# The 90 day SaaS content plan

> A week by week plan for the first 90 days of a SaaS content program, with audit steps, the first twelve pages to publish, staffing and honest day 90 targets.

Source: https://saas-marketing.net/playbooks/90-day-saas-content-plan/
Topic: SaaS Content Marketing
Type: playbook
Published: 2026-09-11
Last updated: 2026-09-11
Publisher: SaaS Marketing (saas-marketing.net)
License: CC BY 4.0. Quote or republish with attribution and a link to https://saas-marketing.net/playbooks/90-day-saas-content-plan/

## Short answer

A 90 day SaaS content plan runs in four blocks. Days 1 to 15 are diagnosis: audit existing pages, run five customer interviews, review sales calls and map competitor coverage. Days 16 to 30 build the coverage map, twelve briefs, a writer bench and tracking. Days 31 to 60 publish the bottom of funnel set including comparison and alternatives pages. Days 61 to 90 refresh, launch the newsletter and report. Expect demo requests, not rankings, by day 90.

## Key takeaways

- Publish twelve bottom of funnel pages before a single thought leadership essay. The comparison pages convert in weeks, the essays do not.
- Day 90 will not show meaningful organic rankings. New pages typically take four to eight months to reach stable positions.
- Five customer interviews and fifteen sales calls give you better keyword ideas than any tool, because they contain the words buyers use.
- Budget 1,200 to 2,500 per bottom of funnel page done properly, including interviews, screenshots and editing.
- Baseline your ChatGPT and Perplexity citation position in week one, before publishing, or you will never prove movement.
- A comparison page needs a factual accuracy review date in the file. Stale competitor claims become a legal problem, not just a credibility one.

---

This is a dated execution plan, not a theory of content. If you just got handed a content program and somebody expects evidence by the end of the quarter, the sequence below is what I'd run, and the day 90 scoreboard at the end is deliberately modest because the honest one is.

One decision shapes everything: ship twelve bottom of funnel pages before you write a single thought leadership essay. The essays feel more important. The comparison pages pay the bills while you wait.

## Days 1 to 15: find out what you actually have

Two weeks of diagnosis, and resist the pressure to publish during it. Anything you ship in week one will be written from assumptions you're about to disprove.

Audit the existing pages first. Export every URL with its impressions and average position from Search Console, and sort for anything sitting between positions 8 and 20. Those pages are close, and a rewrite gets results in four to six weeks instead of four to six months. On most sites there are three to eight of them nobody knew about.

Then the interviews. Five customers who bought in the last six months, 30 minutes each, recorded. You're listening for the phrase they used when they first searched, what they compared you against, and what nearly stopped the purchase. Every good comparison page I've seen started in a sentence somebody said on one of these calls.

Fifteen sales calls next, from the recording tool you already have. Note every question a prospect asked that a page could have answered. That list is your brief queue and it costs nothing.

Finally, competitor coverage. Pull the top three competitors' indexed pages with Ahrefs or Semrush and mark what they cover and what they skip. The gaps are usually the same everywhere: post-sale content, security and procurement pages, and honest pricing context.

Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity ten buying questions in your category and record which domains get cited. Save the answers in a doc with the date. Without a week one baseline you cannot show movement in month six, and this is the question your CEO will ask.

## Days 16 to 30: the coverage map and the first twelve briefs

The coverage map is one spreadsheet. Rows are buyer jobs taken from the interviews, columns are funnel stage, cells hold either an existing URL or a gap. It replaces the keyword list as your planning document, because keyword lists produce overlapping pages and coverage maps don't.

Then pick the first twelve. Here's the split I'd run for a company with nothing published.

| Page type | Count | Why first | Time to first demo request |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| You vs named competitor | 3 to 4 | Highest intent traffic in the category, converts fastest | 3 to 8 weeks |
| Alternatives to the incumbent | 1 to 2 | Captures people already leaving a tool | 4 to 10 weeks |
| Use case pages | 3 | Match the jobs from your customer interviews | 6 to 12 weeks |
| Integration page | 1 to 2 | Ranks quickly, low competition, high fit | 4 to 8 weeks |
| Pricing context or ROI page | 1 | Every evaluation reaches this question | 2 to 6 weeks |
| Definitional or glossary page | 1 | The surface language models cite most | 8 to 16 weeks |

Build the writer bench in the same fortnight. Two or three freelancers, each given one paid test page at 400 to 900 depending on depth. Expect one of the three to work out. Writers who have worked in your category are worth double the rate of writers who haven't, because the research time collapses.

Set up tracking before publishing, not after. Search Console, a rank tracker, conversion events on the demo form, and a self reported attribution field asking how the person heard about you. That field will end up being the number your board trusts most.

## Days 31 to 60: publish the bottom of funnel set

Now you ship. Roughly six to eight pages in this block, the comparison and alternatives set first.

Comparison pages have a craft to them and most SaaS companies do them badly. Three rules. Be accurate about the competitor, including where they win, because a page that claims total superiority reads as an ad and converts worse. Use a real feature table with a last-verified date on it. And put a clear next step above the fold, because the reader is already in evaluation mode and doesn't need 2,000 words of runway.

**Shipping one comparison page**

Distribution per piece matters more than most 90 day plans admit. Each page should get at least: a sales enablement note, one LinkedIn post from a founder, inclusion in the next newsletter, and an internal link from the two most relevant existing pages. That's roughly 45 minutes per page and it doubles the early return.

