The Art Of Software Marketing: Winning Over New Audiences

• By Jason Taylor
• 02-06-2024
• Digital Marketing

Software marketing is quite different from marketing any other product or service.

This is because it’s an intangible product that you sell to a human. The only way you can identify how your product is performing is through digital metrics.

Don’t fret; in this blog post, we have rounded up some of the best software marketing strategies that will certainly help you win over new audiences.

Get Insights By Reading Your Competitor’s Reviews

So, you have made a data-driven software marketing strategy, but still, it doesn’t yield the desired outcome. Now you are sure of yourself; you thought you had made the right business decision, but the results are making you doubt yourself.

Now, you may be wondering what my customers are looking for. Why won’t they buy it? What’s the secret?

It may sound like an old-school tactic, but you need to read your competitors’ reviews. They will provide you with insights into improving your software and making it a better alternative that your ideal customers are looking for. So, in your next marketing campaign, you can leverage this opportunity to showcase the feature that your competitor lacks, making your potential customers opt for your software instead.

• Here’s what you need to do to find competitor’s insight
• Find your top competitor on top review platforms such as Clutch and G2
• Go for the 1 and 2-rated reviews, as they are probably complaints
• List the common issues found on your competitor’s software
• Identify the opportunities on how you can fulfill this gap and become a better alternative
• Incorporate this new feature in your next marketing campaign

Poor reviews don’t only give a bad rap, but they also provide in-depth information to competitors to devise a better product and marketing strategy. This marketing tactic might seem small, but it’s leveraged right; it has the potential to change the dynamics of your business. Even if you are just a startup, you can still utilize this marketing tactic and find opportunities to improve your product than your competitor.

Remember, this tactic can also be used against you. As you are reading your competitors’ reviews, it’s also equally crucial to stay on top of your reviews. In software marketing, you might lose the ability to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and produce a product as per their needs.

Use Surveys To Get Valuable Customer Feedback

You can create a highly effective software marketing strategy if you truly understand the pain points of your customers. And you don’t have to be a psychic to understand what they want from your product.

In such cases, data is not enough to understand how customers behave. So, you don’t need to rely on SEO tools and SaaS metrics.
Sometimes, there are some exceptional cases where you need human interaction rather than click-through rates and bounce rates. You need to understand the underlying reason behind their behavior to achieve the desired results.

What you need is a good-ol’ survey to ask for customer feedback and gain valuable insights into improving your product that serves them better. By providing them with a survey to fill out, you will be able to know more about what they think about your product, where you need to improve and what type of blogs or knowledge base they need to optimally utilize your product. You can also entice your customers with incentives to give feedback. They will also feel valued and appreciate you reaching out to them.

Here’s what you need to do to craft a compelling survey:

• Be as specific as you can
• Utilize the right survey tool
• Limit your survey questions between 5 to 10 max

Once you have all the survey strategy laid out, it’s time to send them to the ideal customers, at their preferred platforms and at the right time. Also, consider the design and functionality of the survey, making sure it’s mobile-responsive. As most of the surveys are now mobile-first.

When you are sending out surveys, follow these tips:

• Make a CTA button for the survey
• Send a personalized email to your loyal subscribers
• Entice them with incentives such as an exclusive discount or a gift card
• Share the survey results with your customers

Surveys answer the reason why customers bounce and churn, which an SEO tool or any other performance can’t answer. So, until AI and emerging technologies understand the human mind, you need to rely on surveys to connect with your customers. Surveys will equip you with in-depth information that will shape your software marketing strategies to achieve the desired outcome.

Use Content Marketing To Generate And Nurture Leads

It’s time to talk about the most powerful software marketing strategy - content. Investing in content marketing probably drives the desired outcomes. Whether it’s blog posts, social media posts, video content, whitepapers, or case studies, every piece of content bears fruits for your marketing campaign.

It’s a lucrative investment that yields tangible outcomes if it offers value, engagement and guidance to your customers. Not only that but also inbound marketing is 62% more cost-effective than pushing outbound ads.

However, devising a content marketing that works isn’t easy. You can get help from professional customer engagement services to help you attract and engage your potential customers.

One prudent tip for crafting content is that it aligns with the appropriate stage of your marketing funnel.

For example, a visitor who lands on your website for the first time is not looking for scientific whitepapers but a compelling landing page that addresses their pain points.

Here’s a simple guide on how you can leverage the type of content you should utilize on which marketing funnel:

Stage: Awareness

In this stage, a potential customer is looking for a solution to their problems. A visually appealing landing page with persuasive website copy is what you need in the awareness stage.

Stage: Lead

Visitors are engaged with your content, it’s time to make them a lead with an in-depth blog post. It will build trust and confidence and further move your leads down the marketing funnel.

Stage: Trial

Your leads need convincing; what better way to do this than by incorporating a how-to video that caters to the specific pain points and resolves their problem?

