Most SaaS companies fail to create leverage with their feature update announcements

Here's how to create high converting feature announcement posts

Creating an announcement blog post for a feature update causes two main problems:

1. Keyword cannibalization
2. Poor user experience for visitors

1. Keyword cannibalization

When you have a successful feature launch, people will link back to your announcement blog post

You have a good chance of ranking for high-intent keywords

But feature announcement posts have terrible conversion rates

This is made worse by the fact that SaaS products change all the time

Pivots happen

The feature you announce today might not exist in 12 months time

That means when visitors who want your product search for buying-intent keywords, they find:

A low converting page

That's probably outdated

And maybe totally irrelevant

2. Poor users experience for visitors

When visitors land on your blog, you want them to find out quickly if your product is a good fit for them

What's good fit? https://twitter.com/iammarcthomas/status/1376484541901209602

When they're scrolling your blog archives, if they see feature announcements, it gives them an opportunity to make a speedy assumption

That they don't need that feature

And so this product must not be for them

Remember how outdated feature announcement posts get?

Well, the cognitive load for a visitor of assessing whether your posts are relevant is just too much in most cases

So they leave

And never come back

Key: Feature announcement posts steer visitors away from thinking about the problem they have

in the context of the solution you offer

and towards thinking about whether your features are what they expected

Better feature announcements:

1. Convert more users
2. Stay up to date in years to come
3. Don't cannibalize key search terms

Now how do you do feature announcements better?

Weave feature announcements into pain point posts

In my experience, pain point content converts at upwards of 15%

Pain point content is:

- specific
- related to the buyer's problem
- evergreen

Search your archive for content that addresses a pain point that could be solved in part with your new feature

Tip: Use 'site: http://yoururl.com  "pain point"' to find relevant content fast on Google

How to work your new feature announcement into that post:

- Basic: weave mentions of the feature into your post's existing narrative
- Shoot a @loom announcing the video + embed in the content
- Embed a callout box into the copy with a screenshot (see example by @podia)

Tip:

Keep a spreadsheet of where I've mentioned features

This means that when the feature gets an update or gets killed off I can go back and update the post

If you enjoyed this, check out the blog post we just published

It also includes two ways to announce features to existing users:

1. Remarketing PPC campaigns
2. Segmented email broadcasts https://www.poweredbysearch.com/blog/how-to-announce-saas-feature-updates/

I tweet highly practical insights on B2B SaaS marketing all the time

Follow me if you enjoyed this thread or

this one: https://twitter.com/iammarcthomas/status/1388093338134405124