How to Get Business for Software Company – Starting a new business might sound exciting at the beginning, but it may also prove to be very difficult in many aspects. There are various challenges that you will have to face in order to make your software company work.
If you are looking for ideas on how to start a software application company, then this article aims at answering your questions in detail.
- Ask for referrals. Referrals are one of the best ways to get new customers—but if you sit back and wait for your current customers to refer their friends and family members to you, you could be waiting a long time. Take charge by implementing a system for actively soliciting referrals from your satisfied customers. Build referral-generating activity into the sales process. For example, send a follow-up email asking for a referral after a customer has received their order from your e-commerce site. Have your B2B salespeople ask for referrals when they follow up with customers to answer questions after the sale.
2. Network. Generate good old-fashioned word-of-mouth by participating in networking organizations and events relevant to your industry and your customers. Be sure to approach networking with the attitude, “How can I help others?” rather than “What’s in it for me?” By thinking about how you be of service, you’ll build relationships that lead to new customers.
3. Offer discounts and incentives for new customers only. Introductory offers, such as a two-week course at your karate studio for $100, can lure curious customers in your door by providing a low-risk way to try your products or services. Track which customers redeem the special offer, then target them with marketing message encouraging and enticing them to keep buying from you.
4. Re-contact old customers. Everything old can be new again—including old customers who haven’t done business with you in a while. Go through your customer contacts on a regular basis and, after six months or a year without an interaction or purchase, reach out to dormant customers with a special offer via email, direct mail or phone. They’ll be glad you remembered them and want to win them back.
5. Improve your website. These days, consumers and B2B buyers alike find new businesses primarily by searching online. That means your website has to do some heavy lifting to attract new customers. Give your website a once-over to make sure that the design, content, graphics and SEO are up-to-date. If this isn’t your strong suit, it’s worth enlisting the services of a website design company and/or SEO expert to help.
6. Partner with complementary businesses. Team up with businesses that have a similar customer base, but aren’t directly competitive, and strategize how you can target each other’s customers to drive new business to each other. For example, a maternity clothing website and a baby products website could pair up to offer discounts and deals to each other’s customers.
7. Promote your expertise. Generate interest—and new customers—by publicizing your expertise in your industry. Participating in industry panel discussions or online webinars, speaking at industry events or to groups your target customers belong to, or holding educational sessions or workshops will impress potential new customers with your subject expertise.
8. Use online reviews to your advantage. Does your business get online reviews from customers? Cultivate your reviews and make the most of them. Link to reviews on your website and post signage in your location urging customers to check you out on Yelp (or wherever the reviews are). Social proof is powerful, and new customers are more likely to give your business a try if they see others praising it.
9. Participate in community events. All else being equal, most people like to support independent businesses in their communities. Raise your profile in your community by taking part in charity events and organizations. Sponsor a local fun run, organize a holiday “toys for kids” donation, or supply a Little League team in your city with equipment. It gets your name out there, which helps bring in new customers.
10. Bring a friend. Offer 2-for-1, “buy one, get one free” or “bring a friend” deals to get your “regulars” to introduce new customers to your business. For instance, a restaurant could offer a “buy one entrée, get a second for free” special to attract more customers. You can even get specific: “Invite a friend to try our new happy hour specials!” to let customers know you’re looking to introduce your business to a wider customer base.
Table of Contents
4 Steps for Developing a Quality Marketing Strategy for Software Companies
It isn’t enough to get a few placements in a trade publication to achieve maximum brand exposure. A good marketing strategy for software companies requires a multi-platform approach backed by an experienced, talented team that can turn the spotlight toward your company and products.
- Tell your brand’s unique, personal story. Too many tech companies make the mistake of giving in to overly technical jargon in their communications. While you need to explain exactly what your software offers, don’t forget to personalize your marketing efforts. Tell the story of how your software has changed businesses for the better. Also, weigh in on broader conversations in your industry to establish yourself as a thought leader.
- Understand who is buying your product. When it comes to software, the buyer journey isn’t always obvious (especially for B2B companies) because the user isn’t necessarily the one making purchasing decisions. A marketing strategy for software companies might target buyers, users, purchase influencers and even the C-suite. You need to develop thorough, accurate buyer personas that guide your web design and digital marketing process to ensure you’re reaching the people who actually make buying decisions.
- Invest in social media for the long run. It’s easy to build a Facebook page, but it’s harder to master the platform. You need to commit to investing time and money in your social strategy. While many companies quickly dole out social media responsibilities to part-time interns, use an experienced, talented communicator that can effectively represent your brand.
- Employ a steady, consistent SEO strategy. Like social media, SEO is not necessarily a quick and easy endeavor. A robust online presence comes gradually. Don’t abandon your SEO efforts if you don’t see immediate effects. To get real results, you need consistent keyword research and shareable content that will cement your website as an information hub and boost rankings on search engines.
Alternative
. Identify A Specific Niche To Target
The most important thing that you can do when advertising a software company is picking a very specific niche to go after.
It’s very true that your product may serve many markets, but the fact is, specificity sells, generality doesn’t.
The biggest mistake most startups make is that they target too broadly, and as a result appeal to nobody.
For example, if you offer HR software, you’re far better to specifically target the IT industry and offer HR software for IT Companies rather than simply marketing yourself as HR software.
