5 Comprehensive Digital Marketing and Sales Recommendations for the Software Industry

In the same way that a software company’s salesperson conveys emotion and information when explaining services or products to customers, the websites of software companies should reflect this emotion and information in the same way.

In this section, we will talk about building the right website architecture, producing the right website content and lead generation focused approach.

One of the biggest mistakes that software companies make is that their websites do not describe the product correctly and do not provide accurate sub-service details. For software companies, a very simple integration, feature or service can be the reason for a prospect to choose that software. For this reason, software companies should act with the right information architecture for the websites of their products or services.

How to Build the Right Website Architecture for the Software Industry?

Website information architecture is a work that every company should do at the beginning when setting up a website. When you create the website architecture, you also create a list of the pages that should be on the website. Below you can see a sample information architecture for software companies.

After creating the information architecture, content production is required. One of the mistakes made when producing content is to produce only textual content and support it with a few visuals. As we wrote at the very beginning of the article, your website should offer an impression close to the impression that your team members who sell or market your products in the field offer.

How to Produce the Right Website Content?

Your content describing products or services on each page should not be just text. So how can you enrich your web pages?

• A. Video: You can add a video that explains in detail the features or services on whichever page your website visitors are on. If you don’t have the time or budget to create a desktop video edit for this process, filming one of your team members narrating will work just as well.
• B. Podcast or Audio File: You can add audio recordings to your product and service pages describing that service. If you shot a video, you can also record the audio of that video footage and add it to Spotify. If this process is too time-consuming for you, you can also use Text to Voice to voice-over in Turkish or other languages.
• C. Use of Appropriate Visuals: Whatever problem the product or service solves, you can use screenshots of how you solve that problem, target audience visuals. If your target audience is doctors, you should not use an irrelevant image. You can also prepare short infographics to show your benefits step by step and add them to the relevant page.

Lead Generation Focused Approach

Since software companies do not sell a product like any other e-commerce site, they first need customer data that is interested in their product or service. As customer data, customer name, surname, phone, e-mail and company information are ideal information to convert this data into sales.

In order to have customer data, contact forms or banners leading to a contact form should be added to products, services, blogs and other web pages to enable customers to leave data.

2- Strong Social Media Use for the Software Industry

When promoting their products or services through social media channels, software companies should know their target customers well and conduct a persona study for their target customers. This persona study reveals why the target audience needs the products or services produced by software companies. For strong social media use, the types of content to be shared on social media accounts should be determined and a social media calendar should be created.

Before determining the types of social media content, a content strategy for social media should be developed and ideas should be built. Social media has three main processes. These are:

1. Send
2. Al
3. Report

The posting process starts with coming up with ideas that will persuade the target audience through social media and attract their attention. These ideas are then turned into content. One idea can be turned into a lot of content. An idea, for example:

• Youtube video
• Podcast series
• It can turn into visual works.

The Al process is the stage where you see comments and feedback from the target audience and get in touch with them. The report process is the process where you report all these two processes and see the results.

3- Building the Customer Journey

Although this process is mostly included in the CRM process, we use digital marketing tools such as sending e-mails, SMS and notifications. The website is the platform where the customer journey begins. Social media channels are tools that lead to the website.

When a customer fills out a form to get information about your products or services or requests a demo after logging in to the website, this is the starting sign of this process. What comes next needs to be built wisely.

When building the customer journey, it is necessary to clarify the steps you as a software company will take in response to the steps the customer takes.

For example, what kind of communication path should be followed for a customer who requests a demo:

• What should be in the content of the e-mail to be sent after the customer creates a demo?
• Should a second welcome email be sent after the demo request?
• How many times should I be reminded of this when the demo period ends?
• Should the mail content include a link to the support center and support phone number?

We have tried to build a simple process in the infographic below. This process can of course vary depending on the type of product and customer. Different actions can be taken on the B2B and B2C side.

4- Engaging Customers and Employees in Digital Marketing

Software companies need to express themselves better and include the happy customers they serve in their marketing processes. The most classic method for this is to add customer testimonials to the website. In today’s world of increasing video consumption, producing videos through platforms such as YouTube is a much more useful and effective way to manage this process.

Many software companies manage a significant talent pool. However, it struggles to reflect this talent pool. Holding a digital mirror to your company’s capabilities and demonstrating them through digital channels makes it easier to convince your target customers.

In addition, studies such as webinars, live broadcasts and YouTube shootings that you will carry out with your customers about the services or products you provide to your customers are very effective. Having your customers talk about you and the services you specialize in is far superior to you talking about yourself.

One of the best examples of this is Fabrikod YouTube work we did with you. We managed the entire YouTube process and produced fun and useful videos.

5- Establishing a Business Partnership System

In the four articles above, we talked about the steps to find customers with digital marketing methods and turn them into sales. Many SaaS or software companies may not have their own sales team. Even if it is found, more data means more sales. Therefore, partnering with companies that have the same target audience as you can provide you with a serious flow of customer data.

To build a good partnership system:

1. Identify companies that cater to the same or similar target audiences as you.
2. Set a specific commission.
3. Create a partnership page on your website and provide detailed information.
4. Create a simple panel where partners can enter leads so that incoming customer data is not confused.
5. Support your partners with documents, badges, printed documents and images to be shared digitally.
6. Keep their excitement fresh by keeping in touch periodically.