Why Is A Social Media Marketing Strategy Crucial For Software Marketers?
Did you know that businesses that include a social media strategy in their processes can see a 26% increase in customer retention? A social media marketing strategy is an organized effort to promote your business in the online world. When this effort is successful, you increase brand awareness, audience engagement, and credibility. So, not only do you generate new leads at a healthy rate, but you also make people trust you. In fact, the majority of consumers believe a brand’s social media presence plays a pivotal role in their decision to purchase from it. Naturally, an engaging social media SaaS marketing strategy boosts your revenue, as even B2B customers discover their next purchase through social media platforms.
But that’s not all. Social media marketing helps you analyze how you stack up against your key competitors. Through social listening tools, you identify your target buyers’ needs and how competing companies cater to those needs. Therefore, you can improve your approach and bring in more clientele.
If you are ready to start crafting a social media strategy, you should stay with us as we explain the methodology step-by-step.
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11 Steps To Create An Effective Social Media Strategy
1. Set Your Goals
For social media to help you, your SaaS B2B marketing strategy must highlight and clearly state your campaign’s goals. For starters, you should understand that marketing and business goals aren’t always the same. For instance, your business goal may be to get more customers, but your social media campaign might focus on boosting brand awareness, generating leads, and growing your following. Breaking down your goals into smaller objectives helps you organize your efforts and enforce different tactics according to your needs.
Your promotional campaigns for brand awareness will probably focus on high-quality content like articles, while your lead generation marketing may concentrate more on gated content and lead magnet ideas. Successful social media campaigns also set numerical goals that are easy to track. How much do you want your lead generation to grow? And how many followers do you want to gain? Being specific helps you track your performance and make alterations along the way when things don’t run smoothly. Additionally, don’t make your posts too promotional. Buyers may complain that they don’t see enough genuine company posts. So, try to promote your business while underlining your company story and struggles.
2. Identify Your Audience
Knowing who you’re talking to isn’t only pivotal for social media marketing strategies but also for content creation. Use social listening tools to receive marketing insights identifying the demographics, psychographics, and locations of your ideal SaaS buyers. Once you know their profiles, you can create relevant content that interests them and promote products you know they want to purchase. However, not all platforms attract the same demographics, and people’s behavior varies across different channels. For example, X (formerly Twitter) is the go-to place for customer service because it allows companies to engage with buyers easily and quickly by replying to tweets. Facebook, on the other hand, has always been used by brick-and-mortar businesses, encouraging customer reviews and trying to grow their local client base.
Another smart business marketing tip for SaaS startups to identify their audience is online surveys. You can send your survey to your email subscribers and get a sense of which are the most popular social media channels. Additionally, you may create polls on X and LinkedIn, arrange focus groups, and conduct interviews with customers. Obviously, the latter is quite time-consuming and targeted, but it can help you retain your paying customers and appeal to businesses with similar profiles.
3. Research Your Competition
If you are wondering how to market a new business, competitive analysis is a wise step. Even already established companies analyze their competing businesses before creating and publishing content for their social media strategy. So, take a look at the SaaS sales market and identify your direct and indirect competitors. We are talking about both businesses offering similar software to yours and targeting the same demographics, as well as companies that sell different products but are under the same umbrella. For instance, you may sell employee engagement software, but it’s good to know companies that sell employee onboarding software, as both are in the HR industry.
The next step is to gather information about their products, pricing, promotions, and social media content strategies. The more you analyze them, the more you’ll recognize their strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, you can lean on your strong points or improve based on your weak side. For example, if your pricing is the highest among your competition, you may lower it to appeal to wider audiences. But what if there are no direct competitors in your geographic area? How can you craft your strategies to increase market share in this case? If your product is very niche, try to look at substitute businesses. It’s those that sell completely different products but cater to the same target audience. You can check how they attract customers and incorporate lead generation techniques.
4. Choose Your Channels
Now you know who your target buyers are and where you can locate them. It’s time to choose the platforms you’ll be more active on. It’s easy to get tempted to start using all of them just for the sake of it. However, effective marketing should focus on those where your potential ROI is higher. Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Instagram are four of the most popular channels for SaaS companies. Let’s take them one by one, starting with Facebook. The platform is ideal for building a sense of community among your audience and promoting long-form content. Its wide reach helps you get closer to your potential buyers. X, on the other hand, allows you to engage with your audience, offer them quick updates, establish a brand voice, and highlight your thought leadership.
