There is no doubt that the software as a service field is growing and it’s a great time to be involved in this industry. With the software industry’s exponential growth also means that their is fierce competition. In this article you’ll find some great resources from inbound marketing companies and analysts to help differentiate your business and stay ahead of the curve.   

How SaaS Marketing is Different from Every Other Type of Marketing

In this insightful article, Neil Patel describes the challenges in SaaS marketing and some of the advantages that will help your marketing efforts. The main points he discusses are the benefits of giving things away for free, the short sales cycle, information being your greatest asset, customer retention, how the service part of SaaS is just as important, and the two key pieces to remember above all.   

Visual Website Optimizer gives away free trial:

Why Buyer Personas Are Key to SaaS Marketing Success

Brie Rangel explains why creating buyer personas is a critical first step when developing a SaaS marketing campaign and how to go about doing so. You’ll learn what two resources are most valuable when creating your research-based buyer personas and the questions that need to be answered to ensure you have the highest understanding about those you are targeting.  

Example buyer persona:

4 Tips for Formulating your SaaS Company’s Inbound Marketing Budget

In this article, Lara Berendt differentiates between conventional outbound marketing tactics and inbound marketing for SaaS companies and how inbound can be the more cost effective approach. She’ll advise on how to sell inbound as a long-term investment to stakeholders, how to check industry budget benchmarks to determine the budget you need, where to allocate funds to align with your growth needs and what those needs may be, and the importance of measuring so that you may adjust accordingly.   

How to Use Content to Increase SaaS Free-Trial Conversion Rates

Content is essential to any marketing strategy and in SaaS marketing, companies can leverage content to convert free-trial users to customers. Sierra Calabresi dives into the specific stages in the buyer’s journey where content can be used to engage trial users to convert to paid users. She’ll discuss content’s role in lead generation, how to use content in the free-trial, in-trial and post-trial stages, how to turn trial users into evangelists, and using content as a customer-success tool.

Example email announcement from Hubspot for a content offer:

SaaS Marketing: 21 Growth Hacks to Test Today

These hacks and out-of-the-box ideas to implement into your SaaS marketing strategy can prove to have a big impact. Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures offers a guide on using these 21 tactics to help grow your business right now.   

Insightful Study of 386 SaaS Startup Pricing Pages

If you have a SaaS startup, it may be good to know that startups are nearly two times as likely to show their pricing than enterprise SaaS companies, and that there is probably good reason for this.  Benjamin Brandall from Process Street differentiates between enterprise and startup companies then combs through an impressive-sized data set to provide companies with insight into the most common trends for SaaS startup pricing pages.

Example of Unbounce pricing page:

SaaS Metrics 2.0 – A Guide to Measuring and Improving what Matters

In this detailed review, David Skok points out the many complexities of SaaS businesses and provides insight into the key metrics that matter. The purpose of this post was to help guide SaaS companies to answer specific questions such as, if your business if financially viable, what is working and what may need improvement, what aspects management should be focusing on, what guidelines the CEO should follow to understand when to accelerate or slow down, and what impact that will have on cash and profit and loss. As a side note, be sure to read through the comments, as David provides great feedback for reader’s questions.

There are so many other valuable resources out there for SaaS marketing. Let us know if you've found this helpful or if you have any other articles to add to the list!