If a business wants to promote its products and services, it needs a marketing strategy. A correct marketing strategy contributes to achieving the business’ goals – to earn a higher income, attract new customers, and build relationships with the audience.
The marketing strategy should be prepared well in advance. It must reflect the product plan and promotion budget, while also defining the key marketing channels and tactics.
This article describes 23 tactics you could include in your strategy to build up your digital product in 2023. These tactics are broken down into user journey stages in line with the AARRR framework.
This funnel will increase your effectiveness in dealing with users at every stage of their interaction with your product.
A number of preparations precede the creation of a marketing strategy:
After that, you need to choose tactics for your product marketing strategy.
A stage when the potential user is not aware of your product yet: you have to find this user, capture their interest, and reveal your product's value. At this stage, users are supposed to sign up, download, etc.
In 2022, over 5 billion people used the internet, with 58.4% of them mainly using search engines.
An official website improves loyalty to the product and can facilitate ad campaigns:
Some digital products can well do without a website. For a casual gaming app, for example, it makes more sense to guide the user to its page in an app store. At the same time, a website can be key to the decision to use products like e-com, SaaS, and B2B and B2C apps.
Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy to attract and retain a target audience by creating and sharing valuable, relevant and consistent content that seeks to spur the user into a target action.
84% of companies from a Semrush survey leverage content marketing as a basic tool for promoting their products. According to the Demand Gen survey, 71% of B2B buyers stated that they consumed blog content during the purchase process.
A blog is a promotional resource where one can feature product and expert content as well as studies. It is important to produce blogs on a regular basis to ensure continuing organic traffic growth on your website.
Maria Vilina, Content Lead at MyTracker, gives the following advice:
Investing in owned media is a key part of any content strategy, with blog being one of the most valuable owned media assets that you can control and leverage to your advantage in a range of different ways - for thought leadership, brand awareness and search visibility.
Here's what a blog promotion strategy may look like:
- Start by identifying your content clusters, create a semantic core and a list of keywords you want to rank for, analyze their volumes and difficulty levels.
- Develop a content plan based on your kewyword list and create a content calendar of what and when you're going to post. Make sure you think about your content types at this stage: you want your content plan to be diverse and to include not only educational blog posts, but also product updates, research papers, expert content, case studies, etc.
- Think about how you're going to interlink your articles: you want your articles to link to each other, especially if they belong to the same topic cluster. This will increase their weight for search engines.
- Once you have everything up and running, think about how you're going to analyze your blogs' performance: how well they rank for target keywords, how much traffic they're driving to your website and which blog posts work best, and whether they're driving any conversions (registrations, payments, demo requests).
Ideally, the blog should feature different types of content, for instance:
Expert content is crucial. Engage both in-house and external experts. As soon as your blog becomes popular and interesting for third-party authors, you can open it for guest posting.
A webinar is the perfect way to answer your audience’s questions, discuss trends, and demonstrate the expertise of your team. At MyTracker, we often host webinars about industry updates and trends, new products and other topics related to our expertise. We then publish and promote them as part of our marketing activities: we expect our webinars to attract new contacts (leads) that we can convert into customers by sending an email with the recording, an announcement about upcoming webinars, and relevant content with links to our blog.
If your webinar is a success, 20–40% of the attendees are going to turn into qualified leads and 2–5% of them will buy something from you.
Ebooks are a great way to generate leads. You can offer them for registration, newsletter subscription, or any other target actions.
The content you offer in exchange for contact details must really be worth it. For example, MyTracker has recently published ebooks on mobile fraud and independent LTV forecasting based on test data. To download them, you have to fill in a contact form, which we will use in our marketing activities.
A video guide is content to be placed on YouTube or your website. It can be a step-by-step guide with a screencast or screenshots with expert advice or it can provide an overview of a tool or solution and show how they work together to address a broader objective.
