8 Types of SaaS Blog Posts to Jumpstart Growth

? TL;DR: We explore 8 SaaS blog post types you can create to diversify your blog content:

• Educational blog posts
• Listicles
• Thought leadership pieces
• Comparison posts
• Product-focused posts
• Case studies
• Webinar recap posts
• Subject matter expert posts

These types of posts support all sorts of business goals, from lead generation to improving SEO. Read more about each post type to learn about their specific benefits and perks.

An active, engaging SaaS blog helps you establish a strong SaaS brand identity.

It can also be a powerful lead magnet, pulling in new customers and showing off what your SaaS product can do.

If you’re determined to make your blog a growth machine for your SaaS business, you probably wonder what types of content you should create.

In this article, we’ll show you eight blog post types that you can’t go wrong with. We also highlight the benefits that each type brings to your content marketing strategy.

Let’s start with the type that turns your blog into a mini classroom: educational blog posts.

Educational Blog Posts

Did you know that an average person looks up things on Google three or four times a day?

What’s more, most of these searches revolve around learning something or solving an existing pain point.

Such Google searches are your chance to grab the spotlight. With educational posts, you can attract some interested visitors to your blog.

SEO benefits aside, a well-maintained blog signals your dedication to knowledge sharing and a good user experience.

Some suitable formats for this purpose are:

• How-to articles
• Definitions
• Tutorials
• Guides

Here’s an example of how informing readers and great blog content go hand in hand.

We looked up the term signature block and landed on this explainer blog post by PandaDoc.

The blog post clarifies the term with definitions and practical examples. It also happens to be written by a SaaS company offering business documentation tools.

However, you won’t notice the subtle brand signals until you fully engage with the content. While the information about signature blocks takes precedence, the post also smoothly introduces readers to PandaDoc.

That’s educational blog writing done right.

One great thing about long-form, educational blog posts is that they are universal. They can cover a spectrum of topics: from basics, to niche product-specific tutorials.

So, we covered educating broad audiences on general topics. But you can also create tutorials and manuals for your software, like this Wistia integration guide.

Providing knowledge with educational blog posts is beneficial not only to readers but also to your company. 

This blog post type can help you rank for hundreds or thousands of business-important keywords. Over time, your blog becomes an SEO goldmine.

To sum up: if you have knowledge to share, don’t hoard it! You’ll get informed customers and better search engine visibility in return.

Listicles

Buzzfeed has turned listicles into an internet sensation. But beyond entertainment, the listicle format also works great in the SaaS and B2B world. 

That’s because people love lists, casual readers, and professional users alike.

Listicles are easy to consume, predictable, and don’t require too much attention to scan. These traits make listicles the ideal SaaS blog post type for when you need to convey your message in a very condensed way.

For instance, you can find loads of SaaS blog posts listing tools with their pros and cons. Here’s one written by SocialPilot listing social media automation tools.

Such posts make it easy for readers to get concise information quickly and all in one place.

However, you’ll notice that SocialPilot’s listicle also mentions their own tool. No overt salesy messages in sight though. Just weaving in their solution naturally when it fits into the context.

Even if you don’t specifically mention your tool in a listicle you wrote, readers will see you as a convenient knowledge source.

Fortunately, you don’t have to limit the knowledge you’re sharing to a tool selection. 

Listicles are immensely adaptable. You can compile lists of the best apps, cheapest items, most useful templates, practical checklists, or top industry trends.

Regardless of your industry, there’s a listicle waiting to be written and read.

Thought Leadership Pieces

New apps and platforms spring up daily in a market as competitive as SaaS. Sometimes customers can barely tell one product from another based only on features and functionalities.  

Building a strong brand around your product, therefore, gives you a competitive edge.

But people won’t settle for artificial, sterile branding efforts. 

Customers are interested in what drives the brands they support. They want genuine perspectives and ideas. And you can achieve that with thought leadership blog posts.

A CEO’s perspective can make a world of difference here. According to a SproutSocial report, people want to hear what the brand leadership has to say.

Your blog is the perfect channel for spurring dialogue. It offers a space for key executives to share their vision and industry insights.

Take Gusto’s blog as an example. This HR management software boasts countless practical posts about hiring, payrolls, and taxes, written by industry professionals.

However, you can also see a few posts written by Joshua Reeves, the CEO himself.

In these posts, Reeves shares his ideas about entrepreneurship. Thanks to his firsthand experience, this adds an extra layer of credibility to Gusto.

Essentially, thought leadership pieces are not just about sharing knowledge. They’re about building trust and credibility with your audience. 

Such unique contributions stand out from the faceless SEO content and distinguish your business from the crowd.

Comparison Posts

When customers are ready to buy, they commonly turn to online reviews and comparison lists to weigh their options.

Appearing on one such comparison list is a great opportunity because more people can discover your product.

But why passively wait for others to size you up against your competitors?

You can control the narrative if you create comparison blog posts and highlight the advantages of your solutions.

Moosend, an email marketing tool, has taken this active approach. They’ve created a comparison post that highlights its own features and also compares them with those of competitors.

The key to this approach is to be fair when discussing your competitors’ strengths and shortcomings. This can work in your favor because it shows your objectivity and credibility.

Now, here’s the twist.

To create this blog post type, you don’t even have to compare your product to others. 

You could analyze how other top players stack up against each other.

For instance, look at this article comparing two grammar checker giants, Quillbot and Grammarly. You’ll notice that it was posted on the blog of ProWritingAid, another strong competitor in the same space.

While the article contains an informative breakdown of the two tools, it also subtly inserts ProWritingAid into the conversation. That way, ProWritingAid cleverly draws attention to another viable option: themselves.

