The effective way to get 100K + customers in Software Industry in 2018
By: Andrey Palagin
Tags: Lead Generation, Software, Digital Marketing, SEO, Web Development

The majority of software companies can increase their website’s traffic and boost their sales along with lead generation with fewer attend. They should consider adding values to their website. The values that their target audience understands and need the most. Think about not only educating users on how to use your software effectively to tackle a specific problem, but the most important part is to solve their basic problems by making your software work online as a web app. It will clearly demonstrate some important capabilities and quality of your solution. Nowadays we all prefer to play with the product before going ahead with its purchase.

Align the functionality of your software with people’s needs

First of all, you need to realize that a big percentage of people never look for a product or a brand, they look for a particular solution to tackle their needs. Why don’t you just help them with it? Write a list of your customers’ needs on the right and come up with the list of the most important features your software has on the left. Then you need to align your software features with clients’ needs to get a list of solutions. That list is what you need to market.

As an example: If your software can transfer a document from one format to another, you need to create a list of all conversion operations your solution can provide, like word to pdf, text to excel, etc. If your application offers address validation service, consider about marketing it as an address verification, address check, automatic address standardization tool or just “ tool to get the address in the right format”.

Getting more traffic

Get some insights from Google Trends and Keyword Planner

Now when you have a list of solutions, check which are more popular on the internet — do a keywords research with Google Ads Keyword Planner and match it with Google Trends as well. Google is the most popular search engine in the world and we all have to rely on that as the main tool to get a traffic to a website.

It takes 10–15 minutes to understand if people really need your product and what feature they are valued the most. Use that information to develop a strategy of marketing the most popular solutions.

Here comes the most important part.

Your market audience should be split into major 3 segments:

1) those who use your solution online;

2) consumers who need to use your solution offline or on their desktop / mobile;

3) businesses who need to use your solution within their software environment.

To get a high volume of traffic to your website, develop several landing pages for every most popular solution and each segment. The majority of your web traffic will diffidently go to your web application, but with the right approach, you can generate desktop / mobile app purchases and SDK leads (or trial download leads for both products).

Web application

Every website needs to provide values, and your audience should get a reason to visit it. Almost every internet company tries to educate their prospects by giving them the instruction for using their products. Get yourself beyond this! Some people don’t want to read and watch, they want to experience first. Make a website that can solve your client’s problems online (with limited capabilities, of course).

It might take some time and resources but you need to develop a web application to satisfy the needs of the first segment and to demonstrate the supremacy of your product.

As you can see from the search volume data above, a simple web application that converts Word document to PDF can attract 1.2 million monthly users to your website. Make the webpage easy to use and optimize it for search engines so you can get that traffic volume in a few months.

Up to 90% of such traffic consists of freebie lovers, but there is another 10% that you can convert to high-valued customers. It means you might get 100K+ customers easy. In addition, high traffic volume works the best for your SEO and increases the ranking of your other webpages on SERP, like landing pages made to generate leads from enterprises. Also keep in mind that when you get 1M+ traffic volume on your website, you can monetize it with different display ad formats. Even AdSense can earn few thousands of dollars per month for your business.

An offline solution is a desktop application

The major and very important difference between web application and a desktop program is that the last one should have more capabilities and it better can work offline (without any internet connection).

My personal opinion is that any mobile or desktop app must work independently and should never require an internet connection, otherwise, what for do I need to install it on my hard drive?

You still need to market your desktop product as multiple separate solutions that tackle people’s problems.

To convert traffic from online applications highlight the most important difference between a web app and desktop app. As an example: it can work offline or it has more settings and other capabilities.

A desktop application can be promoted as freemium, trial or a company can sell it on the store. That all depends on your business model and the product itself. The marketing department can convert traffic right into customers on the web-store or generate leads with gated app downloads.

Other words, you need to sell your desktop app to monetize segment #2 of your marketing audience or insert a few ads to your freemium product to get a revenue.

A desktop application is an optional step for some companies and could also be replaced by subscription-based online service.

Engage enterprise (big business) with APIs and SaaS

Enterprises or segment #3 definitely gives 3/4 of revenue to some software companies. Marketers need to engage those prospects with an API that allows other developers to use their technology in their products or business environment. Use specific, solution-based landing pages relevant to developers’ needs. Those pages should generate b2b leads for your sales team. Think about getting traffic there from search engines and your web app pages as well. To convert some traffic from your web app to MQL, offer your target audience adding appropriate functionality to another software. Don’t forget to send some visitors from your developer-oriented pages to web apps too, you need the prospects to see how your solution work in action.

The conclusion

As a conclusion, I would like to remind you that any company should leverage the power of customer segmentation and stay focused on solving customer’s problems first. Do not be afraid of creating free services and trying to add to your website as many values as it possible. Getting people to visit your website and to use its services is your first priority. That effort can deliver a lot of competitive advantages to your business in 2018.

Want to know more about how to improve your marketing efforts? Visit my personal website now and contact me for more information today.