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Posted by robiganguly

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Disclaimer: This post is an extension of the recent Mozinar "Standing Out in the Sea Of Apps: Building an Audience of Fans for Your Mobile App's Success" and covers questions from audience Q&A. You can watch the recorded Mozinar here!

Mobile. The very word makes some of us cringe these days. Everywhere you look in the marketing world, you see signs of it – mobile this, mobile that… Is it just me, or is it a bit overkill?

Sometimes, I feel like we're pushing the idea of mobile to the limit. But then I look at the numbers:

• There are currently 750,000 apps in the App Store alone.
• These apps have over 40 billion downloads.
• There are one billion smartphones existing in the world, and that number is growing.

Whoa.

There are over one billion consumers looking for information on their mobile devices, and you know what works when consumers are looking for information? Inbound marketing. 

In this post, I share the top three most effective inbound marketing tips app marketers can use to begin making waves in the world of mobile. 

Inbound marketing wins in mobile

The opportunity to connect deeply with consumers through inbound marketing has never been larger than it is today, and mobile is fueling a huge amount of the growth. When it comes to apps, all you need to know is this: apps have already surpassed the web when it comes to consumer time-spent, and are second only to time spent watching television.

The secret is this: very few companies are taking advantage of this space. It’s 2013, but in the world of mobile apps, it's like it’s 2001 all over again.

App developers and their audiences need help acquiring customers profitably and not focusing simply on vanity metrics, such as number of downloads. That's where inbound marketing comes in.

Inbound marketing on the web has matured and grown a lot over the past several years. We can learn a lot from our past and apply it to our future (i.e. we can take what we know and apply it to mobile marketing). Below are three simple inbound marketing strategies for mobile apps that are delivering absolutely incredible results.

1. Be social

By this point, we should all understand how important social is to any good marketing strategy. However, when it comes to mobile, social is just what we do as humans. We text and email like crazy. We ride the bus and check Facebook. We Instagram our lunches and Tweet our random observations while standing in line at Starbucks.

These days, to be mobile is to be social. This means that social is a perfect venue for conversations about your mobile app's offerings. Let’s take a look at two of social’s leaders and how they can be used for mobile purposes.

Twitter

A while back, Nike ran a Twitter-focused experiment to introduce a new mobile app they’d created. They proactively shared their content and the app with likely consumers who were sharing their athletic activities on Twitter. The results astounded them. Their two week experiment yielded:

• Over three clicks per outbound Tweet
• A doubling of the positive ratings and reviews in the app store for their app
• As many downloads from the Twitter campaign as their largest paid channel

Although Nike is a large company, the results of their campaign fascinating at any level. The last part is the most interesting: they received as many downloads from their social “experiment” as they did through their largest paid channel. The ROI was extraordinary.

Facebook

It’s impossible to talk about the social landscape without bringing up Facebook. For mobile, Facebook can be incredibly important. For certain categories of apps (movies, tv, games, news, and others), connecting with Facebook drives a massive increase in revenue and engagement from users. Take a look at the data from some of the most popular apps who have integrated a Facebook login.

Facebook isn’t necessarily the best option for every app developer, but when it’s done well, it’s clear that integrating Facebook into your app can really improve your results.

2. Tell your own story

Consumers generally surf and search for apps from within the app store. As such, making sure that you’ve optimized your app store presence is absolutely crucial.  Getting discovered by a large audience of interested customers can be as simple as:

• Selecting the right name
• Investing in a compelling and memorable icon
• Experimenting with categories and keywords, and
• Testing and optimizing your app’s description (social proof in the description itself works wonders – take a look at the description that document signing app SignNow has crafted)

You must own your presence in the app store and also make it another channel for telling your app's story. Most app developers gloss over many of the important details that can affect downloads for an app. It's important to not let the app store tell your app's story for you. If you do, you'll be missing out on a large marketing opportunity.

