Software marketing strategy plan

But once you get past that point, and earn trust with your target buyers, you'll be in a better position to complete sales than competitors that have been taking the cheap, low-value approach.

Whether you develop content in-house or decide to outsource to an agency or content platform, here are five traits that all your high-value content should share:. Every article, blog, or piece of content tells a story even clickbait. The key is to tell better stories than your competitors.

Take the time to analyze what others in the space are doing, and work to develop more unique and more useful stories than what's currently out there. Remember, helping your audience is more important than helping yourself. Some of today's biggest brands tell great stories of how their solutions solve customer problems, impact customer lives or just provide an entertaining view on their business and culture.

Think about how you would want to consume information. A B2B technology company can appeal to the humans they are selling to through powerful and even emotion-evoking content. Rethink how you are telling your current stories and if they could be redefined as a documentary of a customer's journey, a powerful interview or a day-in-the-life of an employee helping customers solve challenges.

Again, your high-quality content strategy should flow from your buyer personas. You might put out a few great stories to begin with, but they'll probably resonate with some roles over others. Not all your content will be accepted by everyone, and that's ok. What you're trying to do is build credibility and thought leadership for each stakeholder individually, so in the end they'll come together and agree upon your solution based on their own intrinsic motivations.

It's important that when you create strategies and an editorial calendar that you develop an Audience Matrix that defines each person at a company who could be involved in researching or deciding to use your product.

For each of those stakeholders, you can define their pains, goals and motivating factors — building a persona for each target customer is a must-do first step. While individual pieces of content should be personalized, they should all come together in one centralized digital experience that's connected to your brand.

This goes for your social media accounts and video channels like YouTube as well. Building a platform for content delivery that is connected will increase prospect confidence with each new story they interact with and improve their knowledge during the sales process. Built properly, these platforms can funnel leads through to conversion and into your overall marketing ecosystem.

Most important to any tactic is to deliver real value. First, if the audience doesn't get value, they will not convert to the next stage of your marketing process whether a signup, download or buy. Even if you can get a lot of people to find your content, a lack of value will repel them from moving further which is the ultimate goal. Second, when you deliver real value, it creates a positive brand impression.

Your audience will lock in their minds that you are the subject matter expert and when they need help, you are the best resource to talk to. A positive brand impression can last for when you reach them through other marketing channels and increase the likelihood of conversion there. It isn't just the surface-level info a visitor can get anywhere. The challenge here is to get over the fear of giving away too much — which many companies are afraid of. The best place to look for these resources and areas of expertise is within your own company.

What tools do you use, what questions do your customers have and what secret tactics or methods do you covet? Giving away more than the competition can give your company an edge balloon and significantly increase prospect confidence. And lastly, make it unique in some way. Today, people are inundated with information and content because the tactic has significantly grown in popularity. Whether the information or the delivery is unique, it must stand out.

Consider different media such as video, animation, or apps — maybe even consider past tactics such as direct mail. If you can make the information valuable and unique while delivering it in an unexpected way, it will pay off in spades. If so, has it been done well? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, it gets rejected.

Joe Lazauskas, Contently Editor in Chief. The following graphic represents what content can be used in different scenarios. Companies should have a wide range of content to reach people of different personalities, consumption preferences, and stages of the sales cycle.

The following graphic shows the type of content from left to right based on where they are in their buying stage while the top to bottom displays the engagement experience type. Content Usage Matrix. Depending on where your solution, and organization, stand in the marketplace you'll likely have a different focus when attending live events.

Here are four reasons to integrate live events with your digital marketing efforts, depending on your core marketing needs at any given time:. Especially for early-stage startups and tech companies, your main challenge may just be getting noticed in the marketplace.

The goal is to simply get the word out there, so when prospects do finally evaluate solutions like yours, you'll be in the running. For businesses in a more mature stage, it may be more imperative to generate sales leads face-to-face. Planning is critical, so make sure to reach out to key prospects well in advance to drive attendance to the event and your booth. Have systems in place for collecting contacts, qualifying leads, and setting up follow-up sales appointments either during or after the event.

Live events are a great way to meet and greet current customers in a more fun, low-pressure format. Since they're already customers, you'll be able to get to know them on a more personal level, casually discuss their success with your solution, and discover if there are any potential up-sell opportunities.

