Mobile apps have become an incredibly important piece of the digital landscape, in fact, custom app development platform, Buildfire, found that 57% of all digital media usage comes from mobile apps. This huge, viable market for apps does present certain challenges; the Apple App Store has 2.2 million apps, and the Google Play Store has a staggering 2.8 million. With this much competition, it’s no wonder less than 0.01% of apps become financially successful. 

Though the stats look bleak, a well-designed app that solves real-world problems can still see extraordinary success. Mobile apps were projected to generate $189 billion in revenue by 2020, and app usage is only going up from here. Of course, to be one of the few apps that climbs the ranks in the app store, it’s important to do some mobile app marketing along the way.

Pre-Launch

Research 

Before diving into mobile app marketing, it’s paramount that you build a timeline with a wide enough period to face any roadblocks that are unfortunately just part of doing business. Creating a financially successful app can require months, if not years, of prep work; the more in-depth research about your target market, your competitors and your users you can compile the better. 

One place to start research is with the competition. Find out everything you possibly can in this department:

• Look at their timeline (does yours seem plausible in comparison?)
• How do they make money (and are they actually doing so?)
• Look at different iterations of your competition’s apps (looking at their mistakes and improvements can help lead you in the right direction)

While combing through data about competing businesses can definitely provide some useful information, the best sources you can find are the competitions’ users themselves. Looking at the comments, ratings and reviews those customers post about your competition is often far more constructive than any statistic. Talk to their users – they can reveal information you may not think to look for:

• What made them download the competition’s app? (what is the problem they wanted to solve)
• What are the best and worst features? (how you can improve)
  • What makes it user-friendly/unfriendly?
  • What features do they actually use?
  • Are the in-app advertisements overkill?
• If they stopped using the app, why?
• Where did they discover the app and what drove them to download it?

While learning about the competition is important in and of itself, this information could also be quite useful in defining the problem your app can solve. Of course, you probably had a solid idea of what that problem was when you thought of the app, but don’t let that be a limiting factor. The best way to drive a business into the ground is by refusing to adapt. 

User Personas

Knowing what problem your app solves is vital; that’s one reason why user personas, fictional characters that represent your ideal customers based on market research and demographic data, are so valuable. Your user persona will help paint a more clear picture of the people you are marketing to:

• Who is your ideal customer: Occupation, demographics, personality, hobbies, beliefs, etc.
• The problems and needs of your customers: What annoys them, what wastes their time, what are they settling with that you can make better
• Behavior: Where and why do they shop, when and what do they use their phones for, are they frugal or do they like to treat themselves, etc. 

While user personas can be wonderfully valuable, be careful not to stick to them too rigidly. If you find that your real users don’t match up well with the personas you have created – re-evaluate the personas, don’t try and force your real clients into inaccurate categorizations just for the sake of it. The beauty of research is that you can always do more, and we very highly recommend continuing this research throughout the app’s lifetime. 

Pre-Launch Marketing 

Now that you have conducted some solid preliminary research, the next step is mobile app marketing. If your app is part of a pre-existing business, that business could be a marvelous asset. If you already have a base of dedicated clients, why not start with marketing to them? You can advertise your soon-to-exist app through your:

• Social media: Make an introduction post or a demo video to wet your subscribers’ tongues.
• Website: A simple banner ad at the top of your website could draw in potential customers without hindering their experience at all. Your site is also a great place to link off to the app store or your apps specific social media pages once they are available. 
• Emails: Do you have a laundry list of email addresses? Send them an enticing email highlighting the problems your app solves.
• Blog: If you have a blog, this is a wonderful place to tell your clients anything and everything they may need to know about your new app. If you’re ready to take it to the next level, reach out to other blogs/journalists/influencers and see if they would feature your app in a publication.

Though it certainly helps, you in no way need to have an existing business to launch a mobile app; there are a multitude of other ways to get your name out in the zeitgeist. In most cases, you are going to want to start building your apps online presence before it’s ready to launch. The best course of action will ultimately depend on who and what your app is for – but in general, it’s a good idea to make a website and social media accounts for your app if you don’t already have them. 

