Introduction

Due to its cloud characteristics and reasonably low cost, software as a service, or SAAS, is gaining speed and acceptance among enterprises operating in a variety of industries.
Although SAAS is well-liked by users, software developers and marketers find it very challenging to create and promote SAAS applications.
There are two causes for this. One is that software developers need to come up with creative and original ways to include a feature or features that provide their product an advantage over rivals.
The feature they propose must be cheap, and ideally it should cost less than the market price, which presents them with still another problem. The second concern is to marketers, who frequently find themselves in a battle with customers and ad platforms.
However, social media marketing continues to be a popular option despite the significant challenges marketers face when marketing SAAS enterprises.
Read this article if you want to promote your SAAS company on social media sites and grow your clientele and revenue.
The four sections of this manual are introduction, growing reach, before and after launch.


Prior to releasing your SAAS product

Marketing and engineering teams should meet and discuss their respective needs throughout the pre-launch phase. To develop a clever and successful marketing plan, marketers should have a thorough understanding of the product.
Identify your target market.

1- Define your Targeted Audience

To get better results, speak with consumers of rivals’ SAAS software and ask them about the problems they have when using their current SAAS software. Then, try to fix the problems in your product.
For instance, Netflix used Facebook, Instagram, twitter and other platforms to survey its audience before launching its vitalized platform to learn about their video streaming preferences and how much they would be willing to pay for a subscription that gave them access to millions of films and television shows from around the world.
They had the chance to gather names and email addresses of potential consumers through the questionnaires.
To their amazement, almost 75% of respondents said yes, and by the time Netflix debuted in 2013, it had added more than 30 million customers in a single year.

2- List the most important social media channels

Although the adage “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is true, social media is an exception.
Since social media advertising isn’t inexpensive, you’ll need to do your homework to choose the social media platform that will best market your SAAS business and allow you to easily advertise there.
Its a fact that YouTube is a video-streaming website with over 2 billion subscribers, Netflix, for example, uses it to market itself.

This provided it the chance to broaden its reach and present its material to a global audience.

3- Create anticipation for the launch

By maintaining an active social media presence, engaging in paid collaborations with social media influencers, and building your profile on niche websites like Quora, Reddit, and others, you may pique the interest and curiosity of your target market before officially introducing your product.
The secret to a successful social media campaign is to provide very little information in the most inventive ways. Way to do this is to write less and refocus the post on your website.
Additionally, bear in mind the following advice when creating a pre-launch interest:

• What issue does my SAAS solution address?
• How useful would the user find this solution?
• How can I adopt a creative consumer strategy?

See how Funnel-CRM not only positioned their product as a contemporary world answer to an old age problem but also made the creative appealing and catchy enough to capture your attention. Funnel CRM is a well-known CRM Software for organizations.

4- Establish a following for your merchandise.

By setting up a Facebook page, group, or email list, or both, create a community of devoted customers and promote your goods there.
Promote your goods locally, but refrain from giving it free completely. You could provide both monetary and non-monetary incentives in this community, such as a discount, lifetime access to the SAAS product for unbelievably low prices, or rewards for the first fifty sign-ups, etc.
Maintaining specific records and lists of possible leads and early sign-ups, and turning them into ardent supporters, is another approach to assess your community.
The initial sign-ups are your most valuable assets, so you must remember to handle them with extra consideration.
Additionally, the initial signups can make a great alpha testing group.

Following the SAAS Product Launch

Once the product is released, your marketing strategy will evolve to focus more on expanding the scope and reach of your offering.

1-     Begin publishing content

There are no secrets to keep or things to conceal once your product has been released. However, your current task is to inform the audience about your product and its features. However, the most crucial thing is to persuade them to convert to your goods.
You should emphasize the following features of your product while doing so:
• Its attributes
• What is it used for?
• What brand-new features does your product provide?
• Why should consumers choose your product?

You should now actively participate in posting to social media and promoting your material. The goal is to explain your product’s features and educate the consumer about it.
The greater the likelihood that the audience will comprehend it, the greater their interest in it will be
We already know how actively Ahrefs uses social media to market and promote their SEO SAAS product.
They have always done a remarkable job at enticing the user with their content, whether it be through YouTube videos, blog posts that are promoted on Facebook and LinkedIn, or accidental clicks that show off their office’s culture.
Let’s examine their behaviour this time, though, since they’ve just released a new component of their product, Ahrefs Webmaster Tool.
It is, in essence, a free tool that enables you to dig up valuable data to monitor and gauge the overall operation of your website. What’s intriguing, though, is how they used multiple social media sites to advertise this new function.

