The majority of businesses have their own dedicated app these days and if you don’t, you’re missing a big opportunity. Developing your own app is a brilliant way to increase brand awareness and it can be an incredibly effective sales tool as well. However, if you want to boost your business with an app, engagement is essential.

There are thousands of competing apps out there and it’s easy for your app to get lost in the crowd. If you are relying on a flashy design and a gimmick, you won’t find many long term users for the app and your business won’t benefit from it. If you want to be successful, it’s important that you have a clear customer engagement strategy in place to encourage people to download your app and, most importantly, to continue using it for a long time. Whether you are planning to develop your own business app in the future or you already have one on the app store, it’s important that you employ these techniques to boost customer engagement as much as possible.

Create The Right User Experience

If you want people to engage with your app, you need to make sure that they have a positive experience while using it. User experience is vital and a few small mistakes can make an app difficult and frustrating to use, which will seriously hurt engagement. A good user experience starts with the initial design process and extends throughout the build stages, and it’s important that you conduct regular usability testing throughout. Using the Infragistics Indigo.Design design-to-code system allows you to create basic designs and run usability tests, gaining a lot of insight into how positive the user experience is. When you base your entire design and build process around the user experience and use the feedback from testers to drive your decisions, you can ensure that the design is perfect and your app offers a great user experience.

It’s also important that you stay on top of maintenance issues and iron out any bugs right away. If certain features on your app don’t work or pages are slow to load, this will discourage people from using it again, so maintenance is very important.

Consider Your App Store Listing

Now that you have an amazing app that is easy and intuitive to use, you need to put it up on the app store and get people to download it. When you are writing your app store listing, you should consider it in the same way that you would a product listing. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses don’t put enough thought into their app store listing and they struggle to get any downloads.

You need to think about why people would want to download the app in the first place. What problems are you solving? What are the best features on the app? Instead of simply telling the customer what the app does, you need to create a story and explain to them why they can’t live without it. If you are stuck for ideas, check out the listing on some similar apps and look at the listings on the most downloaded apps so you can get an idea of how they entice people and encourage downloads.

Get Your App Onboarding Right

Convincing somebody to download your app is the first step, now you have to convince them to use it on a regular basis. The onboarding process will help the user get to grips with what the app does and how it works. Unfortunately, there are a lot of common mistakes that people make with their app onboarding.

If you launch straight into a tutorial that teaches the user about all of the advanced features of the app, a lot of people will switch off. They are still not quite sure about the benefits of your app yet so you should start by giving more detail about what the app does. Using screenshots of different features is a great way to give people a sense of the utility of the app without bombarding them with a tutorial. Once they are familiar with the overall features of the app, you can then start with the tutorials. It’s best to have separate tutorials that run when somebody clicks on a certain section of the app. This prevents people wasting time learning how to use features that they are not interested in.

Login and authentication is another thing that people get wrong during the onboarding process. If you require a user to be logged into your app for any reason, don’t ask for this right away because you are instantly putting a barrier up and people are less willing to create an account before they even know if they like the app. It’s best to let them explore for a while and get to grips with the basic features and then ask them to create an account only when absolutely necessary. Forcing people to commit to your app too early is likely to put them off and cause overall issues with engagement.

Manage Permission Requests Properly

Permission requests are so important when developing an app because people are very cautious about online security. If somebody downloads a new app and it immediately starts asking for permission to access their camera and their contacts, they may be suspicious, especially if it isn’t obvious why the app requires those permissions.

Ideally, you should keep permission requests to a minimum and you need to be careful about how you word them. When asking for permissions, you should always explain why so you can put the user’s mind at ease. You also need to display a message if permissions are denied, explaining that this will affect the functionality of the app and some features will not work.

Deciding when to ask for permission is important as well and a lot of app developers make the mistake of doing it all as soon as the app opens. But bombarding the user with a lot of permission requests right away will make them more suspicious and it also stops them from getting to experience the app right away. It’s much better to split the permission requests and only ask when the user tries to access a certain feature.

