Software as a Service (or SaaS) has become all the rage among public cloud services.
Predicted to reach a market worth of $623 billion by 2023, it continues to increase and evolve alongside changing business needs.
A market that thrives such as this one, there is bound to be a cut-throat competition.
Today, SaaS businesses face a double challenge:
- Set themselves apart from their competition
- Employ smart and effective marketing strategies
Now, there are many marketing strategies, but social media is one platform that’s worked out great for SaaS brands. It’s no surprise, 43% of B2B businesses have acquired a client through social media.
For this reason, going social with your marketing strategy can make a hugely positive impact on your brand, drive solid ROI, and help achieve your long term goals.
So in this post, I’ll share with you six social strategies you can use to tackle your marketing goals by going social.
Best SaaS Social Strategies to kill it on social media
Table of Contents
Strategy 1: Consistently engage with your audience
Your audience needs to feel heard and cared for. It’s human nature for prospective customers to want to be made to feel important.
Research shows that customers need to encounter a brand up to 12 times before making a purchasing decision, so integrating social with email is an excellent way to reach that touchpoint.
One of the best ways to do this is, you guessed it, engage with them continuously.
Regular engagements with your audience will provide a multitude of benefits for both parties.
Your customers will learn more about you and your goals, how you can help them meet their needs, and why you are better than your competition. You can use this to build a strong foundation for your customer relationships and generate more leads.
Source: Oberlo
There are several simple and easy ways to keep your presence active on the social media front and your audience consistently engaged.
Here are a few to get you started.
- Keep a schedule for your social media content
It’s easy to lose sight of the importance of producing regular content, especially when your ROI is already sailing. But don’t lose steam and make sure you regularly deliver with a set schedule in mind.
Staying on top of your engagements is essential to your social media presence, and there are several tools in this arena that can make the process more efficient.
- Integrate social with email
Social media marketing is great for reaching new prospects. On the other hand, email marketing works great at conversion.
Using email as a marketing channel has proven time and time again to produce high ROI. By directly putting you in the spotlight of your audience’s inbox, you have higher chances for engagement.
On a similar note, you can leverage a streamlined process from email marketing services for efficient execution.
- Use interactive quizzes
Quizzes are a fun new way to interact with your audience.
People love doing quizzes and feeling part of an experience where they are the focus of your attention. Obtaining a result that reveals more about them intrigues them into participating.
Marketing analytics company Buzzsumo released a report that showed that quizzes ranked highest as a form of creating engaging content in terms of participation and reach.
Creating interactive quizzes is an excellent way to not only engage with your audience and gain insights into their psyche, but also impart more knowledge about your business.
Quiz making tools and software can help you form impactful questions and promote them through the right channels, so it reaches your target audience.
Strategy 2: Collaborate with influencers in your niche
There’s no telling how much of a positive impact social influencers can drive for your business.
It’s no surprise that 17% of companies spend over half of their marketing budget on influencer marketing strategies.
The key lies in partnering with the right ones. A couple of rules of thumb include:
- Partner with key influencers in your audience demographics (e.g., BambooHR’s partnership with Payscale)
- Ensure your collaboration is a continued partnership and not a one-time event
- Keep your goals transparent with your collaborator and be prepared to assist them as well
Influencer partnerships can help not only spread word-of-mouth about your SaaS business and attract a greater audience but also build trust.
In fact, having an influencer on your side is like achieving a big high tick next to your brand name.
Your business is being promoted by someone who has a voice of authority in their niche. Automatically: you gain brand credits.
Canva, a graphic design software company, is a successful example of influencer marketing.
Source: Canva
Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple employee and marketing expert, created “buzz” for Canva after using the freemium tool for his graphics.
This helped Canva to stand its own in an already competitive online niche. The continued partnership with Guy is a strong point of its social media marketing plan.
Strategy 3: Go big with your visuals
Did you know that 80% of marketers use visual content in their social media marketing tactics?
Visual content continues to be a highly attractive way and preferred way to engage across social media platforms. On Twitter, for instance, using images leads to more engagement.
