The market of SaaS (software as a service) has been experiencing a rapid growth in terms of revenue from 2012 [statista] and is expected to continue growing even more during 2016. That’s some good news if you are operating on the SaaS field. Well, at least partially. Because besides the growth of almost every field of the SaaS industry, each and every one of them involves tough competition. Furthermore, the products of a SaaS company do not have physical presence and entire market fields use to evolve and change frequently.
So, in order to get top place of the market and stay there, having just a good service is not enough. It is widely known that SaaS marketing is the hardest type of marketing because for the strategy to succeed, you should be really good in two things.
The first important factor is to have every aspect your business connected and optimized. And I mean everything! Your product, your support team and your Marketing team should be fully aligned with each other. Your product should be awesome and designed to successfully solve the pain points of the market you are operating to stand out of the competition. Successful SaaS offer services that their customers will love and they do that by knowing and solving their biggest problems in the best way. Your Marketing team should do its job fast, cost efficiently and well planned. Your support team should be flawless because the majority of your customers will not return back to you if they receive poor support experience.
Provided that the aspects mentioned above are fully optimized and integrated with each other, it is time for the second important factor: Information!
Being constantly informed about what is going on on your industry will provide you with the assets you need to take advantage of any opportunity and prevent negative situations with dissatisfied customers. Your potential customers are out there, in any blogpost with SaaS reviews, in any conversation on social media about software services etc. By being aware of where and when those actions take place will give you the ability to engage and make the most out of them. But how you will know about all these if you do not listen?
This is the reason that brand monitoring should be a vital part of the online marketing stragegy of any SaaS. Below, we will see a real example about what can be achieved by monitoring your SaaS.
A real world example
We picked a random SaaS business to showcase an example use: Wrike is a SaaS that specializes at the project management solutions. They are already well known and have a strong online presence. However, some of their main competitors, Nifty, Basecamp and Asana are enjoying the same publicity as well. In order for Wrike to maintain and improve its position in the market, it could take advantage of brand monitoring so that it will not only have a successful online presence, but also to be able to control it.
By utilizing brand monitoring, your SaaS can:
1. Keep a close eye on your competition
Because it will be able to monitor every online action you perform. That will give it the opportunity to see what your competitors are up to, and try to compete with them in the channels they engage. In this way, you will never be left behind the competition as you will be informed as soon as they start a new online action.
Summary of competitor (Basecamp’s) mentions for a selected period of time
Actual competitor (Basecamp) Web mentions
2. Take Control of mentions to your brand
By doing that, the company will know what is being mentioned about you, prevent negative situations from dissatisfying customers, find web and social media evangelists and form partnerships with bloggers and journalists.
This is very different from the @mentions you can easily track on Social Media, since a Social Listening tool will detect mentions that don’t necessarily have the @ prefix, which otherwise would be very difficult to detect manually.
Your Mentions from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Web and other sources.
Top “Mentioners” and Influencers on Facebook and Twitter.
3. Monitor your entire target Market for signals
Monitor your entire field of operation (in this example, using the phrase: Project Management Tools) and get valuable leads which can help the company see what is needed for its service and with whom it can form future partnerships. Using this method, you can find what users discuss most when they refer to Project Management Tools.
With this you can discover your problems and pain-points of existing software and even straight-forward questions asking for recommendation on which software to use, where you can jump right in and you might even get a direct sale.
Potential customers in need of a Project Management tool. Twitter’s sharing thoughts about project management tools.
Bloggers posting about Project Management tools
4. Find which content is more engaging on Social Media Networks.
Monitoring your brand especially on social media will give you the ability to see what people like to talk about, share and where they like to do these actions. Social media monitoring is very important because it creates a path which you can communicate directly with your customers and potential customers. Knowing where all the discussions are taking place and which of them create more engagement will give you the upper hand regarding your social media strategy.
You can easily detect which tweets are more engaging, i.e. with more likes and shares. You can then join the conversation or contact the author as a key influencer.
Ordering of Web articles by engagement, in order to find more Social-shared content. You can then for example use their comments section to notify them about your solution or contact the author for partnership opportunities.
Small and new SaaS companies
All the aforementioned advantages are even more important if you have a new SaaS company. Your product could be great, but in contrast to the larger players that are already in your market, you probably lack the budget, people and experience to start your marketing efforts efficiently. It is an undisputed pain point of all new SaaS startups, how to ignite their marketing and sales engines.
This is why I strongly believe that a Social Media Monitoring tool is an absolutely required asset for your SaaS marketing strategy. Using a tool like that you will be able to discover what is behind the digital marketing strategy of the experienced market leaders you compete with. You won’t have to reinvent the wheel, it will be right in front of your eyes and you will just need to adapt it to your specific needs.
Conclusion
Social Media Monitoring and Listening used to be an expensive sport up till a couple of years ago, in which you should either develop your own solution or go for the enterprise solutions with a monthly cost of hundreds to thousands of dollars. This is very different now, as there are great available solutions, with very flexible pricing plans, starting as low as $29 a month. They also have Trial plans, in which I recommend you to try and actually see what these can do for you and find out which actually suits you best.
You can try our solution, Mentionlytics, for free here, but a search for Social Media Monitoring on the web can bring you more alternative to choose from. There are also some free tools you can try, such as Social Mention and Google Alerts. As you will see however, if you put them head-to-head with even the more affordable solutions is that their results are very limited, so I would not recommend them for serious work but hey, it’s even these are a start!
So don’t lose these opportunities to the competition, try Social Media Monitoring now and see what it actually can do for you, I am sure you won’t be disappointed!
Gather and analyze all Web & Social mentions of your brand
Mentionlytics works 24/7 and scans for pages and users mentioning your brand and your competitors. Get Share of Voice, Sentiment Analysis, Influencers and many other reports automatically.
