Tuesday, June 16, 2009

30 Tips for SaaS Companies Looking to Become More Social

Every SaaS company wants to become part of the giant social network, so I have put together a tip list.

**Some of these tips may be obvious to some and not so obvious to others. They are also in no particular order of importance**



1. Build a community/website
2. This community needs to be findable
3. Spend money up front on paid ads on all the major search engines
4. The goal is to get more organic searches
5. Get your company on Facebook and Twitter
6. Provide Live Chat BoldChat
7. Provide customer tutorials, ratings and reviews like Bazaarvoice
8. Provide industry white papers
9. Utilize landing pages as much as possible
10. Provide automated flash demos
11. Provide free trials
12. Provide case studies with hard ROI
13. Have third-party industry experts do webinars on best-practices, record them and put them on your site
14. Your website needs to talk about business challenges, not products and services
15. Build trust and credibility as an expert in the industry
16. Invest in a SFA solution like SF.com
17. Invest in a Marketing Automation solution like Eloqua
18. Have very targeted email campaigns
19. Do lead scoring (High Value Contacts vs. Low Value Contacts)
20. Track # of website visits
21. Track the popularity of all web content
22. Track form submittals
23. Track certain keyword searches
24. Build an Inside Sales Team (IST)
25. IST handles all the high-value contacts: hand holding them throughout the entire sales cycle, all low-value contacts remain in the marketing drip
26. IST should be able to offer up best practices advice and demo. It is imperative that they remain consultative
27. Nurture call all high-value contacts
28. Talk about business goals with your prospects not requirements
29. Be comfortable with the fact that buyers "will find you" in the Web 2.0 World
30. It’s all about social-networking….provide the social community and you will build a network of followers, prospects, customers and yes even a few enemies


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