Social media is a given for most B2C businesses. But what about B2B SaaS companies?
Here are the top questions we hear the most from SaaS businesses considering investing in social media marketing:
- “What’s the value of social media for my business?”
- “What type of content should I share on social media”
- “How do I know which social platforms to target”
- “How can I work with influencers to promote my business?”
And our all-time favorite:
- “How do I justify my social media investment?”
Now, we too are a B2B company and we know too well how hard social media can be for businesses like ours.
This is why we decided to explore the topic a bit more to share tips and expert advice on how to make the best out of social media for SaaS Companies.
In this blog post, you’ll learn about 3 things that all SaaS businesses should do right now on social media. Having said that, I can only recommend that you download our Comprehensive Guide to Social Media Management for SaaS Businesses to get the complete picture.
So, you are on social media – Yey!
Now what?
Everybody says “your brand needs to be” on social media. But what does this actually mean for your business?
3 marketing tactics empowered by social media
On the one hand, social media platforms make it difficult for brands to control their own image, on the other – they are fantastic tools to learn from and communicate with one’s audience.
Listen to your audience and market
Before social media, one of the few ways businesses could learn about their audience was to invest a LOT of time and resources in sending out surveys and conducting polls. Nowadays, while you can still employ these techniques, listening to your audience online can deliver a lot more insights, for a lot less.
One of the best things about using social media to learn about your audience is that people give unsolicited opinions. They speak their mind and share their thoughts candidly. This is the key to help businesses learn about themselves. They get to analyze their audience’s challenges and aspirations without having to ask them directly or serve them time-consuming surveys and polls.
What’s more, we strongly believe here at Mention that you can only learn if you listen.
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
― Ernest Hemingway
Sadly, a lot of marketing professionals like the sound of their own voice too much, and thus miss out on what is really important. To truly listen to what is being said about your brand, you need to take a holistic approach:
“Listening to everything that’s happening around your brand — that encompasses your services, products, employees, and stakeholders, but also your competition, thought leaders and market trends — will give you invaluable market insight and, therefore, a significant advantage.“
—Sandra Chung, Head of Content & Partnerships @Mention
Here are the most common questions you can find answers to with social media listening:
- Where is your target audience located?
- Which social platforms do they use the most?
- What topics is your target audience talking about the most? What business challenges do they encounter?
- How can you help overcome them?
- What is your audience saying about your brand?
- What can you improve based on what they are saying?
- What is your target audience saying about your competitors?
- What are the latest market trends and how can you leverage them?
- Who are the influencers in your market?
Share content with your audience
Once you know where your audiences are and what keeps them up at night, you can start sharing content that is relevant to them.
This can be:
- Product updates
- Blog posts
- Industry news
- Corporate news
- Fun facts
- Newsjacking
What matters is that you only share what matches your audience’s interests. If something is only of interest to you, it won’t be valuable to them.
Interact with your audience
Social media is a two-way street and you need to be interacting with your audience.
Interaction – noun – ˌɪn.təˈræk.ʃən
An occasion when two or more people or things communicate with or react to each other.
—Cambridge Dictionary.
An IAB study (2013) revealed that 90% of consumers are likely to buy from a brand following a positive interaction on social media. Having regular interaction with your audience will have multiple beneficial effects on your business including:
- Build an emotional connection: you don’t buy a SaaS product the same way you buy a hot dog. One potentially requires hours of reflection and negotiation, while the other one is mostly based on impulse. Having positive and regular interaction on social media with potential clients will put you on their radar and contribute to building long-lasting relationships with them.
- Enable long-term collaborations: one of the first reasons SaaS customers churn is the lack of quality interaction with a business. If this shouldn’t replace premium email or phone support, interacting with your users and clients on social media – may it be to answer questions or talk about the weather – will contribute to reducing churn.
- Be seen as a thought leader: lastly, interacting with your community on social media will show that you care. Be helpful, transparent and respond promptly, and you will score precious online reputation points.
This is only the beginning
Those 3 actions are only scratching the surface of a vast world of opportunities for all SaaS businesses. The only condition to succeed is to do things the right way.
To learn more, and in particular, from successful companies like Adobe, Slack and Nord VPN, download the Guide to Social Media Management for SaaS Businesses.