Online will provide you with the largest reach, but in-person events can help add a personal touch to your mobile app marketing. If you have the capacity, a launch party or similar event could draw in interested customers, attract media attention, and showcase what your app has to offer. 

Post-Launch

The pre-launch phase of your mobile app marketing will hopefully reveal what pieces of your advertising strategy work, and what pieces don’t. Much of the marketing post-launch will be similar to pre-launch, but once the app is available for download, your options expand even more:

Paid Advertising

Like advertising for any product, paid is always an option. If you choose pay-per-click advertising, make sure your ads are compatible with both iOS and Android on mobile devices. You can also market offline using traditional advertising such as billboards, flyers, free merchandise and QR codes.

If your app is not very well known, paid advertisements within the Apple App Store could be of great use to you. The App Store allows you to buy search ads, which lets you bid for keywords related to your app. If a searcher looks up that keyword, your app will appear at the top of the results. This is a great way to increase app downloads, considering the average conversion rate for Apple Search Ads is 50% (1-2% is the average app conversion rate).

App Store Optimization

Apple’s App Store functions are similar to a search engine, meaning you can strategically improve your app’s ranking through basic SEO techniques. This is appropriately called App Store Optimization, or ASO. Just like in SEO, keywords play a vital role in ASO; in fact, keywords are the leading factor the Apple App Store algorithm uses to determine an app’s ranking for a search query. Keywords hold the most weight in the app’s title; MobileDevHQ, a provider of ASO solutions, found that a keyword in the title increases its ranking an average of 10.3%. Of course, keywords can be used elsewhere as well. You can include keywords in the subtitle of the app and in the keywords field, which is unseen by users. 

The next piece the App Store algorithm considers in its ranking is downloads, ratings and reviews. When it comes to ratings and reviews, quantity is important, but quality is imperative. This piece is trickier to navigate as it falls more on the user, but there are many things you can do to begin accruing positive ratings/reviews. The first, and most important, is to listen to the bad ones; a negative review can provide insight into what improvements need to be made. You can also incentivize users to provide honest feedback with in-app rewards such as a free drink, extra gaming lives, no ads, etc.. 

Perhaps the best way to skyrocket your app’s downloads is to get featured in the App Store – but this is very challenging to do. Apple’s editorial team receives thousands of pitches a day, so if you want a shot at a feature, you’ve got to stand out. Luckily, Apple is pretty transparent about what they look for:

• Beautifully designed UX: Basically, does your app work well and look good doing so? Native apps tend to do much better in this arena, as Apple prefers to feature apps made for iOS. 
• Regular updates: This shows Apple that you are constantly working to improve your app.
• Global: The more countries your app is available in, the better. Apple tends to only feature apps that can be used in multiple countries.
• Accessibility: Apple will not feature an inaccessible app.
• App Store Product Page: Your product page should be engaging, optimized for keywords, and informative. 

Final Thoughts

There is a pervasive sentiment in the modern world that good products tend to succeed – but even the best products usually demand time and effort to get to that point. With millions of apps available for download, a powerful mobile app marketing strategy is of the utmost importance. For most, this will require a combination of in-depth market research, a strong online presence, and (tactful) App Store Optimization. If you have an awesome app that isn’t getting the attention it deserves, give us a call at Brandcave, we’d love to help!

When marketing online, you have two main options: paid or organic. Many companies use search engine advertising as a form of paid online marketing. This tactic allows marketers to buy visits to their website (pay-per-click). On the flip side, search engine optimization (SEO), is the practice of getting organic website traffic through search engine results. SEO practices have been around since the ’90s, and they’re not going away. In fact, Moz found that SEO leads to 20 times more traffic than pay-per-click on both mobile phones and desktop. 

Getting into SEO can present a steep learning curve, but despite its complexity, SEO is an advanced marketing skill anyone can use. 

How does SEO work?

In order to understand how SEO works online, you need to also understand how search engines work. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have three primary functions: crawl, index and rank web pages. 