The app store is only one place to tell your story. Using your website and other channels to share why people use your app and what problems you’re solving is an increasingly powerful method of enabling app discovery, and it also makes your app seem more "human."

Because apps are so exceptional at providing task-oriented solutions in small consumable packages, journalists and bloggers are actively searching for apps they can share with their audiences. The largest tech blogs and app review sites routinely drive as many installations as a feature in the app store. Take the time to produce content and information that will appeal to journalists and share your story in enough detail that they’ll discover your app and want to learn more. For a great example, take a look at how the small team behind Chewsy has shared their unique take on restaurant and dish reviews with publications like Forbes. By sharing your story with these outlets, it's likely that your downloads will increase. 

3. Court your audience of fans from day one

It should be clear that you want to own your story and tell it in the app store and elsewhere. However, there is another, more powerful route – having your customers tell great stories about you. Not only is this personally gratifying (nothing’s better than hearing from a customer that you’ve developed something that delights them), but word of mouth is incredibly effective. Consumer studies continue to show that recommendations from the people we know are trusted the most for the average consumer.

Now, how do you get your fans to go tell their friends and say good things in public?

For many web businesses, this is an incredible challenge because there’s no centralized source for customers to share their thoughts. For mobile apps, that’s not the case – the app stores give you a great venue for this in the form of the ratings and reviews sections.

But how do consumers get to the app store to review your app? Despite the existence of easy opinion-sharing venues most customers don’t speak up. In fact, it appears that less than 0.1% of downloads result in a rating or review in the app store. Most consumers need a nudge – a reminder that they can share their thoughts and opinions.

This is why you should be proactively connecting with your customers from day one. If your app has a returning audience it means that there are people who are a fan of what you’ve built. Those customers are highly likely to share their fandom with the world, if you make it easy for them to do so.

The wonderful thing about developing apps is that you can use them as a direct channel to talk with your customers. Reaching out to your biggest fans inside your app, and connecting more deeply with them is a powerful strategy for increasing customer loyalty and motivating a group of evangelists.

Connecting with your audience of fans certainly increases the number of customers leaving great reviews for your apps, but it’s about more than just reviews. It’s about the recognition that we walk around with our smartphones all day long.

When we take a look at our phone in a meeting or open it at dinner, we’re around others, introducing them to apps we love. By communicating closely with your customer base, you can massively change your awareness and download trajectory. We’ve talked with a number of developers who can map their adoption geographically. Word of mouth, in the real world, is a major inbound channel for mobile which every app developer can influence in a meaningful way.

As this Microsoft ad from a few years ago uncomfortably reminded us – we’re addicted to our phones.

So, mobile

…is a term we’re all going to be hearing a LOT over the next several years. As big and as fast as this opportunity is growing, the mobile apps industry is in its infancy and could benefit from the expertise that any great inbound marketer can bring to the table.

A simple and consistent focus on:

• Being social
• Telling your story effectively, and
• Empowering your customers to share their stories about you

…will be certain to pay off in the long run.

When it comes to mobile apps, inbound marketing looks a lot like the industry we’ve all grown to love. Provide a tremendous amount of value for your target customers and reap the rewards of building customer acquisition channels that increase in efficiency over time. 

Thanks so much for taking the time to read my thoughts on the emerging mobile app opportunity. Now, I'd love to hear from you. Have you been utilizing your inbound marketing prowess for mobile apps? Which strategies are working for you? Did I miss any strategies which are incredibly effective? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, or find the entire Apptentive team on Twitter!

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Posted by randfish

As is tradition here at Moz, I'm conducting my annual analysis of my predictions from 2012, and if I score high enough, predicting what will happen in 2013. I like to use this process because it keeps me honest – if I suck at predicting what will happen in a 12-month span, should you really listen to me for the next 12 months?

This year, I'm also broadening my focus beyond just SEO to all of inbound marketing – search, social, content, PR, CRO, and email. Hence, if my predictions from last year do well, I'll be making a few more guesses about the year to come than usual.

