In order to ensure your software product marketing efforts yield the results you want, check out the following tips.

3 Software Product Marketing Tips You Need To Know

Tip #1: Establish An Affiliate Program Establishing an affiliate program can be an extremely cost effective of software product marketing. Affiliates are independent, third-party representatives who receive commissions in exchange for promoting your software. Anyone who wants to be an affiliate can apply to your program where you can vet them for suitability. The key advantage of using affiliate marketing to promote your software is that affiliate will be paid only when they produce a positive result. You can choose to compensate your affiliate based on a number of different predetermined results. There types of results include: Pay Pay Click – With pay per click compensation the affiliate is rewarded based on the number of visitors that they produce. This visitors to not need to purchase the product in order for the affiliate to receive a commission. Pay Per Lead – With a pay per lead compensation model the affiliate is rewarded when they provide qualified leads for your software. Again the lead does not actually need to purchase the product for the commission to be awarded. Pay Per Sale – With pay per sale the affiliate is compensated when they produce a verified sale. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these different compensation models. As the owner of the software and pay per sale is typically the most advantageous. You are only paying out your affiliate when you receive a sale so there is very little risk involved. With pay per click and pay per lead you need to be correctly determine how many of these visits or leads will convert into buying customers. The advantage of using pay per click or pay per lead is that they are attractive models for the affiliate. Many top performing affiliate will not work on the pay per sale model and so you may be missing out on sales if you choose this compensation model. It is possible to set up your own affiliate program or you can go through a third party affiliate network. If you use a third party affiliate network they will manage your affiliate program for you including introducing affiliates and determining the correct compensation to pay up to those affiliates. Tip #2 – Add Up Sells, Down Sells And Cross Sells Software product marketing isn’t just about bringing more customers into your sales funnel. Software product marketing should also focus on increasing the revenue earned from each customer. You can do this by incorporating cross sells, up sells and down sells into your sales funnel. Up selling involves moving an existing customer into a more expensive version of your software product. An example might be to encourage a person to upgrade from having a single user license to taking a family or enterprise license. This allows them to use the software on more than one computer and with multiple users. Another way to up sell your customers is to offer your software as a bundle. This involves offering different applications either at individually or at a discounted price if they are purchased together. Finally, you can offer different versions of the same software. For example you might have a basic, intermediate and pro version. The basic version will have a limited version of the software’s functionality. If they want to have more advanced features then they can upgrade to the intermediate and pro version. It is important that if you offer a basic version that it still has value for the user. At the same time you want to encourage them to move to one of the more expensive software versions. Cross selling involves selling software that compliments the original application. For example, project management software might be complemented by a content sharing system. When customers purchased the original piece of software you can include marketing for the complementary product. Down selling involves offering something that is valuable but less expensive than the original software purchase. An example of this would be offering add-on levels to a software game that has been bought. Down sales are often relatively easy to make because people are already making a purchase. Tip #3 – Use Pay Per Click Advertising Pay per click (PPC) is one of the most popular ways to advertise software on the Internet. The best known of the PPC advertising platforms is Google Adwords. Most PPC platforms, including Google Adwords, work on an auction basis. Advertisers bid on certain keywords (search phrases) with the highest bidder having their ads displayed most prominently. For example, a software developer of a project management software program may want to target the keyword “project management software”. When someone types in the phrase “project management software” into Google, advertising for the software will appear down the side of the Google search results or at the top of the screen. The higher the advertiser bids, compared to that of their competitors for this search phrase, the more prominently their advertisement will display. There are two major advantages to PPC advertising. The first is that you only have to pay if someone clicks on one of your ads. If no one clicks on one of your advertisements then you are not charged. Secondly, PPC advertising can produce very targeted leads. Looking at the software example mentioned above if someone is typing in the phrase “project management software” then there is a very high likelihood that they are looking for this particular type of software. The fact that they click on an advertisement for this type of software is an even greater indicator that they are targeted prospect. The key to success with PPC advertising is testing and analysis. It’s a good idea to start with a relatively small budget until you are sure that your advertisements are producing a positive return on investment (ROI). You can then scale up your budget to capture more leads. You also need to be testing your advertisements. One of the best ways is through what are called A / B tests. An A / B test is where you change one element of an advertisement and test how it performs against the original ad. The advertisement which produces the highest ROI is kept. This likely to identify and improve each of the elements of your advertising. Over time you can produce a high converting advertisement that will give you the best return on your software product marketing budget.