• Crawling: Search engines dispatch crawlers to explore the internet in order to discover new or updated content. 
• Indexing: The information is then organized into an index, a massive database containing all of the content the crawlers have found. The index can then be used by the search engine to find URLs that fit with a searcher’s query. Google’s web indexing system is called Caffeine.
• Ranking: This is how a search engine determines which websites to show a searcher, ordering them from most relevant to least relevant. 

When a search engine crawls a website, it gathers information from the URL, headers, images and body copy of a page, pulling out important words and phrases to determine what the page is all about. SEO allows you to guide the search engine in the right direction.

Using Your SEO Skills to Drive Organic Traffic

Getting started with SEO is an intimidating feat, but it doesn’t have to be. Many advanced marketing practices such as SEO are easier than they seem; in fact, you may already be doing some of them. 

Keywords

Keywords, the words and phrases people type into search engines in order to answer their query, are foundational to SEO. Properly optimizing your webpages for the keywords you identify is a great long-term strategy for generating additional web traffic.

The first step of SEO is finding the right keywords. Unless your website has a high domain authority (more on that later), you may need to be selective on the keywords you intend to target. This may seem counterintuitive, but it is much more challenging to make it to the search engine results page (SERP) with a broad term such as ‘cookies’ than with a more specific term such as ‘organic oatmeal cookie recipe’. 

Vague or overgeneralized keywords also pose another issue: the people coming to your site may not be interested in what you’re offering. If someone searches ‘cookie,’ the question they are trying to answer could be almost anything: how to clear cookies from their browser, the nutritional value of a cookie, where to buy cookies, and so on. They are not likely to engage much with your website if it has nothing to do with what they were searching for in the first place. On the flip side, you also don’t want to optimize for keywords that are so specific or obscure that no one ends up searching for them. 

This is the process of keyword research. The key to keyword research is finding terms that have a high search volume, yet are not too competitive. Finding that sweet spot can be a real challenge. Luckily, there are some great advanced marketing tools online that can lead you in the right direction.

How to Optimize Your Webpage for an Identified  Keyword

Shoving tons of keywords where they don’t belong leads to content that is clunky at best and unreadable spam at worst. In general, it is best practice to target one keyword phrase per page. After all, keywords work best when they fit the content well; they need to flow so naturally that your readers don’t know you’re using keywords at all.

Once you have identified the keyword phrase you want to use on a webpage, you might find that it is a bit challenging to incorporate it in a way that adds value to visitors. This is one reason why blogs are such a useful asset to many businesses. They allow you to write in-depth on topics in your industry, so they’re great if you have a keyword that is relevant to what you do but doesn’t make sense on the pages of your website. If your company already has a blog, adding keywords to your future posts is an advanced marketing technique that you can start immediately. 

Links

Internal links are links on your site that lead to other pages on your site, while backlinks are links from other websites leading to yours. PageRank, part of Google’s core algorithm, determines the importance of a webpage by looking at the quantity and quality of the links associated with it. Having many backlinks from trustworthy sites indicates to Google that your site is important, and can lead to better search result rankings. Blogging is a great way for your site to increase internal links between pages. Achieving external backlinks, however, will take a little more strategy.

How to Get Backlinks

There are a plethora of ways to get links to your website, here are a few popular ones:

• Create high-quality infographics
• Guest blogging 
• Reach out: bloggers, journalists, partnerships 
• The skyscraper method: find a popular topic and write about it better than your competition

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO

No matter what advanced marketing techniques you are using, the general protocol is to create content for people, not machines. When it comes to SEO, this also means using techniques that abide by search engine guidelines, often called ‘white hat SEO’. According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, these are the basic principles your B2B company should be observing: 

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Don’t deceive your users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Black Hat SEO

The opposite of white hat SEO is, of course, black hat SEO. This approach is meant to trick search engines, and it should be avoided at all costs. While these spammy tactics may work occasionally, they signal to the search engine that your website is not to be trusted. Worse, black hat SEO can make your site annoying and user-unfriendly. Google Webmaster Guidelines points out some key mistakes to avoid:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
• Cloaking: the practice of showing the search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
• Hidden text and links
• Doorway pages: pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

In summation: unless you are a tree or a queen, don’t be shady.

