Veronica Green-Gott — May 23, 2019 — May 23, 2019
If you’ve spent any time at all on any social media platform, chances are you’ve been the target of a paid social advertisement. These ads vary in format per platform but range from native ads ingrained in your feed to sideline text ads. Social media platforms have a huge number of users, all of whom give out certain pieces of information about themselves, including location, job, age, gender, interests and more. This wide variety of important data is what makes paid social for SaaS so important.
Before we really dig in: yes— SaaS providers should be on social. Social media is for everyone. With just over 3 billion users predicted by 2021, your audience is on a social platform. It’s just a matter of picking the right one. Once you’ve chosen the best platform for you, paid social for SaaS can offer you several benefits.
Increase Conversions
How’s your website’s conversion rate? Even if you have thousands of users in traffic, if your website can’t provide you with conversions, then you have a problem. Luckily, paid social for SaaS can help you out.
While different social platforms offer different types of ad formats and objectives, most platforms offer lead conversions as an option. This type of ad directs users to a landing page for a whitepaper download or other type of conversion offer. By using carefully crafted ad content and writing a great landing page, you can increase your conversions.
Highlighting a landing page using paid social for SaaS directs more traffic to the page and uses a different medium to get them there than PPC or the website alone. If you’ve carefully cultivated an interactive and engaging social platform, you can often cultivate more trust between your company and potential customers than through the website alone. Because of this, social media users may be more likely to convert than your average website traffic.
Grow Your Social Profiles
How successful are your social profiles? If you’re starting from a scratch on a brand-new platform, it can be difficult to build up a following and take years to do. Paid social for SaaS is one way to speed up the process.
Many social platforms offer a follower campaign. Instead of your typical advertisement which directs a user off of the platform, these ads bring a user to your social profile instead. These ads truly show the juxtaposition of organic and paid content. While the paid content is needed to expand your audience and bring new attention to your profile, the organic content is what truly converts a viewer into a follower.
It’s important to have great organic content and an active profile for a follower campaign to work.
Generate Brand Awareness
If you’re a small company, most likely one of your challenges is generating brand awareness. If you asked someone in your target audience if they knew your company, what would they say? Yes? Or no?
Paid social for SaaS is a great way to boost your brand awareness. Less expensive platforms, like Twitter, can allow your ad to reach a large number of people for pennies. If you craft a great advertisement, you can encourage viewers to either click through to your social profile or website.
To truly grow your brand awareness, you need to target the appropriate audience. Social ads have pretty targeted filters to find the exact audience your company needs. LinkedIn has the most filtering options, but the other platforms also allow you to narrow in your audience until you target your demographic. When you’re generating brand awareness, keep your audience slightly broader than you would for a conversion campaign. You want to reach a large number of people that could be interested in your company.
Bring in Website Traffic
Social media provides you with several options for increasing your website traffic. If your profile is set up appropriately, one of the main buttons should bring users back to your website. Some portion of your organic content should also bring anyone who clicks back to your website. High-quality blog content can be very useful when it comes to this type of organic post.
However, you can also optimize a paid social for SaaS campaign to bring more traffic to your website. When choosing an objective, be sure to select “website visits” or “website traffic” so that the campaign manager provides you with the right statistics and optimizes your campaign based on the appropriate objective.
Most website traffic campaigns drive users to a landing page. However, you can also drive users to a blog or homepage. Be sure that wherever you send users it provides them with value. For this reason, I would discourage you from directing them purely to the homepage. Typically, a blog or whitepaper is best.
Interact with New Audiences
If you rely on purely organic content, you’re most likely reaching only 2 percent of your audience. Let’s put that in context, if you have 1000 followers, you’re most likely only reaching 20 people on a regular basis. That’s tiny compared to your number of followers.
Paid social for SaaS can help you interact with portions of your audience that you haven’t been able to engage with on a regular basis. If you want to attract new audience members you can target beyond your followers. But if you want to re-engage followers beyond your typical reach, you can target your own already-existing followers as well.
Paid social for SaaS can have huge benefits both on and off social media. But you need great organic content, high-quality landing pages, and outstanding advertisements to get the most out of your investment.
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