Is your SaaS business not growing at the same rate that it used to? Are you having trouble getting new subscribers?
Maybe it’s time to revamp your marketing campaign to include social media strategies.
Having a social media presence makes it easier for you to connect with potential customers. It gives you a way to communicate with them without having to get their contact information.
There’s an untapped market that you can access through social media posts. You get more brand visibility and raise product awareness at the same time.
Your competitors won’t have any problem taking those leads away from you. So you better get on social media platforms as soon as you can.
We’ll show you how you can grow your business with social media.
Define Your Target Audience
Before drafting your social media marketing strategy, you’ll need to determine your target audience.
Your target audience will dictate which social media channels to prioritize. You’ll also use it to craft your core message.
Not sure how to define your target audience?
Here are a few tips that will help you figure out who your target market should be.
Identify Your Ideal Customer
Who is your ideal customer?
The first step to answering that question would be market research. Look at the market size. How big is it? Who are the leaders in your category?
If you already have subscribers, you can use customer data to figure it out.
Go over your data and see what users have in common. What industries do they come from? How big are their companies? What roles do they play in their respective organizations?
Squeeze as much information as you can from the data you collected from subscribers.
And if you don’t have enough to go on, you can always look at your competitors.
Competitor research tells you two things:
One, you’ll see what type of customers they’re trying to attract through digital marketing. Two, it’ll become clear which market segments they’re not addressing.
You can go after the same audience or you can target market segments that they failed to pay attention to.
From there, you should have what you need to create a buyer persona for your social media team to use as a reference.
Understand Pain Points and Needs
Customer pain points and needs refer to the problems that your potential customers face that your SaaS company can resolve.
The best way to identify the challenges your potential customers face is to ask them directly.
If you have the resources, you can conduct interviews with some of your customers. This method will let you engage users in deep conversation to really understand their wants and needs.
However, this is a time-consuming process. So you might find it hard to find willing participants.
Surveys are a good alternative. They’re easier to answer and people can answer them at their own pace. You can use pop-up boxes to prompt users to take one.
Your goal is to find a commonality between all participants.
If they share the same pain points, you’ll know how to craft your message. You’d have an easier time selling your product.
Even better, you’ll know who to sell your products to.
Craft a Message That Resonates
Once you know which pain points bother your target audience the most, you’ll know which product features to push heavily to consumers.
Work with your content and social media team to come up with the right approach. Make sure they send the same message across all channels.
Consistency is the key.
While it’s hard to perform A/B testing on a social media platform, you can use metrics to see if your followers get the message.
If you’re barely getting engagement, you might want to change the copy you’re using and try again.
Choose the Right Social Media Platforms
Small businesses can’t afford to be on all social media platforms, especially in the beginning. There are just so many to cover.
That’s also true for SaaS companies.
The better strategy would be to pick a handful of platforms and focus on getting clients there.
But which social media channels should you choose?
What Social Media Platforms Are Best for SaaS Products?
First, let’s look at social media sites that are even worth considering.
Most social media platforms have a built-in audience. But not all of them will have the type of audience you’re looking for.
For instance:
TikTok is arguably the most popular social channel as of this writing. But most of its users aren’t there to look for SaaS solutions.
Besides, TikTok users aren’t looking for B2B products. They’re mostly there to consume entertainment and not educational content.
But there are social channels where SaaS companies can thrive.
LinkedIn is a social networking platform designed for working professionals. That’s why users are more receptive to unsolicited messages and ads — even those from SaaS businesses.
What’s great about LinkedIn is that it has tools that enable you to find users by industry, job title, and company type.
There are also a lot of advertising opportunities here. For example, you can do sponsored content posts. Text and video ads are also available.
Twitter is great for several reasons. It’s a great space for businesses that want to promote upcoming products and events. And it’s ideal for having conversations with potential customers.
You don’t even have to advertise on the platform.
SaaS companies can gain traction by posting news about their products. There are even companies that just respond to questions sent by followers.
By using hashtags, you can dive into the many discussions in your community. You can also connect with industry leaders in your space.
YouTube
There are SaaS marketers that count YouTube as a social media channel. After all, it is a hub that allows multiple people to share their thoughts on a topic.
You should know by now all the perks of having a presence on YouTube. It’s a good platform for SaaS companies because it’s highly engaging.
