While a native mobile app can sometimes be challenging to market as it requires an access to the App store, the great thing about Progressive Web Apps is that a single web link does all the work. In fact, with just a single and easily accessible link to your website, you can implement a variety of PWA Marketing strategies anywhere and everywhere.
You’ll reach your customers who, with just one click, will find all the fantastic features that they usually enjoy from mobile applications, as well as the rich content and full functionality of a normal website.
Once you have built and published your first progressive web app, PWA Marketing becomes really easy. And there are numerous reasons why:
- You no longer need to add separate links to your website and mobile application to your marketing material. Simple is always better when it comes to customer experience and Call to Action.
- You no longer need to guide people to the app store to find your mobile app. This reduces the risk of them dropping off, or seeing a competitor’s app that looks more interesting to them.
- Additionally, you don’t need to go through the hassle of applying to app stores to list your app in the first place, thus avoiding the long listing process associated with it. And of course, the risk of being rejected by an app store, or having to pretty much repeat the progress every time you update your application or content.
With a progressive web app, you won’t be taking up your customers’ valuable device space. However, you can still send push notifications, integrate camera and location features, and offer an interface with all the tap immersibility of a mobile application.
Your customers will love your PWA. We know this because there is ample evidence that some of the largest global brands who spend fortunes on marketing have seen immense return on investment simply changing from native apps and web, to PWA.
Furthermore, PWAs are no more costly to develop than a mobile website, and are much cheaper to develop than a native mobile application. They’re cheaper again when you consider that you don’t need a mobile application and a separate website, and even more cost-effective if you use a PWA creation platform like Beezer.
What’s that? You are already converted and have a progressive web app? Or maybe you’re in the process of building or publishing your PWA. Now, it’s time to go to market. Let’s look at some important considerations when it comes to implementing a successful PWA Marketing plan.
1. Content & Features
Before you even start the marketing process, make sure your marketing collateral in the form of your PWA is absolutely perfect. With a web app, there is no excuse for missing out on amazing functionality that you know your audience expects.
PWAs incorporate all the immersive, one-click, engaging structures of a native mobile application while being easily accessible like normal websites.
And you don’t need to worry about their size. Unlike native mobile applications they won’t be completely installed on a device, only cached. So, you can have as much content in your PWA as you need without worrying about draining your customers’ memory and forcing them to delete your app.
As with any business and marketing campaign, your content should be excellent and highly relevant to your audience. It should reflect your services and your brand message, while at the same time providing useful information that adds value for potential customers.
As well as including the best features for your audience, always ensure your content is top notch.
An important step for every brand to take before creating content is to define what, exactly, is the brand equity. You can do that by following these steps:
- Start with the facts about your product or service. What are your points of difference compared to your competitors? What are your points of parity, and your points of accepted inferiority – where you won’t bother to compete?
- From there, you can define the higher-level value of your brand or business. In other words, what really makes it stand out from the rest as the best choice for your customers. Having a unique selling proposition is key to a successful PWA Marketing strategy.
- This higher-level value should be reflected in your mission statement. This is the overall goal of what your company will bring to consumers in your market.
- Finally, you need to figure out your brand’s voice. How do you speak to your customers? Are you knowledgeable and educational? Funny and irreverent? Empathetic and relatable?
Defining these core tenets of your business, your brand, and how you’ll convey it to the market makes it easy to create content that helps to drive the uniqueness, and therefore the value, of your business.
2. PWA Marketing with Social Media
Undoubtedly, one of the simplest and most cost-effective online PWA marketing techniques is social media. With just one web link for your PWA and no need for visitors to download, you can promote your PWA freely.
And, with a PWA, each page on your site has its own URL just like a traditional website, so you can point your audience to any page or article within your PWA. This is a huge advantage over native apps.
With native mobile apps, the best that your advertising can do is point the audience to the app store to download the app. And from there, hope they download the app, open it, and eventually find the page you want them to see!
