Beginner’s guide to SaaS social media marketing

When it comes to B2B SaaS marketing strategy, we often hear people make the statement, “Social media is for B2C,” or ask, “Why would we use social media? Only millennials use that.” 

However, these opinions couldn’t be more wrong. Social media marketing is an essential part of your B2B SaaS digital marketing strategy, and here’s why:

“Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. In 2021, over 4.26 billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to almost six billion in 2027.” 

- Statista, 2022.

With businesses shifting their marketing efforts online and the digital world moving at an accelerated pace, the last thing you’d want to be is left behind. 

From LinkedIn to Twitter, there are many different social media platforms and ways to leverage them. It can be overwhelming for CEOs, CMOs, or founders of B2B SaaS companies who are just starting out on their social media journeys, but luckily for you, we do this every day.

Let’s get started. 

Why use social media marketing in B2B SaaS?

Social media has leveled the playing field when it comes to marketing for all businesses either through free organic or paid social initiatives.

No longer are businesses limited to billboards, tv advertising or subjected to big spend to market their products. 

Social media marketing is essentially another means of advertising your products and services. It’s also another form of content creation because you gain the opportunity to surpass one-to-one relationships and instead cultivate one-to-many ones.  

Leveraging social media gives you a platform to reinforce your other marketing efforts and extend your content’s reach to a broad audience. This means B2B social media allows you to build brand awareness, making it familiar and accessible to your prospects, partners, and customers. 

With social media marketing, you can:

• Build trust with your ideal customer persona and become thought leaders in your industry
• Build a community of engaged advocates and users of your software
• Drive organic (or paid) social traffic to your website
• Increase your software’s visibility to new audiences and markets
• Drive inbound and outbound marketing campaigns
• Engage and interact with your audience and prospects
• Partner with niche influencers and thought leaders
• Raise awareness around your SaaS product(s)
• Use social media as a storefront 
• Explain how you use your SaaS product
• And so much more! 

Beyond that, social media is a lucrative place to build connections, talk to industry thought leaders, and form relationships with your peers. 

Here are three primary reasons why people use social media:

1. Forming connections and networking

Social media has lowered the barriers to communication by allowing people to network and connect with new people. From commenting on posts to instant messaging, this approach to communication lets you reach out to those active on social instantly. Wherever you are.

2. Staying informed and educated

People use social media to stay informed, learn new ways of doing things or stay up to date on trending topics of discussion. As a B2B business leveraging social media marketing, this allows you to create valuable and relevant content to your audience’s pain, fear, and dreams. 

3. Being entertained and engaged

People are drawn to information and ideas they can relate to emotionally. They want to be entertained and consume information in different ways. Whether you’re sharing infographics, gifs, images, polls, and more,B2B social media marketing makes it possible to produce other content formats so your audience always has something fresh to look at.

Getting started with SaaS social media marketing

When starting off with your B2B SaaS company's social media marketing, it’s essential to gain a real understanding of your company’s OKRs, goals and ideal customer profile. You’ll need to do some research here. 

For those of you new to social media marketing, there are two kinds: organic and paid social. 

Organic social media marketing

Organic social is the purpose of sharing free content on social media platforms to your followers, groups and potential prospects.

Below is an example of organic social content posted on our LinkedIn account: 

In general, the goals of organic social media are to:

1. Build brand awareness by establishing your company's brand, voice, and tone. 
2. Engage and support customers and your particular industry's social community across the various stages of your buyer's journey.
3. Educate your audience by sharing customer-centric content that entertains, informs, and connects with others.

Posts can include memes, stories, gifs, videos, photos, carousels, hashtags, and more.

The key value of organic content marketing is that it's free and intentional. Rather than paying for eyeballs on LinkedIn and paid social platforms that may not care about your content, a routine of posting consistent, high-quality, and relevant social media content for your ideal customer profile (ICP) builds a network of engaged advocates. 

In turn, organic social media marketing drives brand awareness, resonance, trust, and engagement that snowballs over time. 

If you're looking for more inspiration for organic social posts, check out our blog on "5 ideas for highly engaging B2B SaaS LinkedIn posts."

Paid social media marketing

Paid social is the purpose of providing monetary means to social platforms to increase your posts' visibility to a targeted audience who fit your ideal customer profile or persona. Here's an example of paid social media ads from Funnel: 

You can "boost" your content or run paid advertising on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. The purpose of paid social is to:

1. Build brand awareness and attract new audiences by targeting a distinct set of groups of people.
2. Generate leads and demand by leveraging paid advertising.
3. Share and promote new content, events, and products.