What Google Considers

Google looks at three major pillars when determining the quality of a website: the beneficial purpose, the stakes at hand, and E-A-T. Whether you are utilizing the most basic, or the most advanced marketing and SEO tactics, these three things are of the utmost importance when it comes to Google ranking. 

Beneficial Purpose

In general, websites and pages should be created with the intention of helping users. Pages that are obviously a ploy to make money will be viewed by Google as low quality and will rank poorly in response. 

Your Money or Your Life

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages include information that, when given improperly, can have serious implications on the visitor’s health, happiness, safety, or financial stability. Because of the heightened stakes for YMYL pages, Google makes the accuracy of this content a top priority. YMYL includes topics such as:

• news and current events
• Civics, government and law
• Finances
• Shopping
• Health and safety
• Groups of people

Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T)

Evaluating the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT) of a page is how Google determines that page’s quality. 

• Expertise: This looks at the qualifications of the creator of the page’s content. For non-YMYL pages, Google also allows for ‘everyday experience,’ meaning that people with relevant life experience on a given topic can be considered experts on that topic. 
• Authoritativeness: This looks at both the content and the website itself. A site with high authority is well known and respected in its industry. Authority can be earned through backlinks from other high-quality sites, mentions in articles, and being shared across social media.
• Trustworthiness: This refers to how accurate and honest the information is that your company is publishing. Bad reviews and misinformation can seriously hurt you here. Luckily, Moz offers some ideas for how to improve your site trustworthiness:
  • Having a clear way to make contact with the website owners.
  • Associating the website with a physical location, i.e. your office or store address.
  • Having a term of business or T&Cs page, which is easily accessible to users (usually from the footer).
  • Making sure your website’s domain is secure. Correctly implementing HTTPS is very important to Google and helps to ensure any data your users’ input won’t be intercepted by a nefarious 3rd party entity.
  • Having a privacy policy which is clearly accessible (usually from the footer).
  • If you’re accepting transactions, you should have clear refunds and returns policies.
  • If you’re selling products, try to include comprehensive specifications of the product and include any safety advice that might be relevant.
  • If you’re sharing knowledge, in general, it’s a good idea to have an author biography included and to cite external sources where relevant. Linking out to authority sites is a good thing.

Brandcave is Here to Help

The ever-changing, ever-growing nature of SEO is difficult to keep up with, and this blog post just skims the surface. If you are ready to dive in, there are tons of online resources that can help. You might find that there is a lot to absorb when it comes to SEO, especially for companies who are just getting into it. If your B2B is in need of some SEO assistance, give us a call at BrandCave, it’s what we do. 

There are so many B2B marketing ideas floating around the internet. Some are passing trends and others are evergreen methodologies. One particularly well known strategy, which comes from Backlinko’s Brian Dean, is called the Skyscraper Technique. You may have heard of the Skyscraper Technique before; SEO professionals and inbound marketers often praise its effectiveness. Dean claims his search engine traffic increased 110% after only two weeks after implementing this strategy. Like many B2B marketing ideas, it’s no silver bullet, but is it worth considering for your company?

The Skyscraper Technique is no marketing secret. You might already be doing a similar strategy already. If you have never heard of the strategy, however, here are the basic steps:

Step 1: Lay a Strong Foundation

To start off, you’re going to need to find content worth reading. Begin by finding an article in your industry that has already shown to be buzzworthy. You’re looking for content that has generated social media attention, comments, shares and generally high rankings in Google.

The article you select should cover a popular topic in your industry, but it should also 1) allow you to optimize for a search term your website can reasonably rank for and 2) be a topic you can reasonably approve upon.

Step 2: Build it Tall

Once you’ve found a solid, buzzworthy article, you’ll need to write a better version of it. The Skyscraper Technique is like building a skyscraper: you’ll want to build a taller one than your neighbors.

Make it better. Make it longer. Make it more encompassing. Make it prettier. Make it more current. Make it all-around more impressive than the other articles already available on the web.