Some of the most effective live event marketing that enterprise tech companies do comes in the form of educational content and workshops. This is great for drawing in both current customers and new prospects, especially decision-makers on the technical side.

Again, you'll want to collect contact info upfront prior to any training session and follow up to see what they got out of it and if they're potentially a sales-qualified lead. Make sure to stay active and engaged on social media both prior to and after the event. Encourage employees especially your sales team to spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to maximize the chances of active prospects attending, meeting and moving further along the sales cycle.

Live events can provide you quick exposure to a volume of prospects, but because you may not get much 1-on-1 time, it is imperative that you create a smart strategy to nurture and convert those leads. First, let's start with collecting leads:. Collecting leads is important, but too many companies don't utilize them correctly after the event.

It is a waste of time and money if you don't see the process through. During your event if possible or soon after,, leads should be entered into your marketing automation the next chapter in this e-book or CRM software.

You should have a distinction set for leads that want direct follow ups versus those who are collected. Following up too hard on attendees who submitted a card or came to a workshop will just turn them away. This process is called nurturing and should provide the lead with value while conveying your key brand messages. The key here is not to jump into selling, but instead show your prospects you are knowledgeable, engaged, and care about providing them value.

Doing this first and then building up to a demo or call will open the gate rather than quick rejection from a hard sales approach. Marketing automation helps B2B enterprise companies nurture, qualify, and pass leads over to sales when they're finally ready. This is essential in the technology space, as both pre-sales and sales cycles can last weeks, months, and even years.

What tool you use will depend on the size of your company, as well as the nature of your solution and target buyer. Here are three of the most popular and effective marketing automation tools that you should consider implementing within your organization if you haven't already :.

Price and product have always been important factors for marketing. So, focus on creating experiences for your customers that can make them happy.

Effective SEO Search Engine Optimization strategies aim to increase organic visitors to your website or blog which would later be converted into leads, provided that you have followed the steps so far. Allocating enough time on strategic business development and SEO at the same time is hardly ever accomplished by anybody.

You would probably not have the time to develop the additional expertise yourself. SEO may be tricky to master as a beginner, but it pays off in the long run.

The most straightforward thing you can start with is to identify which keywords will bring prospects to your site. You can use keyword research tools like Ubersuggest or Semrush, to understand what words and phrases your target market uses when searching for information or products that your business provides. There are various industry platforms where your firm can be mentioned and classified among other companies. There are different ways of categorization — location, industry, field or proven skills.

Having your company listed there builds trust and strengthens your credibility in your industry. For instance, DevriX has been listed several times by Clutch:. How do you get ranked by those industry platforms? You need to register and verify your company on those platforms. Then, after setting up your profile you can submit client reviews and gather more references.

In software development, as in any other industry, there are specific terms which you, as a professional, should know and use. However, the visitors on your website are likely to be unaware of their meaning. If you use too many of those, your audience may be unable to understand and relate to what you are communicating. TIP : In order to check if your message can be understood by a broad number of users, show the text to someone, you know has no experience in software development, and evaluate their response.

Another thing you can do is to create a short questionnaire based on the description of a product or service on your website and then see how many of the questions have been answered correctly. Merely providing valuable and attractive content to your customers, competitors, industry influencers, and practitioners is not enough anymore.

You need to find a creative way to present it, as well. The main reason why videos are becoming a more preferred content format is the fact they are visually appealing and make the information easily digestible. To support each of your decisions or furthermore to understand what stands behind your target audience behavior and what drives the attention of the decision-makers in your industry, you need to do a deep research. Studying your customers, your target audience, your competitors and the trends in your industry will give you a better understanding of the current market situation and help define your strategy.

The marketing world is very competitive and noisy. People are exposed to many kinds of advertising daily, and if you want to be heard you have to find the right voice. A great strategy to leverage is to collaborate with tech influencers.

Influencers play an important role in any field. They are the ones who invent terminology and buzzwords, and ultimately define the market space. As a hot source of useful information and expert opinions, they can help you effectively engage your audience and support them through their decision-making process. According to Topal there are six types of tech influencers you should consider collaborating with: analyst firms, innovators and early adopters, independent analysts, tech bloggers and authors, trade press and leading IT vendors.