Use Push Notifications

Continued engagement with your app requires some prompting because people may simply forget about your app. Using push notifications reminds them that you are there and demonstrates the value that your app provides, so people are more likely to keep coming back. However, you do need to be careful about how you use push notifications because if you get it wrong, you may encourage people to delete your app.

Constantly spamming people with useless notifications is the easiest way to get them to delete your app. If you are going to send somebody a notification, there needs to be a reason for it. For example, if you sell products through your app, you can send them suggestions or information about any new deals and offers. Whenever you update your app and add something new, send out a notification inviting people to give the new features a go. These kinds of push notifications provide value to the customer and offer them something, so people will respond to them. But if you send lots of notifications that don’t offer anything, people will get annoyed and delete the app.

Your notifications will be far more effective if you personalize them and tailor them to each specific user. It’s also a good idea to use deep linking on your notifications. This means that users will be taken directly to a specific page so, for example, if you send a notification with a product suggestion, they can go directly to that product by clicking the notification. This makes the process a lot smoother for the user and adds more value to your notifications.

Incorporate Live Chat

Being able to communicate directly with your customers through the app is very important. If you don’t have a clear line of communication and a customer has an issue, they will usually leave a negative review on the app store. Naturally, bad reviews make people far less likely to download your app, so engagement suffers in a big way. Introducing a live chat feature will help to avoid that issue because users can message you directly if they have a problem with the app and having that direct line of communication there is a brilliant way to improve overall engagement. You can also use live chat as a way to improve your customer service, so it’s definitely a great feature to add to any business app. If you use chatbots to answer the basic questions, your users can get an instant answer to their queries.

Developing an app with great features isn’t enough to be successful these days because there is so much competition on the app store. If you want your app to help you boost your business, it’s important that you focus on engagement and you have a clear strategy in place to encourage people to download your app and use it on a regular basis.

SEM experts are in high demand. Not surprising, given the tremendous growth rate of e-commerce.

In 2018, about 1.8 billion people across the world bought goods online. E-retail sales in 2018 amounted to US$ 2.8 trillion.

B2B (business to business) online sales in 2018 were almost 4 times higher than e-retail. The gross merchandise volume (GMV) of B2B e-commerce in 2018 amounted to US$ 10.6 trillion.

It’s a huge market when we take B2B and B2C online sales together.

Ranking by Total E-Commerce Volume 2017: Source

This growth in e-commerce has also fueled the demand for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) experts. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a 20% growth in the demand for SEM experts between 2018 and 2028.

What Does An SEM Expert Do?

The core job of an SEM expert has not changed, however. An SEM expert has the responsibility of improving the SERP ranking of a business webpage.

In jargon-free terms, the company website must appear towards the top of a search engine results page (SERP). That’s what an SEM expert needs to ensure. At the heart of SEM is a company’s SEO (search engine optimization) strategy.

The SEO strategy, in turn, involves the following:

• Keyword research and implementation
• Content strategy planning and implementation
• Link building
• Web marketing with analytics

Categories of Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital marketing can be of three types, at least:

• Organic: Your business webpage automatically appears towards the top of SERP
• Pay Per Click (PPC): A paid marketing campaign where you pay the platform every time your ad gets clicked
• Paid Directory Listing: You pay to be included in a web directory relevant for your business

An SEM expert needs to have the skills necessary to plan, implement, manage, assess, and restrategize as and when necessary, for each of these three categories.

The Skill-Set An SEM Expert Must Have

Two distinct sets of skills are necessary: technical skills and soft skills. Technical skills refer to the specific capacities needed to efficiently and effectively execute what a job position demands. Soft skills are generic skills that determine how effectively a person can work in any position.

Technical Skills

1. Thorough Knowledge of SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is the foundation of SEM. Without SEO, there is no SEM. An in-depth understanding of how SEO works in different search engines is a non-negotiable skill for an SEM expert.

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Thorough SEO expertise involves the following:

• Up-to-date knowledge about search engine algorithms for ranking: This is a critical element as search engines keep changing their algorithms. The mode of search engine rankings changes accordingly.
• How to blend quality content with keywords: This is pivotal to improving organic ranking. It is equally essential for PPC campaigns to be effective. Merely using the researched keywords is not enough.

