How to make Social Media a Marketing Ground for your Mobile Apps?

You have had a great success with the development of your mobile app. You have worked along with your app development partners and have created the most wonderful and useful app. Now you are wondering, what’s the next step towards getting your - soon to be “Hit” - app to its intended customers? Without thinking further, you would know that app promotions and advertisements are your best bets in reaching far and wide. However, how would you go about doing it? Most developers will suggest you that, “in-app advertisements” should be good enough.

Is that enough, though? Remember, it is all about creating demands, the more you let people know about your app and the various uses it offer, the more you create that needed demand. So, would you want to stick with “in-app ads” alone? You probably should think “No”. If so, then what else can you do?

That’s where socialmedia marketing come into play. They are mostly free resources that help you reach potential audience over wider range. Thus, without having to spend a small fortune, you can start promoting your apps to audiences, otherwise not so easily accessible.

Here are few things that you can do in order to make that push through social media and amplify your mobile apps promotion.

• Temptation with Content

To bring more visibility towards your app, it is important that you create great quality content that details your app’s various uses and functions. Thus, keeping your potential audience engaged with the practical usage of your app. Creating the need that will drive them to want your app.

The more creative you are with your promotional contents, the more likely that you can capture your intended customers. An attractive to engage with your audience is to create videos of your app’s uses in real situations. This is a straight and effective way to get people to understand your product. The more they familiarize with the app, the more they will want to try it out for themselves. To create this want, is our goal here.

Making these videos funny could add to the excitement and help you push your app without trying too hard. This could be the right calling card depending upon the function of you app, however this usually works for most apps. Also keeping the content simple and allowing the viewers to imaging its implications will guaranty more downloads than otherwise. While at the same time, the more sharable and the more likable your video is, the greater its chance of doing well by itself.

Also, linking your videos to other highly viewed videos - that in some remote way is related with what your app has got to offer or to videos that would peak the viewer’s interest on the features offered by your app - will amplify your app’s popularity meter tremendously.

Having videos of someone influential using your app on the context of explaining something else is also a great way to promote your product. As people watching the video will consider your app to be highly credible, owing to it being not the primary objective of the video itself. This will spread passive popularity and frankly all the more popularity we can get, the better, isn’t it?

• Social Networking

Apart from video marketing with YouTube, you can use other social networking sites too, to make your desire impact on the mobile apps market. The social media sites mentioned here, practically have the entire online world following them in one form or another. How much of an impact will it have on your app’s recognition, is only left to your imagination if you could make one solid presence on any of these networking sites.

Facebook

Literally has millions of users using it every day. With this kind of customer potential, a perfect Facebook channel for your app - can have no alternative in terms of your social media marketing. However, getting this amount of recognition requires dedication and planning.

Once your channel is created, you will start off with practically zero credibility and followers. But, that’s how a beginning usually is. Following others to get them follow you should be start. Then, with constant posting of new contents and articles (related to your app), should be able to get your channel up and running. Keeping your followers updated and providing them with proper follow-ups on their feedbacks, will improve your credibility greatly. And providing them valuable information during conversations will grant you their respect. All this will boost your channel’s reputation and thus your app’s downloads - which is the goal ultimately.

Google +

Might not be as powerful as the Facebook, but, Google+ has its own perks. Being a product of Google, obviously, you app has higher possibilities of making it to the top of the search results when you get it well established here. Then, Google has the hashtag! Use it wisely to improve your SEO.

Twitter

Best place to network and meet “those” influential people, who can promote your app, indirectly, as they re-tweet or otherwise. Then there is a twitter’s feature, called the “Twitter Cards”, with which you can smartly promote your app via content marketing.

Following these, should help you off the line with a flying start and then some more. Else, you can always hire a social media marketing company to do these for you.

How to build your website across multiple devices and different browsers?

Regardless to the type of device our customers use when browsing through our website, they expect to have a great browsing experience. And the responsibility to give them that is ours. An easy to use website, that’s also compatible with the different browsers available, is a mandatory field that needs to be fulfilled in order to experience your website’s full online potential.

Few years ago optimizing the website to a standard screen resolution and running them on few browsers to test their credibility, was enough to be confidently publish the site and expect all the visitors to experience a roughly similar web experience. Some of the users may notice minor issues such as greater display resolution or different fonts, etc. However, mostly the appearance of the website was constant overall, in spite of OS difference or browser difference.

But, in today’s world people are not confined to just few different browsers and even fewer OSs on their desktop or laptop computers, they are now free to access the web for anywhere through any of the mobiledevices available with hundreds of different display capabilities – smart phones, tablets, of course PCs and even TVs. Also, people have become accustomed to accessing these different devices simultaneously and syncing them between each other.

