When it comes to software development, and particularly B2B companies, you have to pay attention to which platforms your target audience seeks business advice from. LinkedIn is the most relevant B2B social media channel. It is business-oriented and connects professionals from various industries and networks who both offer or look for solutions for their business.
Research by HubSpot shows that LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2. Facebook and Twitter are great platforms for engaging with your potential clients and followers and promoting your content. YouTube has become the second search engine after Google , making it a great platform to post your video tutorials and webinars on. TIP : Never ignore comments and reviews even if they are negative! Try to understand and solve the problem which the user experiences.
This is especially true in the software development and deep programming field, where people are always willing to learn and practitioners are often seeking advice on online communities and forums. Additionally, you should engage in guest blogging and link outreach. Your company can offer content to be cited on another blog and in return for publishing a guest post on your blog. You can also contribute to different groups on social media such as LinkedIn or Facebook groups related to the industry you work in.
Every business aims to stand out from the crowd and beat the competition which is why companies would invest in a new software product. Understand what problems your prospects face and how your products can solve them. Then create educational content which can be distributed through social media, website landing pages or email.
In return, you will be able to collect valuable information about your followers like their contact details, which is a great starting point for your email marketing strategy.
Email marketing is the perfect chance for you to get to know your customers better. It helps to start a conversation or to keep clients up-to-date with your latest products.
Your website is a good place to showcase your business and your unique selling proposition, all well as product videos and client testimonials. When visitors go to your website, they are looking for information regarding your company and offerings, so give them what they are looking for.
You can include pricing pages so you can differentiate between people who visit your website only to find out the price and clients for whom price is the main purchasing factor. To go deeper and enhance your website performance, check this tutorial where you will learn how to analyze your web page performance using Google PageSpeed Insights.
Software development companies often have the technical know-how of building a website. 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.
The key here is to give real value right there on the page, but then entice with deeper information when they provide contact information. Real-time feedback tools are shared and linked to often which significantly increases exposure and search rank. With the right tool, you have the ability to bring in very targeted leads en masse.
The final large benefit from tools is that upon submission you can gain valuable information for the sales process that might be otherwise hard to capture in any other type of conversion. So, while these tools can cost a lot to invest in, over a period of time they can deliver major ROI.
The way enterprise technology and software companies need to approach marketing is evolving, and it is imperative to leverage tactics that will produce real results. In the face of increased competition for attention on digital channels, technology companies in the B2B sector struggle to reach the right decision makers on the right channels to increase their sales funnels. The ability to connect with these decision makers about an important issue, goal or challenge to their business can have a dramatic impact on the success of most enterprise technology organizations.
So what's a technology company to do? To maximize their investment in marketing initiatives, organizations should look for strategies and tools that have the most potential to engage decision makers by demonstrating that they understand the challenges their target industry faces, that they're a thought leader and have a unique solution that can provide substantial ROI.
Towards that end, we'll look at some of the best ways technology companies can do just that. Here are seven key marketing strategies that enterprise tech companies can use to transform how they market themselves.
Talk To Us. Chapter 1 Original Video Content Video content as a marketing tool is becoming extremely prevalent with technology companies to introduce their solutions. While someone might not have the time to go through a product or company datasheet, almost everyone has the time to watch an entertaining, engaging two or three-minute video about a solution that might be of value to them.
Here are the main areas to focus on when producing video content to market your product or solution: Great Stories. While your technology is probably complex, robust, and overall impressive, when using video to market your solution, you should focus on telling a compelling story.
Hook people with a good, easy-to-understand story first, then dig into specifics with them later on sales calls. Fun Videos. Just because you're in the B2B enterprise space doesn't mean that your videos should be dry and technical. In fact, you should instead aim to create engaging, entertaining content. Creating videos that are particularly funny, humorous or enjoyable will help you stand out from the crowd. Take New Relic, for instance.
The most popular video on the New Relic YouTube channel isn't a webinar or tutorial, it's a funny rap video about coding made by one of their employees. Chapter 2 Influencer Marketing Business leaders and enterprise decision makers often look to others who are experts in their field when evaluating new technologies to purchase and implement. Technology companies are increasingly partnering with influencers to up their credibility and social media reach. Here are four steps to begin developing your influencer marketing program: Identify Target Buyers.
Determine Industry Influencers. Build Social Credibility. Bridge the Gap to In-Person. Here are some perfect ones: FollowWonk FollowerWonk allows you to search terms to find Twitter profiles sorted by the number of followers and tweets. BuzzStream A great tool to find influencers, connect and manage your network of influencers.
Onalytica Upload any piece of content and Onalytica's algorithm will find the top related influencers for that content. GroupHigh GroupHigh helps you find bloggers and other social influencers, manage those relationships and even measure the value of your content. MuckRack MuckRack helps marketers find relevant journalists and bloggers, receive alerts, and build media lists.
PitchBox Discover influencers including contact information and social profiles, create personalized outreach messages, automate follow-up, and track results. Traackr Traackr's IRM platform is your system of record to manage, expand, validate, and scale your global influencer marketing. Chapter 3 High-Value Content The amount of digital content being generated today is astounding.
The same is true for content in the B2B technology marketing space. 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: Tell Better Stories.
Personalize for Each Stakeholder. Centralize Your Content Experience. Deliver Real Value Most important to any tactic is to deliver real value.
Make Content Extremely Unique And lastly, make it unique in some way. Chapter 4 Live Event Integration In a post-pandemic world, it might seem counterintuitive, but with so much emphasis being placed on digital marketing, face-to-face interactions are becoming that much more important. While much of the time enterprise solutions can build a case for themselves solely via digital channels, many tech buyers want to get to know their partners in person to separate contenders from pretenders.