Salesforce, a big SaaS company, has a strong YouTube presence with 810,000 subscribers as of this writing.
If you have videos demonstrating how your SaaS product can help people, there’s a chance that people would find them. Don’t let the opportunity go to waste.
Where Will You Find Your Target Audience?
It will all depend on what you’re trying to accomplish.
If you’re looking to educate people about what your product can do, YouTube is where you want to be. You can upload different types of content that’ll not only explain what your product does but also how to use it.
Twitter is a good place to do the same thing but only more direct. This platform gives you a chance to address specific concerns that people may have.
LinkedIn is where SaaS companies can find the best leads. There’s a high likelihood that people over there are already looking for a product like yours. You only need to introduce your company.
Those that want to experiment with short-form content might get lucky on Instagram.
You can also try running targeted ads on Facebook. Get in touch with groups that represent your business category.
How Do You Create a Presence on Your Chosen Platform?
It’s all about creating compelling content. As long as your posts are relevant to your target customers, they will find them.
Optimizing your content for the specific platforms you’re on will also help.
Add visuals to posts to grab the attention of your followers. Otherwise, they might not pay attention to any of them.
And when someone comments on a post, don’t forget to engage. Talk to them. Ask for their opinions and answer as many questions as you can.
Develop a Content Strategy
Knowing where to post is one thing. But what about the content? What should you post?
Here’s a guide on knowing what type of content you should share with your followers. In this section, you’ll also find tricks used by SaaS marketers to manage their content strategies.
Learn What Type of Content to Post
SaaS business owners think they’re limited to promotional content. But that’s nowhere near the truth.
There are plenty of post types to experiment with.
Here are a couple.
- Infographics — These are visually stimulating and easily shared. Digesting information should be effortless with infographics.
- Product Demo Videos — Show everyone how your product works. You can even create an entire course if you want to.
- Success Stories — You need social proof like success stories if you want people to trust you. Feature some of your happy customers. Let them tell the world how you helped them.
- Behind-the-Scenes Photos — SaaS company employees rarely meet the people who subscribe to them. Introduce your crew to your subscribers by posting behind-the-scenes photos.
- User-Generated Content — You can post content submitted by your subscribers. If they posted videos showing how much they like your product, share that with your followers.
Create a Content Calendar
A content calendar is a tool that marketers use to schedule content across channels including social media. This improves a company’s engagement and content consistency.
Creating a content calendar isn’t difficult. All you need is a spreadsheet. Fill your spreadsheet with details like:
- Topic — What do you want to talk about on social media?
- Format — How are you going to deliver your message? Are you using a photo, video, infographic, or all text?
- Date — When do you want the post to go live?
- Platform — Where are you going to post it?
You can add more details if you’d like.
Try Other Social Media Content Strategies
The longer you do this, the more flexible your social media marketing strategy becomes. That’s because you’ll accumulate content you could reuse or repurpose over time.
For example:
Say you have an older post that performed well a year ago. You can repost it or update it and use it one more time. This saves you from having to create an entire post from scratch.
You can also try your hands on content curation. This is the process of gathering and presenting content from several sources.
This will make your social media channels the place to go for people in your industry.
Use Task Management Tools
Marketers use online tools like Orrderly to manage tasks for the day. If you’re struggling to keep up with the demands of social media marketing, you should look into using a management tool yourself.
This is especially true for teams that have to manage posts manually.
Leverage Paid Advertising
It’s true — you can run a social media marketing strategy without resorting to paid advertising.
However, you’ll go a lot farther at a faster pace if you add paid ads to your social media marketing plan.
But what should be your goals?
Small business owners often use social media to generate new leads. SaaS businesses do it for the same reason.
Your main goal should be to use paid ads to drive traffic to your site. From there, visitors can convert by signing up for a free trial or whatever metric you decide to use.
Other paid ads goals can include raising brand awareness and remarketing. The latter refers to finding users who have engaged with your site or app before but left before converting.
With remarketing, you can incentivize users to come back by offering special offers or discounts.
Make an Advertising Plan
Before paying for ads, double-check to see if you’re on the right social media platform. Keep in mind that you’re paying for the campaign. You want to make the most out of your marketing dollars.
If this is your first time advertising on social media, find someone with experience to walk you through the process.
Determine how much you’re willing to spend. If necessary, allocate a budget for every platform.
Things will run smoother if you have a dedicated team working on your ad copy. You should tailor your content to each social platform.