LinkedIn is the perfect spot for your B2B lead generation strategy to flourish, as it is designed for professionals in the B2B world. You can establish thought leadership by posting blog posts, articles, webinars, and infographics. Also, you can connect with decision-makers in your field and nurture them through company updates and industry news. And what about Instagram? Is it a good place for software marketers to promote their products? Sure! Since the platform focuses on brand aesthetics, your visually pleasing content can attract clients who are ready to purchase. You can promote your posts easily and collaborate with influential figures to boost visibility.
5. Set Your KPIs
There is no way to know the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy unless you measure your marketing performance. To do that, you need to set your KPIs early on, when you identify your goals, as every goal should be linked to specific metrics. So, if your goal is brand awareness, you should track your reach, engagement, brand mentions, and impressions. Also, start measuring your hashtags’ performance so you can include only the best-performing ones. However, if your goal is boosting sales, your metrics change. Your social media plan should track clicks, click-through rates, and conversion rates. You want to know how many people click on your sponsored posts and take a business-related action.
In case your goal is to increase your follower number, you should focus on the number of people who follow you in a specific time frame. The follower growth rate shows you how fast you lose or gain followers. Therefore, you can analyze your strategy and find ways to improve it. Lastly, your digital marketing strategy differs when you want to improve your customer service. So, you should focus on your reply time, total response volume, and customer satisfaction score (CSAT). These SaaS metrics help you understand where your customer care suffers and what your audience thinks about you and your services.
6. Create Content
Content is to social media what the wind is to windmills. Unless you don’t have any, your channel goes unnoticed. Nevertheless, small business content marketing should be crafted carefully to align with your goals and every individual channel. For example, if you want to increase sales, videos like tutorials and step-by-step guides prove to prospects why your products are ideal. If, however, your goal is brand awareness, then you must create educational content that does not focus on your services. Whatever your objectives are, you must find your brand voice and identity. Are you a strictly professional company that talks formally or a playful business that makes puns and entertains audiences?
When you do social media planning, you should consider the different platforms you’re leveraging. LinkedIn is a professional channel individuals and companies visit for insightful posts and articles. On the contrary, Instagram is great for quicker posts and eye-catching visuals. Twitter is ideal for quick and short updates. Therefore, your content shouldn’t be identical on all platforms. For instance, a long read may be tremendously successful on LinkedIn but fail to generate any interest on Instagram.
7. Conduct Case Studies
A seasoned B2B content marketing agency will probably advise you to create as many case studies as possible. Why? Simply because your social media strategy will benefit immensely. Case studies are detailed reports regarding past success stories. You may ask permission from your clients to talk about their stories and triumphant results. Start by mentioning their struggles before they collaborated with you and explain your course of action to help them. Then, showcase the numerical results of your efforts to prove the effectiveness of your SaaS product. Case studies come in various forms. For starters, you can write a case study article and expand your endeavors by turning it into a video. You can interview your customers and let them explain their situation. If you want, you can go one step further and host a webinar about a specific client story.
8. Make A Content Plan
Now that you know your audience and their preferences, it’s time to carefully plan your content and develop a posting schedule. You may create long videos for YouTube, where you also repurpose your webinars, but social media isn’t the place to promote long-form content. Crop your videos and podcasts to intrigue your audience so they visit your landing page to watch and listen to their full versions. But what type of content should you publish to build a positive brand image? Testimonials and personal stories work wonders, as they create emotions and build great brand memories. Whatever you publish, ensure you add your unique logos, slogans, and color schemes so you are easily recognizable.
No social media marketing strategy is complete without a posting schedule. There are no uniform posting times for software marketers to increase online visibility and engagement. You have to keep experimenting and tracking your results. Platforms like Hootsuite often propose optimal posting times based on past performance. You can also look at individual posts and their engagement levels depending on posting times. You will probably discover patterns that will be helpful to your software sales strategy.
9. Engage With Your Audience
Do you know one thing the best marketing campaign examples have in common? They create captivating content and engage with their audiences. To build a close and active community, you need to reply to their messages and comments and show how much you respect their output. Even when you get negative comments, don’t go into defense mode. The more you nurture your community, the more brand advocates you create. Once your customers are loyal to your brand and truly believe in your services, they will start promoting you to their peers. This means that you increase your client base without investing in social advertising more than you already have.