The tactic-level detail on which of these earn back fastest is in [23 SaaS content marketing tactics, ranked by payback](/guides/saas-content-marketing-tactics/), and if you're short of page ideas after the first twelve, [63 SaaS content ideas by funnel stage](/guides/saas-content-ideas/) has the queue.

**12 pages** The bottom of funnel set to publish before writing any thought leadership

## Days 61 to 90: refresh, newsletter, reporting

Three jobs in the last block, and the first one surprises people.

Refresh the pages you found in the week one audit. Those position 8 to 20 pages get rewritten now, with the search intent actually matched rather than guessed. This is where your only real ranking movement inside 90 days will come from, because those pages already have history.

Launch the newsletter. Not a digest of your blog posts, which nobody opens. One useful idea per send, plus links. Start it now rather than in month six because the list compounds and because it's the one distribution channel an algorithm can't take away. A hundred good subscribers at day 90 is a fine outcome.

Then report. Build the deck once and reuse it monthly so the format becomes familiar and the argument doesn't restart every time.

## Staffing and budget at each block

Three viable shapes, and the choice usually comes down to whether you have someone in house who can write.

The agency option fails in one predictable way: the agency never gets access to customers or sales calls, so the pages get written from competitor research and read like everyone else's. If you go agency, put customer interview access in the contract as a deliverable you provide, and expect to spend four hours a week feeding them. The stage-by-stage version of this decision is in [Content marketing for SaaS companies, by stage](/guides/content-marketing-for-saas-companies/), and the ACV-sensitive version in [Content marketing for B2B SaaS, by ACV](/guides/content-marketing-for-b2b-saas/).

## The honest day 90 scoreboard

Here's what a well-run quarter actually produces, and it's worth setting this expectation with your exec team in week one rather than week twelve.

| Metric | Realistic day 90 | What it means |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pages published | 10 to 14 | The asset base exists |
| Meaningful organic rankings on new pages | Close to zero | Normal. Four to eight months is the real timeline |
| Rankings on refreshed pages | 2 to 5 pages moved into the top 10 | Your only in-quarter SEO win |
| Demo requests attributed to comparison pages | 3 to 15 a month | The number that keeps the program funded |
| Newsletter subscribers | 80 to 300 | Owned distribution started |
| AI citation position | Baselined, maybe one or two appearances | Movement here typically starts month five |

If someone is expecting a traffic chart that goes up and to the right by day 90, the plan will be judged a failure regardless of how good the work was. Have that conversation early.

Ninety days of bottom of funnel focus means you build no topical authority and no brand voice in the quarter. That cost is real. It becomes a problem around month nine if you never transition, because comparison pages have a demand ceiling set by how many people already know your category exists.

## What happens after day 90

The second quarter is where the middle of the funnel gets built and where you decide whether to scale volume or depth. The full strategic frame for that decision sits in [How to build a SaaS content marketing strategy](/guides/saas-content-marketing-strategy/), with the B2B specific mechanics in [B2B SaaS content marketing](/guides/b2b-saas-content-marketing/) and the wider hub at [SaaS content marketing](/saas-content-marketing/).

Put a recurring review in the calendar now. Quarterly, using [The quarterly content strategy review](/checklists/saas-content-strategy-review/), so the program gets reassessed against evidence rather than drifting on momentum. And if you're building the team's capability at the same time as the program, the structured path through [Build your B2B SaaS content strategy](/courses/b2b-saas-content-strategy/) covers the reasoning behind each block above.

## Start Monday

Export Search Console, sort by position 8 to 20, and book five customer calls for next week. That's day one. Everything else in this plan depends on what those two things tell you, and neither of them requires budget approval.

## Frequently asked questions

### What should a SaaS company publish in its first 90 days of content marketing?

Bottom of funnel pages first: your main competitor comparisons, an alternatives page for the incumbent in your category, two or three use case pages tied to real buyer jobs, an integration page for your most common stack partner, and pricing context. These convert within weeks because the searcher is already evaluating. Thought leadership can wait until month four.

### How long does SaaS content marketing take to show results?

Bottom of funnel pages produce demo requests within four to ten weeks, largely from brand and comparison searches. Meaningful organic rankings on competitive terms take four to eight months for a new domain, sometimes longer. Content sourced pipeline that a board recognises usually appears between months six and twelve, so plan budget accordingly.

### How many blog posts should a SaaS company publish per month?

Four to eight properly researched pages a month is a sustainable pace for a one person content function with a freelance bench. Volume without a coverage map produces overlapping pages that compete with each other. If you can only do four excellent pages or twelve mediocre ones, take the four every time.

### What does a 90 day SaaS content program cost?

At the lean end, roughly 15K to 25K over the quarter: a freelance writer bench at 400 to 900 a page for twelve pages, design or screenshot help, and tooling around 300 a month. With an in house content lead at 120K base, add about 30K of salary for the quarter. Agency retainers for the same scope typically start near 8K a month.

### Should you audit existing content before publishing new content?

Yes, and it usually takes two to three days rather than two weeks. You are looking for pages that already rank on page two, pages that cannibalise each other, and pages that are factually wrong. Fixing a page that sits at position 12 is often faster and cheaper than publishing a new one, and it gives you an early win to show.

### Does content marketing still work for SaaS with AI Overviews?

It works differently. AI Overviews appear on a large share of informational queries and reduce click through on those, so top of funnel traffic is worth less than it was. Bottom of funnel comparison, alternatives and pricing pages still get clicked because people want to verify. The blog's job shifts toward being the source models cite and the internal link support for money pages.