The One Content Marketing Tweak That Can Drive 1,000+ Users (By Breaking a Sacred Rule)
Content marketing has no shortage of best practices.
Publish consistently, write for your audience, map content to the funnel, optimize for keywords, repurpose everything.
If you’ve worked in SaaS for more than a few quarters, you’ve probably heard these mantras enough times to recite them in your sleep. And while most of them are directionally sound, some of the most accepted truths in content marketing also produce the most mediocre outcomes.
But they become invisible assumptions, so embedded in our approach that we stop questioning them entirely.
One of the most persistent is the idea that the purpose of content marketing is to build an audience and become a source of education and inspiration for your industry. In theory, the bigger the audience, the more conversions you generate. But in practice, this leads many SaaS companies into a trap:
You end up writing for the crowd and wondering why no one buys.
If you’re a growth-stage founder or marketing leader who’s investing in content and not seeing results, the problem may not be your quality, cadence, or keyword strategy. The problem may be that you’re writing for the wrong people.
The most impactful tweak you can make to your content marketing, especially if your goal is revenue, not just reach, is to stop writing for your audience and start writing for your buyers.
And this is not me playing with semantics. It’s a fundamental shift in orientation that can change everything.
Walk with me.
Most of Your Audience Will Never Buy From You
The logic behind “write for your audience” is compelling. If you create useful content that solves problems, builds trust, and consistently delivers value, people will follow you. Eventually, some of them will convert.
This approach scales nicely. And for companies with massive addressable markets, it works. But most SaaS companies are not HubSpot. You don’t sell to everyone, nor do you need millions of visitors per year. What you need is a smaller set of highly relevant, highly motivated, and highly qualified users to understand your product and take the next step.
When you optimize for audience growth instead of buyer relevance, you’re effectively watering down your content in pursuit of reach. You write posts that appeal to the masses, choose broad topics because they attract more traffic, and aim for 2,000-word listicles on “best practices” that apply to everyone and, as a result, no one.
These posts do well in Google Analytics. They inflate your vanity metrics but will rarely convert, as they’re designed for someone curious, not someone in market.
That’s the core issue. Audiences are filled with lurkers. They might enjoy your ideas, even follow you on LinkedIn, and nod along to your take on the importance of customer experience. But they’re not experiencing the pain your product solves. And they’re not in a position to do anything about it.
In contrast, your buyers (real, active, qualified buyers) do not care about your brand voice or your thought leadership cadence. They care about solving a specific problem they’ve already tried (and failed) to fix.
If you write for them, everything gets sharper. You strip out the fluff, anchor your argument in reality, and go deep on a narrow topic. And, most importantly, your content starts to turn readers into buyers.
Write Like You're Trying to Close
When you shift from audience-centric writing to buyer-centric writing, your tone, structure, and strategy all change. You stop writing to impress your peers and start writing to persuade decision-makers. You stop publishing for volume and start publishing for leverage. You stop aiming for engagement and start aiming for alignment.
And good buyer-focused content doesn’t mean writing blog posts that read like sales pages. It means creating strategic content that mirrors the real conditions of a sale.
If someone is close to making a decision, or at least seriously evaluating options, what do they need to see? What questions do they still have? What assumptions are they struggling to validate? What tradeoffs are they weighing that aren’t being addressed anywhere else?
These are the gaps that content can fill and collapse time. A good blog post can shortcut a three-week evaluation process. A good teardown can eliminate a sales objection. A good case study can function as social proof, market education, and user onboarding all at once. But only if the person reading is in the right mindset to act. And only if the content is designed for a buyer, not an observer.
One of our clients (a Series A SaaS company with a small but high-intent user base) was facing exactly this challenge. They had a well-trafficked blog. Dozens of articles. Top-of-funnel SEO humming along, but no meaningful conversion impact.
We audited their library and found what you'd expect: posts ranking for broad keywords, covering surface-level topics, and offering little connection to the core problem their product actually solved.
The audience was real, but unqualified. So we stopped publishing. For six weeks, we didn’t touch the calendar. Instead, we rewrote two anchor posts; one that mapped directly to a key buying moment (right after churn spiked), and one that explained a critical technical concept better than any competitor had done.
We just changed them into ruthlessly buyer-aligned pieces designed to hit the right reader at the right moment with the right level of specificity. Within one quarter, those two articles became the top source of assisted conversions on their site.
This Doesn’t Scale. That’s the Point.
There’s a reason most companies don’t write like this. It doesn’t scale easily.
You can’t crank out 20 buyer-specific blog posts per month. You can’t outsource this to a generalist freelancer with a content brief and a list of keywords.
This approach requires intimacy. You need to understand your buyer’s context well enough to anticipate their questions. You need to go beyond surface-level industry knowledge and speak to the decisions that keep your ICP up at night.
But the results are outsized. When content is written for a real person, in a real job, facing real tradeoffs, it lands harder. It gets bookmarked, shared, forwarded, discussed in meetings, used in onboarding, and even referenced in sales calls. It has a longer shelf life and a deeper impact.
If you’re stuck in the trap of writing weekly blog posts for an audience that isn’t converting, the most powerful thing you can do is stop. Not forever, but for long enough to reevaluate the purpose of what you're writing.
Go back to first principles. Find your five best-fit customers (the ones who already bought, or the ones you wish would) and build a piece of content just for them.
Forget the funnel stages. Forget the personas. Write something so specific and so useful that it couldn’t have been written for anyone else.
Do that once, and you’ll never go back to writing for the crowd again.
