Building a business from scratch isn’t easy. You’ve spent a lot of time coming up with a unique SaaS idea that offers value to your target audience, and now you want to see your business grow. Given the unique challenges SaaS companies face, they need a strong social media marketing strategy that emphasizes the value their product provides.
These 7 tips will help you accelerate the growth of your SaaS business by using social media marketing.
1. Figure Out Who Your Target Audience Is
In order to come up with an effective social media marketing strategy, you need to start by identifying your audience. Participate in online discussions and meetups related to your industry or your product and connect with your competitors’ customers to find out what they consider to be the upsides and downsides of the respective products.
2. Identify Key Social Media Platforms
When it comes to SaaS, being present on all social platforms isn’t the best idea. Choose only the key social media channels where your target audience is present and join existing conversations to find leads.
With more than three billion users, social media is indispensable to the marketing success of your SaaS business. Facebook alone has more than two billion active users, so be sure to get a Facebook business page first. Facebook is great for marketing B2C SaaS products as well as for remarketing both B2B and B2C SaaS products.
There are over 4 million brands actively marketing and advertising on Facebook, and even though it might sound like a cluttered marketplace, the beauty of SaaS marketing is that you only need to find your target niche audience in order to reap the benefits of FB marketing.
If you’re a B2B SaaS company, LinkedIn is the best choice for you. With more than 364 million users, LinkedIn provides the perfect platform to build your client network. A simple search, using the right keywords, can help you find thousands of industry experts, service providers, and potential clients. Of course, using an automation tool can help speed up the entire process. Tools like LinkedHelper offer features like LinkedIn bulk connecting to help you get thousands of targeted contacts without too much fuss.
Twitter is useful for branding. Research has shown that nearly 80% of users recommend brands they follow on this social platform. Use Twitter to build brand awareness, get followers, and attract more visitors to your website.
YouTube can also be a powerful platform for SaaS companies. Share any promotional videos you have created for your SaaS business, as well as training courses and software education videos.
3. Use a Calendar
In order to be more organized, you need to have a social media calendar in place. A social media calendar is a tool that helps you plan, produce, and schedule content that you’ll be posting to different social platforms. It will make sure all your social media activities are timely and in sync.
Another benefit of social media calendars is that they allow you to see the performance of your posts, thus giving you an opportunity to plan more efficient marketing campaigns in the future. However, ensure that your calendar contains plans for no longer than 2 weeks, as you need to make sure your audience is always provided with fresh content.
4. Create Some Buzz
Join social media groups, communities, and forums to spark some curiosity about your software. If you provide helpful information, Q&A sites like Quora, forums, and blog comments can be a great, long-term source of traffic. But be careful and resist the urge to promote your product; slip a link and let it do the talking. For instance, you can use a signup form to get people to sign up for a free trial.
5. Create Compelling Content
You probably already know that you need to create quality content for your readers. But what exactly does ‘quality content’ mean? How do you create something genuinely worthwhile that people will want to read? Simple, by offering something that they’ll find useful.
Your content should never be pushy and promotional as it will annoy people. Instead, it should add value by solving issues and problems your readers are facing. Check out these content marketing stats:
1. HubSpot receives 37% of the total traffic share to its blog, whereas its homepage receives only 13% of traffic;
2. KISSmetrics gets 70% of its traffic to its blog, where it offers a combination of articles, infographics, and helpful tools.
Both these companies attract their readers by sharing insightful stats and data, info about useful tools, tips, services, etc. In fact, creating pro-tips is one of the best ways to attract the attention of SaaS readers.
6. Engage With Your Community Continuously
One of the best ways to stay in touch with your community is by setting up a blog on your website. Blogging is a great way to increase awareness about your SaaS brand. According to HubSpot, B2B SaaS companies that have active blogs generate about 65% more leads than competitors that don’t. Having a blog will allow you to infiltrate almost any online community without risking looking too promotional. You can share your posts on social media, forums, syndication sites, etc.
Having a strong social media following also helps when you decide to sell your business. This is because when an investor wants to buy a SaaS business, they may opt for one that has multiple streams of traffic and hence you can command a higher valuation as the risk level is lower.
7. Partner with Influencers
Collaborating with relevant influencers can be vital to the success of your social media marketing. Research has shown that more than 85% of IT product buyers use social media when deciding to make a purchase. Another study showed that about 70% of B2B buyers check influencer posts on social networks before making a final decision. Follow SaaS influencers like Brad Feld and Marc Benioff and share their content if you want them to share yours.
Final Words
Growing a SaaS business requires faith in your product, flexibility, and a smart marketing strategy. Don’t pass up promoting your SaaS through social media as most SaaS customers are already active on social networks and are looking for tech solutions. Social media marketing provides SaaS businesses with a great way to achieve their goals at minimum effort and expenditure.
