Usually, a B2B software company is product-oriented. Most B2B companies come into play when there’s a business problem that requires a solution. After creating a solution, the company is ready to launch.
As a result of the launch, the product gains traction and makes some early sales. After a while, the hype goes down, and reality stares the company in its face. The product is excellent, and many people utilize it, but not as much as expected.
The valley of death is the stage where most software companies lose a lot of money. At this point, software startups realize that they need to sell and market their product effectively. Having a great product is essential but generating leads and making sales is more critical. Thankfully, Getuplead makes lead generation and conversion easy.
This article reveals five tips to help your company market new software effectively, thus surviving the valley of death. Read on for more information.
- Publishing Problem-Solving Blog Posts
A quick look at the most successful SaaS vendors shows that blogging frequently works. You can increase brand and solutions awareness by creating blog posts that solve customers’ problems and challenges with your software.
Social media and online search are two effective ways blog posts can drive traffic to your site. Social networks help quality blog posts become viral across your industry, while frequent searches help link and boost your blog posts’ Google search rankings.
- Monitoring Customer Activity
Most software providers hardly monitor how customers use their software. For example, every software has its onboarding process. If your customers try out your software during the onboarding process, it is best to monitor their progress closely. Close monitoring helps you know when they get stuck; therefore, you can either send automated emails or have a team member reach out to the customer to help them make it to the next step.
Suitable software for monitoring customer activity is Intercom. This software helps visualize how customers use your software and reach out to them manually and automatically. Consequently, you can maximize trial conversions and minimize churn. For instance, when selling project management software, Intercom allows you to identify and reach out to users who haven’t invited their team members and find out their reasons.
- Publishing Free Guides and Whitepapers
Free guides and whitepapers are suitable for solving challenges your prospects may face in their business, thus, generating leads. Blog posts help promote free guides and whitepapers.
HubSpot is an excellent example of a software company that utilizes guides and whitepapers. HubSpot’s marketing library contains free resources like checklists, templates, eGuides, and whitepapers. These resources help solve problems that HubSpot’s’ software solves for their target market.
- Hosting Helpful Webinars
Unlike free guides and whitepapers, webinars allow you to connect and speak directly with your prospects on a more personal level. Typically, a webinar should focus on a particular challenge, and it shouldn’t be more than an hour long. You can run successful webinars by keeping them educational and not promotional. No one wants to sit through an hour-long sales pitch.
In addition, prospects want to know what they stand to gain. Therefore, ensure you include values participants stand to gain when promoting your webinar.
GoToWebinar is a webinar hosting application that integrates a lot of software to market your webinar effectively and collect registrations.
- Leveraging Marketing Automation
Software companies love the marketing automation concept; they prefer building software that automates some processes. Incorporating marketing automation software can help automate your crucial marketing activities.
Marketing automation software is helpful in:
- Encouraging people who attend your webinars or download your eGuides and whitepapers to take action by sending out super-targeted emails. Instead of bulk emails, only people who perform specific actions on your site, consume certain content, or are at a particular stage of the sales lifecycle get personalized emails.
- Providing a centralized database with detailed information, including the activities of your current customers and prospects. This database helps you and your sales team keep up with both customers and prospects
- Integrating your user database. Most marketing automation software contains APIs that allow easy plug-in of your data and activity information. Consequently, you can set up the software to respond to specific actions by customers and prospects.
- Providing a marketing hub that allows tracking metrics like search engine visibility and landing page conversion rates all in one place.
Contact the Experts!
The efforts you put into sales and marketing are essential in making your new software a success. You can either build your sales and marketing team or hire an agency to develop a foolproof strategy that works for your business.
At Getuplead, we help SaaS and B2B companies acquire and convert more clients. Contact us today for top-notch software marketing strategies.