10. Make Partnerships
The top partnership software marketers can choose is collaborating with content marketing agencies that offer various services, including SEO optimization, link building, email marketing promotions, and PPC directory listing promotions. Not only do you increase your brand’s visibility, but you also improve your ranking in search engines. Yet, this may not be enough for your social media strategy. Partnering up with influential figures in your niche may be just what you need to boost brand awareness on the most popular social media platforms. Before choosing your influencers, make sure they have deep knowledge of your field and the type of product you’re promoting. Their brand has to align perfectly with your company.
Another digital marketing strategy tactic to get people to buy your product is to invest in co-marketing. This is where you join forces with another business to promote each other’s services. But how is that beneficial? You’re supposed to promote your product, not theirs, right? Well, it depends. Let’s say you have developed an LMS and the other SaaS business has created an automation tool that is easily integrated into your LMS. Your products are not in direct competition. So, you both benefit from promoting each other’s solution to similar audiences that could possibly purchase both.
11. Evaluate Your Strategy
Once your social media marketing strategy is up and running, you have to check its performance frequently to identify successful and unsuccessful patterns. Your SaaS growth strategy may involve various paid ads on social media platforms, meaning you have to track and analyze all of them. Maybe your promotions that feature short videos are more successful than those with still images. Therefore, you have to tweak these campaigns so your resources don’t go in vain. Additionally, you should check which keywords receive the most traffic and start utilizing them more in your posts. Check each platform’s insights to identify your engagement levels and which topics receive the most traction.
To further understand which posts drive more traffic to your website, you may implement UTM parameters. These are text snippets you add at the end of your URLs that track where traffic comes from. Once you have gathered all necessary marketing results, you may create benchmarks to see how you stack up against your competition. You may add the number of followers, audience growth rate, engagement rate, clicks, shares, comments, etc. When you fix the areas that need improvement, you can test your new options to see whether your alterations drove significant change. Iterative testing can help you try different options to see which one has the biggest potential.
How Often Should You Post?
So, how often should you post on your social media channels? This is a question that plagues most SaaS businesses when they start making their mark in the online world. There is no magical number that will definitely catapult your business to new heights. SaaS lead generation relies on a well-crafted social media marketing strategy that includes as many channels as possible. The frequency depends solely on your content availability and your unique insights. That said, experts believe that on Instagram you should post more frequently, 3–5 posts per week and two stories daily.
On Facebook, you may try 1–2 times daily and on X 2–3 times per day, as posts get lost in the algorithm easily. How about LinkedIn? 1–2 times per day are probably enough unless most of your audience is there. Then you may post up to 4 times daily. If you’re using Threads, you can upload content 2–3 times daily and 3–5 times per week on TikTok. Is Pinterest in your plan? If so, try to keep your account active by posting at least once a week.
Still, this is all theory. You need to try for yourself to find the best social media practices. For example, if you have a small business and a relatively low following, you may need to upload less frequently than large enterprises, which need to keep their audience updated multiple times daily. Also, you must test various posting times to check which one works best. This depends on the location of your audience. So, if your SaaS sales strategy targets people in the US, you have to organize your scheduling accordingly, even if you are based in a different country.
What Makes A Good Social Media Post?
How do you captivate your audience at first glance? Whether you write a short headline with a longer description or a long headline with a shorter description, your text should be eye-catching. We can offer you a few SaaS copywriting tips for your social media content strategy. First, you may start by stating a benefit or result of your SaaS product and add numbers like “top 10 lists.” Your captions should sound urgent, encouraging people to take action quickly. Plus, you may ask them a question to spark their engagement. Maybe you can withhold some of the information to pique everyone’s curiosity so they visit your website to find out more.
Have you ever considered how engaging and entertaining emojis and special characters are? Not only do they give your brand character, but they also increase audience engagement. However, every emoji should have a clear purpose. For example, if you are talking about animals, you may add their emojis instead of words. And, of course, make sure any special characters you use align with your brand. If you are not sure about the meaning of an emoji, look it up before using it, just to be safe.
All advertising strategies have one thing in common: powerful and clear CTAs. Treat the posts of your social media marketing strategy like separate campaigns by adding clear instructions on what people should do next. For instance, if you are posting about a new product release, you should encourage people to leave their comments or sign up for your newsletter for exclusive offers and gifts. On X, you should ask for reposts to boost your performance and increase visibility.
