High demand for software development comes with extreme competition within the companies as they perpetually try hard to get the attention of the targeted customers. Software development companies invest a lot of money in market research and strategy implementation to get the desired results of their liking. This digital write-up of ours will take interested marketers through seven proven marketing strategies that can drive revenue.
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Insights into the market valuation of the software world
- The software market is evaluated to reach a revenue of USD 659.00 billion in 2023.
- The expected market volume of software enterprises in 2023 is estimated to hit USD 271.80 billion.
- Revenue is anticipated to exhibit an annual growth rate (CAGR 2023-2028) of 5.42%, emerging in a market volume of USD 858.10 billion by 2028.
- When global comparison is considered, most revenue will be generated in the United States (USD 338.20 billion in 2023).
As the software development industry has promised growth in the past, present, and future, here are some result-driven software marketing strategies that marketers must implement to increase the profitability of their software development companies:
1. Story Telling is Dependable
When a software development company focuses on marketing, it is mainly centered on the technical aspect of its services. The promotional part of the marketing forum concentrates on how their services and products can help other companies.
But the absolute truth at the given time is that only a few unique products or services are available in the market. Personalizing the approach is the way to go. Why personalization? One, because it works, and two, your prospects expect it. In the long run, prospects’ expectations carrya lot of weight, and prospects are highly aware of what kind of product or service they are looking for and when they need the product as well.
To meet the precise needs of the target customers, B2B marketers have to create discrete curated communications. These should be intensely personal but at the same time should not feel overly invasive. For example, let us assume that your B2B enterprise provides services in the banking and finance sector and is presently looking to expand by collaborating with businesses having similar niches. Creating individual landing pages for each segment provides a personal touch that helps hyper-target the right prospects.
Enterprises at par with the market trends personalize their contextualized marketing. Statistics suggest that personalization can lead to 20% user engagement, personalization in B2B sales in particular can increase 1.4x time revenue growth, and 77% of the B2B buyers won’t think of purchasing your product or service until it was marketed to them with significant touches of personalization.
2. Top-Notch Social Media Marketing Strategy
Meticulous utilization of social media is becoming extremely popular in software companies. Being active on social media seems to be an unspoken rule of the software trade. The social media strategy of B2B should be designed to fit the needs to the enterprise. B2B enterprises usually market their products on one-on-one clients meetings but this old-school methods are no more enough. Social media marketing can be used to directly target high quality prospects and is a form of efficient marketing.
The best part of social media is that it is not only restricted to software development companies or B2B ventures, but it has a myriad number of users on it, and it is fun to engage with the users. When you post on any social media platform, encourage your users to comment on the post and share their feedback. When you receive any comment, ensure that someone promptly reverts.
It’s not written in stone about any social media platform being the best for B2B firms. But, for professional purposes LinkedIn has gained quite a reputation. It has almost around 800 million users globally. Its primary objective is professional networking, and it is a superb place to connect with C-levels of different organizations and employees working in those organizations. If you take the aid of the LinkedIn paid advertisement feature, it becomes the finest platform for B2B lead generation. Numbers support the statement as B2B marketers state that 80% of their social media leads have been generated through LinkedIn. Almost around 40% of social media marketers believe LinkedIn is the most functional channel to drive leads.
3. SEO Strategy is Must
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can make your website rank better on the search engine result page. Small changes on the pages of your website improves the rank of your website. When prospects have any question on their mind, they type queries in SERP. Certain pages that answer the question better load securely and fast without any error. Once the website has met these particular parameters, it is considered highly trustworthy by the search engines and ranked particularly higher in the hierarchy.
In theory, SEO sounds simple, but executing it practically is not quite the same. The enterprise has to make sure that the current website entirely covers all the aspects of their products and services. For example, the description of software designs, Q/A of software services, and information related to recent software development should all be included in the current website with the necessary vital information with the right keywords.
You also need to ensure that a website looks trustworthy and authoritative. User experience should be enhanced throughout the website. Lastly your website should keep coming up with educational content for your prospect about how to use multiple technologies and platforms. Along with informational content, you need to come with blogs that talk about how your software development is different in intricate details and how it takes care of the pain points of their prospects.
Every one of the tasks mentioned above can be taken care of through on page optimization, off page optimization and technical SEO and content development. An interesting statistic about average click through rate for top paid results is 3.17%, where the average click through rate (CTR) for the top organic result is 27.6%.
4. Work on Local Demands
The size of your organization, or how far your prospects stay from the organization doesn’t really matter. Marketing your business locally is vital because local marketing targets the geographically potential customers. It involves picking up the nuances of the prospects community.
