How To Attract New Customers To your B2B Tech Startup? 9 Easy Steps

B2B tech startups are quickly becoming a global phenomenon, with Statista reporting the industry to be worth close to 5.3 trillion. This amazing growth can be directly related to innovation, changing customer demands, limitations due to the pandemic, and increased technology reliance.

Professionals establish three essential factors of every SaaS startups organizational strategy, namely customer retention, customer engagement and customer satisfaction. To attract a loyal customer base using these three factors, B2B tech startups take complex actionable steps.

Today, we take a closer look at nine actionable ways to attract initial customers for a B2B tech company.

9 Steps to Attract New Customers to your B2B tech Startup

1. Offer Free Trial
2. Create & Market your Content
3. Cold Email Outreach
4. Introduce Referral/Partnerships/Affiliate Program
5. Maintain Customer Databases
6. Boost Your Organic Presence
7. Invest In Paid Advertising
8. Use Storytelling To Build Your Audience
9. Build Your Presence In Communities

Attracting the first few customers to your tech startup can be an engaging but complex task. The SaaS startup business is based on delivering value, therefore entrepreneurs must proactively research ideal customer profiles and relevant marketing channels so that they attract most interested audiences.

1 – Offer Free Trial

Offering free trials to attract new customers for your SaaS startup is an excellent way to engage new users. Not only can it assist to lower customer acquisition costs, but also begins to build a loyal brand following.

In his interesting Forbes article, Stephen Hetzel writes that free trails offer 3 core benefits including:

1. An increase in customer satisfaction
2. Reduction in aggressive selling & guerrilla marketing, and
3. Minimal inherent customer attrition risks

As we mentioned above, it is essential to provide value even before audiences have purchased your service subscription. Delivering free trials allows B2B tech startups to innovate, improve design, and understand customer pain points better.

Startups must also define the limitations of free trials to ensure customers become curious about the value of paid products. These limitations should entail:

• Time & feature limits of the free trial
• Free trail requires credit card information
• The price of the full feature product in case of auto renewal
• Ways to cancel the subscription

2 – Create & Market your Content

Having a sound content marketing strategy is simply a must to attract audiences to a B2B tech startup. Content marketing is the most cost efficient way to attract your customers, plus the content should reflect their values and solve their pain points.

Content marketing offers lucrative benefits, especially providing a way for customers to discover the B2B startup by themselves. In an interesting article Rock Content mention five important benefits of having a seamless content marketing plan:

1. Enhances brand reach
2. Builds trust with the target audience
3. Improves brand loyalty
4. Acts as a growth marketing strategy for the startup
5. Engages new leads in to the sales funnel

Marketing teams use a variety of techniques including blogs, articles, videos, reports, research papers, infographics, and live events to attract followers for SaaS startups. The bottom line however remains the same, “delivering value.”

Identifying customer pain points and providing solutions through cleverly branded content is an ideal way to engage target customers. Every audience has its own preferences and particular behaviors, therefore buyer personas should be the top of every marketer’s list.

It is also ideal to research competitor content to analyze the differnet applications products and various customer segments that it engages. From there B2B marketers should research the ideal keywords being searched to create relevant content that audiences will find valuable.  

3 – Cold Email Outreach

HubSpot identified that email marketing offers the highest ROI for every $1 spent. It remains one of the most effective means of attracting new customers and engaging them with the brand. Cold email outreach can be a beneficial way to educate customers, engage them directly, and approach larger audiences.

As discusses earlier, email marketing returns the highest conversion rates when done properly. Developing the right email campaign can provide marketing teams the incentive to educate, nurture, convince, and convert customers through a reliable customer journey.

Email is also an excellent way to build relationships and rapport with essential decision makers in organizations. This direct communication opens doors for demonstrations and discussions about the startup and its services.

In addition, email marketing allows B2B startups to deliver their product to target customers. Emails increase website traffic allowing audiences to learn about the SaaS startup and how it can help them.

4 – Introduce Referral/Partnerships/Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs are a very popular way to engage new customers to B2B tech startups. This is usually word of mouth marketing performed by influencers through branded blogs, video channels, and social profiles.

