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How to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy for SaaS Companies

Social Media Strategy for SaaS Companies

The year is 2054. 

After abandoning planet Earth and settling on Mars, humans have forgotten how to speak to each other face-to-face, with social media becoming the only means of communication. 

Huh?

Ok, we may or may not have made up a fake futuristic scenario to make a point. And what is that point?

That social media has entirely transformed the way we communicate, share information, and market new solutions. 

So, it’s a no-brainer that nowadays, every company should be active on social media. 

Let’s dive into why SaaS companies need to use social media and explore how to build a winning strategy. 

Why SaaS businesses should use social media 

Not every SaaS business achieves direct sales via social media, but social media does influence buying.

B2B buyers use social media to gain greater confidence in their choices and to support their purchase decisions with management. Plus, based on a survey from the IDC, B2B buyers that are most active on social media are more senior, have bigger budgets, and make more purchase decisions. 

In other words, social media should be a powerful part of your top-of-funnel marketing strategy. 

What exactly do we mean by top-of-funnel? Glad you asked!

The top-of-the-funnel refers to the very early stages of the buyer journey when customers are seeking information about how to solve their pain points

From interesting blog articles to testimonials, videos, interviews, and other marketing content, social media users consume endless amounts of business information every day. So, the goal of your social media strategy should be to plant a seed about your company in your prospect’s mind that will eventually create a strong enough connection to make them buy. 

But content marketing and social proof is only part of it. It turns out that social media advertising can also be a powerful lead generation tool. 

Keeping this in mind, let’s understand the differences between paid advertising and organic (free) content, and how you should use them in your social media strategy.‍

Understanding paid campaigns vs. organic social content 

As a B2B SaaS company, your social media publications aim to position you as an expert in your field, showcase your product and its capabilities, and build trust in order to ensure better lead conversion. 

And as we mentioned before, your social media campaigns can either be paid or organic. 

Organic social media is any social media activity without a paid component to boost views or actions. 

This includes posts about new features, blog articles, user testimonials, press articles mentioning your company, interviews, tips, fun content, and even staff updates. When it comes to what you can publish organically, sky’s the limit. 

On the other hand, paid social campaigns are posts that you pay to promote. You can boost posts for awareness (like videos or blog articles) or create direct ads with the immediate goal of generating leads. 

For the latter option, AKA direct advertising, the best practice is to include a call to action (CTA) in every paid (or sponsored) post, such as an invitation to schedule a demo or a request to sign up for a free trial. 

We won’t get into the nitty gritty of every promoting option—like increasing followers on a page, generating video views, or increasing link clicks—but you get the main idea: You pay to achieve a certain result. 

Not sure which method to use? Here’s a list of benefits for organic and paid social media: 

Benefits of organic social media 

1. Price: Organic posts are free. 

2. Customer relationship: Social media channels help you manage your customer relationships. You can reply to any complaints and compliments in real-time.

3. Monitoring: Through your social media, you can collect feedback about your product and brand easily. You can also monitor what your competitors are doing. 

4. Community building: Social media is one of the most powerful tools to build a community with your customers. 

5. Authority and brand building: The content you share with your followers helps you convey your brand identity and position your company as an authority in your field. 

6. Employer branding: By sharing staff pictures and company events, you can showcase your office culture and attract new hires. 

7. Trust building: You can use user-generated content to build trust in your brand. It can be reviews, testimonials, or interviews with your users. 

Benefits of paid social media 

Investing in paid social media can help you reach a much wider audience.

In addition, paid social media is: 

1. Targeted: You can define the exact audience you want to target according to relevant parameters: location, age, profession, company size, interest, etc. 

2. Cost efficient: In most cases, you only pay for the action you define as your goal: leads, clicks, views, engagement, etc. 

3. Insightful: You can collect detailed analytics about your campaigns to optimize your marketing. 

4. Precise (retargeting): You can retarget people according to their past actions like visiting your social accounts, website, and more. But we’ll talk more about this later on. 

How to build a winning social media strategy 

You’re convinced that it’s time to start building your social media strategy. 

Alright, alright, alright!

But remember, it’s essential to have this strategy in place before you launch your SaaS business. 

So, let’s break down everything you need to do during each stage of your SaaS product launch to create a winning social media strategy.

Before you launch

You should start your social media campaign before your launch, but preferably after you have developed a minimum viable product (MVP). 

In the weeks and months leading up to a SaaS product launch, spend your time establishing a network, determining your tone, and fine-tuning your marketing messages. 

