Marketing through social media [Ashley & Tuten, 2015] has changed the way that businesses market their products and services. Towards analyzing the effectiveness of social media marketing, several tools are available to help monitoring the brand or product presence on social media platforms and the web [Smith, 2012]. Monitoring on social media becomes a great way for businesses to get ahead of their competitors, engage as many customers as possible and deploy an efficient marketing plan for further business development.
More Effective SaaS Marketing
Social media monitoring becomes also vital for Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses that provide their services through the web, towards leveraging their presence on social media networks and building a strong brand presence, as well as applying an effective SaaS marketing strategy [Battles, 2016]. Platforms such as Mentionlytics, Brandwatch, Mention, etc play an important role towards this direction, enabling for the development of an effective marketing plan, which can be exploited by SaaS businesses and services. These allow the tracking of conversations, detection of possible customers, leads or key influencers, thus helping a SaaS business to interact with them and build a positive image.
This will further foster better relationships with the customers, leading to more loyal followers and SaaS brand evangelists. It can also enable for the creation of a SaaS marketing plan template, which can be exploited for alternative SaaS digital marketing purposes. For example, Mentionlytics, as a SaaS marketing tool, also enables to understand problems with customers, as well as identify negative issues that they might have with specific functionality of products or services. This helps to come up with a different customer support service or change your SaaS content marketing strategy [Holliman & Rowley, 2014]. In this direction, businesses can detect several problems, update their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), change their SaaS marketing platforms or differentiate their SaaS inbound marketing approaches with a better SaaS marketing automation.
SaaS Marketing Metrics
Monitoring of specific SaaS marketing metrics enables marketers detecting what is mentioned about the business, who mentions it, how often it is mentioned, in which location it is mentioned and on which social media platforms, forums, web sites, blogs, comments etc.
Getting knowledge on what is mentioned (and with which sentiment: positive or negative mentions), marketers may reallocate their SaaS marketing budget and choose alternative SaaS marketing companies for their digital advertising targets. They can also improve their SaaS marketing funnel approach, by leveraging topic insights in a way to come up with optimized content or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies [Sanchís, 2014].
In this direction, Mentionlytics features intelligent functionalities, towards helping SaaS businesses to take good care of their social media channels, by following fundamental SaaS marketing essentials. It allows a SaaS business to monitor multiple networks and profiles via a single and usable dashboard, enabling marketers, as well as specialized marketing agents to execute smart campaigns through alternative channels and evaluate their performance.
Timing is everything
Timing is critical, when adopting social media for such campaigns, especially if the reaction from a customer is negative or a complaint. The time of reaction is also vital, towards building a positive brand image. By adopting intelligent social media monitoring, various problems that customers experience may be timely solved, when they use a SaaS tool. Then, such problems may be redirected to the related internal team (e.g. web development team) of the SaaS business to release an optimized version of the provided service/product. Monitoring of the positive or negative comments of the SaaS product, enables to get additional input from the users and improve it to effectively suit the expectations and requirements of the targeted audience.
Boosting your SaaS sales
An additional use of a social media monitoring tool is for actually boosting the sales of a SaaS product. Your sales agent can detect conversations that may indicate the intention of a user to subscribe to your service or your competitors. You can use general keywords referring to the market you are targeting into and engage yourself in conversations with perspective clients, perhaps give them a special offer or a demo, or make them feel special and increase your brand’s equity for them.
Keep your enemies closer
A very interesting functionality of Social Listening systems is for keeping track of your Competitors. You can monitor the competitors’ behavior and their users’ comments on social media and the web. There are so many opportunities to be extracted from this functionality. You can detect their shortcomings from the actual users’ perspective and make sure you address them in your solutions. You can also see their marketing efforts at the minute they are performing them and act accordingly. Especially if you are a new SaaS company trying to find your way through this market, this could be a life-changing seminar on what the experts in the field do and how they act.
Human resources
A SaaS business can also be benefited, in terms of human resources, when adopting the tracking of mentions and extracting important insights via a social media monitoring tool. Human resources managers may detect key experts for specific positions, as well as influencers for effective marketing purposes and further SaaS business development.
Conclusion
In a general context, social media monitoring becomes vital for an effective SaaS marketing strategy and efficient business development. It can provide insights related to every area of a SaaS business, towards improving users’ interaction with the company and building a positive brand name on social media and the web.
References:
[1] C. Ashley, T. Tuten, “Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory study of branded social content and consumer engagement”, Psychology & Marketing Journal, Wiley, vol.32, no.1, January 2015, pp. 15-27.
[2] A. Smith, “Social Media Monitoring. Share This: The Social Media”, Handbook for PR Professionals, 2012.
[3] R. Battles, “SaaS Marketing Essentials: The Ultimate Guide to Launching and Growing Your SaaS Application”, 2016.
[4] G. Holliman, J. Rowley, “Business to business digital content marketing: marketers’ perceptions of best practice”, Journal of research in interactive marketing, vol. 8, no. 4, Oct. 2014, pp.269-293.
[5] E. S. Sanchís, “Search Engine Ranking: A SEO Strategy”, In Strategies in E-Business, Springer, 2014, pp. 91-103.
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