Inbound marketing strategy
for software development companies

Determine your niche(s)

If you don’t have any niches (or your niche is too broad), you’ll likely end up scattered and with a bunch of fluff that’s too broad or too generic to help your customers understand what you’re actually good at relative to their reference point.

Since software development is virtual / digital by design, you’re going to have some amount of 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.

Determining potential niches involves considering factors like:

• problems you’re solving,
• market size,
• differentiation,
• employee interest,
• and customer findability and engagement

to assess where these factors overlap enough to satisfy your risk tolerance.

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

Organize your information

You don’t want to just scatter content about with no purpose/destination in mind. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Organizing your information essentially amounts to several aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and UX (User Experience), which are worlds unto themselves. There’s a ton to learn about SEO and UX (start searching around these terms and you’ll see what I mean). Here are a few fundamental tips to get you thinking about this topic in a very human-centered way:

1. Strong empathy can go a long way. Are you satisfying potential customer needs and wants fully?
2. You need a decent grasp of the motivations and personalities of your potential customers.
3. You need people to easily find what they’re looking for on your website.
4. You need to understand where your potential customers are likely to want to head next.
5. This is not a set-it-and-forget it process. You should update your information flow on an as-needed basis.

Content marketing – creating content for software development companies

In order to do content marketing well, you generally want to know:

1. who your audience is
2. what they care about
3. why you’re creating each piece of content
4. how you’re going to engage them (in this case the answer is through inbound marketing).

You want to provide useful info (that aligns with your business model) to help your potential customers understand whatever they want to know about.

Content is foundational for inbound marketing. Your potential customers will generally prefer information on their schedule, not yours (a basic tenet of inbound). They’d usually rather find out what they can about a topic or your company prior to speaking with a person (especially someone in sales). That means you need content to start the conversation, educate, and build trust.

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

Content for software development companies should generally contain:

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

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

1. Align your content to the needs and interests of your potential customers
2. Know the goal(s) of each piece of content
3. Have a good idea about how you want your content to get to your potential customers

See Content marketing for engineering for more detail.

Experiment & Iterate

You’re trying to gather feedback from the market.

As your gathering feedback you’ll be analyzing that feedback to decide whether to:

1. Kill off the experiment
2. Optimize
3. Emphasize
4. De-emphasize
5. 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

A few more thoughts on inbound:

There are several pluses to leveraging inbound marketing, but make no mistake: inbound is not all fun, and not always appropriate. Here are some pros and cons to help you determine whether or not inbound marketing makes sense for you: Pros and Cons of Inbound Marketing. And here’s an Inbound marketing readiness – self-assessment tool.

My speculation is that breaking into the top few spots in search engines (whether Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc) will become harder and harder over the next several years. This would make it harder for new companies to enter the market. See Inbound Marketing – what’s the risk of waiting to get started? for more on this.

Want to see what comes next if your inbound marketing machine starts turning and you’re seeing sales-ready leads (SRLs) start to trickle in? Check out: Inbound sales tips for your first meeting with a potential customer and How to sell software services.

Interested in alternatives to inbound? Check out Inbound marketing vs outbound marketing – for B2B services. Especially intriguing is Account-Based Marketing vs Inbound Marketing.

If you’re interested in getting started on your inbound journey and want some help, feel free to reach out for a chat.