Have someone be in charge of monitoring the performance of each ad. Google Analytics should be an excellent place to start.
The data will come in handy when it’s time to test new ad elements.
Launch Your Ad Plan
You can’t run a social media ad campaign without setting up an account. Be sure to do that ahead of time.
Familiarize yourself with the many ad targeting options that each social platform offers. Narrowing down your parameters will make each ad more efficient.
Remember that you have the option to target potential clients by demographic, interest, and behavior.
Engage With Your Audience
As mentioned earlier, it will be in your best interest to respond to social media comments.
You want to interact with as many users as possible. Platforms like Twitter allow other users to see your responses. So not only will your replies help the one who asked but also everyone else who sees your reply.
Don’t be surprised to find people sending you direct messages. You should pay attention to these. People who send direct messages are more likely to convert into paying customers.
It is possible to grow your social media community outside of their respective platforms. Use a tool like GroupApp to gather all your followers in one place.
You can use the app to create courses, memberships, and events. This way, your social media team will have a simpler time managing all your followers.
There’s also a way to convert new Facebook group members into leads through apps like GroupLeads.
Being able to respond to most social media inquiries will require dedicated people. Do keep that in mind.
You should also have one or two people in charge of answering the more technical questions thrown your way. This includes questions about billing and other account-specific complaints.
Perform Social Media Outreach
Responding to direct messages and comments is important. But this won’t be enough to get you more subscribers.
Your social media strategy will have to be more proactive if you want to see better results.
That’s why you have to perform social media outreach. This is where you engage with people, communities, and organizations directly.
Where Should You Reach Out?
Since you’re pitching a SaaS product, the best place to reach out would be on LinkedIn. Again, users on this platform are more open to business-related communications.
You can automate LinkedIn lead generation tasks using a tool like Dux-Soup.
Contacting Facebook users could work. But the problem is that users on those platforms are there to stay connected with family and friends.
If you send promotional messages on Facebook, they might take it the wrong way. It would feel like you’re invading their personal space.
That’s simply not what Facebook is for in the minds of its users.
But if you’re keen on using Facebook to communicate with users, you should use a tool like ChatSilo. This will make managing multiple conversations run smoother.
Social Media Marketing Tips
Personalizing messages will go a long way toward establishing relationships.
The last thing you want to do is to send a generic message to all your social media contacts.
It might take a bit more work but including small details like the lead’s name does wonders. It’ll even be better if you can mention specific details in their profile and the content they posted.
This would show that you’re really paying attention.
When you have enough information, you might even be able to bring up a lead’s specific pain points. If you do decide to mention them, point out how your product can make their worries go away.
Every social media user is different. Don’t expect everyone to respond positively to your social media outreach efforts.
You will get rejected by a few. But you shouldn’t let that stop you.
Monitor and Analyze Results
You, the business owner, or one of your managers should know how to set up social media analytics. You’ll need this to track your campaign.
Every platform is different but the fundamentals should be the same. Each one will have a section that will show you your engagement numbers.
Work with your social media team to figure out which key performance indicators you want to prioritize. Use your business goals as a reference.
When you add links to posts, make sure you’re using custom tracking URLs. It’s one of the ways you can measure the effectiveness of your posts.
Tracking URLs enable Google Analytics to monitor your click-through rate and conversions.
It should be noted that you can connect your social media platforms to your analytics tool of choice. This will make monitoring a more streamlined process.
You can use vanity metrics (likes, shares, etc.) but SaaS businesses prefer monitoring conversions since that is usually their main goal.
But whichever metric you do end up measuring, be sure to keep a record of it.
Why?
Because you will need to adjust your social media marketing strategy based on the data. These metrics will give you valuable insights you can use to improve your strategies.
Conclusion
You need to have a presence on social platforms. It’s a great way to gain new subscribers for your SaaS business.
When developing your social media marketing strategy, you should define your target audience first. This will tell you which of the major social media platforms you should focus on.
After picking the right platforms, work on your social media content strategy. Use a variety of post types to keep your followers engaged. Consider paid advertising if you have the budget for it.
Keep up with comments and direct messages sent your way. Respond to as many as you can. But you should also send messages to potential customers to grow your business. Make sure you record your metrics and adjust your social media campaign as needed. If you’re still not getting enough subscribers, here are 15 tactics you could try.