Step 3: Have a Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

Unfortunately, good content is not enough. Now, the right people need to see it. To begin, you’ll need to identify the industry bloggers, media outlets, customers and aggregate outlets that may be interested in your new article. You’ll also want to make sure they’ve linked to similar content already. The key is finding a primed audience.

Once your media list has been identified, now comes the fun part: content marketing. The success of the Skyscraper Technique comes from pitching to your targeted audience that your new content is worth sharing. When you email these individuals, be sure to ask them to link to your content if they enjoy it.

Dean claims to have an 11% success rate from his email outreach. While that may be a small return, he suggests they were all quality links.

Is it a solid strategy?

Taking existing content, making it better and reaching out to the right people – a simple strategy that any company, big or small, can utilize. Right?

The effectiveness of most B2B marketing ideas is contested widely on the web, and this one is no exception. Some marketers will swear by this technique. Several case studies have even shown better results than Dean’s. However, the technique is not without its critics. It’s up to you to decide if the pros outweigh the cons.

Pros

You’ve made better content. Even if nothing else worked, you still have something better than your competitors — and that helps position you as a thought leader in your industry. Besides that, fresh content will always be beneficial for your SEO.

You’ve also made new contacts in your industry. Compiling your media list definitely ate up some time but, whether they respond positively or not, you still have the excuse of your content to make contact with other industry influencers. At the end of the day, your network is still your networth. Am I right?

Cons

The Skyscraper Technique might not work so great for fledgling sites. According to Dale Cudmore from Ahrefs and our friends from howtostartablogonline.net, this strategy worked well for Dean because he had a considerable advantage prior to beginning the technique. His site, Backlinko, has a domain authority of 76. That’s more than most of us can say.

Competing against high domain authority sites can be difficult. If you’re expecting to be on the coveted first page of search results, you will likely be disappointed. High difficulty keywords will still play a major role in your site’s ability to rank. If your site is smaller, consider practicing this strategy on a search term with low difficulty.

Of course, the Skyscraper Technique is not the only SEO strategy you can be using. Other B2B marketing ideas also have the potential to increase search visibility and domain authority. If SEO and content marketing is something your company has been struggling with, give us a call. Brandcave can help improve your rankings and many other aspects of your inbound marketing strategy.

With 67% of B2B buyers relying on digital content to research and make purchasing decisions, the importance of content marketing seems like a no brainer. Like a dealership without a car salesman, content marketing produces the kind of marketing material that buyers want: entertaining, educational and largely non-branded.

Content marketing can be tailored for any part of the buyer’s journey. Here are some key ways content marketing can be important to your B2B marketing strategy.

Content Marketing Can Entertain

Let’s say you’re a B2B marketer. Your services are great and now you have an eCommerce website to show prospects all the different services you can do. The problem is, so do hundreds of other B2B marketers. How do you make them aware of you? And, more importantly, how do you make them remember you? The first step may be producing entertaining content.

The key to entertaining your audience is to appeal to their emotions. Make them curious, laugh or even cry (cue Sarah McLachlan). As a marketer, you might produce a new video such as “The Top 10 Dumbest Terms our Industry Created This Year” or an article such as “B2B Marketing Tips You Need to Stop Following.” Whatever you decide to do, make it worth watching, reading and sharing. On this note, your website’s content needs to be easily shared. When your prospects share your content, they generate awareness and virality. It’s a sales funnel and not a sales tube, after all.

Content Marketing Can Educate

Educational content can often work hand-in-hand with entertaining content. And, while it can be entertaining, educational content has the primary role of informing your audience about your product, services or industry. It is great for prospects at the top of the sales funnel as they are researching information about companies like yours.

Educational content takes on many forms. In your company, you might provide a helpful guide to your prospects on determining which social media platforms are right for their businesses or provide information on how to craft the perfect LinkedIn profile. It’s important that educational content represents a learning opportunity for your prospects because, while it grabs those prospects at the awareness stage, it also guides others further down the funnel. Making them laugh at this point won’t help you much – they’re already interested – and now they’re thinking.