Take Forbes as an example. After the news publisher had received criticisms of its poor user experience, it introduced its PWA in 2017 and pushed it out to its audience through numerous channels, including social media.
With this PWA Marketing strategy, Forbes saw its visits increase by 43%. With six times more readers actually completing articles, and a doubling of its overall engagement rate.
This means you can push ahead with all the usual social media marketing techniques, including:
- Creating and posting engaging content that links to your PWA;
- Encouraging your audience to participate in ongoing discussions;
- Organizing social media competitions and challenges;
- Offering exclusive promotions to the most active users;
- Identifying and including relevant hashtags within your posts;
- Or even creating a group to build a community around your topic.
You can use any and all social platforms relevant to your audience. Make sure that you monitor the performance and engagement rates of the content that you post. That way you can learn as you go, creating more content similar to your most successful posts.
3. Email PWA Marketing
Regular email newsletters and promotions work well for most businesses, and that’s no different for those with PWAs.
A great way to keep your newsletters and emails engaging, and to continue to drive traffic to your PWA, is to take advantage of the fact that you can add links to any PWA page throughout your email content. Thus, driving your website visitors to wherever you want them.
Did you create a super-engaging new feature on your app that lets users vote on their favourite of your new product ideas? Grab their attention by putting it front and centre in your email and linking the users straight to that voting page in your app!
Form and voting functionalities like this are easy to build into your progressive web app. These features, alongside pop ups and push notifications, give you the maximum opportunity to capture new visitor sign-ups, email addresses, and valuable insights about your audience.
4. Push Notifications
That bring us on to push notifications, one of the most effective tools for customer engagement. Push notifications have high open rates and are an integral part of a Progressive web app functionality. Used correctly, they help with regular communication with your customer base, and can drive your audience to take action on your site.
Beyond the Rack achieved an average 26% increase in basket size and spend and 72% more visit time for its PWA by using push notifications. Carnival Cruise Line reported a 42% engagement rate from its PWA push notifications.
When using push notifications, it’s important to keep the content you’re pushing out exciting, interesting, and relevant to your users.
The last thing you want is to flood them with notifications that don’t matter to them, leading them to disable notifications for your PWA. A Beezer-built PWA allows you to send push notifications with super-engaging rich media content, like images, GIFs, and coupons.
5. Offline Mode
Brand and business marketers can push their sites safely, knowing PWAs with their data caching are particularly well suited for being used in an offline mode. They are great for spotty connections and work well in emerging economies too, where internet availability can be inconsistent.
6. Search Engine Optimization
A significant difference between native mobile applications and progressive web apps is that PWAs can be indexed by search engines.
This means that you can actually optimize your content to show up for users’ searches organically, increasing your traffic without having to invest in paid promotion.
Native applications, on the other hand, can only be optimized for App stores. They might show up on Google if someone is searching for a particular app, but this only works if the person already knows the name of the app. However, you can’t really position them for highly relevant keywords within your industry.
For this reason, Search Engine Optimization is one of the most powerful PWA Marketing strategies for businesses, as it is capable of bringing sustainable traffic for years to come.
For native apps, the lack of SEO opportunities is a major drawback, as brands must rely solely on proactive, paid PWA marketing efforts to drive visitors to an app store link. When it comes to organic traffic, they will not be able to reach their target audience without significant investment.
With PWAs, it is possible to drive organic traffic to any page of a PWA. With the help from organic traffic, investment that may previously have to be driven in to marketing a native application can be spent wisely elsewhere.
Whether you take on the task of Search Engine Optimization yourself, or hire an outside expert, it’s an important part of any marketing strategy to figure out what keywords are relevant for your business. And of course, to make sure that you optimise your PWA so that searches for those keywords surface your link to consumers.
7. Referral links
Referral links from reputable sites are invaluable for concentrated PWA marketing efforts. They not only help to increase traffic and improve your search engine rankings, but are also great for establishing authority within your community.
