2020 Content Marketing Analysis of 60+ High Growth SaaS Companies

It has certainly been an unprecedented year, especially for those of us running a small business or a fledgling startup. At Automata, we began the year with a solid plan and a firm understanding of where we wanted to be by the end of 2020. Unsurprisingly, things could not have turned out more differently. We, like many other businesses, have completely re-examined our company and have tried to find the delicate balance between surviving in the short term and thriving in the long term. 

Although many companies were catapulted into a brand new market environment overnight where they were able to thrive beyond expectations (Zoom, Slack) thanks to new demands on remote work and collaboration, others were sent to the sidelines and forced to either wait it out (Stubhub) or make a short-term pivot with potential long-term implications (Spotify, Unilever).

Finding the silver lining this year wasn’t always easy. Our new work environment all of a sudden included crazy kids barging in during video calls and some of us working 10 hour days 4 feet away from where we sleep. (On a personal note, I was lucky to have an obvious silver lining — and this one too). 

Many companies have provided critical support and enabled other businesses and public services to function in a dysfunctional environment. Google Classroom and Grammarly have eased the transition from in-person to distance learning. Webflow and Zapier have enabled side hustlers and new entrepreneurs to build quickly with no-code tools.

Growing in 2020 wasn’t straightforward

For those of us who decided to embrace the fresh start, 2020 was likely a strange combination of panic, fear, relief and excitement. In these uncertain times, building something new is a nerve-wracking proposition. However, plenty of companies have continued on full-steam ahead by being nimble and reacting to changes in the market. Others have been fortunate to already be uniquely positioned in a pandemic-friendly vertical.

With in-person events, event-based marketing, and physical display advertising on pause for many companies, they have been able to focus on other channels (see here, here). Content marketing and blogging reach your customers where they are spending the majority of their time these days, right here: on social media and procrastinating while on mute in a Zoom meeting 😉.

Growth comes in many forms. Revenue, employee count, subscribers, customers, new products, and big rounds of investment are all valid signals of a company’s growth. Some companies stood out against the rest despite an uncertain forecast for 2021 and beyond.

Fastest Growing SaaS Companies

We decided to take a look at the content marketing activity of the fastest growing SaaS companies of 2020 as reported in SaasMag and powered by the data behind ContentPro. Of course companies are continuing to write about the same-old-same-old. New product announcements, hiring a new VP of Whatever, and the “Top 5 Dog Walking Apps” have not gone out of style, but there are some definite trends across the 2020 collection of articles written by companies that are unique to the times.

We took a sample of the the list published by SaasMag and here’s how the data breaks down:

Of the 63 companies that were analyzed, we saw an average of 35 articles/company over the time period that we analyzed (the last part of 2020). However, this average is inflated by some over-achieving publishers (looking at you, Qualtrics). A more reasonable estimation is the median 25 articles/company.

The “Fastest Growing SaaS Companies” of 2020 published by SaaSMag looks at the percentage increase in their number of employees over the past six months. Our subset of this list is a sample of the top 250 companies:

Content changes with the times

Now, there is not necessarily a direct correlation between these companies growing like crazy in 2020 and their content marketing efforts, but we know content marketing is an important component in the growth strategies of most SaaS companies. So let’s take a look. 

Some year-specific keywords and the percentage of articles and companies mentioning them are shown below:

This shows that 20% of the articles analyzed mentioned “covid”, which is particularly high. In addition, the same amount of articles mentioned “remote.” The terms “covid”, “remote”, “collaboration”, and “pandemic” were all mentioned at least once by over 75% of the companies analyzed. This clearly demonstrates that the events of 2020 dominated not only public discourse, but even bled into marketing material. There were topics that demanded attention and companies had no choice but to address them.

Although topics like “remote work” directly apply to only a small subset of products and companies under normal circumstances, it’s certainly a topic that has affected employees and customers of every company. Despite less than 3% of articles mentioning “remote work,” a much higher proportion of companies (39.7%) have mentioned it at least once in the articles we analyzed.

A lot happened in 2020 but it was mostly politics and COVID-19

There is usually a lot to write about, and most companies don’t spend much time blogging about things that are in the news. For example, there are horrible wild fires every year, hurricanes, social injustice, and local and national elections, but it’s not often that these types of topics dominate corporate messaging.

Consider this year, where we had one of the more tumultuous national elections in recent history alongside a degree of social unrest not seen in many years. However, even the 2020 election and its primary participants did not dominate corporate messaging like the global pandemic. The degree to which this disaster has affected consumers and employees is unlike any event or circumstance in which we have found ourselves.

If we take a look at the percentage of articles published by each company that mentions pandemic-related keywords and politics-related keywords, we can see that the pandemic-related segment dominates:

The long lines indicate a big percentage of the company’s articles mention that relevant topic. In the graphic above, large light blue lines show that “collaboration” was a pervasive topic in a large percentage of articles written by most companies. On the other hand, “Biden” is mentioned very infrequently by only a handful of companies.

It remains to be seen if we will see such a deviation from the norm in content marketing and promotional material in 2021. We are all waiting for some degree of normalcy where SaaS companies are posting about new integrations and pricing tiers. However, until this emergency is over and people are back in offices (if that ever happens), we can expect corporate messaging to be aligned with what is happening in their customers and employees lives. Perhaps we will learn something from this year–companies can and should speak to the personal experiences of its employees and customers.

Andrew Fraine, Director of Product Development and Co-Founder at Automata.

Andrew and the team at Automata have recently launched ContentPro, the most up-to-date and complete searchable database of company blogs and articles. Check out the Chrome Extension and inquire about competitive content analysis dashboards and services.