How to promote a
software development business

Want to promote your software development company?

You’ll want to:

Determine your niche(s)
Get specific about the word “promote”
Select marketing methods to start with
Create content
Experiment & iterate

Before we get into this, let’s address this concept of a “marketing plan”. In general, I don’t like them, at least when viewed the way most people view plans: instructional / procedural.

Why?

Because creating an instructional/procedural marketing plan up front can give you a false sense of security, causing you to focus on activities over progress.

As you know in the technical world, plans often include a causal set of actions to get from point A to point B. It’s much more uncertain in the marketing realm (mostly due to partially observable variables, a dynamic external environment, and complex human behavior).

See The problem with marketing plans for small B2B companies and what to do instead and Marketing plans for engineering companies if you’d like to dive deeper into this topic.

Determine your niche(s)

If you don’t have any niches, what are you going to promote? ……. Exactly.

A bunch of fluff that’s too broad to help your customers understand what you’re good at and not good at.

Since software development is virtual / digital by design, you’ve got some geographic freedom between you and your customer base. The larger your geographic reach, the more likely you are to overlap with other software development companies. And the more that’s the case, the more important niches become to you and to your customers.

To determine potential niches to experiment with, you need to think about / speculate on the:

problems you’re solving,
market size,
business model alignment,
differentiation,
employee interest,
customer findability,
and customer engagement

to assess whether these factors align well enough to satisfy your risk tolerance. There can be others of course, but these factors are a good starting point.

If you’d like to dig in deeper on why you probably need a niche and what do about it, check out why you need a niche.

Getting specific about the word “promote”

Advertising/promoting is a dangerous concept, especially for smaller businesses. Seeing ads of all sorts from large companies can really distort your mental model of how this all works (or more precisely, how it can work, when all the stars align).

You can waste a LOT of time, energy and money promoting your services. Give yourself a better fighting chance at the offset by adding some clarity to your goals.

A few directional goals for consideration:

Increase the number of or quality of sales-ready leads.
Increase awareness of your company.
Sell more to existing customers.

Don’t try to focus on all of these at once, especially if you’re a smaller company of say less than 50 people. Pick 1 primary, and maybe, maybe a background goal that gets way less attention.

Marketing method selection

Experimental marketing method selection is complex and nuanced. A few key factors that’ll influence your decision:

Your selected niche(s) – due to the findability and engagement factors for each niche. You should try to engage your potential customers in ways and locations that are naturally agreeable to them. The more you misalign here the more you’re going against the current.
Your promotion goals – you’ll find that some methods are more appropriate for building awareness while others may lend themselves better to trying to obtain sales-ready leads.
Your sales & leadership team – personality and sophistication. Some methods require a heavier lift from sales and/or leadership than others.

The good news is that you’ve got several methods to choose from. The bad news is that you’ve got several methods to choose from.

Some marketing methods to consider:

Partner channels – essentially these are companies that you have a symbiotic relationship with. The idea being that together you and the partner company can create a better solution for your customer. Partners can be great if you find the right one.
Inbound marketing – this is an overarching philosophy focused on positioning your company to be found when your potential customer has a need (whether that need is learning-oriented or development services-oriented). The focus should be on being helpful, not pushy. Common corresponding methods include search marketing and content marketing.
Search marketing – this is a subset of inbound marketing and is focused on what people search for in search engines. It could be organic-focused (i.e. SEO), or paid-search-focused (e.g. Google Ads).
Account-based engagement – the thought process here is that there are a relatively small number of companies that fit your ideal customer profile, and you want to actively engage those companies (accounts). This is one of the most sophisticated methods, not just for marketing, but for sales, leadership, and developers. Not well-suited for beginners.
Tradeshows – I probably don’t need to explain what tradeshows are. Something to keep in mind with tradeshows though is that they often run asynchronous to a customer’s buying cycle.
Social media marketing – social media marketing has its place, but it has a lot of caution flags associated with it. It’s easy to get excited about vanity metrics. It’s easy to think that your marketing will go viral. And it’s asynchronous to your customer’s needs.

You’ll likely only want to select one primary method to experiment with, and maybe one secondary method to play with just a bit in the background.

Create Content

You might’ve noticed that “content marketing” wasn’t included in the list of marketing methods. There’s a good reason for that. Content marketing is wildly important, yet by itself, an incomplete method.

The focus of content marketing is to create useful information to help your potential customers understand whatever they want to know about. However, you’ll need to leverage other methods (e.g. search, inbound, social media, partners, trade shows) to connect your content to people. Please, do not just build it thinking they will come.

Content is foundational for most marketing methods you’re likely to consider. People generally prefer information on their schedule, not yours. They’d generally rather find out what they can about a topic or a company prior to speaking with a person (especially someone in sales). That means you need content to start the conversation, educate, and start building trust.

Your website should usually be the core of your digital presence. So, what does content on your website mainly consist of?

Content for software development companies generally includes:

Landing pages
Articles
Case studies
Core web pages (e.g. “about”, “contact”, etc)

But before you start jamming away on content creation, a few fundamentals to keep in mind:

Make sure your content matches the needs and interests of your potential customers
Know the purpose of each piece of content
Have a good idea about how you want your content to get to your potential customers

For more details see Content marketing for engineering.

Experiment & Iterate

You initiate an experiment with the understanding that you’re trying to gather feedback from the market.

As you gather feedback, you’ll want to assess the feedback to decide whether to:

Kill off the experiment
Optimize the experiment
Emphasize the experiment
De-emphasize the experiment
Stay the course

The duration of each iteration is very scenario-dependent and somewhat fuzzy, but generally you’ll be thinking in terms of months (sometimes more than a year), not days or weeks. Given that reality, you’ll likely want to kick off multiple experiments in parallel.

Next steps

After you’ve digested all of this, sit with it for a day.

Then, when you’re in the right frame of mind, get to a spot that you’ll be free from interruptions, grab a notebook, and take half a day to start capturing your initial thoughts around your niche(s), goals, marketing methods, and content.

If you’d like help with any of this, you can reach out here:

Yes, let’s chat

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