Source: Buffer
Here are a few methods by which you can boost your visual engagement:
- Use graphic design software tools like Canva to make high-quality images
- Leverage Piktochart and other similar tools to design quality infographics
- Take advantage of social media templates that are easy to customize
- Build visual content through different forms of visual media (for example video and webinars)
Mailchimp is a stellar example of a marketing SaaS business producing attractive visuals on Twitter.
For example, when they launched their #SmallBusinessSaturday campaign, they leveraged a mix of high quality design images and personalized GIFs to appeal to their Twitter followers.
Source: Mailchimp on Twitter
And by the looks of it, it certainly paid off!
Strategy 4: Build on your social customer support
Slow customer support can kill your business, especially when it comes to social media support.
In this era, customers feel empowered to demand instant support, and social media is one of the most popular channels to express this.
If you fail to deliver here, customer satisfaction levels can drop and lead to a negative perception of your brand.
Your social media strategy must incorporate this. Listed below are a few areas to stay on top of as you build your customer support this way.
- Closely monitor your direct messages from your audience.
- Establish an efficient call center and hire well-trained call center agents to provide excellent customer care and support.
- Improve your internal communication to improve team collaboration on customer issues.
- Answer questions from customers promptly and thoroughly.
- Delegate social media account management through tools to focus on higher-priority tasks.
- Automate chat support for primary concerns through chatbots.
- Create communities online (for example, Facebook groups) to encourage healthy discussions with and among your customers.
Monday, a SaaS productivity app that helps manage and implement social media marketing strategies, is also on top of their customer support game.
When they encountered a retargeting issue for their ads through Google, their customers reported and passed on negative feedback of the repeated and continuous misplacement of their ads.
Monday was prompt with their Twitter rescue, addressing their concerns head-on.
Source: Monday’s Twitter
This example demonstrates the importance of staying committed to your customers on all fronts, including the increasingly powerful platform of social media.
Avoid high churn rates by incorporating a mix of customer strategies into your social media efforts.
Strategy 5: Leverage user-generated content
One of the best ways to increase the trust in your brand apart from partnerships with influencers includes partnering with your consumers themselves.
Positive word-of-mouth buzz generated from fellow consumers can do wonders for your brand.
Whether this is through a sparkling customer review on Youtube or tweeting praise about your service, when others see it, they’ll nod along in approval and might consider giving your brand a shot.
Leveraging this social proof by sharing it on your channels to your broader audience can help bring this positive feedback to the forefront, boosting customer retention rates.
Some simple tactics to integrate user-generated content into your social media strategy include:
- Create posts sharing multiple images/videos received from users with a catchy caption/description
- Use #hashtags in campaigns to encourage user participation and showcase the submissions
- Re-share direct mentions of your brand on your Instagram/Facebook stories
- Create polls, have users vote on campaigns and share the results
A great example of a user-generated content strategy done right is Adobe’s.
The design software company ran a campaign called the Art Maker Series, inviting designers and artists from all over the world to create and share their work through Adobe products like Photoshop.
Source: Adobe
Adobe repurposed this content like customer reviews and product promotions, showing off their various service product expertise through their own user’s results of the same.
This helps keep them ahead of the competition while establishing a sense of trust with their community.
Strategy 6: Keep track and assess results
While you may be employing a variety of marketing strategies to promote your SaaS, you’ll need to be able to track the performance of your efforts.
Marketing report templates or other software can help you better analyze just how effective your marketing campaigns are.
Source – my own image
It’s necessary to not only assess the performance of each platform individually, but you need to have the ability to compare and contrast each marketing tool against one another. This way, you get a better understanding of which tools are generating net benefit and which tools are a drain on your resources.
Go Social with your SaaS
Going social with your marketing strategies is the latest trick in the book to keeping your customers satisfied.
But it goes beyond that as well.
Depending on your goals, you can tweak your social media strategies to generate and convert new leads, retain existing customers, and even enter into a new segment of your market or demographic.
Social media is one key component in achieving all these goals.
So what are you waiting for? Start to go social.
Do you have other strategies that have worked in your favour? Let us know in the comments.
This is a guest post by Mark Quadros. He is a freelance content marketer who helps SaaS and online-business develop content that not only drives traffic but also boosts user-engagement. In his free time, he loves traveling the world and living a minimalist life from his backpack.
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