Finally, you can also compare the platforms that aren’t your direct competitors, but that your audiences likely use.

Zapier, an online automation service, uses this method to get new leads. They aren’t a messaging tool, but they do have a blog post comparing Slack and Teams. 

Why? 

Because Zapier shares a huge chunk of its target audience with Slack and Team. Therefore, this post is an excellent way of engaging potential users based on a shared tech stack.

In essence, if the buying intent is already there, why not draw it in your direction? 

Product-Focused Posts

The worst mistake you can make on your blog is to turn it into a medium for aggressive sales pitches. As we’ve established previously, people mostly read blog content to learn something. 

That said, you can and should plug your product within relevant blog content.

For a more toned-down approach, you can go for educational posts that happen to mention your product in passing.

Writing a general how-to article, for instance, allows you to teach readers how to solve a problem. To do so, they may but don’t have to use your tools.

Semrush uses this approach in their article about link building, where they talk about researching keywords. 

Here, the company doesn’t explicitly say that their tool is the only option for the job. They simply mention it as a part of the workflow.

Keep in mind that the Keyword Magic Tool is just one of more than fifty tools that Semrush offers. They could have mentioned all of them, centering the blog post about the company, but they didn’t.

Instead, the article focuses on practical advice for link building, emphasizing value over sales.

Of course, you can also go all out and write only about your products. These product-focused posts let you describe their features in more detail.

Semrush has these as well. This post, for example, offers a deep dive into the latest updates and new features for 2023, showcasing how they can help users.

You won’t see any buy-our-thing CTAs there. The focus is on informing existing users about the value of new features (and hopefully drive adoption too).

So, whether you mention your tool in passing or write about it in depth, take an occasional break from the hard sell.

Inform and engage—once the users see the value for themselves, they’ll follow.

Case Studies

Science says that we’re more affected by stories of individuals than by cold-hard statistics. This makes case studies a powerful and persuasive type of collateral. 

But there’s no reason to limit your case studies to sales purposes only. With a little bit of tweaking and storytelling, you can turn case studies into highly effective SaaS blog posts.

To show you how we’ll turn to one of Typeform’s blog posts. It talks about how their form cut an agency’s lead-to-client time by a significant 40%.

The blog post covers more than a heartwarming story. It also boasts data showing the tangible benefits of Typeform’s tools.

Typeform has adopted customer-focused blog posts quite seriously and in a targeted manner.

While Typeform offers several tools, this case study focuses on just one tool and its specific impact. Also, in all those posts, you can easily extract one main problem and a specific market segment it applies to.

Talk about creating unique, valuable, and personalized content!

If you have clients willing to share their success stories, you can easily create this SaaS blog post type. Narratives are far more compelling than mere numbers (even if your product has helped thousands of users!). 

Why not use them to demonstrate the real-world impact of your solutions?

Webinar Recap Posts

Webinars, in general, are one of the best content types for SaaS content marketing. They usually involve industry leaders and professionals, which is excellent for your brand to be associated with.

So what do you do once the webinar is over?

You don’t let it sit in an archive, but you squeeze every ounce of value from it.

Recapping your webinars for your blog prolongs the life of your webinar and deepens positive associations of your brand with the authority figures you hosted.

See how Canny, a feedback collection tool, recaps a webinar they’ve hosted in this blog post.

First, Canny listed the speakers—all selected industry experts, and then summarized the key points from the discussion. This brief webinar recap ends with a CTA, inviting the readers to watch out for future webinars.

For those who want to dive deeper into the topic, they’ve also added a YouTube link to the webinar recording.

While Canny has made the discussion publicly available, you can also opt to gate the webinar recording and only tease the most valuable parts of the webinar in your blog post.

Gating the webinar recording allows you to collect email addresses in exchange for access, so you can grow your email list. 

Either way, a recap blog post gets you more mileage for your webinars, engaging both participants and those who missed the live event.

Subject Matter Expert Interviews

As we’ve seen, SaaS marketing is not only about what is said but also about who says it. 

That’s why you should add some subject matter expert contributions to your blog to boost your credibility and authority.

You don’t even have to search far to recruit expert contributors; they may already be on your team. 

Discord, for instance, frequently publishes blog posts written by in-house senior engineering staff.

This means that the readers get credible, valuable insights straight from the source.

Another benefit of featuring your team’s expertise is the positive impact on employer branding. 

After all, content marketing and employer branding go hand in hand. Posts like the one above paint a more favorable image of your company—one where employees are recognized for their expertise.

Aside from employees, you can also feature successful users as experts in their respective industries.

Let them share their knowledge and perspectives on your blog. Hosting your user experts adds depth to your content and expands your reach as you tap into the networks and industries of these users.

Finally, having expert contributors listed as authors instills trust in your readers.

Think about it—would you take advice from an anonymous source without knowing whether and how qualified they are?

Which SaaS Blog Post Types Should You Create First?

Now you’ve seen what variety of blog post types you can create to enrich your blog. We’re confident you’re already reeling with blog post ideas.

These SaaS blog post types will diversify your content, engage different audience segments, and improve your brand’s visibility and authority. Over time, you can add even more types to the mix and innovate with your blog content.

Just remember to stay authentic and lead with value.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

• 6 Ways To Boost SaaS Blog Post Engagement
• 16 Things to Do After Publishing a Blog Post
• Content Upgrades: Unlock Leads From Blog Content

If you’re not sure how to align specific SaaS blog post types with your business goals, we can show you how to do it. 

Acomplix specializes in content strategy development and content management. That means we can create a customized blog content strategy and workflow to make creating your blog posts a breeze.

If that sounds good, send us an email and lets talk ?