Here's how scoring works:

• Spot On (+2) – when a prediction hits the nail on the head and the primary criteria are fulfilled
• Partially Accurate (+1) – predictions that are in the area, but are somewhat different than reality
• Not Completely Wrong (-1) – those that landed near the truth, but couldn't be called "correct" in any real sense
• Off the Mark (-2) – guesses which didn't come close

The rules state that if the score is lower than +1, I'm not allowed to make predictions for the coming year. Here's to hoping!

In 2012, I made 8 predictions:

1. Bing will have a slight increase in US marketshare, but remain <20% to Google's 80%+: This one is spot on if you use real numbers like those from Statcounter (which makes way more sense than using Comscore). Here's the graph for 2012:
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   It's showing almost exactly what I predicted. Bing has gained very slightly in the US (while Yahoo! shrunk a tiny bit), but the two combined remains at 18.2% while Google hovers at 80.68% (GG+AOL). That's worthy of +2 points.
2. SEO without social media will become a relic of the past: I'm struggling with exactly how to rate this one. One the one hand, there are certainly forms of SEO that can exist independent of social media, and some practitioners still don't combine the two. On the other hand, that number has drifted to a very small percent of the SEO world, and the use of social, especially in link building, outreach, PR, research, and networking is nearly universal. This one comes down to opinion, but I think few would say it's off the mark, so I'll give a +1.
3. Google will finally take stronger, Panda-style action against manipulative link spam: This one was a slam dunk. The "Penguin Update" is not only focused specifically on link spam, but it's also similar to Panda's style of updating and, many suspect, uses much of the frameworks that Google's Search Quality team built with Panda. +2 points on this prediction.
4. Pinterest will break into the mainstream: To be fair, this was one of the easiest predictions to make for 2012, given how Pinterest was exploding at the end of 2011. And while growth the first half of the year was exceptional, it slowed in the 2nd half (as seen below in this chart from Nielsen's excellent Social Media Report 2012):
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   I'll only give myself a +1 despite the fact that Pinterest was the web's fastest growing social network in 2012, due to that slowing second-half growth, and the fact that from a media, investor, and market standpoint, Pinterest still isn't mentioned alongside Twitter & Facebook.
5. Overly aggressive search ads will result in mainstream backlash against Google: Given how Google ads and Google properties are appearing in verticals like travel, autos, mortgages, and credit cards, I'm surprised we haven't seen more of a backlash.
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   Certainly, we've seen some activity like EU regulators cracking down on some potentially monopolistic practices, but the outrage for Google's ad practices are miniscule compared to, say, the TOS changes by Instagram. I suspect the search giant is still benefiting from the positive reputation it's built over the past decade. We'll see if they can maintain that long term. All in all, I'm giving myself a -1 on this prediction. There's been some backlash and we may see some legal consequences, but they're pretty small.
6. Keyword (not provided) will rise to 25%+ of web searches: I'm sad to be right on this one. I believe Google is destroying value on the web and hurting the ability of site owners and content creators to better serve searchers, and doing so only in the interests of protecting their own revenue opportunities (since keyword data is still provided to any paying AdWords customers).
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   The above chart comes from the excellent (Not Provided) Count project which tracks referral data across a large number of sites in a variety of verticals to show the average impact. Given that this number hit just over 25% at the end of the year, I'm giving myself a +2. Predictions that accurate don't come along often – I only wish it was a less negative one. 
7. We'll see the rise of a serious certification program: Tragically, this still hasn't happened. Distilled U is certainly a great resource, and Market Motive, Search Engine College and free programs like Hubspot's Inbound University continue to do well, but there's no true standard (or even a combination of standards). I'm giving this one a -2 as the trend just hasn't materialized in a mainstream enough way to deserve more.
8. Google will make it very hard to do great SEO without using Google+: this one's tough. It's mostly true for local business SEO, where Google Local Pages now require a Google+ account. And certainly Google's authorship program, which leverages Plus, is a powerful tool for content publishers (and has some hidden benefits, too). However, Google+ signals like shares and +1s don't appear to be a big part of the ranking algorithm. Thus, I'm giving myself a -1.