Ahrefs spread word of the announcement wherever they could. Here is everything that has appeared on various well-known social media platforms since the introduction of their new feature;

• They produced a comprehensive tutorial and posted it to YouTube, insta, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• They directly marketed their tool on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
This is how it should be done for your SAAS company as well; completely intrusively.

• Examine various content formats

It is getting harder to identify which social media platform will be best for your goods as more individuals use a variety of social media platforms.
It is therefore best to advertise your product across all platforms. Diversifying your content advertising strategies might be an efficient strategy to engage the audience, nonetheless.
Instead of sticking to one niche of content, you should try as many different things as you can.
To increase the accessibility of your information, try incorporating photos, infographics, data graphs, podcasts, videos, and audio recordings. This is crucial because different people process and comprehend information differently.
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Therefore, you must experiment with the different types of content if you want to make sure that your company reaches a broad audience.
The content types listed below can be helpful:
• Written postings (include or exclude images)
Short/long videos, links to external content, detailed infographics

• Collaborate with influencers on social media

Influencers abound on social media, particularly Instagram, but only a small number of them are techno-influencers.
Finding social media influencers that are respectable, trustworthy, and knowledgeable about technology, its applications, your product, and your company will thus be your largest problem when working with them.
There are, however, a few pointers and strategies for locating and working with social media influencers.
• Use tools like Google, Quora, and Trendspotter to research significant influencers in your sector, then get in touch with them.
• On social media sites like Instagram, Linked or Twitter, look up a few hashtags related to the nature of your SAAS product. Then investigate the posts that surface and assess their profiles to determine if they meet the criteria for influencer status.
• Take a look at the influencers pushing the SAAS products of your competitors. Even if you aren’t interested in working together, you might discover a large network of influencers you can contact.

• Interact with Your Followers and Respond to Them.

Once you have a customer base and active communities centred around your SAAS product, you must continuously respond to them.
Along with responding to messages, emails, and comments, you should also post frequently and keep an active social media presence. An engaged audience will be able to gauge your social media activity and will utilise it to contact you if they have any issue.
Additionally, your audience and some social networking sites, like Facebook, grade you based on how quickly you respond; the quicker the reaction, the higher the rating.
42% of consumers want a response within an hour, and 32 percent expect one within a half-hour, according to Jay Baer, the creator of Convince & Convert, a website that focuses in digital marketing.
Take Slidebean, a software programme for producing startup pitch desks and presentations.
They do something that is extraordinary for a YouTube channel with 174K followers, in addition to creating excellent quality and highly instructive videos related to their field. Every single comment left on their videos receives a response.
Not only that, but occasionally they actually reply specifically to the comment, which increases its value for the commenter.
He emphasizes that speed of response is crucial in the digital market because it improves client perception.
Additionally, if a consumer has a negative experience with your business and leaves a negative internet review, the news will spread quickly, giving your rivals some rotten meat to chew.
As a result, it is imperative for your business to promptly address client comments.
Your product has to be expanded upon once it has been introduced and established.

Expanding the Audience of Your SAAS Product

You’ve introduced a fantastic product to the market, and your company is developing steadily toward sustainability. That is the precise moment to scale your company and go after those enormous numbers.
This is the procedure.

1- Spend money on advertising.

Use the paid advertising as much as you can because it has a big impact.
Paid advertisements on social media not only expand the reach of your company but also help you gain clicks.
The algorithms of these platforms assist you when you pay to publicise your material on social media. For instance, Facebook and Instagram show your product to the people in your target market.
For instance, Facebook periodically modifies its algorithms to scale up and give its users relevant material depending on their searches. As a result, the reach of organic posts for branded pages has dropped by 40%.
According to data from AdWeek, the typical branded Facebook post only reaches 2.6 percent of the audience that the business is trying to attract, which means that almost 97 percent of the brand’s followers won’t see the post.
And Facebook isn’t the only place it exists. The majority of social media sites will limit or have already reduced organic reach on their network. Although certain platforms still offer outstanding promise, unless you invest in paid advertising for your SAAS firm, that potential might never fully materialise.
Exactly for this reason, even if they already have substantial social media followings, several large SAAS businesses, including Hubspot and Ahrefs, continue to invest in sponsored advertisements for either the direct promotion of their content or products.
You can target your customers using the following platforms to run advertising for brand awareness or conversions: Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Pinterest Ads, and Twitter Ads.
Facebook’s Pixel and Retargeting capabilities can be incredibly useful when discussing scaling through social media marketing. In fact, by using the identical strategies, we recently produced an 800 percent Return-on-Investment and a 350 percent increase in revenue for a fitness apparel firm.
Case Study: A Clothing Brand’s Use of Social Media for Marketing (350 percent More Revenue)
These strategies, when used effectively, can benefit SAAS companies as well.

