Digital content has been the primary marketing strategy for SaaS companies over the past 15 years. From webinars, eBooks, articles, and social posts, tech companies have done it all, with mixed results.
The problem with creating content for such a niche ecosystem is that it’s really hard to find something that resonates.
Whether you are targeting platform owners, developers or architects, their needs, characteristics, and even job roles are changing year on year.
So we’ve analysed over 88 campaigns at SF Ben, to give you the insights to get your content converting again!
Salesforce Marketing Status Quo
The tech world has changed dramatically in only a few years, so it’s only natural that professionals' roles and responsibilities will change, along with their priorities, and how you market to them.
Other shifts that are creating this change are…
A saturation of software vendors. Once, when you might have had 2-3 major players in each product category, you now likely have 10-20+.
Fewer people are going to events.
Confusion amongst professionals and businesses around how and when AI is going to impact them, and how.
So when you combine confusion on SaaS with AI, more product choices, and a less engaged audience, then it requires a lot more effort to ensure you reach the right person.
The Problem with Content in 2026
Remember when personal branding was everywhere? Everyone was being told to post on LinkedIn, build a following, grow their career off the back of it. It worked for a lot of people, and it still does. But look around and you'll see far fewer people actually doing it now.
That's the pattern with almost every marketing tactic. A company gives it budget, time and a real go, then kills it the moment results dip.
But the format almost never dies. Blog posts, webinars, short-form video, social, they're all still completely valid ways to reach the right people. What dies isn't the channel. It's the execution.
And in 2026, execution has a new problem. AI has made producing content effectively free. Anyone can generate something polished, on-brand and convincing in minutes – so everyone does. The result is a flood of content that looks the part but understands nothing about the person it's meant to reach.
Audiences feel that instantly. They scroll past. Views drop. And the company draws exactly the wrong conclusion, "content doesn't work anymore", and quietly shuts it down.
But the content was never the problem. The lack of understanding was.
That's the part AI can't shortcut. The most important thing in marketing has always been the content itself, and content only lands when it actually understands who it's for. AI didn't change that rule; it made it the only rule that matters. When everyone can produce content, the only edge left is knowing your audience well enough to say something they'll actually stop for.
I actually see this as good news,
The 2026 SaaS Marketing Playbook
We analysed 88 of our campaigns over the last year, and came up with a set of rules and examples that will hopefully set you up for success.
It might not come as a surprise that these rules focus on deeply understanding your audience, their pain points, and what keeps them up at night.
Titles need Action, not Abstraction
One of the biggest mistakes we see SaaS companies making is being too abstract with their titles and content.
If it's unclear what your webinar or article is about from someone skimming through their social feed, then it's very unlikely that they will attempt to understand; they will just scroll past.
Titles are very hard to get right; even something that might sound actionable may be too broad and fluffy. Take this, for example…
“How Software DevOps Can Increase ROI”
It might sound interesting on the surface, but what does ROI mean? Is this revenue? ROI on employees? Who knows, and most people won’t care to find out!
A title such as “How Software DevOps Can Increase Deployment Velocity”, is much more straight to the point and actionable.
Your Content isn’t bad, it’s your framing
Most companies we work with understand the type of content they should be putting out. They understand the broad market picture and what is important to Salesforce professionals.
But unfortunately, that’s part of the problem; you are competing with many other companies that have the exact same picture of you on the market.
Take AI in the Salesforce ecosystem, for example…
When Agentforce was released at Dreamforce 2024, we saw a huge influx of partners who very rightly wanted to talk about it. These posts got huge traction, as everyone was excited at the prospect of AI & Agents working together.
But then, we saw a huge drop off. A few months later, the Salesforce ecosystem just wasn’t interested in reading another piece of content on how game-changing Agentforce was going to be.
Agentforce is still as interesting as ever to our audience, especially as Salesforce soar past $1b in revenue.
But the secret is in the framing. Once a topic has been beaten to death, you need to adapt to a new angle that is interesting to your audience.
Deeply understand your audience
Building a company, brand, or marketing your services requires one fundamental skill. You need to deeply understand your audience, their needs, their wants, and their desires.
Unfortunately for us, we’ve chosen to work in an industry that changes every few months, and this cycle of change is only accelerating with AI.
SaaS professionals are met with different challenges each year. Maybe it’s AI, maybe it’s adoption, maybe it’s technical debt, or maybe it’s all 3 simultaneously.
To properly understand how to market to software buyers, you need to understand not only your personas and their characteristics, but also the changing trends in the ecosystem, and how these are affecting these roles month on month.
Although this is a fairly finger-in-the-air exercise, data is your friend. Social content, website views, and time on page enable you to understand what your audience cares about.
Stop relying on AI
Whilst it’s tempting to use the magic bullet of Claud or ChatGPT to create content, I would heavily advise against it. Of course, like any task, AI has its place, but to be outsourcing your ideas and knowledge to a generic LLM is not a wise move.
Although I got a C in English back in my GCSE years in the UK, I now consider words, content, and marketing my speciality.
For me, and maybe this is only me, but I refuse to read content when I can tell it’s overly using AI. I know a human hasn’t written it, and I would much rather learn from a human than something I could generate myself. Even if a human has written a post and then got AI to proofread and edit it, how is one meant to tell?
Recently, I’ve seen eBooks, landing pages, and social posts riddled with classic AI “nomenclature”. Usually, the content is extremely generic, doesn’t tell me anything new, and isn’t close to adding value.
In my opinion, companies that overly use AI are harming their business more than benefiting from it.
The whole idea of content is to build trust with your audience over time, so when the time is right, they make a purchase.
An AI-generated eBook may help you generate 500 leads, but out of those 500, how many have you built trust with?
Campaign Strategy
Marketers understand the value of a clear customer journey, and with the amount of digital formats that we have access to, it’s more important than ever that everything is tied nicely together.
The approach we take at SFB, is to advise our customers to work with a core gated, high-value asset, with a hub and spoke model. A webinar, eBook, sponsored post or video.
Once you have put many hours into creating this high-value asset, then it’s much easier to spin up additional pieces of content to promote it. 10 short videos, 10 social posts, 10 social images, and 5 articles.
This is something I actually advocate using AI for. Once you have a high-value, human-written asset that is deeply connected to your audience, AI can help you plan out and strategise your “spoke” content, exclusively using what you have already created.
But there are 2 fundamental aspects to remember…
The asset must be high value, using all the points from this playbook.
The entire customer journey must be tied together on all assets, with consistent messaging.
We have seen some partners in the ecosystem spend many hours creating an amazing asset.
But then the messaging on the landing page does not meet the expectations of the user, and then fails to convert.
For example, if you are promoting an eBook on Salesforce DevOps & Technical Debt, then all those words must be completely visible on your landing page on the H1/H2.
To use a very basic example, in every single article or webinar that we publish on SFB, we use the word “Salesforce” in the title. Otherwise, people may think this isn’t content for them.
The only exception to this rule is if we use a word that is so widely understood by the ecosystem that it’s a given, such as Agentforce or Sales Cloud.
Final Thoughts
Software marketers have a huge opportunity to engage their audiences in a unique, authentic way.
Sure, tech pros have their work cut out for them in 2026: from reduced headcount, increasingly complex tools, and pressure to deliver on the promise of AI.
But the truth is that whilst AI is of course top of mind for all professionals in the software sector, enterprise companies are still struggling with the same old issues, data duplication, technical debt, deployment velocity, and adoption of tools.
From my perspective, the biggest problem with content is poor framing and a lack of audience understanding. Once you have a better connection with who you’re selling to, marketing gets a hell of a lot easier.