By choosing a very specific niche to target, this allows you to create content specific and relevant to that Industry, rather than creating more general content that appeals to nobody.
It’s far easier for a bootstrapped startup to dominate a smaller market than it is to go into a larger market and compete with well-funded competitors.
Have A Content Strategy
Produce as much content as you possibly can that solves problems that your target market is facing.
By producing regular content, this gives you an evergreen strategy to drive traffic to your website without the continual need of paid advertising.
Every blog post you produce gives you the possibility of SEO rankings within Google which again is an evergreen strategy to drive traffic to your site.
You also need great content to encourage prospects that are not yet ready to buy to return to your site to consume more content in the future.
The reality is most prospects will not buy the first time they come into contact with your product or service, they need repeated exposure to your brand.
If you are continually producing great quality content, this keeps giving those prospects reasons to continually return to your website until they are ready to purchase.
Answer Questions On Quora
One of the best ways to drive traffic to your SAAS startup is by answering questions on Quora.
By answering 5 to 10 questions per day, it’s possible to easily drive hundreds of visits per week to your website which may cost thousands of dollars if you were using a paid traffic strategy.
Quora is also a great way to find topics to create content around.
Simply go to Quora and type in questions that would be relevant to a user of your software and see which questions come up.
Then create a blog post that answers that question and respond to the question on Quora with a link to the blog post just created.
This means that the blogpost you just created is 100% relevant to a real-world prospect who is looking for a solution.
There’s no question that this strategy involves a lot of effort but it’s well worth it seeing as it will drive targeted traffic for years to come.
Create Newsletter / Mailing list
As we mentioned before, a prospect may need many exposures to your brand before being comfortable to buy.
A mailing list or newsletter is a great way to catch your prospects’ contact details and repeatedly encourage them to return to your website.
This works well in conjunction with the great content strategy, every time you create a blog post you can also repurpose it as newsletter content.
A great way to do this is to commit to creating a weekly blog post and then simply emailing your newsletter subscribers with a link to the new blog post.
Just make sure you’re creating a great content that solves problems and not creating blog posts simply for the sake of creating blog posts.
Use Retargeting
A newsletter or mailing list in some ways can be considered retargeting as the goal is to encourage the prospect back to the website.
Another great strategy that is a more conventional form of retargeting is where a prospect is cookied when they first visit the website which then allows you to show them banner advertising as they browse around the web.
This is generally very inexpensive and can be highly effective.
All the major platforms such as Facebook and Google offer retargeting specifically within their platform but an easy way to get started is with a third-party aggregator service such as perfect audience.
Simply add the Perfect Audience pixel to your website and then you are able to easily target all major platforms directly through the Perfect Audience interface.
A good retargeting strategy can literally 10x the conversions of people signing up to your SAAS.
Identify The Biggest Problem You Solve
The next strategy is to make sure that you’re speaking about problems that your software solves and not the features that your software offers.
One of the biggest mistakes startups make is that they speak about how the problem is solved and not the problem that is actually being solved.
For example an inexperienced startup may make a statement such as “we have advanced email gathering capabilities” which speaks exclusively to how a problem is solved.
A better statement would be “never wonder where your next prospect is coming from ever again”. This speaks more to the problem that the prospect is facing and indicates that you have a solution to that problem.
Speak directly about the problems that you solve and not about how you solve those problems.
Once you’ve identified a niche market to target and you’ve identified the biggest problems that you solve, then it’s time for some direct outreach.
The most effective and cost-effective way to do this for a software startup is through cold email.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is great because it’s effective and is one of the lowest cost routes to market available to a software startup.
Once you’ve identified the niche market that you wish to go after it becomes extremely easy to build a list of highly qualified prospects which you can market to through software such Lead Lantern.
Simply use the search features within the software to create a list of your ideal decision makers and then reach out to them directly within the software.
To maximise the effectiveness of this there are a couple of next steps to be taken which are as follows…
Build Segmented Lists Of Target Prospects
What works best with email is very personalised outreach, so creating specific, segmented lists is a great thing to do.
An example of this might be location.
For example, we could create a list for each city and then have the email mention that specific city.
An email might read “we are looking for clients to work with specifically in San Diego” for example.
By creating a list of prospects in each individual city, this will then dramatically increase the response rates over just a generic message that does not include any personalisation.
A great email strategy also allows you to reach 100+ new prospects every single day.
The next thing we are going to need to make email marketing effective is a great outreach message.
Create An Outreach Message
Download 7 Cold Email Outreach Templates FREE
Just Enter Your Email Below And We’ll Send You Our 7 Best Cold Email Outreach Templates 100% FREE!Email*YES…I Want The Templates
Post In Forums
The last tip onhow to advertise a software company is to post in forums.
This strategy is very similar to the Quora strategy, simply find forums that are relevant to your software and start answering questions that people have.
If you have relevant content on your blog or website then link back to it.
This not only creates value for the forum, it creates value for you and creates a backlink for your website.
When used in conjunction with the other strategies this helps add to the ongoing evergreen traffic generation that will help you get customers into your software business.
Conclusion
Starting a software company can be super hard. You might be thinking that it’s not the right career choice for you simply because of human psychology. If that is your mindset, I would like to tell you some reasons why it’s a good career choice and some tips and tricks to succeed and launch a profitable software business.