How to market a web application (part 1)
Date: 02 Oct 2009 Author: Ivana Bozinovska
Planning
But first things first, you need to start with a plan of activities and your expectations. For every marketing project or campaign, the plan is the key. Consider it as your guidance in the chaos of activities that need to be undertaken.
For every activity – setting up goals is a smart thing to do. DO NOT PANIC if you don’t meet you your goals very closely. It is the practice that makes you perfect, and in this way, at least you will have a sense of measure what to expect the next time you try to set up your goals.
Website
For a better marketing of your web application always have a separate product website. Choosing the right domain is the first thing to do. Even if the website isn’t ready yet, the domain still can be bought and parked for future.
The domain name needs to be clear and easy to remember, representing the name of the web application, to have important keyword in the domain name, to be easy to remember etc. I know it sound like too much work and it is – although it should be a two-phrase name at tops and those phrases need to have some meaning.
If you run a multilanguage website for your product then use the international domain name for the certain country – French - .fr etc. Be sure to use top-level domains for the home page and use sub-domains when you want to stress the existence of a sub-site of your product website.
The content on the website should have the usual description of the product with the product’s supporting document, option to try it online and purchase it, demos and screenshots and forms for collecting leads – potential customers.
SEO
Once the product website is online, you need to have it optimized for the most relevant search engines. This means: to have keywords research, have your web content and code optimized, make internal linking, optimize the formatting, etc.
With the Search engine optimization techniques in place, the potential customers will be able to find you online – by the targeted keywords that actually are the same keywords the users are searching.
Blog
Choosing the right alternative for a blog solution is always hard since there is not a correct solution. First of all, you need to decide what type of blog that will be – corporate, product or personal blog, or a combination.
My opinion is that it depends on the product/application. If you have a low cost mass consumer application for everyday usage, you need a more personal touch – so a personal blog is good choice or a product blog with more personal audience addressing.
For the b2b applications where the price is much higher and the decision buying process is longer, more technical blog writing is required, so the choice would be for a product and/or corporate blog.