Social media can be a goldmine for SaaS businesses. These platforms let you disseminate marketing content with ease, provide plenty of audience data, boost brand awareness, and build a strong and engaged following.
So, how can you market SaaS successfully on your socials? After all, searching for software solutions isn’t the first thing that springs to mind when people think about Facebook, Instagram, and so on.
That said, there is an audience out there for SaaS products on these platforms—but to reach them, you need a solid and highly specialized social media marketing strategy.
Let’s take a look at how you can boost SaaS marketing on your social platforms to bring in new leads and nurture a dedicated following.
Is social media worth it for SaaS businesses?
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It’s tempting to ignore social media when you work in a B2B industry—especially if you’re employed in tech. According to some, these platforms are best left to people posting pictures of their breakfasts and arguing about pop culture. They’re not for advertising software to other businesses.
However, social media, when used with a proper SaaS marketing strategy, can actually bring huge benefits, and it’s not just popular with B2C businesses and influencers. It can also be a very powerful tool for B2B.
For example, social media can:
- Build organic awareness of your brand and product
- Reach niche audiences that may not be accessible through other B2B channels
- Intensively target your marketing to reach specific customer groups
- Give detailed analytics of audience demographics and behavior
- Provide in-depth reporting on campaign performance
- Drive relevant traffic to your website and generate high-quality leads
- Provide extra (and highly effective) options for customer support
To access these benefits, SaaS brands might have to work a bit harder than more social-friendly B2C brands. But when you know what you’re doing, it’s less difficult than it sounds.
Let’s now take a look at how SaaS brands can build a winning formula for social media marketing success.
Seven steps to building a winning SaaS social media marketing campaign
There are lots of elements that make up a winning social media campaign. Here are six essentials to help you pull together the perfect strategy for your SaaS business.
Step 1: Develop an action plan
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A good strategy provides a strong foundation and a powerful driving force for any marketing campaign. This is especially true for B2B social media campaigns, which may find it tougher to build traction than their more social-friendly B2C counterparts.
Your SaaS social media marketing strategy should act as a roadmap for success, outlining who you’re targeting, why you’re targeting them, what you hope to achieve, how you’ll measure your success, and more.
Building it is a big job, but there are plenty of resources out there to help you. Here, we’ll touch briefly on a few basic elements that every marketing strategy should have:
- Goals and objectives. Ideally, these should be SMART i.e. specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and with clear timeframes.
- Defined responsibilities. Everyone on the campaign should know what their role is, what they’re working toward, and why.
- An understanding of your current situation and the resources available to you. Running SWOT and PESTLE analyses can help a lot here. Make sure you check what tools are at your disposal, such as social media management solutions and employee communication software.
- Plenty of data to help you understand your audience, the context, the market, and more.
- A good set of tactics. Tactics and strategy are often confused, but they’re not the same thing. The former are the actionable, customer-facing elements of a strategy, while the latter is the overriding framework from which these tactics are deployed. For example, ‘Appeal to younger audiences’ is a strategic goal, while ‘Use animations’ may be a tactic associated with this.
- A timeline, detailing all the important staging points in your campaign.
- Measurability. To keep your campaign on track and make sure the next one is even better, you must be able to measure and analyze your performance. Make sure everything possible is tied to a metric and that you’re using the best social media analytics tools available.
Step 2: Define your audience
A good understanding of your audience is one of the biggest advantages you can give yourself as a social media marketer. When you truly know who they are and what they want, you can develop both strong engagement and lasting audience relationships built on mutual knowledge and understanding.
As a SaaS marketer, the task of building rapport with your audience is a bit different from the task of those marketing directly to customers. Rather than merely understanding the needs and wants of the individual, you also have to know the needs and wants of their business.
So, it’s vital to look deep into your audience metrics and figure out who your most promising leads are, what they desire most, and how you can reach them.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is your target audience or customer?
- What’s their job role?
- Who do they work for?
- What are their business aims?
- What are their pain points, and how can your software help?
- In which practical ways could your software improve their working life?
- Which platforms do they use, when, and how?
- What kind of content do they find engaging?
- What devices do they use to access social media?
The more you can learn about your audience, the easier you’ll find it to reach and engage with them.
Step 3: Find the right platform
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You’ll also get much better results if you focus on the platforms your target audience uses the most. LinkedIn is popular with a lot of B2B brands, as it’s designed to facilitate professional networking. That doesn’t mean you should focus on it in isolation.