2- Frequently Promote Discount Offers

Provide us with discount offers on your social media pages, and designate one day as a discount day to better understand your community.
On national holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, provide special discounts. It is best if you provide a seven-day or a month-long free trial in order to evaluate more customers and identify future users. There is a free trial option for Netflix, and roughly 47% of consumers continued using the service after the trial period had expired.
So, if Netflix’s free trial marketing strategy is effective, you ought to give it a shot as well.

3-     Spend money on viral marketing.

Nowadays, the majority of trends are created when something become popular online and You may have your SAAS product go viral all over the internet, just like the Kiki Challenge and Baby Shark regularly go viral on social media.
The only factor in viral marketing is innovation. The idea must be presented in a way that encourages sharing. These are the advantages of viral marketing:
• It expands the market for your company.
If your company becomes popular online, it will go everywhere. The majority of individuals worldwide have access to the internet, which is necessary for viral marketing to succeed. Therefore, if your viral campaign launches in Chicago, someone in New Zealand can view it and place an order.
• It is quite affordable.
• It lends legitimacy to your company.

You only need to make the advertisement once, then wait for it to become viral. Once it does, you don’t need to spend a tonne of money on it.
People will believe that something is legitimate when there is so much buzz about it and everyone is talking (sharing) about it, which will lend credibility to your company.
How exactly a SAAS startup approach viral marketing should is the question. The key to making content viral is creativity. Let’s utilise HipChat as an example, which formerly offered tools for video calling, file storage, group conversations, and one-on-one communication.
Their CEO somehow managed to obtain an inexpensive billboard ad at 101 North in the San Francisco Bay area for a few weeks a few years ago when they were just starting their marketing. He had a brilliant concept that had the potential to go viral because he knew he would never again have the opportunity to run a billboard advertisement this cheaply.
But why, in the first place, does a SAAS company spend money on billboards? Well, it was a subterfuge for them to advertise on social media.
HipChat’s CEO chose the Y-U-No character from the Rage comic for the advertisement, which cost $7K.
The outcomes?
Images of the billboard advertisement went popular on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr.
The volume of people searching on their website jumped by 300%.

You’re undoubtedly wondering how an increase in website traffic might be obtained from a billboard advertisement.
Well, the entire episode was covered by numerous well-known publications, including TechCrunch, and this allowed for an internet-wide search of them. They forced others to research them.
They generated a tremendous amount of discussion online with only one astute move.

4-     Work with an established digital agency

Digital and social media marketing is a specialty of digital agencies. Therefore, you must make an investment in a digital agency if your SAAS firm is significant to you.
We are aware that most people, especially start-ups, believe digital agencies to be quite expensive, but in the long run, they are worthwhile investments that will yield a significantly higher long-term return on investment (ROI) than if you were to forgo them.
Digital agencies are skilled professionals in marketing who understand how, when, and who to target when launching your SAAS company.
Consider it this way: even if your idea is brilliant, it won’t help you financially if it doesn’t succeed, thus you must work with a reputable digital firm to make sure your company is successful.
Asking yourself the following questions should come before you employ a digital marketing company:
• What standards does your business follow?
You should consider what you want the marketing agency to do for you. Do you wish to market your goods or have a website designed? Once your goals are clear, you may identify agencies that will help you achieve them.
• How is the agency structured?
The correct sign to do business with an agency is if it can manage its operations successfully utilising the “right” advertising technologies.
• Has the agency ever collaborated with a SAAS company?
Although there are many digital marketing organisations out there, relatively few of them work with SAAS companies as clients.
As a result, you must be sure to pick a company from your shortlist that has experience working with SAAS businesses.
You won’t have to go into dig deep with them about your requirements and expectations, which will make things easier for you as their prior experience will help them develop an efficient marketing strategy for your company.
Our team of performance-driven social media marketers at Connect Digital has produced some outstanding results for our SAAS business clients. For you to fully understand why we take delight in referring to ourselves as “Performance Driven,” have a look at a few case examples.

Few Case Studies

• Marketing Services for an App Similar to Uber (26 percent More Rides)
• Using social media to market CRM software (187 percent More Sign-Ups)
• Utilizing social media to market a MarketPlace product (166 percent More Transactions)

Conclusion

You must use social media to advertise your SAAS company since it has enormous potential that has yet to be realised.
Second, social media marketing is a reasonably inexpensive way to promote your content when compared to electronic and print media, especially if your firm is just getting off the ground.
Additionally, since the majority of your (possible) clients will be social media users, social media marketing is ideal for your SAAS firm.