Here are four reasons to integrate live events with your digital marketing efforts, depending on your core marketing needs at any given time: Branding and Awareness. Lead Generation. Customer Engagement. First, let's start with collecting leads: Ideas for Collecting Leads At Events If you have a booth, have a drawing to collect cards — whether a contest, offering discount services or have people register for an upcoming webinar.
Make sure your sales team doesn't have chairs, cell phones or excuses to stand behind a table. Get them out meeting people and asking for business cards. If you have a workshop or presentation, offer slides and other related content on a landing page that requires attendees to enter their contact details. Hold a happy hour and invite your VIP prospects — just make sure it doesn't interfere with the event. Get reciprocal — tell attendees about other booths that are good or offer to introduce to a speaker make sure you meet them early.
If you send people to other booths, they will often do the same. Create some partnerships — do joint follow-ups with other booth companies or partner with a speaker to sponsor a slide or their follow up.
Nurture Those Leads Collecting leads is important, but too many companies don't utilize them correctly after the event. Some ideas for soft follow-ups right after your event are: Send a summary of the highlights of the event with quotes from speakers and resources recipients may not have gotten. Shoot video at the event and provide a similar summary, but more engaging. Provide relevant articles, videos or tools checklists, calculators that follow the theme of the event or the main keynote speeches.
Collect all the speakers slides, domains and some of their key content and send a series of e-mails to give greater depth. I've seen photo booths and other fun activities as ways to get people to stop and see what's going on.
Chapter 5 Marketing Automation Tools A critical part of staying on top of, contacting, and nurturing leads for enterprise tech companies is employing a marketing automation tool. To build a sustainable and predictable revenue model, you'll need to have automated systems for collecting leads, building a marketing pipeline, segmenting contacts, and marketing to them on a consistent and intelligent basis.
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 : Marketo. Here are some high-level points on marketing automation to help you understand the value. Automation A process of automating follow-ups to potential customers. Segmentation The organization of prospects into like groups or leveraging data to target prospects with information most relevant to them.
Chapter 6 Existing Customer Re-Marketing One of the best — and often most overlooked — ways that enterprise technology companies can increase revenue through marketing efforts is by targeting their current customers. By having systems, processes, and programs in place to remarket to active customers, you'll be able to build out an infrastructure that facilitates consistent retention, upsell and cross-sell of additional products, features, and services. Keep your eye on that technology as it develops and be the first to offer it to your customers.
It might go without saying: to stand apart from competitors, hone in on your unique selling proposition and make sure no one is doing it better than you. When developing or refining your software, you probably know to check in with your customer support team to learn about common customer questions or complaints.
However, consider checking in with your sales team, too. Capterra and G2 Crowd are online review services that help businesses find the right software for their needs. Capterra claims to have over 5 million active buyers a month, while G2 Crowd claims to have 1. In any case, both websites have a lot of potential for software companies. Capterra and G2 Crowd both offer free basic listings. That means you can add an overview of your software with screenshots and feature listings on the website for users to leave reviews.
Paying for sponsored posts provides you premium placement in the software directory, multiple links to your website, and optional landing pages optimized for lead generation. In addition to competitive placing, paid G2 Crowd accounts enjoy custom branding, the ability to add gated content, and FAQs for buyers. Despite everything you hear about waning attention spans, long-form content has consistently proven to drive site traffic.
The top ranking posts on search engines usually have at least 2, words or more:. It works on homepages, too. Search engines like Google count a variety of factors when determining rank position. In addition to content quality, backlinks and social engagement are often cited as top ranking factors. With that in mind, focus on creating content with the potential for high levels of community involvement and virality. Groove , a helpdesk startup, designed their blog around a live challenge.
Groove vowed to share all the lessons they learned along the way in their content:. The end result exceeded expectations. Long-form content is reliable, but long-form content coupled with out-of-the-box thinking is even better.
Displaying third party approvals shows that your software is reliable, professional, and high quality. There are several options to choose from. Google Customer Reviews allows customers to leave reviews with companies who participate in the program:. It replaced the Google Trusted Stores program and can be linked to Google Ads to generate seller ratings, seen on the ad in the form of stars.
Another option is having a Norton Secured seal. Norton has been around a long time, so brand awareness and trust is high, especially when it comes to technology and security. An accreditation from the Better Business Bureau is also an achievement that most people will immediately recognize and trust. An upsell is something sold to an existing customer that increases the functionality of their original purchase.
Upselling and cross-selling are vital components of any SaaS business model. It could be as easy as offering premium versions of your software, options and customizations, extended service, or financing. An ideal customer profile ICP is a description of a customer who would not only benefit from your software, but would also offer significant value in return, such as client referrals and an extended customer lifetime. Some startups are initially resistant to having an ICP. However, having an ICP keeps your marketing and sales teams focused on the prospects and companies who are most likely to buy from you and remain lifelong customers.
Some basic things to take into account when developing an ICP are industry, location, company size, and budget. Some of the most popular paid advertising opportunities are with Google and Facebook ads.
A well-executed ad campaign has the potential to radically change your business. Investing in a consultant or employee who can navigate the platform can pay off in a big way. Imperva Incapsula , a cloud-based service that makes websites of all sizes safer and faster, invested in consultants to execute their Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook campaigns and build optimized landing pages:.
Understand who is buying your product. A marketing strategy for software companies might target buyers, users, purchase influencers and even the C-suite. Invest in social media for the long run.
You need to commit to investing time and money in your social strategy.
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