Unlike organic, paid social media marketing enables you to target specific locations that fit your Ideal customer profile. 

But what does this all mean for CEOs, Founders, and CMOs of B2B SaaS Startups? 

Both organic and paid social have their key benefits that can be useful for your B2B SaaS startup. Consider marrying both efforts to gain traction on your social media platform. 

While paid social provides quick wins, organic social is the long-term strategy to leverage, and as we know: Organic isn’t dead. 

Pro tip: For B2B SaaS companies with small marketing teams, consider focusing your organic and paid social media marketing efforts on one platform as you start. This will allow you to establish your presence and set a good rhythm before venturing off into another.

How to get started with SaaS social media marketing

1. LinkedIn as your go-to B2B SaaS social media platform

If you’re planning your SaaS social media marketing strategy for the first time, LinkedIn is a great place to start. 

With more than 630 million monthly active members, it’s a centralized network where  B2B marketers can connect with and provide value for leaders, influencers, and decision-makers in real-time. 

Here are some fun stats surrounding LinkedIn and buyer insights:

• 76% of buyers are ready to have sales conversations on social media
• 62% of B2B customers respond to salespeople who connect by sharing content and insights that are relevant to the buyer
• 81% of buyers are more likely to engage with brands that have a strong, cohesive, professional social media presence
• 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level executives consult social media before purchasing decisions. 

LinkedIn has become the powerhouse for B2B SaaS marketing for organic and paid social purposes. Setting your profile up for the right target audience is just the first step. 

2. Audit your current LinkedIn business pages

It’s easy to talk about yourself, your products, or your services, but you should do more than that. Suppose people use social media to inform, entertain, and connect. Should you be shouting about your product in a sea where there’s more valuable content to your end-user? 

Before you start building out your social calendar, perform a health check on your current LinkedIn business page. 

Consider the following when doing your first social audit.

Your public company profile

Your business page needs to meet SEO best practices and creative ones alike. While using specific keywords helps increase your page’s visibility across the internet, your profile’s aesthetics and tone entice people to see more. 

As you audit your company’s profile page, ask yourself if the following best practices are on your LinkedIn company profile:

• Your name refers to the name of your brand’s website
• Your URL is unique to your name and brand
• Your profile represents your industry accurately
• Your company’s description is filled out, uses the same message from your B2B SaaS positioning and messaging framework, and holds relevant keywords for your ICP
• Your specialties section is filled out with relevant keywords (services you provide)
• Your logo and cover image are on brand, high resolution, and speak to your services
• Your CTA button leads to your website

Your B2B SaaS products page

A relatively new service, LinkedIn’s products page provides options for B2B platform and software-based companies with a page to showcase their solutions. This is an excellent opportunity for bottom-of-funnel marketing and improving your products’ visibility on social media. 

If you don’t have a LinkedIn Products page, consider making one for your SaaS offerings with support from your product marketing manager.  When creating the page, consider the following:

• Include keywords in your product description to increase the page’s visibility
• Add a product logo or your company’s logo (if none exists)
• Be specific with your product category
• Include your personas job titles in the product user category
• Use videos or images of your product (short video tutorials are better)
• Add customers that use your product for further social proof

LinkedIn analytics data

When auditing your business page, make sure to check out your analytics dashboard. When reviewing these, benchmark and monitor the following Social Media KPIs: 

Visitor data

• What types of profiles regularly visit your LinkedIn page? 
• Where are your visitors located? 
• What industry are your visitors in? 
• What is their level of seniority? 
• Are they viewing with mobile or desktop devices? 
• How many page views are you receiving? 
• Which device is mostly used by your audience?

Follower data

• Which month did we receive the highest amount of new followers, and what led to that increase? 

Engagement data

• Which post received the highest amount of engagement? CTR? What format was this post? 
• Which hashtags received the highest number of impressions?

If you don’t have a LinkedIn business page, consider checking LinkedIn to see if you can claim a page. If not, get started on creating one.

Happy social media marketing! 

As social media goes, this is an excellent starting point to level up your SaaS company’s profile.

At Kalungi, we believe B2B SaaS social media marketing strategy, execution, and monitoring are essential to a healthy, holistic buyer’s journey. Make sure your funnel doesn’t have any gaps with our comprehensive marketing audit.