So, how do we ensure that the browsing experience is uniform and best for all our website visitors? Here are few steps that you can take in order to ensure that.

Analyzing your traffic and customer interactions

It is of primary importance to immediately understand the visitors to your website. What type of device they are using? What type of content they are accessing? Etc. When, with your analysis you realize that the visitors using mobile devices to access your website averages above 10% of the total, then it is time for you to make the necessary changes to your website to make it mobile optimized. And optimizing the contents of your site to be more customers centric (i.e. contents for which visitors access your website) will grant you better traffic flow.

• Responsive Web Designing

As we have seen, to improve the user experience of visitors using mobile devices to access your website, it is important we make our websites mobile optimized. And one such way of optimizing our website is using ResponsiveWeb Designing (RWD.) RWD ensures that the contents of the existing web pages are uniformly displayed on various screen sizes and across different platforms. This is all done without having to create a separate website for mobile viewing alone. This is a much simpler option which can be used when you do not require advanced features on your web pages. RWD resizes your web pages to perfectly fit within all the different screen without the need of zooming or side scrolling.

• Dedicate Website for the Mobiles

Certain websites require more complex functionality such as user interactions, etc in such a case we recommend the development of mobile specific websites. A website with pages that are specifically designed to be used on mobile devices – higher visibility, faster load time, seamless design, easy form interactions are some of the features this option allows. Websites selling products on the web or websites with requires constant interactions with other visitors can make use of this type of mobile optimization optimally.

• Making Browser Specific Changes

Apart for optimizing the websites to be compatible for mobile device viewing, it is also necessary to optimize them to be compatible with the browsers available to the users without any issues.

There were days when you had to have all the different browsers open individually, and check for issues or incompatibility between your website updates and the browsers. When found, you had to again individually make the necessary changes to the coding based on the issue, on a completely setup. This was a time consuming process as multiple changes to multiple page layouts meant, work on them forever.

However, with the advent of newer technologies - HTML 5 and CSS 3 - and better means to make the changes, this process has become much easier. Now, coding the contents based on the browser market you want to engage or conquer will allow you to successfully optimize you web contents to be compatible with the different web browsers.

It is a known fact that with regards web technology, it is possible for the websites to work as good as it can even when something is quite not right. Which when compared with other programming environment is above notches, as even the mistake there will completely cripple it.

Hence, make sure you make necessary change whenever any issue is found on the websites, to provide your customers with the best user experience; to keep your business or service going to greater heights.

Options to list your website on top via online traffic!

How do you increase traffic to your websites? A question that has been a topic of discussion, on many occasions. Also, to which the answers are numerous. However, most of these answers all point to certain key factors that make up for major impact on your websites. They are Quality Content, Social Networking and Good Web Design.

Increasing the traffic flow to any website is a concern for any business or service that is striving to take a foot hold through online means. This is because more traffic naturally means more business possibilities and prospects of growth. To this end many companies go to great levels and greater financial strains in order to attain and sustain peek traffic to this websites.

So, can you too compete and expect to see results in areas where the big fish are dominating? Following are some ways and methods you can consider, that will help you sustain in the competition and improve your website’s traffic.

1- Content

There is always a demand for good and quality content, it doesn't matter how tough the competitions are, but, content that is rich and original will keep your customers coming back to you. Here are some tips to help you with that.

Great Beginning - Title

What other better way is there to attract people to your content than a catchy and resourceful title? Title of an article is the first thing that a reader will see before getting to your article. And that usually will be the only thing they will be seeing, if it isn't driving them forward. So, spend time on your titles and come up with attractive captions that can hook a reader in a glance and spike there interest to a level beyond their resistance.

The Content

It is important to understand, that reader are here to gain something from your article. So, it is very important to provide them with just that. So, making sure your content is rich with information and proves to be a source where your readers can learn something from it, addresses this need. Ensuring this can greatly boost the value of your content.

Never post a duplicate of another website, because this will put yours right at the bottom of the order.

Covering one sector of audience and offering them the best of what they can get, will dramatically increase your web’s traffic with one section of people. This is much better than trying to cover a wider range of audience and not being able to deliver such high quality of content. For this you could either start a web on topic related to your interest, or one based a topic that is least covered (This will require research on its own).

Final Touches

Giving the proper finishing touches can make the difference between “another article” and “right article”. These include Meta Descriptions, Keywords and Tags to your article. Posting your content under the right category and linking them with suitable tags and keywords is a very important step, that, if ignored is going to deprive your website off potentially great traffic. However, don’t overdo them though.

2-Social Networking

As your contents become more and more likable, your readers would want to share it, thus creating contents that are easily sharable through networking sites is mandatory for a successful website.

