Now, it’s a proven fact that inbound marketing for SEO is beneficial as almost 90% of the web traffic is attained with the help of search engines, social media and content creation. So, if you are interested in establishing a stable web business, it’s always a good suggestion to consider the option of inbound marketing. It will certainly show a huge difference made by search engines in your visitor blogs.
However, the story is not a happy one for app publishers. Due to the widely spread misconception about the App Store, developers only tend to focus on App Store Optimization or ASO. They think that it is the only way to get organic traffic to their blogs and don’t focus on web traffic at all. In simple terms, generally app publishers don’t understand the benefits of inbound marketing and just ignore it by thinking that it’s not of their use.
You must have noticed it that most of the apps own rudimentary sites which have very less content. These app publishers believe in following a product-driven, build-it-and-they’ll-come approach. Generally apps with web presence play the role of basic funnels in sending visitors to their App Store page. However, they lose the wonderful chance to pre-sell the benefits of their apps. They ignore the fact that it helps in building a trustworthy bond with the user before he actually reaches the actual app store page.
It’s the time for App developers to take the benefits of the web and start following the approach of the web publishers. So, keeping in view of this change, their approach should also change and they should believe in first building, then marketing and after that expecting the users to come.
In the present web world where more than 700,000 apps are competing for getting visibility, completely relying on the App Store will never be a good choice.
Though there are a lot of tricks and tactics are used for app store optimization, but the potential of inbound marketing for SEO is way ahead.
The App Store which follows the build-it-and-they’ll-come strategy uses title, icon, a few keywords, description, some screen shots and reviews of the users.
The best benefit of web marketing is that it helps you in creating a website which seems worthy to the visitors. With it, you get a good opportunity to build a blog, create content, gain social media presence and prove to the visitors that your site is worth to be visited. So, it certainly helps you in building trust with the help of familiarity and information.
Though there are a lot of benefits attached to inbound marketing, but people generally don’t use it as they remain unable to understand the process of using it and how to apply it.
People generally face a lot of difficulty is using web marketing as they find the marketing channels difficult to measure. Especially Mobile app publishers face greater difficulty in using it as services like Google Analytics used by them before didn’t provide any options for measuring conversions. With App Store, you only get information about the number of people who downloaded your application without any clues about where they came from. So, it doesn’t give you access to any web referrer data for your app activations. However, there is no need to worry as with challenges, better opportunities are lying ahead.
With changing needs, the opportunity for getting access to the right data has gained a lot of popularity and has evolved very quickly. With this, mobile publishers and app marketers get a wonderful opportunity to keep a track of their key metrics used for their campaigns.
Understanding this need, Tapstream was created by a team of Canadian app makers. This software helps to associate downloads with the original inbound channels. So, using this, you can refine your web strategy by correlating referring URLs, search engine keywords and landing pages to app activation numbers. This has certainly opened an exciting new world of measurement for the web users.
This has given an opportunity to the web publishers for the first time to calculate both the cost of customer acquisition and customer lifetime value at the same time for a specific inbound channel. This will greatly help you to calculate the ROI of your SEO efforts and gain visibility as an app marketer.
Now the major question is about the amount required for owning a new app user through blogging, social media, and content creation as compared to various paid channels like Google Adwords. Here are a few ways by which you can yourself measure the channels and know which of them can bring the most valuable customers.
First, let’s understand how to calculate the effectiveness and profitability of app marketing which consists of CoCA and LTV.
CoCA is a wonderful way to measure the performance of your marketing. It’s always better to acquire a customer at a low cost till your marketing strategies help you in bringing the right customers. LTV proves to be very beneficial in bringing in the right customers. Your main task starts after roping in the customers as you need to keep them happy in order to keep them stick around as well as monetize them. This also helps in enhancing their value for you throughout your bond by providing a useful product or service.
For calculating CoCA, you need to take your cost of sales and marketing for a particular period and then divide it by the total number of customers acquired by you during that period.
In order to understand this concept in a better way, let’s take a scenario. For example, a total amount of $1500 is spent by you to sponsor a blog and you also take the help of an ad placement for a week. In order to track the details, a unique tracking URL is used on your ad, and your analytics service tells you at the end of the week that your ad has got 10 new sign-ups. So, in this case, the amount spent in acquiring a customer or your CoCA will be $150.
It is also of utmost importance to understand that paid channels are generally more straightforward in computing. It can only be avoided if the same process is not used for inbound channels.
The primary aim in such situations is to first check various marketing channels using both paid and inbound campaigns. This helps in analyzing the channels which are the most effective for roping in new customers. You should always remember that your selling skills, usage of landing pages and preparation of a convincing sales copy plays a pivotal role in deciding the performance of your campaign.
The acquiring of customers is not the only job; the main task is to ensure if they are worth it. It’s very necessary as signing up people who don’t need your service will be a sheer waste of your efforts.
LTV basically refers to the gross margin you can expect from a customer during the entire span of your bonding with him. You may have to spend some good time in understanding LTV as you need to check pricing and a sense of the stability of your customers. The best thing about LTV is that it offers great information on the effectiveness of your marketing skills as well as your product.
However, the final aim is always to keep CoCA lower than LTV. For web businesses, the calculation of CoCA and LTV is quite straightforward using services like KISSmetrics. However, mobile developers, marketers and agencies need to take help of mobile-specific solutions like Tapstream.
The days are gone when you were able to discover your mobile app organically with the help of a simple app store. The need for the App publishers is to start using inbound marketing for planning, executing and attaining growth.