Best Marketing Strategies for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Progressive Web Apps have surely changed the game for the better in terms of improved user experience and adequate use of device resources. Gone are the days when native apps were the only lucrative option for businesses.

Now, the web has significantly made progress and given birth to PWAs that have seemingly resolved several issues of the native apps. One of them is the marketing strategies, that are quite challenging, costly, and elaborate for native apps. However, with PWAs, the single accessible link to the website makes strategies to promote that much easier.

For instance, with native apps, you would need to create a landing web page that redirects visitors to the app store for purchase and download. Then once the app is residing within the phone, it can be interacted with.

In the past, this wasn’t considered a long process, but the ‘obvious’ route to app download and usage. However, fast forward to 2020, where PWAs are all the rage, it definitely seems like a lot. Why? Because with PWAs, you only need to give your website’s link and the users do not even have to download and can instantly start interacting.

‘Accessibility’ is a huge factor in the tech and consumer world. Hence, PWAs take the trophy for being accessible with just one click on the link and yet behaving just like mobile applications. Screams convenient and who doesn’t want that?

How Does Marketing Become Easier and Successful With PWAs?

So, let’s assume you found the perfect custom software development company in Houston to develop a progressive web app for you and it has been launched successfully. Keeping in mind that progressive web apps are websites under the shell of a mobile app – which makes ranking in search engines even easier. However, if we could narrow down the benefits of marketing compared to native apps, they would be:

• One-Click Availability: Unlike in native apps, you do not have to provide a different link to your website that then has to lead them to your mobile app for download. This makes marketing easier and straight forward.
• No Redirection Required: As stated above, you are spared from the hassle of nurturing leads on various platforms and then leading them to app stores only for them to get distracted by your competitors.
• No App Store Hassle: We all know the long drill that app stores make you go through and still the probability of being rejected is always looming large. So, PWAs eliminate all of those hurdles and allow you to not only launch your web app with ease but spare the users from the hassle of downloading your app.

One of the best features of a PWA is not taking up device space or excessively eating away battery. Although, PWA does make use of mobile device’s resources like the camera, location feature, and more.

All in all, PWA is much better than a native mobile app. Along with having technical advantages over native, it also has monetary benefits that allow businesses to reap massive revenues in the long-run.

Best Marketing Strategies for PWAs

So, a website that behaves like a native app and can be placed on the home screen of the smartphone – sounds great? But how will you market this kind of app? Well, there is no hard science behind this. Here are some of the best marketing strategies for PWAs.

1) Push Notifications

To increase engagement with your PWA, the push notification feature is a great tool. When done correctly and with the right frequency, it has the record to increase engagement rates; which is, leading to an increase in conversions on your site.

Take OLX for example. With the help of push notifications, this PWA managed to increased engagement levels by 250% with 146% higher click-through rates on ads. Moreover, a PWA has 80% lower bounce rates compared to an average native app.

When using push notifications, make sure your content is adding value to the targeted users. If it’s not exciting or enticing enough for users to engage with your app, then they might simply turn the notifications off for your app.

Hence, make sure your content is rich, relevant, and engaging. This leads us to our second marketing strategy:

2) Your Content Strategy

Before you even dive into the marketing spiral, you need to make sure your content strategy fool-proof. Since this is a PWA, which doesn’t drain memory, you can include a lot of content.

Your content should be, for starters, relevant, not just to your app but to the audience as well. It should be a reflection of the services you offer and should provide useful information that adds value to the reader.

There is a need to provide information that helps the readers in some shape or form, whilst promoting your services in a subtle way – call it content marketing.

So, make sure you got these pointers right when planning your content:

• What sets you apart from your competitors? Once you have the answer, you then can start planning your content strategy around it.
• What value does your PWA provide? This answer will allow you to curate a strong vision of your brand and what it has to offer to the consumer market.
• Combining the two of the above together, what tone does your brand and app is setting? Once all this is clear and decided – it becomes easy for you to market yourself through concrete content. The kind of content that is confident, assertive, and valuable.

3) Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has become a separate entity on its own with experts knowing the ins and outs of it. Moreover, it is one of the best cost-effective platforms out there, where you get the chance to promote your PWA for free.

So, imagine you curating an engaging post on Twitter adding the URL of your website in the caption. Done imagining? Great! So, that link will directly take them to your website without them having to first go to a landing page and then MAYBE go to the app store to download your native app.

Such is the power of a great progressive web app. But how can you effectively use social media for its marketing in hopes to increase engagement and retention rates?

• By creating engaging content that links to your PWA
• By interacting with your audience and engaging them in your posts
• Organizing social media challenges and competitions
• Through tapping into the powers of hashtags on relevant platforms for more visibility and reach

One of the best parts about social media platforms is that they have analytics available for you to gauge the performance of your post with the audience. This way, you can maneuver around what your audience connects best with and serve them with just that.

4) Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the underdog that doesn’t get to be at the forefront but work behind the scenes. SEO is also what sets native and PWA apart. PWAs enable you to rank in search engines, which then results in increased traffic, conversions, and visibility.

On the other hand, native apps can only be optimized within their app stores. Yes, you can create a landing page and perform SEO on it. However, it still has to entice the visitors enough to respond to your CTA button leading them to the app store.

This is why SEO gives PWAs a significant advantage and when done correctly gives your marketing efforts a big boost. How? By ranking well on your target keywords. So you are looking at organic traffic coming through search engines and add your social media marketing on top of it – double power!

With relevant keyword research and up-to-date SEO practices, your PWA is bound to receive attention.

Now, our last pick was definitely a tough choice but important nonetheless. There are many more marketing strategies for PWA but you simply cannot miss out on the 5^th one.

5) Google Advertisements

Yes, organically achieving your marketing goals is the ideal situation. However, it is nearly not enough. You still need to rely on Google ads and campaigns. From display ads to search ads, you can not only show up on the search results for certain keywords but increase engagement as well by directly leading them to your app.

Conclusion?

PWAs are awesome and provide a convenient route for your marketing efforts. They are easy to promote and with one link increase engagement, traffic, and conversions. So you are looking at spiked revenue and ROI.

Native apps simply do not provide the seamless experience that progressive web apps provide to not just the consumers but to the businesses as well. From low maintenance and development cost to easy and cheaper marketing campaigns – PWAs are a great deal!