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The dummy's guide to software marketing in 2020
You may have built some amazing software, but how do you get the word out quickly? We'll teach you how to effectively market your software in 2020.
26. jun. 2019 • 16 minutters læsning
Opdateret 6. feb. 2020 af Closed User
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Software marketing 101
Regardless of the amount or hours you spent in its creation, or how effectively your software solution resolves a certain issue, if nobody knows about it, it will not sell.
If you have no experience in marketing, the prospect of achieving an impressive user base as a result of a successful marketing campaign can be a very daunting thought.
If you filter out all the jargon and inflated instruction on Youtube, the entire marketing process can be broken down to these two core tasks:
Build a landing page with all the information about your software.
Drive traffic to that landing page.
That’s it.
Doesn't seem so unattainable anymore does it?
In this post we will run through the following:
How to design a landing page for your software that’s optimised for conversions.
How to drive traffic to this landing page.
How to use video to supercharge your marketing efforts.
Secret growth hacking formulas to help you gain a high number of users in as short amount of time as possible!
It’s going to be a wild ride, so strap yourself in and hold on!
Change your mindset
This post will be predicated on the following assumptions:
You have identified your target audience and developed a solution that solves their pain points.
Your software is already developed.
Your software has been beta-tested and all the bugs have been fixed.
If your software solution meets all of the above criteria, you're in a position to start marketing it.
But before you pop the cap off your whiteboard marker and start brainstorming, it's imperative for you to change your mindset.
If you start planning your software marketing strategy with the wrong mindset, you're destined to fail.
What is the right mindset?
Think of yourself as the authoritative solution for your customers.
Print that out and stick it on your office wall.
You need to completely own the solution ... become known as THE solution your customers are seeking.
When you adopt this mindset, all of your marketing efforts will reflect this identity and therefore, naturally be very compelling.
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Landing pages: Why you need them
You need a place to send prospective clients in order to educate them about your software solution.
Creating a landing page is the most important milestone in your software marketing journey. It’s the gateway to your software.
Because it's so important, were going to spend quite a bit of time discussing its effective creation.
To better understand the role of your landing page, let’s take a step back and examine the different stages of a typical customer’s purchase journey.
There are different variations of these stages and their respective definitions floating around the internet, but the one below is one of the most concise and accurate.
Let’s go over each of these stages.
Awareness
The awareness stage is when a customer becomes aware of their problems and their need for a solution.
It's important to understand that a customer never commences this journey without the end goal of “taking action” in mind.
In other words, no prospect will step onto the awareness platform if they are not willing to keep walking and take some sort of action that will resolve their issues.
So everyone who becomes aware of their problems is a potential customer yours!
That’s pretty powerful.
What this means is that, with the right marketing strategy, any piece of software you create has the potential of being a success.
Feeling motivated?
Good.
Discovery
At the discovery stage, prospects discovers a possible solution.
This could either be via an advertising campaign or word of mouth (the holy grail of all marketing efforts!).
Interest
After a customer has discovered a solution, they will either be interested in it or not.
During this stage you need to implement some clever marketing tactics to convince prospects to take action.
Action
This is the end of the line.
Also known as the point of conversion, at this final phase a lead takes your desired course of action.
The purpose of the landing page, therefore, is to guide a lead from the discovery stage, straight through to action.
In order to achieve this, a landing page must meet the following criteria:
Identify what your software solution is.
Identify how your software solution solves the pain points of your prospective customers.
Identify your value proposition.
Prompt leads to take action (convert).
In order for you to meet all of the above criteria, you need to optimize both the design and the content of your landing page.
Let’s start by discussing how to perfectly design your landing page.
Anatomy of an effective landing page
The design of landing pages has dramatically changed over the years.
Just take a look at what landing pages used to look like back in 2003:
Looks less like sales copy and more like programming code!
Take a look at what call to action buttons looked like back then:
The e-Commerce in those days was still a novel venture so it was much less saturated than it is now.
Coming across a landing page was a very new concept, so it wasn't that difficult to convince a lead to convert, even if it was only due to curiosity.
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As a result, there was less of a need to use graphical elements as a means of psychologically manipulating a lead into converting.
