Most of the information you will find online about digital marketing is designed for companies selling physical products. If you want to run a bakery, you’ll find plenty of tips, and if you want to run an ecommerce-based business, there’s certainly no shortage of statistics. If you’re selling a product, though – especially if that product is software – the information out there to help you is few and far between. Here, you’ll discover some of the best ways to sell your software successfully in today’s digital age.

Create the Ideal Brand

Your brand is more than just a reflection of your company. The global Havas study has shown that brands must accomplish three things to succeed: they must play a role in society, deliver what they promise, and improve people’s lives. According to some of the experts behind the study, brands simply aren’t trying hard enough to make a positive impact on people’s lives, and that’s where they continue to fall short.

When you take the time to create your ideal brand, think about how the software you’re selling was designed to improve lives. Does it save them precious time so they can spend more time with their families on the beach than at work behind a desk? Make that clear. Does it save them money that they can then reinvest back into other parts of the company or use to go on that vacation to the beach? Make that clear, too.

Partner with Websites where Your Target Audience Spends Time

Think about your target audience. Is it mostly comprised of small businesses? Large corporations? Companies that are large, small, and every size in between? Once you have the answer to that question, you can start to pinpoint places where your audience is likely to spend its time online. Good options include online magazines written especially for small business, websites that cater to large business, and SMB portals.

Once you’ve found sites that seem willing to partner with you, consider offering them some sort of commission to help sell your product. If a partnership is out of reach, perhaps you could offer to trade services. Ask the website to put up your advertisement and offer to provide that site a free sample of your software if it could benefit from it. The possibilities here are truly endless, so be sure to consider them before choosing just one.

List Your Product on Download and Review Sites

Another proven strategy for getting the most out of your software marketing campaign involves making sure you have it listed on several of the leading download and review sites. Some great options include CNET’s download site, Tucows, and others. This puts the software out into the public eye where people can pick it up, read about it, share it with friends, and perhaps even download it and try it themselves.

Be sure that you offer some sort of free preview, demo, or trial when you list your software on these sites. In today’s day and age, with so many companies offering week- or even month-long trials, failing to do the same with your software will likely have a negative effect.

Perfect Your Onsite SEO

Search engine optimization is vital to your overall success, and several case studies have proven it time and again. Once you have your software out there, you need to make sure your website is perfectly optimized so people can find it when they search software. There are several steps to optimizing your SEO. These include:

• Coming up with a list of competitive keywords. Figure out what the people who could really use your software would likely type into Google if they wanted to find it. As an example, if you offer cloud-based accounting software, this should be your very first competitive keyword. Otherwise, things like financial reporting, financial reporting software, and accounting software solutions are all great choices.
• Looking at onpage SEO. Every single page on your website must have perfect SEO. This means that you’ll need the right alt tag for every image, the right URL for every page, and the right meta tags for every single element that calls for one. Your content must be clearly written, informative, and filled with your competitive keywords, too.
• Writing the best possible articles. You’ll need articles on your site that your potential customers can find via Google searches and by browsing your site. These should be clear and concise, and they should explain the various elements of the software you have on offer and why that software is beneficial. Ideally, your articles will make you the authority in your niche, and by the time your visitors finish reading, they will trust you a little more.

Here are some results you can see when things are done correctly.

Use Social Media to Your Advantage

Social media marketing is incredibly sophisticated these days, but it can only work for you if you use it. You can buy as many Facebook ads as you’d like, but if you don’t actually interact with the people who interact with your ads, then you haven’t really made much of a difference. Social media is all about the interaction, so take some time out of every day to check your comments, respond to them, and perhaps create a post with a link to your latest blog or article, a high-res photo, or even a video. These things expand your overall reach, and half of succeeding in selling software is letting people know it exists.

Make Sure You Deliver on Your Claims

Even if your software is every bit as amazing as the ads claim it to be, there are other factors to consider in terms of delivery. For example, if you promise quick-response customer service (for example, emails will be answered in one business day or less), but it’s taking you far longer than you would like to respond, this will have a negative impact on the public’s perception of your brand. Make a list of everything your brand promises to deliver, then sit down and analyze whether your company is doing a good job of delivering those things. If not, create a plan to do better.

These are the things that matter the most to software consumers. Like any physical product, they want software that solves their problems, and they want it from a company that is active in their community and delivers what they promise.