How to grow a software startup without marketing4 Key Steps

Looking to grow?Before you hire marketing headcount or shop for an agency, check out these 4 basic steps. You just might be able to growth hack your way to success!

Step 1Build a Website

Organic search drives the highest quality traffic. Make sure your pages are optimized for key terms.

Focus on SEO

Not sure which key terms to optimize for? • Ask customers and prospects

what they did (or would) search for.

• Look at what competitor websites are optimized for and paying for in paid search.

• Use the free trial on keyword tools to run some analysis.

Make your Features page phenomenal

For a software company, the Features and/or Pricing page is always the most visited.

• Make sure your page has great key terms and pricing (if you can list it).

• This is also a strong page to use for paid search traffic once you have budget.

Add a blog

• Blogs are great for organic traffic. You can experiment with key terms and see what drives hits.

• Try to blog at least twice a month, once a week is best.

• Submit strong posts to third party sites and include hyperlinks to your website.

• This gets you backlinks which

helps your web rankings. You can usually repost the content on your blog a week later.

Continually measureand improve• Your website needs constant care

and feeding or else competitors will pass you by in organic search and you’ll never catch up.

• Set up a Google Analytics

account to monitor 4 key metrics.

1. Unique visits – You’ll want to measure this month over month and see it increase. But don’t resort to paid options to get there. Increasing organic visits is most important.

3. Site conversions - Track which pages people convert on. Make those pages better and take out of navigation pages people aren’t visiting and converting on.

2. Visits from organic traffic - These are your best visitors. Make sure this is increasing month over month. If not, try different key terms on your important pages.

4. Blog visits – See which blog posts are getting the most views and analyze them to see why. Consider writing more on those topics that got high traffic or even creating a web page in navigation.

Step 2Keep software to a minimum

Don’t invest in marketing automation (at least not yet)You don’t need lead scoring, campaign management or any of the other bells and whistles that come with marketing automation until you are much bigger.

• To send emails either use a simple email marketing software or utilize whatever system your Sales folks are using. Besides, it is more personal to send emails from a rep than from a generic marketing persona.

• Invest in the optimization of Sales emails before you invest in the optimization of marketing emails.

Do invest in a lightweight CRM

While this isn’t necessarily part of marketing, it will help you track your pipeline and your customer interactions.

• If you are too tight on budget to invest, just make sure you keep a clear record of your customers, their contact information, the product(s) they have and a way to keep basic notes on your interactions with them.

• You will have turnover and you’ll want to make sure that customer IP doesn’t leave with your employees.

Step 3Start a referral program

High growth with little investment can be achieved with referrals

Uber, Dropbox, AirBnB and countless others achieved growth this way.

• It works because your happy customers are doing the marketing work for you - finding the right prospects that are interested in your products.

• This is critical to helping you scale because you don’t have the money to have Sales chase down a bunch of bad leads. You need them focused on the highest quality leads.

Do invest in referral software

Investing in a solid referral software solution will allow you to scale without headaches and headcount.

• Tracking referrals is not easy. You need to connect a prospect to an advocate across multiple digital avenues and through the sales cycle. If anything breaks or is missed, you can easily give your once happy customers a very disappointing experience.

• Plus you need to figure out how to fulfill rewards and handle tax management.

• Referral software automates the tracking and fulfillment so that you can focus on making sure customers and partners are aware of the program.

Step 4Spoil your customers more than your kids

Customers expect to be delighted

Gone are the days where customers use your product and are satisfied that’s enough.

• Customers expect you to treat them like they are precious and valued.

• This is particularly true in software where you have a long term subscription relationship. You constantly have to be earning their business.

Proactively provide value beyond your product

Don’t wait for problems to come in, solicit feedback from customers often.

• Create online or in person surveys to collect feedback at logical times in your implementation process and throughout their use of your product.

• Invite customers to focus groups with their peers to discuss how to use the product or how it can be improved.

• Monitor use of your product and consult with them on how they can get more value.

Make them feel appreciated

Make sure you operationalize customer appreciation.

• Call them to congratulate them on a successful referral.

• Give out awards for best ROI, best users, best referrers, etc.

• Quarterly or monthly send something fun to them in social media or via direct mail - just because.

Bottom Line• Make your website strong to attract

the right buyers• Minimize technology investment until

you scale• Start a referral engine to drive growth• Keep customers happy to minimize

churn

You can growth hack your way to success without marketing!

Learn how to start a referral program at Amplifinity.com