During the 16 years that followed, marketing tactics adapted to accommodate an audience that has grown accustomed to a fast paced and technologically saturated world.
Take a look at what an effective landing page looks like today:
Let’s break down some of the effective features of a modern landing page design.
Unlike the landing page from 2003, this one actually uses color!
The motivation behind using colors is to make the page as aesthetically pleasing as possible.
A perfectly designed landing page is nice to just look at, not just nice to read.
Modern landing pages always incorporate graphics.
The saying “A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words” is especially relevant to landing pages. If you can replace blocks of text with a graphical summary you should!
Not only do graphics help break up the monotony of text, they also make your content much more memorable .
Graphics, however, are not always the best illustrative method for landing pages; some solutions (such as software) often require a deeper level of explanation.
In these instances it is best to also include video explanations of your solution (more on that later).
A particularly powerful graphical placement strategy is to implement a “hero image” in your landing page design.
A hero image is located at the very top of the page, as pictured below:
A hero image usually contains the following.
A very short textual summary of your solution.
A relevant photo or video.
Call to action button.
The hero image on the landing page in figure 4 contains all of these elements:
Solution summary - A user-friendly wedding registry.
A relevant photo or video - Wedding cake and examples of wedding gifts.
Call to action button - Sign up to the registry.
The most effective hero images are concise and to the point, so no clutter.
Because they have such prominence at the top of the page, hero images are very good at intriguing readers and coercing them to keep reading the landing page to learn more.
Rather than having the text squished together in one ugly block, landing pages now segregated information into bite sized sections.
Not only that, but there is also plenty of space between each section.
This makes the information much easier to process and much simpler to navigate through.
There is no question that the landing page in figure 4 should be read from top to bottom.
One call to action.
If you take a close look at the archaic landing page in figure 3, you will notice multiple confusing calls to action along the right side of the page.
There are far too many add to cart buttons that are ambiguously placed on the page. It's hard to understand exactly what the creator of this page wants visitors to do.
The modern landing page in figure 4, however, only has one call to action: Sign Up.
Even though there are three buttons on the page, they each lead to the same action.
Customer Testimonials
Modern landing pages contain customer testimonials for maximum effect, and for good reason.
Just take a look at these compelling customer review stats :
72% of customers don't convert until they have read reviews.
92% of B2B leads do not convert until they have read reviews.
Attaining customer reviews should be pretty simple.
You could contact users that have beta tested your software or current customers that are signed up to your platform.
For maximum effect include a picture of the reviewer as well as their job title and/or workplace, especially if they are either a prominent industry figure or work for a prestigious organization.
Do not, under any circumstances ever post a fake customer testimonial. It will always backfire at some point in time.
Let’s summarise:
Landing pages are SUPER important. They are the gateway to your software.
Separate information into different segments. Leave plenty of space in between each segment and avoid clutter!
Use graphics and videos. Hero images are really effective.
Include customer testimonials.
Now that we have covered the essential design criteria of your landing page, let's shift our focus on its actual content creation
Using video to market your software
When visitors come across your landing page, you only have a few seconds to convince them to stay.
On average people spend about 15 seconds on a landing page . If, however, you can convince them to stay for longer they will.
A great method of convincing visitors to spend more time on your landing page is by including a video.
As mentioned earlier, software solutions are highly likely to require an explainer video because the solution is usually too difficult to effectively explain with text and graphics alone.
Even if your software solution is as simple as pie, it’s never a bad idea to include a video in your landing page.
According to Optinmonster video marketers achieve 66% more qualified leads every year.
The great thing about creating video content is that its application is not only limited to your landing page, you could also post your video content on your website, use it for ad campaigns etc.
But what types of videos should you create?
Start at a high level by creating a video that summarises what your solution does and why it is needed. Think of this video as your "elevator pitch."
This style of video is known as an "explainer video."
Explainer videos
You can either hire a video production company to record an explainer video for you, or, if you’re on a conservatie budget, you could use explainer video creation software.
Explainer video software platforms are pretty intuitive to navigate, videos are created using a drag and drop interface
It does, however, take quite a bit of time to create these videos, so if you’re on a tight schedule consider hiring a freelancer to do it for you.
Here are three explainer video software creation options: