Digital, or online marketing, is a term consisting of many methodologies and disciplines that when combined are effectively used to enhance performance and profitability of any website or app. This page lists some of the more commonly used disciplines.
Generally speaking, almost any digital marketing includes the following steps:
Page Navigation
Prior to Launch
After Launch
Branding
Star Ratings and User Reviews
Landing Page and Call to Action
Unique Offer and Call to Action
Online Advertising
Conversion Rate Optimization
Fresh Content – Building a content Strategy
Inner and Inbound Links
App Marketing Vs Website Marketing
Measuring and Analyzing
Prior to Launch
- Prototyping and characterizing your site or application
- Usability / user experience testing
- Choosing service providers (e.g. hosting, CMS, graphic designer etc.)
- Implementing measurement tags
- Checking quality content and consistency
- Ensuring all SEO / ASO and related tags are properly installed including Schema, page speed, mobile compatibility and many other factors
Without proper testing and assessment prior to launching, many key performance indicators could suffer a long lasting negative impact. Your app or website may not convert as many customers as expected, while plenty of resources would have to be invested to address easily avoidable issues.
Common avoidable example: many modern websites are built using JavaScript libraries such as React, Vue or Angular, a technique that was popularized around 2016 still is today. It’s a great way of building fast intuitive websites for the most part. But still today, years after it first became common, many developers still use inner URL structures that search engines simply cannot read. Losing massive amounts of potential organic traffic is not the only problem with poorly configured sites. Messaging and social platforms will not be able to show previews of inner pages, thus making sharing content almost useless. Ad networks will also reject inner pages, or assign them very poor quality scores, making any effective campaign almost an impossible achievement.
After Launch
- Marketing your digital asset using any suitable network, including organic
- Performance measurements using GA4 and alternative analytics platforms, as well the the ad platforms themselves
- Conducting A/B tests for continual improvements and purchase funnel issue detection
- Monitoring other potential problems using tools such as Search console and crash reports
- Locating potential content partners, distributors and creating better brand recognition using multiple methods
- Continual UI/UX improvements using real time tests
- Building a dedicated community on social media
- Making use of effective landing pages and other point of engagement
Branding
Building a recognizable brand is probably the single most effective way of achieving online (and most likely offline) marketing success. Google’s search engine is known for years now to prefer large brands. The amount of searches for a specific brand, rather than its business expertise (e.g. searching for “geico” when actually looking for “auto insurance”) and the amount of times a user looks for the actual domain (i.e. typing geico.com) have an enormous effect of how the algorithm determines so called “brand signals”. Much in the same way, social networks attribute “profile strength” signals to users with large, engaged followers. This built in algorithm bias is just part of the ecosystem.
While big brands can afford expensive TV or radio ads to increase brand exposure, some web based brands use this inbuilt bias as a way to start new brands with minimal monetary investments, all while getting some much needed offline media attention.
Star Ratings and User Reviews
Star ratings is a tried and proved method of gaining a user’s trust, and so are user reviews, sometimes known as UGC, or user generated content. The fact that manipulating these reviews is sometimes as easy as clicking a button, has seemingly little to no effect on their overall effectiveness. Whether you’re looking at an Amazon product, searching for a Google business review or looking at an app store rating score, a star rating is more likely than not to influence your decision. Some independent rating providers, such as Trust Pilot, may promise unbiased reviews and ratings, but like other reviews and ratings, they are subject to manipulation by either owners or their competitors.
Landing Page and Call to Action
A landing page, whether a dedicated page on your website or an app store page, is usually the first (and sometimes the last) interaction you may have with a potential client. This simple truth makes every element on your page a worthy candidate for A/B testing to constantly ensure performance and conversion rates gains.
Although most elements have some influence on user decisions, some carry more weight. For online stores and ecommerce, Star ratings, user reviews and clear images usually count for more conversions than other elements.
Landing pages also have a significant and direct influence on your ad quality score. Page loading speed, text compatibility between page and ad and their relevance to the search that triggered the ad will all affect the quality score.
Unique Offer and Call to Action
An effective call to action usually uses a unique offer users were not necessarily exposed to in prior visits. Hotels and airlines often use FOMO type calls to action, meant to invoke urgency: “Only two rooms left” or “limited time offer”, while retailers may offer discounts or giveaways to online buyers only. But many other unique call to action types exist, some more subtle and creative, while still generating long term benefits to both your brand and its clients.
Online Advertising
Every digital marketing includes some form of advertising, not necessarily in paid form. Small businesses such as local restaurants usually have active Facebook or Instagram pages, while larger businesses have almost limitless paid advertising choices.
Generally speaking, there are two forms of digital ads: reaching out to new audiences or trying to re-engage those who were already exposed to your brand. Reaching out to new customers is probably the most common method of online advertising. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok (just to name a few), thrive mainly on reaching out ad expenditures. Remarketing campaigns are most commonly used when re-engaging with past customers or non converting visitors to your app or website. A key component of any successful remarketing campaign is a unique offer, as mentioned above.
Conversion Optimization
Ultimately, every landing page, either on your own site or in any designated app store or 3rd party platform, is measured by its ability to convert casual users into customers. Conversion rate optimization, for the most part, is the art of fine-tuning a landing page, down to sometimes overlooked elements such as font size or color.
Using Google Optimize (or similar tools), continuous A/B tests may reveal invaluable insights, which in turn may result in much higher engagement and conversions rates.
Fresh Content - Building a content Strategy
One of the best and cost effective ways of driving new traffic to a website is by continually generating fresh, captivating content. Search engines and social networks assess content relevancy by its freshness and engagement rates, among other factors, and in return award traffic to the best content. Continually generating new content will also strengthen your brand signals, as measured by various algorithms.
Standalone apps, that have no accompanying website, also need a constant stream of new content. Marketing the app may require 3rd party reviews and the app itself still needs new content on a regular basis, just not text based content necessarily.
Inner and Inbound Links
SEO is inherently integrated into any digital marketing campaign, whether for a website, an app or both. A strong inbound link profile is a crucial ranking factor for any search engine, and it has much of the same influence when searching for apps or app related searches (“caller id” for example) as it has with traditional website related searches. Content or retail based apps also require deep link integration, ensuring organic traffic can reach the apps’ inner screens when a user clicks an organic search result or an ad.
While inner links have a far lower significance for standalone gaming apps, most other apps and websites still rely heavily on inner links to create meaningful hierarchies and categories search engines can easily read (“related products” is probably the most common example of effective inner linking strategy).
App Marketing Vs Website Marketing
Though often perceived as two distinctly different ecosystems, most websites and apps share many similarities. In more ways than not, marketing an app requires a similar strategy to that of a website, with a few added exceptions. The majority of apps have no organic, search engine discoverable content (other than the app name and category, as they appear in relevant mobile searches), and rely solely on the app or play stores for their organic outreach. This fact makes star ratings and user reviews critical for any successful campaign, and it also usually requires cooperating with 3rd parties, alongside paid mobile campaigns.
Measuring and Analyzing
The bottom line of any campaign. whether organic or paid, is reaching your attainable goals, on and offline. App downloads, leads, registered or paying customers: no matter what type of actions you consider as conversions, they are all measured using common analytics solutions. But all analysis platforms also collect a lot more data than just conversions. This data may be used to retarget unconverted visitors, obtain invaluable insights into user behavior and ultimately improve your assets overall performance.