Social media has changed the way we communicate today, whether it's on a personal level or on a business level. It is an essential channel for growing your business, so get active where your customers are and provide them with useful and engaging content. Be sure not to use it like a megaphone or opportunity for constant sales pitches - it must be a 2-way conversation. Use your buyer personas to determine which social media channels to concentrate on, put a strategy in place and reap the rewards.
"Nearly one-third of the world uses social networks regularly"
Source: eMarketer
The following are the top 7 reasons SaaS companies should use social media marketing, and with the right strategy in place, you can achieve them all.
1. Increased Brand Awareness
Putting your brand on Social Media and promoting it there will make your brand more visible and put you in front of a lot of potential customers that more traditional marketing methods cannot reach. Social media can help you find prospects and customers already talking about your business which you can then use to reach even more people. Publish useful, educational, high-quality content that your prospects and customers will want to read. If you do this regularly, then others will share your content which will further increase your visibility, and you will get more and more subscribers.
"Twitter is the top social platform for B2B brand mentions, with 73% of B2B brand mentions happening on the site.
Source: Brandwatch
2. Brand Loyalty
Out of sight, out of mind. By having a presence on social media, you are making it easier for customers to connect with you. Regularly engaging with them and continuing to educate and help them will help keep them loyal, and as a result, you should achieve much better customer retention rates. Loyal customers are also much more likely to recommend you to others.
3. Lead Generation
Most SaaS companies rely on traffic to their website. Social media provides a fast way to distribute your content and connect with potential leads while building your subscriber list. Publishing the right content at the right time will attract and engage prospects who are interested in what your brand has to offer and engage them. By posting campaign offers and blog posts on social media, you can direct traffic back to your website. If you have a content creation strategy around your personas and buyer's journey these leads should be high-quality ones that will have higher conversion rates as a result.
If you need some great tips on lead generation, check out our Lead Generation Tips and Tricks guide.
4. Higher Conversion Rates
When you regularly interact with your existing and potential customers, it allows them to get to know you helping increase the likelihood of conversions. As already mentioned above, if you are generating leads as a result of targeted campaigns and blogs, you will also achieve higher conversion rates.
Social media lead conversion rates are 13% higher than the average lead conversion rate.
Source: HubSpot via Struto.co
5. Increased Website Traffic & Better SEO
One of the biggest benefits of social media is using it to increase traffic to your website. For example, using social media to distribute your blog or special offers drives organic traffic and leads to your website. The more optimised, useful content you publish the higher your ranking will be and the higher you will show up on SERPs. This will increase the chances of you being found in search engines.
6. Valuable Customer Insights
It's critical for any type of business that you know your customers. Social Media provides a huge amount of information about your customers. You can learn who they are, what engages them, what they like, what they don't like, and how they feel about yours and other brands. This information is invaluable to any business, so take advantage of that and use Social Monitoring and Social Media Analytics and ensure you regularly review the data. By regularly reviewing this data, you can tweak your marketing strategy based on those insights to get the best results.
Also, remember to use this information not just for your marketing efforts but also for improving your product/service and other areas of your business, such as customer service, sales etc.
7. Customer Service
Many companies have moved towards using channels such as Twitter for customer service and support. It's a very easy way for customers to engage with your brand and get answers quickly to questions. It has the added benefit of enabling you to quickly communicate important information like outages and keep customers up to date on resolution which will decrease the volume of support tickets you have to deal with in these instances. You can see in the image below how DropBox do this (and also how they were early adopters of Social Media for customer service and support).
Just make sure that if you decide to go down the route of providing customer service/support via social media you put a strategy and resources in place that will enable you to always provide timely responses to your customers and answer all of the questions asked.
According to Hootsuite,
59% of Americans who have a social media account agree that customer service via social media has made it easier to get questions and concerns resolved.
So, in summary, if you are a SaaS or Software company, Social Media is definitely a marketing tactic you should consider. Use it to
- Increase Brand Awareness
- Develop Brand Loyalty
- Boost Lead Generation
- Drive Website Traffic
- Increase Conversion Rates
- Collect and Analyse Customer Insights
- Provide Customer Service and Support
It's a worthwhile investment for any SaaS company and, if done properly, will provide a great return on investment.
If you want to know more about how to create a Digital Marketing Campaign which utilises Social Media download our checklist below. If you follow these steps, you will be well on your way to achieving some of the benefits listed above.
If you want some advice on using social media or any other aspect of marketing, please contact us for a free consultation.