Affiliate marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry according to referral rock. There are considerable benefits of these programs that include:

• Brand exposure to larger audiences
• Minimal investment risk
• Insights from affiliate marketers
• Social proof provided by influencers

B2B startups must however keep in mind that affiliate programs are built on commissions. In case the budget doesn’t allow this its always useful to go with a referral program. Referra programs are an excellent choice for SaaS startups as it enables them to reward existing customers when they introduce the brand to their partners.

Referral programs provide participating customers incentives including discounts, free subscriptions, gifts etc. This is also an excellent way to convert your initial customers into loyal brand advocates. 

Partnerships are another innovative techniques to elevate your startup brand and attract audiences. Associating with another brand allows startups to minimize marketing investment, and although it seems like a piggy back ride its a great way to enter new markets.

Alexander Song mentions in his Medium article that partnerships are highly lucrative as they deliver promises of the sharing economy. Customer experience and convenience are critical to develop lasting brand loyalty, therefore partnerships give startups the positive brand association that develops a loyal following.

5 – Maintain Customer Databases

We have consistently discussed ideal customer profiles in this article. Yes, these profiles are the framework that product development, marketing, branding, and customer services are built upon. SaaS starts are meant to be purposeful and customer focused, they are meant to solve a problem or deliver value.

Maintaining a customer database is important as a growing database results in more leads and provides value customer insights to manuvre the marketing & sales strategies. Updating databases regularly allows startups to proactively answer questions and identify trends before the competition.

6 – Boost Your Organic Presence

Search engine optimization (SEO) remains critical for B2B startups to attract new customers. To compete with established brands, startups need keyword optimization for their digital assets. SEO offers tech startups the opportunity to present their brand name to potential customers through the website & social feeds.

Popular SEO techniques that B2B startups utilize, include:

• Optimized on-page meta tags
• Build quality backlinks
• Produce SEO optimized content
• Customer focused value drive content

7 – Invest In Paid Advertising

Digital advertising has quickly become a leading source of traffic and conversions for tech startups, given they have the budget for it. Google Ads a highly pursued platform to advertise directly to audiences searching for particular solutions.

Startup marketers tend to base their ads around different creative techniques that encourage audiences to engage. One of the most popular way is enticing audiences through discounts, for example, 25% off your first subscription.

You may have noticed brands creating valuable paid video ads that discuss a customer pain point or offer a solution to them. This is one of the most creative ways marketers are engaging new audiences through user reviews, product demonstrations, story telling, and problem identification.

8 – Use Storytelling to Build Audience

B2B startups can tell compelling stories around their products and how they helped businesses solve their pain points. Especially in a highly cluttered B2B SaaS industry, it is essential to differentiate your brand from the competition through real life problem solving.

Storytelling is a complex technique and should preferably be executed by experienced product marketing consultants. B2B tech startups have the opportunity here to create the story around their products and how they help or around the vision of their brand.

The idea of the storytelling by the startup is to empathize with customer pain points, and provide them a solution for their problem. Real life stories tend to build interest and trust among new customers, while enhancing loyalty in your existing ones.

9 – Build Presence In Communities

An ideal platform to build an engaged and loyal following is through various online communities. While building a community of your own is preferable, joining and partnering with different social media communities is great for brand awareness.

Answering questions, building up discussions and interacting with potential customers allows startups to build strong relationships that lead to conversions. Community marketing fosters a relationship of trust and loyalty directly with your customers, as you provide them value on a personal level.

Pro Tip: Product Hunt

Product Hunt is the future of B2B tech startup customer acquisition. Our goal is to enhance early adoption, by pitching to a huge community we enhance your brand footprint for sustainable startup growth.

At Product Hunt, we provide SaaS startups a qualified audience that engages and provides real time feedback. Our renowned product sharing and customer feedback infrastructures enable new products to highly relevant audiences while providing real time reviews by potential customers.

Conclusion

Attracting new customers for your B2B SaaS startup requires a clearly defined plan. This includes identifying your ideal customers, developing customer focused marketing campaigns, and providing value even before leads convert.

We hope you found this blog helpful to understand the intricacies of attracting new customers for your B2B startup. For more interesting reads, remember to bookmark our blog and connect with our social feeds.