Stage: Conversion

Your lead is about to become a buying customer, but they need solid proof to encourage them to take the desired action. A case study is an ideal content that showcases the success stories of how your product helps businesses achieve their goals successfully.

Stage: Retention

You have made a sale! That’s great! But you won’t be full of yourself. You still need to retain your customers and make them keep coming back for more. Publishing whitepapers from time to time is a good strategy to showcase the research behind your software.
With a proper content marketing strategy, you are just crafting content that doesn’t give value to your visitors. It’s essential that your content fulfills the needs of the visitors in each marketing funnel, nurturing them to the next funnel until it converts them into buying customers.

Partner Up With Influencers

Now, you might be having doubts when it comes to influencer marketing; you are selling software, not beauty products.
We get that. But let’s hear us out for a second.

Did you know that the influencer marketing industry is expected to reach $14.2 billion in 2024 and over $50 billion by 2028?
So, even if you don’t think influencer marketing is worth it, the facts and figures state otherwise.

We think that influencer marketing got a bad rap because of money-grubbing Instagram models who promote beauty products they don’t even like or probably use.

However, the primary purpose of using influencer marketing does make sense. When you partner up with an influencer who is relevant to your niche and your product and who uses his vast fame and loyal following to promote your product to the right audience, it is probably the best software marketing strategy you can get to achieve your business goals.

Businesses are making the most out of influencer marketing, as almost 60% of influencers are setting to increase their budget this year.
If you are still unsure about whether it works for a SaaS company? Let’s look at the example below:

Canva, a top-tier Australian graphic design company partnered with Guy Kawasaki, an American marketing specialist of Apple and a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist to promote their company. Guy Kawasaki used his massive fame and influence to propel Canva’s popularity to new heights.

This is a great software marketing strategy to partner up with a powerful influencer of the tech industry to achieve the business goals.
Now, the next question is, how do you find the right influencer? Consider these three factors, and you are good to go:

Relevancy

Consider whether the influencer you are about to partner with aligns with your business goals and product. You need to collaborate with an influencer relevant to your niche. When they use your product, it gives them value to share their splendid experience with their followers. On the other hand, if your product and the influencer are irrelevant, it will mislead them and give a negative image of your product.

Audience Demographics

Before partnering up with an influencer, you must ensure that they match your target audience, especially demographics. For instance, if you have cloud software and your influencer endorses your product, But your influencer has a following of teenagers, then it’s not worth the time and money to collaborate with them.

Audience Size

There are some influencers who advertise their combined following which is misleading. For instance, you may be tempted to partner with an influencer having a worth of $1 million. But they have a combined following of all social media platforms: YouTube, X, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Instagram. In reality, most of their followers are teenagers which are not the ideal customers for your software product.

Use Paid Ads To Boost Your Content’s Visibility

We know that in the entire blog posts, we have raved about inbound marketing methods and how they are the cost-effective way to create brand awareness and generate leads.

Now, all of this is definitely true, but how do you get to ensure your content reaches the right target audience?

When you are promoting your software product, it’s also essential to use paid ad campaigns to make your content visible to your target audience. Paid ads work wonders for click-through-rates, encouraging traffic to visit your website and learn more about your product.
As a software marketer, you need to make sure that your paid ad content compels your target audience, nurtures them more into your marketing funnel, and convert them into buying customers.

So, paid ads boosts your inbound marketing efforts to promote your software product. However, the only caveat of paid ads can be expensive. And if it’s not properly researched and executed, you might end up boosting irrelevant traffic to your website.

Well, there are plenty of paid ad campaigns that can be executed on different marketing channels. However, in software marketing, there are two major platforms that we recommend:

Pay-Per-Click

Even though people tend to easily recognize and avoid paid ads, the click-through rates are still in millions daily. These numbers make it all the more crucial for software marketers to invest in paid ads and achieve the desired outcomes.

The secret to executing a successful PPC campaign is to conduct split testing. This marketing tactic involves experimenting on two different PPC landing pages of the same product with different content pieces. Keep on experimenting until you find the perfect landing page that is working and improve the one that isn’t.

Retargeting

Also known as remarketing, it is an online advertising method that targets those leads who abandoned the cart or didn’t follow through with the conversion by displaying ads. It’s a great marketing tactic that creates an opportunity to convert those leads who bounced at the very last second. When crafting retargeting ad campaigns, create compelling CTAs while avoiding over-promotional content. Hire customer acquisition services that will help you win back customers.

Final Thoughts

Software marketing isn’t something everyone can do. It takes tremendous amounts of time and money to understand customer behavior. This is something you will not find in data analytics and metrics, as you are selling software to a human, after all.
By leveraging these software marketing strategies and aligning them with the buyer’s journey, you will be on your way from being a startup to a market leader.