Taken together, the total score is a surprisingly good +4. That means it's time for another set of annual predictions!

#1: None of the potential threats to Google's domination of search will make even a tiny dent

I've heard all the theories – Apple is getting into search, Facebook is getting into search, DuckDuckGo will take market share, Amazon will restart their old A9 project and take share, Bing will take share as Google loses consumer trust, Yandex & Baidu will expand to other markets and slowly peel away users, and all the rest. I don't buy any of them. Google is a "default behavior" for the world's Internet users, and it's going to take massive, repeated failures on their part or a complete shift in the way the web is used before Google will feel even a sliver of pain.

My prediction is that Google's market share at the end of 2013 will remain at least steady, and possibly gain in the US, and its global domination will continue unabated.

BTW – If I had to place a bet on which of these would have the best chance, it would probably be Amazon (mostly because search is a behavior we're used to on Amazon and their brand already serves as a destination in lots of commerce-focused verticals). But, I still think it wouldn't work.

#2: "Inbound marketing" will be in more titles & job profiles as "SEO" becomes too limiting for many professionals

Searching LinkedIn today, I can see that "SEO" far, far outnumbers "inbound marketing" on job profiles.

The same holds true for job postings on aggregator sites like SimplyHired:

But, I think there's already a trend among early adopters to expand their job descriptions and earn more responsibility and influence in areas that have a significant impact on SEO – social media, PR, content, etc.

The only term I've seen that potentially rivals "inbound marketing" is "growth hacker," but that's confined to only the most hardcore Silicon Valley cultures and companies, and the definition seems far less clear. Still, it''s my guess that either or both of these terms will make a more serious showing in job profiles and listings in 2013.

#3: More websites will move away from Google Analytics as the only provider of web visitor tracking

I read Russ Jones' post on Dropping Google Analytics for Piwik and it struck a chord. I think we're going to see more of this as marketers grow more suspicious of Google and less happy with relying on what the search giant does or doesn't grant. I do expect this trend to be small, but measurable, in 2013.

Benefcators will include folks like Piwik, but also potentially Omniture and Webtrends on the enterprise side (though both have UX and usability work to do to catch u with GA), and Clicky, Statcounter, Mint, Mixpanel, KISSMetrics, Hubspot, and others on the SMB end.

#4: Google+ will continue to grow in 2013, but much more slowly than in 2012

At last report (Dec. 6th via TNW), Google+ had 135mm active users viewing their streams on the service in a 30-day period, and 500mm total users. The total users number was only 90mm according to Google in January of 2012, meaning the service grew nearly 5X (unfortunately, we don't have earlier numbers on monthly actives).

In 2013, I'm predicting both numbers to grow 1.5-2X at maximum, and I'll be shocked if Google can reach more than 300mm active monthly users.

#5: App store search will remain largely ignored by marketers (for lots of defensible reasons)

Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store attracted a lot of attention over the last 2 years, but not much serious effort from marketers (with some notable exceptions), particularly on the SEO side. The reason's fairly clear – search on the app store isn't anything like web search. Brand searches are probably 80%+ of that market (I'd actually guess they're well over 90%), and the algorithm used to rank apps is based on basic keyword use and metrics like downloads and ratings, hence the rich get richer.

I thought Vibhu Norby's post Why We're Pivoting from Mobile-First to Web-First made a tremendous amount of sense, and while I respect and admire those who disagree (like USV's Fred Wilson), I think marketers as a whole and certainly a lot of startups, too, are going to come back to the web as the way to build a brand and mobile as a way to extend it when and where a device-specific format makes sense.

