How to get SaaS-y on Social Media

Vijay Mandeep, Marketing Manager, CleverTap shares inputs on how can B2B brands leverage SaaS social media marketing to ace their digital game. 

The mobile workforce and its growing business outsourcing of software and services have bolstered the growth of the entire global SaaS market. According to Transparency Market Research, the SaaS market is expanding at a CAGR of 27.9%. However, the overall value of saas market is expected to reach $164.29 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 32.90%.

Many B2B SaaS companies fail to identify their ideal marketing mix and understand their core marketing goals. You need to start by creating an amalgamation of personas to characterize your brand identity. But before getting started, you need to frame these questions:

What’s our core business value?

What’s our position in the market?

Current problem statement?

It is always said that “Content is King!” Well, it is true. Content Marketing has to be on top of your marketing mix, rest all falls under the umbrella of it. Of course, just publishing your content is not enough, you need to promote it and explore various channels to amplify the reach to the target audience.

Social Media has always been the newest hat for B2b SaaS business with companies taking inspiration from HubSpot and Teamwork.

Think of the brands that are gaining on social media, the first 10 companies that come to mind are B2C (business to consumer). You hardly hear about an IT company crushing social media marketing on Twitter, or a B2B business that’s dominating Facebook. These types of businesses and companies do exist.

However, the problem is that they are in vast minority. But if one follows these strategies, then the minority can be turned in a decent majority.

9 Channels to toggle between to get your B2B game going

Facebook

If you head marketing for a B2B Software as a Service (SaaS) company, then you must’ve probably thought about running Facebook ads in order to grow users for your product. But you’re likely to face the constant challenge of scaling your Facebook ad campaigns to success and to constantly be coming up with newer ad creatives to test.

Facebook LeadGen Ads have been considered a great success in filling up your leads funnel by running ads for various content assets. Not only leads but also in terms of branding and generating traffic to your blogs. Facebook remarketing ads have also been a great way to retarget your website visitors and creating the brand connect on other channels. This helps in bringing the users back to your website and evaluating your product/service.

Twitter

Twitter has time and again proven to be a great channel for business-to-business companies to ply their products. If you haven’t tried this channel out then you’ve got to. Besides product launches and feature releases, high-tech SaaS companies have many other messages to communicate. From the latest trends in the industry to GDPR security updates and delivering industry thought leadership, SaaS companies use social media—and particularly Twitter—as a crucial channel to connect with clients and prospects.

Twitter for B2B SaaS industry is used widely to generate traffic to the blogs and website. It can easily spike your page views on the website but keep in mind with great traffic comes higher chances of increase in bounce rates. Keep in mind that Twitter is a live platform and the feed span is very limited. You got to tweet the right content at the right time.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business-centric social networking website. It can prove to be a great platform for bringing new clients to your business too. Known for its professional reach, this channel is by far the best for giving your marketing funnel the leads it demands. Be it organic or paid promotion, Linkedin has its way to reach the potential audience. Widely used by B2B SaaS companies the true potential of linkedin marketing solution is yet to be explored and tested.

• As s SaaS marketer, your LinkedIn marketing goals should include:
• Finding new connections and targeted customers
• Staying on top of your customers’ radar
• Nurture and grow your email marketing list
• Utilize Sponsored updates
• Always post high-quality/relevant content
• Participate in groups and stay active

Quora

Quora is a Q & A based social networking platform with millions of people from diversified demographics post and answer questions on daily basis. You can create a topic or pick a category related to your business and start following it. Answer as many questions possible that are related to your business. If you answer enough questions of users, the chances of spotting your profile are very high and are most likely to check out your website.

With Quora now rolling out analytics on how many people viewed your answers you can also measure the conversion rates. Edit your answer to see if it affects your upvotes and conversion in any way doing some simple math.

You can only run text ads on Quora, unlike other social media platforms. But the sanity of the leads from these ads is subjective.

GrowthHackers.com

According to Josh Helman, Growth Hacking is made of two components - Marketing and Technology. It’s all about rapidly experimenting various marketing channels, sales segments,  product development, and other vital areas of the business to quickly identify the best way to grow your business. One such platform is Growth Hackers by Sean Ellis.

GrowthHackers in a great platform for your content to reach a vast audience without even spending a dime. It acts more like a community of like-minded marketers. Here you’ll have to balance your knowledge sharing by giving valuable articles and asking appropriate growth marketing related questions. You can also participate in their AMA’s featuring industry experts, who answer questions related to their work and everything under the umbrella of growth hacking.

Growth Hub (Earlier Inbound.org)

Inbound.Org is similar to GrowthHackers.com but is senior in presence and occurrence. It’s a social news website completely dedicated to everything that’s related to digital/online marketing. It has over 260,000 active members. Here members can submit the most interesting and up-to-date industry news and decide which one really matters. The rules to this community are pretty much stiff, that not many are aware about and are moderated by moderators who approve your content. But the only hindrance with this channel is that it only accepts twitter to log-in.

While the founders have decided to shut down inbound.org, the essence of it will still live on, however, in the form of a new community platform called Growth Hub. It will have the same rules as inbound.org but with a newer layout and additional features.

SlideShare

After its acquisition by LinkedIn, Slideshare has drawn more attention than any other professional channels. It garners 60 million users globally - used by students, marketers, business owners, this channel makes its way into every marketer's arsenal. One can upload presentations, event decks, case studies, documents, infographics, etc. It also becomes a key way to promote your blogs via SlideShare and vice versa.

• Key strategies to enhance your Slideshare
• Create original content with targeted keywords on SlideShare
• Convert your blog posts into presentations and upload them to SlideShare
• Convert your videos into presentations and upload them to Slideshare.

Always upload a description to your Slideshare presentation as it might help you rank higher.

Pinterest

As B2B marketers, we understand the importance of identifying new channels where the potential buyers are present and when to grab their attention. Mostly underrated channel for B2B SaaS industry, Pinterest is catching up to the likes of us marketers. Pinterest helps in SEO in terms of both content and visuals. It also is considered one of the strongest channels to drive traffic to your website. While Pinterest's user base is continuously changing and more B2B companies start using this platform, the majority of users are still focused on personal boards/interests, but not professional ones. Hence there’s a lot of scope to explore and redo the way people use Pinterest for business.

Also Read: #Report Video budget to increase by 68%: Straightforward B2B Marketer’s Guide

YouTube

YouTube is a video hosting platform. It has a massive search engine which caters to several millions of queries on daily basis. It is usually termed as the most popular social media platform compared to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. YouTube enables you to create and maintain your very own channel where you can share company videos such as product explainer videos, product launch events, new feature updates, webinars, imperative tutorials, how to videos etc.

Unlike other social networking platforms, all the published posts remain for a very long time. Thus, making it the best channel for sending referral web traffic and generating leads in the long run.

Reddit

If you haven’t heard of Reddit then you haven’t done anything in marketing! Reddit attracts close to 5 billion page views monthly making it the number one community with such defying traffic. However, it’s a great source to put your word out on Reddit about your product/service but Reddit can also be a great place to advertise your product/service only if done right. The best way to advertising is not to be too sales oriented, but to use Reddit as a channel to effectively communicate with your customers or industry insiders.

However, it is not easy to get organic traffic to your website via Reddit. It takes time to build some time to build credibility on Reddit. Each subreddit has its own rules and policies which a Redditor has to abide by. But if built enough credibility and quality content shared rightly across subreddits, this channel will be your cash cow for organic traffic.

While there are different ways and channels that have huge potential to tap into but are limited to scope on searchability. Feel free to drop in your views and share your best B2B Saas-y marketing mix.