Decide which channels to use

There are many social media channels you can use to promote your business

And although the exact channels you use will depend on where your target audience is, many marketing teams consider LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Quora, and Reddit to be the preferred channels for SaaS social media marketing. 

LinkedIn

Ready to get down to business? Well, that’s exactly what LinkedIn is for. 

LinkedIn is focused on business professionals and can target display ads to reach prospects based on job title or industry. It’s also a great social network to share professional knowledge and position key stakeholders at your company as thought leaders. 

Facebook

Facebook is the most used social media platform in the last decade. 

A mix of business-specific and customer-orientated content makes it easy to reach large numbers of prospective clients. 

Instagram

Picture or it didn’t happen! 

Instagram isn’t the obvious choice for SaaS businesses. However, it has excellent marketing capabilities and can be helpful when building up an audience. 

That said, most B2B companies will usually use it to show the “behind the scenes” of their office for employer branding purposes. 

Twitter

Twitter is about news and conversations. You can take advantage of competitor or prospects’ posts to start a meaningful conversation or offer an alternative view. 

On top of this, you can create hashtags (or use existing ones) around common pain points that you solve and become more discoverable. 

Walnut's Twitter post

YouTube 

Lights, camera, action!

YouTube is a great channel that can showcase what you do using informative or marketing videos. 

Quora 

You can set up Quora to monitor topics and industries related to your business and your prospects. 

Look out for any questions relevant to your business posted on the site. You can respond and showcase your experience and expertise on a topic. It’s also a great way to start interacting with potential customers. 

Reddit

Although it’s not super common among B2B SaaS marketers, Reddit can be a super helpful platform to monitor conversations that are happening within your industry.

Not only can you use Reddit to share valuable content, but you can also join subreddits that are related to your target audience. This can help you solidify your brand’s authority and help you build trust with prospects. 

Do some research 

Do some research on social media to get inspired by other companies and understand what your competitors are doing. 

You also need to find out which platforms your audience is active on.

What would you like to change? What would you want to keep? Write down notes that you’ll be able to use when you start to create your content. 

Pick your assets

Once you’ve done your research, you need to start thinking about the different kinds of content that fit your brand and that your followers will enjoy. It can be: 

(Click to see an example)

1. Blog articles

2. Memes

3. Interviews of industry experts 

4. Tips 

5. Customer testimonials 

6. PR releases & announcements

7. Polls 

8. Quotes

9. Stats 

10. Company life posts 

11. Company milestones

12. Holiday posts

13. Product updates

14. Marketing videos

15. Webinars and live Q&A sessions 

16. Checklists, ebooks & white-papers 

17. Funny pictures you make using Canva

Once you pick your content types, it will be much easier to create a social media calendar. 

Create a social calendar

Now, it’s time to create a weekly calendar. 

To do this, you’ll need to decide what kind of content you’d like to post each day and on which network. 

But you don’t want to have boring channels with the same kind of content every day. 

In addition, you should think ahead of important dates like holidays, celebrations, special days, and events that you’d like to jump on—Women’s Day, Halloween, April Fools Day, etc. Pick the ones that are relevant to your brand. 

Walnut's holiday post

During the launch phase 

It’s launch time!

Here are a few best practices to make sure your SaaS product launch is successful. 

Open your channels 

Now that you’ve picked the channels you want to use, it’s time to open them to everyone. 

Make sure to create a short bio conveying your message, design a cover and profile picture for each of your accounts, and fill out the relevant information the different social platforms will require from you. 

Don’t hesitate to invite friends and contacts to start building your community! Most platforms offer you this option automatically. 

But this is only the first step of building your network. 

Build networks and audiences

Taking part in meetups and online forums connected to your target audiences and industries can go a long way towards raising awareness about your brand and solution. 

Start posting news, infographics, thought leadership articles, and other content relevant to your company in LinkedIn groups, on Facebook, or via other channels. 

Create some buzz

You’ve laid the groundwork. Now, you have to make a splash!

Create buzz about the new product you are bringing to the market. In SaaS, it’s always better to show than to tell. 

It’s a good idea to create short videos of new features as they roll out and demonstrate how your product will solve pain points for specific industries. You can combine some good PR and apply on Product Hunt to ensure you make maximum noise. 

Start advertising 

Start building audiences and advertise your product directly to them. 

This will not only help you bring leads, but also allow you to learn about their preferences. 

Optimize messages and formats

Social media is an excellent gauge for your marketing messages. 

Always test your messages and track which posts, images, infographics, and topics resonate best with different audiences. 

