How to promote a software development business

Promotion and marketing are a big part of running any business, but different industries require different kinds of marketing. For instance, learning how to promote a software development business is different from promoting a consulting company or a catering business. This difference is due mainly to the technical focus of the software development industry.

This article will look at a few different tips that you can use to help promote your software development business. We’ll look at a variety of marketing strategies, such as: 

• Find your target market
• Learn how SEO works
• Spend time on your website
• Influencer marketing
• Don’t be afraid to spend money
• Managing your cash with Countingup

A target market is a group of people you’ve identified as interested in your products and services. If you don’t identify your target market, you might struggle to promote your business effectively.

You can identify your target market by creating a customer profile. This is a document that lists all of the characteristics you expect to find in your company’s potential customers, like their location, job, interests, and shopping habits. Once you create the profile, you can research the characteristics of your actual customers to see how the profile matches up. 

By combining the theoretical characteristics of the profile with the actual characteristics of your past customers, you can identify your company’s target market. This knowledge allows you to adjust your marketing to promote your software development business directly to the people most interested in it. 

If you don’t already have one, it’s essential to create a website for your software development business. A website provides an online hub for all of your social media, contact details and business information, so it’s an incredibly valuable tool for any modern business. 

Having a website also allows you to be found by a wider audience, as being online means you can now promote your business to the entire world via the internet. Of course, being online also increases your competition for the same reason, but quality marketing can minimise the impact of this problem. 

As a software developer, it’s important to make sure you have a particularly good website. This is because you’ll be operating in a digitally-focused industry, and having a high-quality website will show that you have a good idea of how digital platforms should work. 

Creating a high-quality website is one part of establishing an online presence. Another huge factor to consider is your website SEO, or search engine optimisation.

Put simply, good SEO means that your website will be highly ranked on search engine results pages when people search for terms related to your business. The aim of SEO is to have your business appear on the first results page in a visible spot.

The key to search engine optimisation is smart keyword use. The terms people search for on a search engine are keywords, and a search engine will look for these keywords when displaying results. For example, your business might pop up when people search for ‘software development business’, as this keyword will appear on your website. 

When Google and its competitors first became popular, the best way for your website to rank highly was to fill it full of relevant keywords. Now, due to various updates to how search engines work, this can actually be bad for your SEO. A better tactic is writing relevant, helpful content in a natural way. Use your keywords, but do so sparingly.

There are many other factors to consider when improving SEO, such as internal linking and website structure. If you’d like to promote your website more but aren’t sure about SEO, give our guide to small business SEO a read. It’s full of helpful tips for making your website more search-engine friendly.

A business influencer is someone that has the power to influence people’s purchasing behaviour and decisions. This power comes from the influencer being a respected figure in a particular industry due to their knowledge and expertise. 

Some business influencers own companies, and that business’s success is the source of their influence in a particular industry. Others solely focus on being an influencer — they make their living by marketing other businesses’ products using the influence they’ve built up. This is known as influencer marketing.

Software development, as an industry, is all about expertise. The better you or your team understand coding, the user experience, or an app’s functionality, the more respected and successful you will be. 

This means that influencer marketing is a great way to promote your software development business. An influencer is someone regarded as an expert in the industry, so having them recommend your business to others implies that you are also a very competent member of the software development community. 

Influencer marketing can take many forms, but the most common method is to use social media content on both you and your influencer’s pages to promote the business. It may be that an influencer will ask for payment, but the potential benefits mean that most of the time, the cost is worth it.

Good quality promotion means more customers. More customers mean more income, which means you might need to put more time into your financial management. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 
Find out more here.