Maximising Reach: 7 Effective SaaS Social Media Strategies

Social media is part of your SaaS Marketing strategy…

… but it’s not (or it shouldn’t be) the strategy itself. Social media can be a critical tool in the way you deliver the content you create to promote your SaaS product. It can be essential in building your community. It can do a brilliant job of shining a spotlight on specific features and benefits of your product. But for every SaaS business, there should be more to the marketing strategy than just social media. Here’s why:

Because not all your potential customers are on social media (although most are)
Because, unless you spread your content across every platform, they may not be on the same social media platforms as you
Because showcasing all that your SaaS product has to offer requires more room to breathe than a single (or series of) social posts
Because potential customers shift across a range of media – and you need to engage across all of them

As a consequence of the above, you’ll need a website which can serve as the content hub on which all your services, package prices, guides and FAQs live. You’ll want to retarget leads that visit your site or social via paid ads (on Google or social). You might want to send an occasional, direct, personal email.

We explore a more rounded approach to content marketing for SaaS companies here.

Having said all of that, there’s no escaping the fact that done right, social media can have an immensely powerful effect on the marketing of your SaaS business. So in this post, we’ll explore some strategies for building and engaging your social community.

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Let’s not start at the beginning

For the sake of brevity, we’ll assume you’re familiar with what social media is, the various platforms available to you, and the sort of material a SaaS company might typically post to social platforms.

If that last paragraph has you shaking your head, can we suggest you spend a little time on LinkedIn, X, TikTok etc, exploring the different ways SaaS companies ‘do’ social media. They won’t necessarily be right for you but they will give you a broad-brush picture of what some of the strategies we explore below look like when you turn them into posts.

Effective social media strategies for your SaaS product

1. Let your audience in on your product’s development

You could wait for your product to reach launch stage before you start to build your social media presence. But if you do that, you’re starting from scratch at a point when…

You need customers immediately
Social accounts need time to grow; and
Your average SaaS product takes between six and eighteen months to shift a customer from first discovery to ‘sign me up’

Instead, invite your followers on your journey. Show them your ambitions, your solutions and ‘workings out’. Better still, ask them to contribute. Build a committed group of followers now and you’ll be able to survey them about the features that should or should not be part of the product. You’ll be able to ask them to test it. And when it finally launches, you’ll have an inbuilt pool of evangelists to not only buy it but champion it for you.

2. Build your personal brand

There’s the business. There’s the product. And then there’s the person behind the business and product. As a marketing tactic, leveraging your personal brand to the benefit of your SaaS business can be enormously valuable if you’re the sort of original thinker who finds that a) you appear to have a different take on the industry compared to your peers (which leads you to say things that provoke comment and challenge convention) and b) when you speak, people listen.

This approach isn’t for everyone. Lots of business leaders are content to sit in the background and let their products speak for themselves. But for someone with lots to say and a compelling way of articulating it, a speech, article, video or podcast “by YOUR NAME, founder of PRODUCT” can help drive interest in you and your business.

For proof, consider this: according to HubSpot Social Selling, “92% of B2B customers are willing to engage with sales reps who have positioned themselves as an industry thought leader. This credibility is often attained by posting regularly to social media.”

3. Work with influencers and affiliates

We’ve just been exploring how you might market your SaaS product by leveraging your own growing influence within the industry. But what happens if you’re the sort of person who would rather not be the social media figurehead of the business?

One alternative is to work with someone who has already walked that path to becoming an ‘influencer’ (we’re putting that word in inverted commas to distinguish them from the people who unbox trainers on YouTube and then tell you how much you need them).

These influencers are leaders in the SaaS sector, people who will understand the mission you’re on, the product you’ve developed and the customers you’re aiming to attract.

The aim here is to put yourself on the radar of SaaS leaders who already front their own podcasts or video channels, the people who’ve blog posts you read when you were initially learning how to launch a SaaS business. These people will already have connections with huge social media communities.

You can either interact with them in their capacity as an influencer — that is, you place your product and story in front of them and hope that it grabs their attention and gains some traction.

Or you can invite them to be an affiliate, which gives them a commission for the sales they generate. Unsurprisingly, this is likely to grab their attention a little quicker than simply hoping they are sufficiently impressed by your product to give you a mention.

Influencers work. A study by Dell found, “More than 70% of B2B purchase decision makers use influencers’ posts on social media to make decisions.”

4. Give something away to a carefully targeted audience

Virtually every social platform gives you a smorgasbord of tools to target your preferred audience. It’s important that you take advantage of those tools because the better you can target, the better the results will be.

But what should you target that audience with?

You might naturally assume a discount is the answer, perhaps a free month’s subscription to your product or similar, but unless your audience is ready to buy that’s unlikely to prove successful.

For an audience still exploring you and your product, our suggestion would be something of genuine value that enhances your credibility within the industry and which your audience could repeatedly use as a referral tool. Consider a checklist, a template, or a decision making tool that makes their life a little easier and which keeps your brand in mind whenever they use it.

5. Go bitesize with video

There’s still power in the longform blog post, but not everyone is going to engage with something that takes time to digest.

A 20-second TikTok video, on the other hand, lets you showcase a single feature in a quick, visual burst. Create a series of them, and you’ve got something that’s perfect for grabbing the attention of a Gen Z audience.

6. Lead with culture

Something we’re often asked is how do you approach the marketing of your SaaS product when, despite its quality and capability, you don’t have an exciting media ‘hook’ that can make it stand out in a crowded market.

One potential way of addressing this problem is to focus on the part of your business that really is unique: your people. It’s true that, just as there’s not always a great deal to separate one company’s product from another, the same can be said about their culture. On the face of it, one diverse, inclusive, innovative SaaS company may look a lot like the next.

But how you do it. How you engage your community. How you champion the knowledge of your expert team. And how you showcase new features, client case studies, or charitable giving are all social media-friendly ways of distinguishing you from everyone else.

7. Retarget via ads

We’ve already noted that it’s unlikely anyone will buy your SaaS product on impulse. That’s not a reflection on your product or you. It’s just that when you’re buying something so involved, so feature-packed and which potentially requires you to throw out something you invested in only a few years ago, you’re going to want to research it, think about it and take your time committing to it.

Retargeting puts you back in front of people who’ve engaged with your content and gives them another nudge to buy. You’ll no doubt be familiar with retargeting in the Google Ads you see, but retargeting via social media ads can be just as effective and tends to be a little cheaper.

Want to explore these (and other) techniques for marketing your SaaS product on social media? Talk to us.

Written by:

Lee Jackson

Mastering B2B SaaS Lead Generation: 7 Strategies That Work