Content Marketing to Persuade and Convert

Only after you have both thoroughly entertained and educated your audience have you earned the right to discuss your product or service offerings. Now, you can begin persuading them to convert into customers. A call to action, or CTA, can be a very persuasive piece of content to have alongside a video or blog post if you do it right. Depending on their place in the sales funnel, you might ask them to subscribe to your email list or download your eBook. Just be sure that your prospects know what they will be receiving and that it will be worth receiving.

Now is the moment you’ve been waiting for: tell them about you. What services do you offer? How are they unique from your competitors? How do they improve compliance? How do they minimize risk? This content needs to pull your prospects the rest of the way through the funnel. To convert them into customers, they need to be informed and ready to make a purchasing decision.

A good content marketing strategy should curb the sales pitch, engage your audience and guide potential customers through the conversion process. But, at the heart of this strategy is a need for great content. If you can create things that entertain, educate, persuade and convert your prospects, they just might come out the other side as brand new customers.

Now that you understand the importance of content marketing for your company, join the 80% of B2B marketers that have a content marketing strategy and start converting leads. A content marketing strategy is more than just a regularly updated blog, a popular video or a social media presence – it’s all of that and more. Brandcave does an excellent job of tailoring the perfect strategy to meet your needs. If you’re curious to learn more about how our team can create relevant and engaging content for your business or service, give us a call.

Your blog is often the first page of your website that perspective clients stumble upon. It’s the perfect place for you to showcase your expertise and disseminate company news. However, it’s not as simple as just throwing together few haphazard paragraphs and calling it a day. Successful blogs take research, time and careful cultivation. There are a several key elements that can make or break the success of your blog.

If you’ve been following our blog up until now you may be asking, “Hey Brandcave, how do you guys write such awesome posts?” Well, fear not, loyal reader. We’re about to tell you. By the end of this post, you’ll know how to blog effectively!

Choose a Target.

Establishing a target demographic is crucial to the success of your blog. The target audience you choose will shape the topics you cover as well as the voice you use. When deciding on a demographic, ask yourself three questions: who are we wanting to buy our product or service, what are their needs and concerns, and how can we help? Knowing this information can help you form the profile of your ideal reader and ultimately shape the type of topics you will cover.

Make Your Topic Relevant.

As discussed above, topics should be built to serve your target audience. Readers should always walk away from the blog with the feeling that they have learned something. The key here is relevancy and variety. You will want to cover topics that meet a day-to-day need of the potential client as well as topics that show your high-level industry knowledge. For example, including a blog that discusses how to draft an awesome eBook right alongside a post covering the current state of the content marketing industry would give readers a nice range.

Plan Ahead.

There is nothing more dangerous than starting out with an empty word document. A lack of research and preparation can result in a lack of purpose. Creating an editorial calendar can help you keep track of what topics you’ve covered, what research has been done and what keywords have been used. Decide ahead of time what keywords will most effectively serve your purpose. This is also the time to decide on what other content you will link to in your blog. (Pro tip: linking to other articles on and off your site can help you establish your credibility). This will also help you be prepared should a topic fall through. A blog is a constantly evolving item but there should be clear goals set in place to guide you through the changes.

Be Consistent.

Make choices and stick with them. Even if you have several employees drafting posts, make sure each post follows the same format, uses the same voice and stays consistent with your brand. Your posting schedule should remain consistent as well. Readers should be able to count on you to post routinely. Posting erratically can cause visitors to lose interest quickly.

Add a Call-to-Action.

The most effective blogs operate as a two-way street to benefit both you and the visitor. Not only can they provide information to the reader but they can be used a means for you to gather information about the reader. Common call-to-actions include signing up for a newsletter, filling out a contact form or filling out a form to access a more in-depth asset like an eBook. When relevant, you can also use this space at the bottom of your blog to direct users to other pages in your website like a products, services or solutions page.

Want to learn how to blog effectively? Following these tips. If you’re already blogging, don’t worry! You can easily incorporate these elements into your current practices. Just remember, decide where your audience wants to go, show them how to get there and then direct them forward.