So as a software development company, you need to get active on social media by creating and sharing valuable content with your audience. All of which will help establish your company as a thought-leader in the industry.

Today, paid advertisements on social media and Google represent one of the most profitable digital marketing strategies for software companies. As a tech company, your job is to learn who your target audience truly is and then craft targeted ad copy to promote it via paid advertisements on the platforms of your choice. In the end, the more you learn about your target audience, and their wants and needs, the more successful your paid ad campaigns will be.

On-page optimization includes optimizing your headlines, HTML tags title, meta, and header , images, and overall website structure. One can also access all this information by Mobile phones, and it can also be integrated with third party tools via SalesForce AppExchange. So, it can provide a real-time data, fast speed, sales performance management, and customer service very quickly. HubSpot — It is small software that can be used to store information about contacts, vendors, sales, customers etc.

It also provides email notifications, alerts, document tracking, in-app calling etc. It provides a fully functional software solution to the new businesses for any number of users free. The dashboard is easy to use and customizable. One can create deals or notifications to share special information. It provides calling and call tracking, documents sharing, email templates and other functionalities.

It has a large number of training videos also, but the free users cannot talk to customer care via phone, so it is the limitation for this software. Google Docs — It is very common software and free of cost. One can share limited information on this, but can use this software effectively to store more information.

It can quickly integrate with mobile phones, calendars and can store documents of any kind with very strong Gmail application. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Gmail are a strong combination of documents which do not need a lot of training and is available free of cost so one can quickly start using it. But it does not provide a full-fledged software package solutions and functionalities as its limitation.

Profile Gorilla is dealing with software packages which could be targeted for small business owners, vendors, and very limited retail customers. Therefore, it would be important to analyze the growth of small business companies in the USA. This analysis is conducted using secondary research sources, from SBA. The data as shown below is collected from the annual research reports published by these institutions Hembrough, Trend 1 — As shown below, the number of small businesses and the employees hired by this business — are increasing in last 10 years.

In , small businesses added 1. As the number of employees increases, there will be more requirement to store contacts, business data, and ensure availability of business data with on-field marketers which Profile Gorilla software provides. Trend 2 — As shown below, the number of new small businesses opening is higher than exits, showing more sales of Profile Gorilla software could be possible.

In the second quarter of , , establishments started up, generating , new jobs in the United States. Startups are counted when business establishments hire at least one employee for the first time. Trend 3 — As shown below — Retail trade, Professional Services, Finance and Insurance — are 3 sectors where small business employment is increasing very high, with approx.

These sectors require a lot of marketing, contact sharing, contract buildings and availability on the field — which Profile Gorilla software provides. It means, these companies will look for cheaper cost software, and may avoid SAP, Zoho, and other costly software. So, Profile Gorilla can approach them with limited feature software versions, to start with.

Profile Gorilla software can provide a lot of raw data for this analytics. Current markets—Who does the company currently sell to? Who are their current target markets? Include customer data provided to you by the owner if any. New markets — Here is a good place to talk about the different segments you created in homework 4.

Are there any new segments you are considering? Target Markets — discuss your specific target market or target markets here!!! Who are you trying to reach with your programs or strategy! Give details. Briefly discuss anyways you are considering modifying or enhancing your brand Lake, Positioning: Provide a sentence positioning statement. You may also briefly discuss why you elected to take this position and any points of difference from your competitors that allow you to occupy this position what makes you different?

Customer Value Propositions: A very brief statement sentences at most that includes what needs you satisfy and how do you satisfy them…. These products are targeted to a variety of customers to satisfy their needs, as well as provide them additional benefits to run their business smoothly. This has been summarized below:. Product Levels for one of the above products:.

The software navigation is fast for the business users. He can retrieve this information quickly using search and filter options. He can get access to pre-built reports after purchasing applicable product plan, and can get updates on the software also or 24X7 support services based on the support package or added value proposition asked. Retail Users managing a lot of contacts. Mid-Size companies — Start with small software as trial.

The company should add mobile integration feature for all these products, with same or limited features, as many business owners use mobile platform for various business purposes.