#6: Facebook (and maybe Twitter, too) will make substantive efforts to expose new, meaningful data to brands that let them better track the ROI of both advertising and organic participation

Both social media services are woefully underserving their advertisers and marketers today, and I predict that for paying customers as well as account administrators, more substantial and robust options will be available on the data side. A great match for marketers would be tracking via the Facebook share / Twitter tweet buttons that maps to account info in the platform's dashboard, e.g. 7,514 logged-in Twitter users visited this blog post of which 72 tweeted it. More data like sources of shares and click-tracking could add even more utility.

A good example might be what FourSquare's doing with their dashboards for businesses (though I think both need to go further on the data they provide):

Twitter in particular could benefit hugely from this, while Facebook is already close(ish) with their admin portal. That said, I think it's unlikely we'll see Facebook fo as FourSquare has and share full names of users who visit.

#7: Google will introduce more protocols like the meta keywords for Google News, rel author for publishers, etc.

Google continues to keep SEO for their engine a complex, nuanced, and fast-changing practice through the launch of dramatic numbers of updates and introduction of new optimization protocols and opportunities. I don't see this slowing down anytime soon. 2012 saw the launch of the Google News Meta Keywords tag, the expansion of the Rel=Author/AuthorRank program, and the new Google+ for Local Business pages, among others.

In 2013, expect a few more of these to keep SEOs, publishers, and web businesses of all kinds on their toes. There's no rest for the optimization weary.

#8: The social media tool market will continue a trend of consolidation and shrinkage

I haven't seen this trend widely reported, but as we studied the social media tools market in 2011 and 2012 from a potential acquisitions perspective, we observed a surprising amount of tools and services shuttering (many of which, to be fair, were "features" not fully-baked products that could support and justify companies). We also noticed that 2012 in particular had far fewer wholly new social media monitoring/management/reporting/scheduling/analytics tools that the three prior years.

I'm guessing that 2013 will be the year this comes to a head, and the few dozen social tool companies who have substantive, loyal users will gobble up or copy the key features of their smaller, less-well-suited-for-long-term-survival competitors. 

#9: Co-occurrence of brands/websites and keyword terms/phrases will be proven to have an impact on search engine rankings through correlation data, specific experiments, and/or both

The idea of co-occurrence as a ranking factor is by no means new, but it got a lot more attention in 2012 thanks to a number of SEO industry folks discussing it on blogs, forums, and at conferences. One of Moz's most popular WB Fridays this year was on the subject: Anchor Text is Weakening… And May Be Replaced by Co-Occurrence. Bill Slawski wrote an excellent follow-on: Not All Anchor Text is Equal And Other Co-Citation Observations, and Joshua Giardino followed him with another good piece: It's Not Co-Citation, But It's Still Awesome.

#10: We'll witness a major transaction (or two) in the inbound marketing field, potentially rivaling the iCrossing acquisition in size and scope

Acquisitions and IPOs make headlines and they make the market's movers & shakers (and investors) stand up and take note. In 2010, iCrossing's $ 325mm acquisition by Hearst Media dominated headlines and got a lot of organic search-focused agencies (and big advertising/publishing brands) taking note. That acquisition marked one of the few massive exits in the SEO/inbound space and remains the largest transaction I'm aware of outside the email world (e.g. ConstantContact, iContact, etc). Eloqua's public offering in 2012 was a bright spot, too, and I think we're in for one or two more of those in 2013.

My money would be on the tools/software market (companies like Marketo, Hubspot, SearchMetrics, Conductor, Brightedge, Covario, Raven, Act-On, SproutSocial, Hootsuite, Ginza Metrics, etc) but I'm not confident enough to limit my prediction to the software space exclusively. Agencies may still be in the picture, and the big four advertising firms still have opportunity in the inbound realm, IMO.

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2013 is going to move fast in our space. The relentless pace of innovation, change, and opportunity have little chance of slowing down, and that's a wonderful thing for all us in the marketing world. Hopefully, these predictions will provide some value to you – whether they do or not, I'd love to hear some of the expectations you have for what the world has in store for us in 2013.

Happy New Year and best wishes for a fantastic 2013!

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