Dig into your audience metrics. Find out which social media platforms they use the most, what times they’re likely to be online, the kind of social content they engage with, and so on.
Targeting the right platforms can give you a head start when it comes to building a loyal following. While you can accelerate your growth by buying followers on platforms like Instagram, if you pick the right platforms in the first place, you’ll find it much easier to grow this organically.
So, look into your social media metrics and take note of where you have the most followers. If you can, send out surveys asking your customers which social media platforms they use and which of these they prefer for work purposes.
Step 4: Segment your audience
Segmentation involves dividing your audience into “segments” based on shared traits/features. This helps you target your marketing more intensively.
Say, for example, that you segment your audience according to their job titles. You might have a segment for CEOs, another for heads of department, and so on.
With your audience organized like this, you can target your social media marketing to appeal to the particular needs and interests of each group. For your CEO segment, you could create content that speaks to the unique needs and concerns of business leaders. For department heads, you could emphasize how budget-friendly your software is and how it can boost productivity.
To segment your audience successfully, you need plenty of data. You can get a lot of this from your social media analytics, but it’s also a good idea to supplement this using surveys and so on.
It can help to give each of your segments a “persona”. This is a named character that fits the demographic, work role, characteristics, etc of this grouping. Creating a persona makes it easier to build relatable marketing materials, as it’s easier to communicate with another human (even a fictional one) than it is to communicate with a set of data points.
Step 5: Don’t neglect your SEO
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SEO often gets neglected when it comes to social media. There’s a tendency to believe that it’s only useful for Google searches and has no impact on social platforms. In fact, effective search engine optimization impacts your entire digital presence.
Social media and search engines aren’t mutually exclusive. A strong social media presence and a large, engaged following give your brand more visibility and integrity, which in turn boosts your SEO. Similarly, great SEO lends your brand the kind of credibility that social media algorithms love.
You can use tried and trusted SEO techniques to elevate your social media efforts. If you know how to post to Google in ways that get results, you can use this same knowledge to get your social media posts in front of the right eyes. The correct keywords combined with plenty of good content can be a huge help when building a following.
Step 6: Create great content
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Content is king on socials. All social media algorithms love good content posted on a consistent schedule. So, content creation should be one of the biggest parts of your strategy.
Content can be anything from videos to blog posts or carousels of graphics. The important thing is that it’s good quality, valuable, relevant to its intended audience, and posted frequently. The more you share, the happier the algorithm will be.
Engagement is key here, so take note of which posts get the most and angle your future content accordingly. For example, if you find that posts with pictures get more engagement than those that are text-heavy, consider making your captions more concise and upping the amount of graphics you use in future campaigns.
Good content management is essential to a successful strategy. So, to keep your output organized, consider investing in a content management SaaS system (CMS). This will give you the tools you need to make it easy to create and share your output.
Step 7: Hire an agency
Building and maintaining a strong and engaged social media following is hard work. It can also be very time-consuming. To get great results without exhausting your resources, it might be wise to hire an agency.
There are plenty out there that can assist with your SaaS social media marketing. Some are focused purely on social media and can support you in putting together a strong and coherent campaign across all relevant platforms.
Others are more oriented toward digital marketing and SEO in general. These agencies can help you build the kind of digital strategy that will boost your entire online presence, including on social media.
If you want to get the very best results without interrupting your in-house workflows, why not hire professionals to build your brand on social media for you?
Ambassador marketing is one such strategy that can be employed effectively by agencies. This approach involves leveraging satisfied customers and industry experts as brand advocates to expand your reach and credibility. It can be particularly effective for SaaS businesses looking to establish trust and authority within their niche.
Boost your SaaS social media marketing with a strong social media strategy
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Marketing SaaS on social media isn’t difficult when you know how. So, let’s now recap what we’ve suggested here:
- It’s essential to build a winning social media marketing strategy, including SMART goals.
- Be sure to have extensive knowledge of your audience and use this to craft highly targeted content.
- Look into your audience metrics to work out which platforms will be best to concentrate your social media marketing efforts on.
- Segment your audience according to criteria that make sense for your campaign.
- Make sure your SEO is strong both off and on social media.
- Create and disseminate fantastic content that’s targeted toward specific audiences.
- If need be, consider hiring an agency to take on some of the burden of social media marketing for you.
By following this roadmap, you can’t go far wrong with your SaaS social media strategy.