Local marketing is cost effective too and the messages you convey through local marketing has immense value and impact. The influence of local marketing is felt quickly, and it paints a picture on how to strategize marketing for a larger audience. Henceforth one can think of marketing to local communities as a stepping stone, before moving up to costlier marketing projects.
Another core reason behind local marketing is that it acts as a beneficial method to work on the enterprise’s reputation. Collaborating with local businesses fosters loyalty from targeted customers and supports a noble cause to connect with the community.
5. Website Optimization is a Must
Your prospective customers learn about your enterprise before making up their mind. That’s why if you can deliver the correct information in the right way at the right time, it can positively impact your website’s conversion rate. B2B marketing covers a broad spectrum of content optimization, email deliverability, keyword and page speed load; all these services have one goal: increasing conversion.
However, these things are more complex for B2B marketers, as the recipients are either businesses or enterprises with numerous employees. This particular modern marketing scenario gave birth to account-based marketing. On average, the usual purchasing group of B2B products/services consists of six to ten decision-makers.
Optimizing your brand according to how prospects perceive your brand is a process that has received quite some admiration from today’s marketers. For the same reason, optimize your website following the rules and regulations of search engine optimization so that your products and services become discoverable for your clients. If you are into a B2B business and still need to start optimizing your website, SEO incorporation will be the way to go, as it will be the way to lead generation. What’s more pivotal in marketing is that quality SEO reduces the sales cycle and increases the enterprise’s credibility and trust.
These facts are supported by the statistics derived by distinguished brands/organizations/search institutes. Stats suggest that search engine result pages generate 95% of the traffic, and B2B marketers achieve 70% of the organic traffic from the searches. 2022 was the year when 40% of B2B marketers realized their main revenue driver was organic content.
6. Try out Guest blogging
For B2B marketing, professional guest blogs are all about referral traffic. The primary objective is to have tons of new visitors by publishing a blog on a distinguished website. Once the blog is posted, some readers will track your website with the link on the article, and a few will also become loyal readers, maybe even subscriber and a handful of them will become leads.
Referral traffic is good, but what’s even better is the superior SEO benefits that are unlocked with guest blogging. You must optimize your guest blog article with targeted researched keywords via article body text, link, anchor text, and article title so that you can provide your blog with the needed SEO to boost article rank on the search engine result page. Then again, providing credible interlinking with your website theme will provide continuous traffic flow in the coming years.
When internet users find your content through different queries, it appears as relevant content in sync with their intent. If the writer has incorporated valuable information in the article, it will cater to the needs of the searchers on the internet and bring in more targeted traffic that is immensely valuable for your brand.
According to statistics, 7% of bloggers reach out to more than 100 blogs per month, and almost 50% take up outreach for guest posts to 10 contacts a month. About 60% of the bloggers write one to five monthly guest blogs.
7. Supervise your Marketing Strategy
Keeping track generates a clear picture of the complete lead generation journey to conversion. With Correct decisions are made based on facts rather than assumptions.
Once the enterprise has figured out the strategies that bring in results, vital resources, like time, money, and workforce can be allocated in order to have the highest return on investment. Moreover, having a regular reporting process highlights promising market opportunities, area of work that needs improvement, and emerging trends. It is one of the finest ways to address weaknesses and leverage strengths.
To ensure that every C-level executive has a unified understanding of the marketing performance, clear and consistent reporting is a must. Analyzing at regular intervals fosters impactful collaboration, and every employee works together for unified goal attainment. Once the C-level is on the same page within the organization, showcasing transparent reports and achievable results can strengthen the existing business partners’ trust and enhance their credibility.
B2B marketers need to remember that the B2B landscape keeps changing exponentially. Keep regular track of all the strategies on the run and work as a feedback mechanism for the organization itself. As you know, software development companies can keep adapting to the changing market conditions, refine marketing strategies, and ensure that their approach consistently delivers value.
Here are a few numbers to support the above: 90% of marketers consider email engagement at the top of the performance metric and regularly check it. 88% of marketers keep a check of their performance metrics by keeping track of the website traffic. 86% and 83% of marketers respectively keep track of their performance by checking the website engagement and social media analytics.
Conclusion
You can plan to start a software development company, or your enterprise can be an existing one. Having meticulously planned software marketing strategies is vital in both cases. If you have strategies working in place, track them to see if they bring in the desired results. If procedures are not bearing results or you don’t have any strategies in place, it is time to start implementing the above strategies gradually. Marketing is critical to optimal success in the software development industry and in every other functional sector that will lead to the ripple effect of skyrocketing your sales productivity.