A seamless blending of the relevant keywords with attractive content is what works. Search engines like Google are smart enough to reject content that focuses only on the keywords.

• Comprehensive understanding of offsite SEO: Everything that you and others do away from your site to improve the ranking of your website is offsite SEO.

A critical element in offsite SEO is building links to your page. Google, the most-used search engine, depends on links to determine how relevant your content is. Writing blog posts and guest articles on other sites are methods of link building.

The SEM expert does not need to write. But they need to have technical information like using critical keywords towards the beginning of a post for effective linking. This is necessary to guide copywriters to produce content that works.

2. PPC Management Skill

PPC (pay per click) campaigns are the paid counterpart of driving organic traffic to your webpage. The aim is the same: improving the SERP ranking of your website. Therefore, all the skills needed for SEO are relevant.

However, PPC campaigns involve financial investments. To ensure high returns on investment (RoI), its management needs additional skills as well. Focus on the following when you hire your PPC campaign manager:

• Marketing Skills including a basic understanding of consumer behavior, consumer segmentation, and trend analysis of targeted consumers.
• Planning and Time Management to determine how long a PPC campaign should continue, how often the content needs tweaking, etc.
• Monitoring, Reviewing, and Adapting skills are critical to efficiently and effectively manage PPC campaigns.

B3. asic Knowledge of Programming Languages

The ability to use CSS and to write in HTML is essential for an SEM expert. Some technical understanding of web design is also critical. Without a basic understanding of how websites work, efficient and effective SEM is impossible.

An SEM expert needs to understand technology from the user perspective to be effective.

4. Ability to Work with Data Analytics

Analyzing the numbers and making sense of the statistics are necessary to understand the general trends in relevant search patterns. These become even more critical with paid ad campaigns.

5. Copywriting and Copyediting

The SEM expert need not be directly responsible for generating the content. Without a creative understanding of what works and what does not, it is impossible to guide and refine the content to match SEO needs.

6. Social Media Management

Social media platforms continue to play an increasingly more important role in influencing consumer behaviors. A recent report mentions that 54% of social media users research products on these platforms.

No SEM expert can do their job competently without social media management skills.

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Soft Skills Critical For An SEM Expert

Soft skills refer to competencies that are non-technical, yet critical for effective functioning in nearly any role. For an SEM expert, the must-have soft skills include the following, without being limited to them.

1. Curiosity and the Willingness to Learn

Stagnation of thought is a killer for any marketing position. An SEM expert is ultimately a crucial component in your marketing wheel. The quality of being a lifelong learner is essential.

That presupposes a curious bent of mind, in turn. Without it, an SEM expert would fail to engage in research, which forms an indispensable part of their job.

2. Analytical Skills

Working with data analytics is a technical aspect of the larger analytical skill-set that an SEM expert needs to have. Common usage packs several competencies within the domain of analytical skills. The ability to disintegrate complex information, critical thinking, and problem-solving are the core components.

3. Proactive, Transparent and Effective Communication

An SEM expert cannot work in a silo. They need to work as part of a team. Effective team functioning requires strong communication skills.

More importantly, without proactive and transparent communication abilities, an SEM expert will be unable to judge the aptness of the contents to be used. Contents are meant to communicate – to search engines and consumers alike.

4. Cross-Functional Partnership Competency

An SEM expert needs to function with a multidimensional team addressing different business needs. Without the ability to collaborate and coordinate with a cross-functional team, an SEM expert will be shoddy at their job.

5. Project Management Skills

An SEM expert will likely need to manage several projects simultaneously. That needs strong project management skills. Planning, strategizing, time management, review and prioritization, etc, are some of the key abilities included within project management skills.

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Outsourcing Might Be The Smarter Choice

Partnering with an experienced SEM agency with a proven track record often proves more cost-effective than hiring an in-house SEM expert. You save on overheads and other related costs without losing access to the expertise you need.