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Marketing strategy for software development companies has to take advantage of modern technologies. For such a cutting-edge industry, too many advertising ideas still rely on traditional advertising that fails to be cost-efficient or zero in on its target market. Focus on these software marketing ideas to fully take advantage of how people see and engage your business today:

1. Profile Your Ideal Client

Many newer software marketing ideas rely on advertising that has a conversation. It doesn't sell the potential customer, it simply engages them and invites them in. You can't have a conversation with someone you don't even know, so create a profile of your ideal customer. Very few will actually fit this profile exactly, but the key is that they all want to. Speak to who they want to be, and that becomes part of what you're selling.

2. T-Shaped Social Media Mastery

The T-shaped employee was a buzzword idea years ago. It meant an employee who had broad knowledge that made them familiar and useful in many areas, but with deep specialization in one precise area. The concept was that such an employee was a specialist with unique talents who still knew how to communicate broadly with other departments.

You need a T-shaped social media plan. You need to be on every social media platform you can, sharing your content, regularly replying to comments, and generally seen to be active and engaged. You need to specialize on one platform, however, whether it's LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – whatever fits your strategy. You need to know how to communicate across all those platforms, but you also need to dive deep into one and understand everything about how content gets shared on it. Don't try to specialize in all platforms at once. Be on them all, but fully master one before you think about pushing the boundaries on the next one.

3. Talk About Meaning

Share your accolades. Perhaps your business has earned awards, or ranked highly in a list of businesses. Perhaps you or someone in your business spoke at a conference. Maybe an employee hit a milestone or earned an award. Share all of these things. Write press releases and post them online.

You may even wish to develop content about it. A press release should simply be factual and brief. A blog or article, on the other hand, should center on the meaning the award has to you. It shouldn't be self-congratulatory. Set the ego aside. Compliment your employees, the business, the passion and effort that your staff dedicates. Don't write about the award, write about it's meaning. Write about why participating in that conference is important. Write about what that employee hitting a milestone represents about that employee's dedication and hard work.

Talking about how good the employees are, how meaningful the award is, affirming the importance of a conference that invited your company to be featured...these all humanize a business while confirming its professionalism. That speaks to prospective customers.

4. Quality Over Quantity

Email marketing campaigns are often treated with a “carpet bombing” approach. This is wrong. Potential customers have long since learned how to tune this out and email offers extremely accessible tools to simply filter your business into a spam folder.

Be selective about the email you send, both to prospects and current customers. They don't want to know every update, they just want to know what's important. They won't click just because the email's there. They'll only click if there's a value offered to them in that email – an educational article, a white paper, a content offer, a demo video, a webinar. You expect something from them – their time and interest. Give them something that earns it.

5. Separate Your Email Lists

Gated content shouldn't ask for too much: name, email, title, organization, that's it. A drop-down menu for why they want to access the content is quick and can help you be more precise with what content prospects get. Sending the same content to everybody is overly broad and will fail to engage most.

Separate prospects onto different email marketing lists based on their interest in your content. Gated content isn't the only way to do this; it's just the easiest. You may notice specific visitors focusing on a narrow range of content.

Once prospects are separated, you have specific lists. Each list should get more precise content tailored to their interests. You can then automate content to go out to one list or another based on tags. This saves you the time of micro-managing each list. Just make sure you don't swamp any particular list with too much content. Remember: quality over quantity.

6. Organic SEO vs. PPC

Content that relies on building organic SEO results and improving your Google ranking is a much better long-term investment than PPC advertising. SEO has to be the core marketing strategy for software development companies. Without it, you won't improve your visibility in a lasting way or build quality leads steadily.

That said, PPC can still have a place in an organized campaign. Just avoid scattershot approaches. Too many businesses bid for ad placement in a way that is inconsistent. A PPC campaign should blanket a particular range of search results like a net, not simply grab blindly in the dark. If you don't have a precise strategy for how your PPC buys will be used in a campaign, then don't buy them or take more time to figure that strategy out.

7. Google Isn't Alone

Google is the monster when discussing search engines and software marketing ideas, but it's not the only search engine. Bing may be an afterthought in everyday life, but 30% of Bing's users have an annual household income of $100,000 or more. Combine this with the fact that Bing can be easier to climb and less expensive per click than Google, and you can capitalize on its wealthier average user base.

Google absolutely has to be your focus. You need strong SEO there as the core of any marketing strategy for software development companies. Google absolutely comes first.

If you have the time and focus after getting established on Google to start learning how to take advantage of Bing's indexing, it can give you access to a wealthier average user base that may not be as easily accessible through Google.