Looking for a custom SMM solution for your SaaS suite? Learn how white-label SMM integration versus in-app development can help your enterprise rapidly scale SaaS revenue.
Social media management (SMM) is a booming industry, generating a staggering $207B in revenue in 2023.
And with the increasing need for businesses to have an online presence, SaaS companies want to tap into this lucrative market. We don’t blame them!
You may feel discouraged if you are a software provider looking to offer embedded social media tools. The costs can be high, and creating your own solution can be complex.
Many companies find that features like scheduling posts and creating content for social media are tools that customers want.
However, these companies often lack the time and resources to develop these tools, even though their customers or customers in adjacent markets would be willing to pay for them
This is a frustrating situation if you’ve identified a surefire growth opportunity but lack the resources or time (or both) to bring it to fruition.
This guide explains how a third-party embedded social media platform speeds up product development and generates revenue faster than starting a product from scratch.
We covered the operational benefits of building on your SaaS platform in our Beginner’s Guide to SaaS Software Integration, such as creating a competitive advantage and improving productivity and customer retention.
In this guide, we’ll turn our focus on the other business impacts that expanding your software suite has, so let’s dive in!
Most SaaS companies build on their product suite to attract customers from adjacent or complementary markets to scale revenue, which is a sound growth strategy.
This method of growth involves introducing new features that make sense for your current customers, increasing retention while providing compelling value to a new audience by addressing their pain points - such as a competitor’s price point or lack of scalability.
Social media is crucial for so many businesses but time-consuming to manage. This is becoming more prevalent as more and more businesses feel the need to create and maintain an online social presence.
However, most small and mid-sized businesses lack the bandwidth and skillset to move the needle on social media.
Coming up with ideas, scheduling content, and responding to messages - it’s quite literally a full-time job. This is why it’s usually one of the first things to be cut from most budgets, even though it is crucial for visibility and growth.
Expanding your software's capabilities to a true all-in-one solution can lock in customer loyalty and turn them into brand advocates. Failing to do so opens the door for competitors to steal the show.
Let’s suppose you run a software company providing best-in-class web analytics for marketing agencies serving local small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in the hospitality industry. To keep your costs low and your business nimble, you work with outside companies to develop your software.
Through research, you found an opportunity in this industry's lack of integrated and localized social media management. As a result, you decide to add embedded social media tools to your web analytics product suite.
Depending on your situation, you can pursue this opportunity by building these software tools from scratch or embedding them through a third-party platform. But which approach makes the most sense for rapid, scalable growth?
If you’re a mid-sized or large company with extra resources on hand, you might consider building your own solution for a number of reasons.
First, building your own software gives you greater control over features and customization. This can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the tool compared to a more generalized product.
This approach also allows for full brand integration and consistency with your existing ecosystem, creating a cohesive experience, as a third-party platform might not integrate as seamlessly as your in-house product.
Another benefit of developing your own platform is complete ownership of data and security. If you’re able to parse this information, you can gain crucial insights into customer behavior, features used, and other key information for future development.
A custom social media management tool can help you stand out by potentially offering unique features other tools do not.
However, there are significant obstacles preventing every company from developing SMM tools from scratch. Let’s explore them in conjunction with the benefits of integrating existing software next.
This is where the first major advantage of an embedded social media platform reveals itself.
It can cost between $25k to $100k to develop even a basic app, depending on the scope. On top of that, you’ll need to find or hire a team to build the project, which takes months or years - and on their time. This can be frustrating when you want your product launched yesterday.
Additionally, the initial development cost does not include the annual overhead associated with maintaining, updating, and upgrading a social media SaaS platform.
This is a major investment that takes time to earn back and may require a significant amount of planning and budgeting to justify the expense, leaving narrow margins for the product.
On the other hand, licensing and integrating an existing service costs a fraction of that and can be deployed in days or weeks through simple connections and inline frame (iframe) code in your software’s dashboard.
Licensed software also benefits from generous profit margins that can be set to suit your business’s and market’s needs. Just check out the ROI curve for a business developing its own app at this $25 - 100k development range versus licensing it.
As you can see, the returns are nearly immediate. And if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless personnel hours on the project - the barrier to exit is much lower, making it a safer investment.
Companies like Meta, Google, and TikTok continuously push out new features and updates, which customers want to access through their tools.
If you’re providing SMM services, you must keep up with the latest features to create and maintain a competitive advantage while managing your existing products.
It’s a full-time gig, trust us! Unfortunately, it isn’t particularly cheap or easy to find and retain the talented people required to make it all work.
An embedded social media platform, like Cloud Campaign, lets you affordably outsource product development and updates so you can focus on more important aspects of your business.
In fact, a leader in social media management for dental offices, realized that integrating a white-labeled version of Cloud Campaign into its suite was exponentially more cost-effective and discontinued its own tool, saving the business hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in development and upkeep.
As a result of integrating white-label SMM into their product, they could rapidly expand their business and currently serve a significant share of that market.
Another key advantage of plug-and-play SMM software is that it can be easily white-labeled (also known as rebranding) to blend seamlessly into your existing dashboard. Here’s an example of what this looks like in the wild.
Integrating a tested, trusted, ready-to-go platform prevents your users from experiencing the turbulence of releasing yet unproven software. As exciting as new tools are, your customers will remember a botched launch or faulty tool!
Additionally, you save yourself from the headache and cost of data security, infrastructure maintenance, and providing adequate server performance.
This also has the benefit of easy access through single sign-on (SSO) and keeping your users in one location, which, as we mentioned in our Beginner’s Guide to SaaS Integration, is crucial for productivity and retention.
Scalability and automation are at the core of Cloud Campaign’s award-winning feature set, but that isn’t the only way we help agencies scale.
We’ve made it incredibly fast and easy to white label and embed social media tools into most CRM dashboards, allowing you to provide best-in-class SMM tools in record time.
Additionally, you can choose which platform tool users can access with permission-based feature flags. This makes it easy for agencies to build focused or tier-based packages for their ideal audience.
For example, you could enable only Cloud Campaign’s content creation and scheduling tools for self-serve or low-cost customers that are more hands-off.
For mid-tier customers, you could provide access to data reports and direct inbox messaging. And for high-tier customers, you could unlock powerful features like AI-powered caption generation and pre-generated content packs - all at custom pricing plans of your choosing.
These are just a few of the possibilities for integrating Cloud Campaign into your product, thanks to our platform’s easy implementation, customization options, and affordable pricing.
Ready to bring social media management to your software suite? Reach out to our team at info@cloudcampaign.com to get started!
Cloud Campaign is an award-winning white-label social media management platform built with agency scalability and automation as its core.
The company’s mission to help marketing agencies scale extends from the platform to its pricing plans, customer service, and continuous support.
Cloud Campaign operates from its Boulder and Portland offices, serving thousands of marketing agencies, freelancers, and software resellers.
The company is committed to supporting the SMM community with resources, articles, webinars, and partnerships to help marketers thrive.
Click here to get started on a free two-week trial and see how white-labeling with Cloud Campaign can transform how you manage social media!
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