Social networking relies heavily on interacting with other brands, contributors, and influencers. You can promote or offer support to a business you admire, and they will most likely share your post with their following. Such a practice boosts your visibility and engagement since people from both sides leave their comments and like the posts. But don’t just mention anyone in your posts. Pick businesses and professionals you have common interests and target audiences with and believe they would appreciate your shoutout, unless they are a competitor. Even when you find your ideal mentions, don’t overdo it, as your efforts may be perceived as spam.
A social media plan can’t ignore hashtags when it comes to posting on various platforms. X, Instagram, and TikTok are particularly known for the heavy use of hashtags to boost post visibility. People often search on these platforms using hashtags. That’s why SaaS marketers should identify the most relevant and popular ones to include in their posts. Nevertheless, don’t just use hashtags just because they are trending if they have no correlation to your post. Sure, you may get more clicks, but it could rub your audience the wrong way. Also, understand the meaning of a hashtag before using it. Maybe it’s trending for a completely different reason than you may think, and you risk being associated with an inappropriate matter.
All social media platforms rely heavily on engaging visuals. In fact, posts that feature visuals get way more clicks and engagement than text-heavy posts. So, try using captivating photos, short videos, infographics, and animations to attract your audience’s attention. If you have your own graphic designers, try to create custom images. Alternatively, you may purchase stock photos and work on them to make them appear on-brand. Additionally, images should be bright and eye-grabbing, fitting the requirements of each platform. Don’t add too much text in the images themselves, as it may become hard to read. If you want to add more information, you can do so in your description.
How Do Social Media Algorithms Work?
Every social media platform has a unique algorithm with its own characteristics and peculiarities. That said, most of them share some similarities. One of those is that you get shown content that aligns with your likes and past viewing history. So, if you watch a cooking reel on Instagram, the algorithm will probably show you more similar reels that suit your preferences. Not to mention, it is pretty easy to go viral on most platforms. The more views and audience engagement a post has, the more it appears in searches. There is only one platform that differs in that area: LinkedIn modified its algorithm in 2023 so nothing can become viral. This decision was derived from the core fundamentals of the platform. The only way to get ranked highly is to produce high-quality and meaningful content people from your network enjoy consuming.
So, what signals do algorithms consider? User engagement, relevancy, timing, frequency, recency, profile authority, interactions, and location are all crucial factors. Let’s say you are on X and have followed a series of hashtags, one of which is “HR tech marketing.” On the Explore page, X’s algorithm suggests tweets including this hashtag as it deems them relevant to your interests. According to the company, their algorithm looks at over 500 million tweets daily to ensure you view only those relevant to your preferences.
How Can You Work The Algorithm?
So, how do you market your business on social media successfully? If you’ve heard of social SEO, it’s a good place to start. This is where you enrich your SEO skills with tactics that boost your profile on social media platforms. They are algorithms, too, and they usually favor accounts that incorporate relevant keywords in their post descriptions and alt texts on the images. In addition, you must identify your audience and their preferred content—people will keep scrolling once they deem your content irrelevant. And what time should you post? This is a decision you’ll make based on the location of your target audience and through experimentation. Keep testing different options and marketing solutions to see where the scale tips.
A good SaaS strategy is to focus on social media trends. You may use a social listening tool to identify burning topics in your field. But don’t overdo it, as you don’t want to turn into a news outlet. Moreover, posting short-form videos is a powerful social media tactic, as people consume them more easily. Pictures should still be at the top of your priorities, though, since more than half of the content on social media consists of still images.
Key Takeaway
When you are a newcomer in the intricate SaaS world, a well-crafted social media marketing strategy is part of your market penetration strategy, as it helps you reach your ideal customers and engage with them. Once you identify your target audience, their interests, and their pain points, you can set targeted goals connected to meaningful KPIs and metrics that help you track your marketing performance. Don’t forget to conduct a competitive analysis and extract SaaS marketing tips from your successful competitors. Then, it’s time to create captivating content and fill out your scheduling plan.
But how do you make the algorithm your best friend? It starts with the quality of your posts. Choose smart and catchy headlines, captions, and images people can’t help but notice. SEO and keyword analysis also play a crucial role in boosting your posts. Landing page optimization is also pivotal if you want to convert people who click on your URLs and turn them into paying customers. More importantly, it’s the visuals you incorporate. Short-form videos or long-form content? The answer varies depending on the channel. You have to go through trial and error until you get the perfect recipe that captures the audience’s interest and convinces them to add things to their carts.
