How should I start a customer acquisition plan for a software business—paid acquisition to better control leads?

Find out what your target market values and wants before you set up any kind of lead capture page or differentiation content.

Anything else is complete guesswork and virtually guaranteed to be completely off target.

Get some information interviews with members of your target market. Do this by phone. You can't automate it or do it by email because it's too slow and easily ignored. Plus, if you use an online survey, the responses are limited to the choices you give them and that is an approach which is too leading. You want the truth, not to confirm your own biases.

If you want help in this department, let's talk.

I will try to give you not so spammy response like one of the previous one. My name is Humberto Valle, I run a marketing agency and have helped many startups and entrepreneurs go from idea to millions in revenue for about 10 years now. My education is in engineering, art, and business and masters in business.

With that said, I specialize in marketing service based businesses and software -intangible value driven companies. Your situation is very common and to an expert what this says is that you are still figuring out who your target customer truly is. You might have sales and organic flow but it would be my expert guess that you haven't done your homework on them yet. No biggie though - what you need to do is conduct your research on patterns from your existing clients based on buying cycle, industry use, specific needs for that final buy decision, did you have to negotiate with them, educate them? - develop a buyer persona and get into the right mindset, once you have that buyer persona well researched and your mindset is based off facts rather than assumptions you can then easily create landing pages and call to actions that will have the highest possible conversion rates (obviously a/b testing them)
you should be able to avoid jargon and speak in their language and offer things of interest to them.
Once you know how to talk to your customers in their language, address their FUD (fears, uncertainties, doubts) the channels don't really matter.

This is basic inbound marketing - the work and time go into developing a proper content strategy around the consumer, user and the value proposition in english terms. Have content for each phase of the buying cycle - awareness, consideration, and decision. For expert advice on how to increase website traffic for software products and or help with your ongoing marketing service, send me a direct message.