If a lot of sources with high domain authority are pointing to your web app, this is a sign for both search engines and users that your content is trustworthy. This will help you establish your brand reputation online over time, along with gaining the trust of customers.
But how can you increase the number of referral links that are pointing to your web app? Some referral PWA Marketing techniques include:
- Generating high-value content – viral content will get people talking about you without any additional efforts, as they will mention you on their own blogs, websites, and social media channels.
- Collaborations – by collaborating with digital newspapers, magazines, or highly autoritative websites, you can create sinergies that will bring you more referrals and links pointing to your web app.
- Customers – you can also get in touch with your own happy customers, especially if they are other businesses, or simply influencers. They will gladly share a link to your website.
With the ability to have more quality content within a PWA, that is search optimised, is it easier to gain referral links from credible sites. Plus, as Google recognises PWAs in its search algorithms, there are further benefits for SEO.
8. Advertising
All of the usual advertising possibilities for both native applications and websites are wide open for PWAs. From search to social media advertising through to affiliate campaigns, there are lots of opportunities. As PWAs are more cost effective to develop than native mobile applications you’ll find you have a little more budget for paid advertising campaigns.
On top of this, you can add to your PWA Marketing strategy by displaying ads on your own web app as well. This can be a huge benefit both in advertising your own products or services, and in generating additional revenue through third party advertisements.
9. QR Codes
When it comes to progressive web apps, the PWA marketing opportunities don’t stop at digital. You can easily and quickly generate a QR code which, when scanned, instantly brings your app up on people’s phones.
If you’re running an event, distributing print media, or even handing out business cards, a QR code can be a slick and easy way to drive traffic to your business. And when that traffic is going to your super-engaging PWA, rather than a standard, static website, you can convert your visitors to customers at a much higher rate.
10. Making the most of one web link
We can’t stress it enough – this is truly a key advantage of a PWA. You now have one site and one web link that takes mobile and desktop customers on any browser or device to from that single link to one destination.
This way, PWA Marketing suddenly becomes much simpler; you don’t have to divide a digital marketing budget between mobile and web. Nor do you need to dilute your efforts by including the web location of an application AND your website in all your marketing collateral.
Amongst other things, what this consolidation does is free up valuable cash. Instead of requiring two budgets to market two different online destinations, you have a single, more powerful budget.
Use it wisely! Find what works best for you by testing with small budget and increasing where successful – whether that be organic posts, paid ads, print materials, or good old-fashioned networking.
11. Loyalty Programs
When it comes to PWA Marketing, loyalty programs can really help to drive repeat business. Many brands have created loyalty applications, but as consumers are become more averse to using up valuable device space, PWAs are an effective alternative to native loyalty apps.
The content for a loyalty program can sit alongside other content and e-commerce functionality, easy to find and instantly accessible for use when consumers are in physical stores.
The increasing trends of applications and promotions that can be discovered on-mobile and in-store, QR codes that can be scanned on mobile whilst shopping, as well as loyalty “card” details for points collection are all perfectly served by a PWA.
12. Google Ads
As we already mentioned, one of the most powerful strategies when it comes to PWA Marketing is taking advantage of search engines. However, this is not exclusively limited to organic Search Engine Optimization, which we already covered in one of our previous points.
Being able to show up on Google means that you can also use your web app link to create campaigns in Google ads. This way, when somebody looks for relevant keywords on the search engine, you can send them directly to your app. From display to search ads and gmail, you have a whole new world of Digital Marketing opportunities that are not limited to the App store!
Which is typically the case for native mobile applications.
Conclusion
As we just saw, there are multiple PWA Marketing techniques that make progressive web apps so easy to promote and share around. Compared to native apps, which are significantly more limited when it comes both to organic and paid promotion, PWAs access the majority of opportunities that actual websites have. How awesome is that?
