• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 10, 2012

“Software-as-a-service” (SaaS) is playing an increasingly important role in social media marketing, and I’m not just saying that because the acronym resembles my last name, although that does help endear it to me. SaaS is important because it will help small and mid-sized advertisers to adopt social and mobile media marketing, which in turn will contribute to revenue growth, especially from local ad dollars.

On that note Votigo has released a new SaaS social marketing suite which enables marketers to run cross-channel promotions, manage conversations and social contacts and analyze metrics across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Web, and Mobile.

The suite’s promotions manager allows marketers to launch photo and video contests, sweepstakes, and other promotional apps (in multiple languages) across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks on mobile and the web. Meanwhile its conversation manager allows them to schedule and publish posts, links, photos and video and promotional campaigns to multiple channels, as well as manage responses, user-generated content, comments and other types of interactions with fans.

Votigo already has a number of big customers signed up for its social marketing platform, including Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Sony Online Entertainment, Kaiser-Permanente, National Cinemedia’s Fathom Events, Energizer, and GoPro. Customers have used the Votigo platform on behalf of clients including Ford, Fox, JBL, Random House.

By adopting a single SaaS package, companies composed of many local subsidiaries or franchises can maintain consistency and conformity in their marketing efforts, while still giving the local sales teams free rein to craft locally-relevant strategies.  Thus Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide uses Votigo to manage more than a thousand Facebook Pages for hotels and related properties, providing “a scalable solution that satisfies our corporate and legal team needs, while allowing our individual hotels the autonomy to create unique and engaging promotions,” according to Starwood global search and social media strategy lead Abbey Reider.

On the more modest end of the spectrum, the new Votigo SaaS social marketing suite also allows local advertisers to run limited campaigns, including promotions and marketing apps with budgets of $15 or less (implying I could run an ad campaign with the daily proceeds from my recent jury service).