7 Ways to Expand Your Software Business

The biggest goal of any B2B Software company CEO or Director is to expand your software business. A reliable marketing and sales strategy is one of the best ways to grow any company. Traditional marketing involves spending a lot of money on print ads and marketing. It also involved cold-calling and making generic sales pitches to people who might not even be interested. Key influencers and decision-makers don’t always respond to this. Over the years, more effective methods for expanding your software business have formed—the “Inbound Methodology.” This marketing and sales strategy concentrates on bringing in leads online and transforming them into clients using informative, relevant content and nurturing methods. 93% of companies using Inbound reported a greater return on investment (ROI). (HubSpot)  Here are seven ways to expand your software business using the Inbound Methodology:

1. Understand and Identify Your Ideal Customer

Growing your organization will require a comprehensive understanding of your ideal customers. This could change a bit as your company grows and changes. Take time to produce buyer personas of your optimal clients. This should be an extensive exercise, but on a foundational level, ask yourself:

• What are their work duties?
• What are their unique objectives?
• What are their struggles?
• How do they make decisions?
• Where do they get their information?

Once your B2B company’s target audience is clear, your marketing and sales teams play a crucial role in creating content to nurture your leads and expand your software business. Their collaborative efforts are integral to the success of your inbound methodology strategy.

2. Develop Clear Objectives for Company Growth

Without a goal, it’s hard to score. Establishing clear objectives that you want to reach in a certain period of time is important. For instance, you can set a goal to bring in 300 leads in the next six months. This translates to 50 leads each month, or ten leads a week. Similarly, you should set goals around the number of clients you want to acquire your revenue. Monitoring your progress and making adjustments as necessary will keep your organization focused on its growth objectives.

3. Create a Targeted Content Strategy to Engage

An effective content strategy will help you bring in site visitors and convert them to leads. You must guarantee that the content your marketing and sales teams create is aligned with the phases of the Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Prospective customers in the Awareness Phase are just starting to recognize that they have a need or trouble. Content in this phase should offer information to help your prospective clients without being a sales pitch. Blogs, videos, and infographics are great for this phase. A State of Marketing report found 92% of companies that blog daily get customers to their sites. (HubSpot). Prospects in the Consideration Phase are more aware of their needs and are starting to look for an option to help. To inform them of potential options, premium content like ebooks, templates, overviews, SlideShares, and lists will work nicely. You can ask potential customers to give their contact information in exchange for this content. Send them relevant information via email as you nurture them to transform them into customers. In the Decision Phase, leads have compared their choices and ready to buy. This is where you can talk about your product and services and show them why they should pick you over others in the B2B Software market. You can support your claims using case studies, whitepapers, and reports.

4. Discover the Keyword Phrases Ideal Customers are Searching

According to research by GE Capital Retail Bank, 81% of buyers do online research before making a buying choice. (SalesLion)Optimize your content for internet search will increase your site’s ranking and make you more noticeable online. Your marketing team should do some research to find which keywords your prospective customers are using when searching online. These keywords could be used in headlines, content, meta descriptions, page URLs, and alt images. A tip: long-tail keywords and phrases that have less competition will help your chances of success. Stay away from keyword stuffing since this could cause you to be penalized by search engines.

5. Advertise Your Content With the Right Networks

Engaging and enhanced content will not immediately bring in swarms of site visitors. You need to advertise your content to produce good web traffic. Share links to content on your social media networks. Premium content like eBooks and whitepapers can be sent to your email list. Targeted social media marketing can also be an effective means of advertising your content.

6. Leverage Marketing Automation

According to HubSpot, marketing automation is using software to automate marketing procedures like project monitoring, customer information management, and segmentation. Use of marketing automation will let you more quickly do the things formerly done manually. You can choose from a variety of marketing automation systems like Marketo, MailChimp, GetResponse, HubSpot, and Eloqua. Many systems offer great features like Lead nurturing, site visitor monitoring, CRM, social media, and analytics. Using automation will help you enhance your marketing, save you time, and increase your revenue.

7. Align Your Marketing and Sales Teams

It’s important to create great content. It’s also critical to plan effective lead nurturing. But, if you have a marketing team and sales teams with differing objectives, you will have some trouble. That’s where ‘smarketing’ comes in. As a manager of all tasks, it’s a good idea to hold regular meetings with your marketing and sales teams to help them update each other with new information, go over goals, and get on the same page. Make sure they are working together by offering motivations that benefit both groups. Let’s explore more on how to get the first 100 users and how to keep growing your SaaS user base and have your sales and marketing teams work together. . .  

The Final Word

Expanding a software business involves strategic planning, understanding market trends, and leveraging various growth avenues. By adopting Inbound Marketing and sales, you’re not just implementing growth techniques, you’re unlocking the potential to scale your organization and achieve greater success. We’ve helped many CEOs and directors integrate Inbound into their marketing and sales processes. Don’t hesitate to schedule a free strategy session. In this session, you can expect to learn more about your competitors, understand domain authority to help increase Google+ rankings, and review your current methods and find new ways to grow your company.