Twitter, Facebook, Google+ Pinstrip, Instagram are some of the major networking site that you effectively can use for this purpose. Making sure that you have a greater presence in these will improve your traffic by multi-folds, as sharing and following becomes a necessary step towards getting higher recognition and exposure.

Interacting with your readers and creating opportunities where they are motivated to interact, comment, follow and write on your forms is also part of networking. The more networked you are, the higher the probability for greater website traffic.

Apart from getting your website linked to these sites, you can also make internal links. That is creating links to your older posts within newer post, where appropriate.

Advertising

Of various modes of marketing, advertising has had the primary position for centuries. This holds true with our need for more traffic too.

There are both offline and online methods to advertise your website. The most obvious means of offline advertising is through word of mouth; tell everyone you know and get to know about your website - newspapers, magazines, etc are other mediums that you can make use of.

The online methods would involve buying advertising packages available in search engine majors, such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.

3-Good Web Design

The look and layout of your website is another factor that is going to play a vital role in retaining and attracting customers and tempting them to return often. Making sure that your website’s design matches that of what you are offering is the first step towards it.

A simple and sharp web interface will go a long way in being attractive. The layout will be simple to handle and easy to navigate around. This keeps the visitors and potential customers from getting lost and frustrated.

Make your website optimized for mobile devices. As more and more are accessing the internet via their smartphones and tables, it is only obvious that optimization of your website to suit these needs is next to immediate.

These are some of the best proven and tested ways to improve the traffic for your websites.

Mobile augmented reality apps to drive sales in retail sector!

The term Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for over two decades now, however only with the advancement of smartphones did AR really begin to make the intended impact. And the implications of this technological marvel are so huge that whatever is available in the digital world at the moment (Jul 2014) is only scratching its surface.

More over with the advent of newer and better computing options such as wearable computing and “smarter” smartphones, AR is making a steady progress into the consumer market. The implication possibility of this AR technology is only left to the imagination and the capabilities of mobile apps.

From being a tech toy that’s used for entertainment and fun to being one of this generations’ ultimate business tool, AR’s potential is limitless. With that in “sight” Google & many other companies are scrambling ahead to make this market, theirs. One such product from Google is Google Glass, it is set to make use of all the potentials of AR to its advantage and deliver the perfect Augmented Reality world to the users.

So, how all this has anything to do with the retail business?

In today’s world, the conventional means and modes of shopping has dwindled to a great extent. Once we all had no other options but to physically go to places and browser through the shop’s inventories and shelves in order to look for the products we want to buy. However, now we have plentiful of options no matter what we are looking to buy be it garments, tech gadgets or even an automobile. We can browse for them, compare them, customize them, read their reviews, order them, advance book them, all that and more by sitting anywhere we want with a computing device and an internet connection, through a wondrous technology called online shopping. What more could we want? Everything at our finger tip!

Well, we humans cannot get enough of anything, can we? Here comes AR to quench this thirst, with its next level of shopping possibilities. Blending the two worlds together – the online world and the offline world – to give us this next level experience. Let’s have a look at some of the mobile application possibilities, of which most are already being implemented in shops across the globe.

• Virtual Fitting:

So, what makes the major difference between the online garment stores and the real-world stores? It’s the Trial Room!

This has always been the issue with buy a dress online, we cannot be sure of its fitting until we finally receive it in hand and are able to try it out personally. Now, with AR’s Virtual Fitting we can do just that; virtually.

We can try out all the different garments available to our hearts content and then make the buy. As an added bonus, this process in much less cumbersome and is within instants.

• Warehouse Space Management and Navigation:

Keeping a record of the warehouse’s inventory is by itself a daunting task, finding a particular product from this huge list could prove to be another trouble altogether. With the AR technology, all this can change in a jiffy. Browsing the inventory, updating it, filtering it can all possibly be done with just a look and few clicks. Now, how smart is that?

We no longer have to navigate around the huge spaces of a warehouse blandly looking at the lists. Rather looking straight at the various cartons could give a virtual 3d image of its contents, thus cutting down our time spent drastically.

• Advertising and Product Details:

No longer do advertising banners and posts be static and uneventful, retail brands can AR their advertisements and capture the eyes of potential customers. The poster can be augmented with product videos, content details, etc.

The customers will also be able to scan through the various products available in the store and get detailed information including product rating, coupons, expert discussions, etc on these different products in an instant. Allowing us to make informed purchases.

• Virtual Products:

Gone will be our present days, where we take measurements of our living room wall to find the right set of sofas. Through the AR tech, we can get projected catalog – IKEA is offering this option – to virtually stimulate an experience in real time and in real scale to view exactly how the product would fit within the home space; long before we make the decision to buy.

Thus, the magnitude and potential if this great technology is unfathomable, yet. But, all hands point towards the direction of absolute growth for the retailers who make wise use of this Augmented Reality.