guides Are Helpful
Mesh is helping its customers save money. In a poor economy, managers will be looking for easy ways to cut costs. Canceling a service that comes with monthly fees is an appealing option, especially if the business is no longer using the service. But identifying a service that charges recurring fees might not be enough. Mesh is also walking its customers through the process of canceling these services.
Mesh is providing an important service with these guides. Businesses that charge recurring fees often make it difficult to cancel the services they provide. Because of this issue, California forced subscription-based companies to allow customers to cancel their services online in 2020. Then, in 2021, California updated its automatic renewal law by requiring subscription-based services to warn customers before their subscriptions automatically renew.
Creating Guides Is a Repeatable Content Marketing Strategy
The spend management app has created 44 service cancellation guides so far. It would be relatively simple to add more of them. Each guide has the same basic objective, explaining how to cancel a subscription service. So Mesh doesn’t need to come up with a new angle or a new content format to create more guides. The SaaS business model is now widespread so Mesh won’t have much trouble finding additional SaaS companies to write about.
Each SaaS app cancellation guide includes information specific to the SaaS developer. For example, the cancellation guide for IBM also includes a basic profile that explains how IBM’s business works. It also provides contact information for the software developer such as links to its website and its toll-free phone number. The IBM guide only contains information about IBM itself and does not mention competitors like Oracle.
The Challenges of Creating Unique Guides
Google doesn’t want to see 40 guides that contain the same information and neither do marketing managers. But it’s hard to create 40 unique guides when they all cover the same topic. Each guide will include similar information such as how to log into your account and click the button to cancel the service. This situation is unavoidable, but it puts a content marketer in a tough situation.
One way to solve the problem is by adding unique facts about each company to the guides. For example, IBM and Oracle have different phone numbers and addresses. Their corporate profiles are different. And each company offers a different selection of services to its customers. By adding background information for each company, Mesh ensures that Google sees each SaaS cancellation guide as unique. SEO agencies employ similar strategies with business directories, which also have to contain unique information about each company to rank well.
A SEO agency could even take this marketing strategy a step further. It could add a unique image to each article by hiring a contractor to take a picture of the SaaS developer’s offices. I’ve seen job ads on marketplace websites that imply that SEO agencies are hiring gig workers to do those types of jobs. It doesn’t appear that Mesh is using this strategy, but the guides are about how to cancel services online so a visit to the SaaS developer’s office wouldn’t be needed.
Conclusion
Mesh is using a repeatable and targeted content marketing strategy to attract potential customers. Each individual guide generates a small amount of traffic to the company’s website and that adds up as the company adds more guides. The guides help Mesh’s prospective customers and show them why its software is useful. And by using broadly focused keywords to promote the guides, Mesh could expand the total market for spend management software. So this is an effective top-of-the-funnel content marketing strategy.