Once you know which messages and formats deliver the best results, use these insights to make continuous improvements to your content. 

Post-launch

You’ve checked “launch product” off of your to-do list. But there’s still more work to do when it comes to building your social media strategy. 

After you’ve launched your product, you’ll have more insight into your audiences. So, use your newly acquired knowledge to tailor and refine your social media content. 

Retain, educate, and entertain

You can use social media to keep your solution front and center for existing users and potential customers. 

One way to do this is to share tips and tricks to make the most of your product. It’s also important to share thought leadership articles to start meaningful conversations. 

On top of this, keep the discussion open with your followers to understand how they feel about your brand and product. 

Make prospects identify with your brand 

Now that you’ve collected enough feedback and insights during the launch phase, it’s time to use this information to your benefit. 

What problems do your customers face? How can the solution you are proposing solve them? 

Point out how your SaaS product can help them resolve their issues in ads, blogs, and social media posts. 

More than that, once you’ve understood your typical customer profile, you can create more content that they would identify with. 

If they’re marketers, design posts about wider marketers’ pains. The more they’ll identify with your brand, the easier it will be for you to build a relationship. 

Walnut's meme

Create and promote social proof

Once you’ve launched and started signing customers, compile and promote testimonials and case studies on your social media channels. 

Remember to tag companies and decision-makers featured in your testimonials. 

Why? Because tagging others will help you reach similar companies and your decision-makers’ networks.

Remarket your visitors

We’re all familiar with the concept of marketing. But what the heck is remarketing?

Remarketing or retargeting is an effective complement to inbound marketing techniques that shows targeted ads to people that have already visited a site or social network. 

How does this process work? Well, a snippet of code is used to place a cookie in the user’s browser once they’ve visited your site. The cookie informs your remarketing platform to serve specific display ads based on the actions they’ve taken on your site.

One of the benefits of remarketing is that it can help bring back customers that didn’t sign up for a free trial or book a demo. 

And most social networks offer a remarketing pixel so that you can serve targeted ads to visitors that have left your site. So, use this to remind them to come back for more information, a special offer, or an appointment. 

As for what type of content you’ll need, you can remarket web visitors with posts promoting product tours, blogs, and infographics. And don’t forget to always add a call to action that includes an invitation to request a demo. 

Bonus tip: Drive leads to product tours

Product tours are another way of keeping your existing and prospective clients intrigued and engaged. Create detailed product tours that explain how your product can address your customers’ pain points. 

Embed these tours on a landing page on your website and use social media to drive prospects to try them. 

This is a great way to warm leads for the sales team since they already experienced your product.

And again, learn and optimize 

The beautiful thing about the internet is that you can constantly collect insights and data. 

This way, you’re able to make sure to constantly optimize your content and improve your social media strategy.  

Other ways to enhance your SaaS sales strategy

Your social media presence has two main goals: generate leads and make them feel connected to your company. 

Or in other words, bring new prospects while ensuring they trust— and love—your product and brand. 

There is no shortcut;  it requires a lot of work and learning. 

But even if you are able to boost your social media presence using these tips, your work is by no means complete. 

You need to make sure that you can turn followers into paying customers. And one way to do this is by using a demo platform (like Walnut) to create interactive and personalized product demos. 

The bottom line is that while social media can help you spread the word about your product and brand, the end goal is really to convert the leads to clients. And that’s exactly what a demo platform (Walnut) will enable you to do. 

FAQs

What are the different types of social media? 

There are several different types of social media: traditional social media networks, social review sites, sites for sharing images and videos, discussion forums, interactive media, and community building sites.

What is a social media content strategy? 

In short, a social media content strategy is a plan of action that outlines how you and your team will post on different social media platforms. It also defines how you’ll interact and engage with your audience. 

What are the steps involved in creating a successful social media strategy?

To build a winning social media strategy, you’ll need to research your audience, pick your assets, create a social media calendar, choose your social media networks, open your channels, build up your networks and audience, generate buzz, advertise, optimize your messages and formats, retain followers, promote social proof, and remarket website visitors. 

How do you write a social media strategy proposal?

There are five steps involved when it comes to writing a social media strategy proposal. 

1. Set both business and social media targets or goals.

2. Research the target audience. 

3. Get to know the competition. 

4. Take note of the current social media presence and look for ways to make improvements.

5. Start writing the proposal! 

Ready to start using Walnut? Click the “Get Started” button at the top of your screen. 

Create demos your prospects will love today.

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