software marketing strategy – Brandfocal Consulting

Set your initial positioning goal

January 10, 2017September 2, 2015

Software and technology companies can have a particularly hard time establishing solid positioning because the offered benefits may resemble that of a competitor.

The ideal goal of positioning process is –> to help your target buyers associate a benefit with your solution, product or company. With effort and time, you can claim a position by consistently reminding that benefit to the target audience.

Central idea

Your positioning statement becomes the central idea or theme for all your marketing activities. A positioning statement is a short, declarative sentence that states just one benefit, and addresses your target market’s No. 1 problem.

This short message serves as a recipe for your entire software product’s marketing communication.

Repetition and commitment

Positioning delivers the same message across all marketing media – including web sites, brochures, advertisements and presentations – to investors, industry analysts and prospects. Repetition is one of the most important factors in claiming a position and giving it staying power. Remember, you’ll get tired of your message strategy long before your target audience is tired of it – and sometimes even before all your audiences have heard your positioning for the first time. Be patient and give it a chance to work.

Do you measure Content Marketing?

January 10, 2017September 3, 2014

There is no point spending precious dollars in developing marketing content if you are not going to measure the result.

Google Analytics (GA) is one of the best analytical tools available out there for this purpose. Be aware though, GA is a very comprehensive analytics tool, therefore it can be difficult to determine exactly which information will be most informative. Once you set it up with your domain, refer below suggestions to start basic measurement of your content marketing strategy:

Measure both traffic and time spent on page

Traffic alone is not enough to indicate success with content marketing. Example, your home page is usually one of the most visited pages on your site even though it may not have lo of content there. When you us SEO and promotion strategies correctly, chances are your home page will receive hits.

Note: Study and compare traffic volume of pages with similar content. Because not all pages are created equal, you may notice useful insights.

For instance, below traffic spike could be due to one of our blog posts that got shared on a popular Facebook page. A business with a socially active online community prompted many “likes,” comments, and shares. All of this contributed to high volume of traffic and amount of time spent on that post.

Posts that get shared over and over again due to social media or active audiences continue to garner visits a day, even though they were published months ago.

Measuring referral traffic

Referral traffic is those visits to your website that came from an outside source. So if a visitor clicks a link on a social media site like Facebook that leads to your website, that visit is called a referral.

Under Google Analytics, you can measure referrals through the referral traffic report (under “acquisition”). You can also do so by choosing “referral path” or “full referrer” from the list of secondary dimensions.

If your content is of value and backed by a content promotion and distribution strategy – such as sharing your content on social media sites, promoting it through email marketing and submitting the links to bookmarking sites – the audience will share, email, and bookmark your content on their own. As sharing increases, so should your referral traffic.

Note: Once you obtain insights on which sites are referring the most traffic, and the timing of the traffic being referred, you can further optimize / adjust your promotion and distribution strategy.

Don’t you think content marketing (and its measurement) is an ongoing process?

Do you use FAB to market your software?

September 7, 2016August 9, 2014

Feature, Advantage, Benefit (FAB)

It is not difficult to see the difference between a feature and a benefit. Developers mistakenly present their software product’s features as the solution to their customer’s problem. That won’t work because what the customer really wants to know is how your product or service will benefit them.

Features Tell, But Benefits Sell

Build reader’s desire for your software product by mapping features to benefits – benefits to members of your target market.

When it comes to the marketing copy, it’s important that you don’t forget those benefits at this stage. When you describe your offering, don’t just give the facts and features, and expect the audience to work out the benefits for themselves: Tell them the benefits clearly to create that interest and desire.

Example: “This app helps you find doctors” describes a feature, and could leave the audience thinking “Is that it?”. Persuade the audience by adding the benefits something like “get in touch with the right physician – by accessing reviews, ratings and contacts – all from a single app”.

How to Determine the Benefit

If you did proper requirement analysis before starting coding your software, you already know what the benefits to the end user are.

Use that list and simplify it further so that more new prospects can understand what they can achieve using your software.

In general, nearly every software feature you will result in a benefit, but they may not always be obvious.

Answer these questions:

How can you help your customer see the benefits? Start with a list of a product or service’s features.
What does it do?
What unique characteristics does it have?
What technical information is important?

Once you have all of your features listed, think about what each feature means. Why does it matter? What problem does it solve? Your benefits should dig deep and be as specific as possible. Show, don’t tell.

Finally, keep in mind that some features are simply that—features. If the dimensions of the product are standard, or your software is compatible with standard operating systems, you may not need to include them as a benefit when selling to a customer.