According to a survey by Startup Bonsai, video content attracts higher-quality leads as 44% of potential users are more likely to buy a product after watching a video on its features. Surveys also show that video guides and explainers are the most consumed content among users.
Research publications are a powerful way to improve loyalty to your product. It may be your own data, e.g., analysis of the market and trends in your specific field, user surveys or joint research projects.
If your tool can manage data, use it to monitor exciting industry trends. For example, at MyTracker, we followed up changes during the year after the release of iOS 14.5 and then published a research on adoption rate by region.
As another example, we used our Fraud Scanner tool to analyze installs and view fraud trends by type, app category, and geography before compiling an ebook containing all the data.
One of our most important tips in content marketing is to repurpose your content. This saves your team's time and your company’s money, because the content is reused rather than created from scratch: more content brings in more traffic and more leads.
Let's imagine you've recently held a webinar and it went down particularly well. Take the recording, give it its own landing page and promote it via email and social media. After that, turn the recording into an article or a series of smaller articles for your blog. Rework the tips or the FAQ session from your webinar into infographics and post them on social media.
You can do the same with old presentations, Ebooks, emails and other content types: that way, you'll make sure that quality expert content continues to exist across various channels.
– Maria Vilina, Content Lead at MyTracker
Event marketing is used for raising brand awareness, demonstrating your products, finding partners, and getting in contact with potential customers. You can organize events of your own or attend relevant conferences.
Types of events to attend for a marketing strategy:
The aim of conferences and networking is to collect leads, which will then have to be further processed.
According to surveys and studies, 52% of business owners say that event marketing brings a higher ROI than other channels, and 31% of marketers consider it the most effective marketing channel. 90% of B2B marketers and 70% of B2C marketers executed at least one in-person event in the latter half of 2022.
A tip from Maxim Grigoryan, Business Development Manager at MyTracker:
Conferences are not about collecting contacts as such. This is a long game. A guest may not need your product right now - they may be interested in the topic, speakers, or networking at the time. But make sure that whenever they do need a product like yours, they immediately think about you thanks to your stand, merchandise, branded presentations, and follow-up newsletters.
This is a form of marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers with an audience similar to the target audience of your brand.
eMarketer lists the most popular platforms for influencer marketing in terms of budgets in 2022:
According to eMarketer, TikTok will outperform YouTube in terms of influencer marketing budgets by 2024.
Glewee reveals the following average prices for sponsored content:
According to a Mediakix survey, 80% of marketers found influencer marketing effective, while 71% also mentioned that the quality of traffic from influencer marketing is better than other marketing sources. Additionally, 89% of marketers mention that they are seeing ROI from their influencer marketing programs.
Social media is a tool for reaching out to your target audience through product and industry news, entertainment and educational content, interactive features, and other SMM activities.
Key SMM trends in 2023 according to Socialinsider:
Some comapnies have a dedicated SMM-specialist who will work with social media, draft a content plan, run competitions, highlight industry trends, and more. If you don't have an SMM specialist, try and use your social media to give your content an additional boost by posting blogs and product announcements, and information on upcoming events and promotions.
Content marketing and SEO is about playing the long game: it may take several months before these tactics start bringing in the first constant organic leads. To secure results quickly, paid advertising is an option, with lots of consumers attracted and some of them eventually becoming your clients. This tool can be used to launch products, promote especially valuable content, or grow your user base.
Contextual advertising refers to text, graphic and video ads that are displayed to users if they type in a certain search query or google relevant keywords. Contextual ads appear in search engines, mobile apps, websites, and other resources.
Here are the main trends of contextual advertising in 2023.
Elizaveta Shutova, Senior Marketing Manager at MyTracker, shares her tips and tricks on how to launch contextual advertising.
Contextual advertising is bound to go down the automation route, with a switch to campaigns using ML algorithms now inevitable. This is something marketing professionals need to accept and get ready for – by generating and testing a variety of ad texts, creatives and landing pages that convey the value of your product to your target audience and that describe the pain points that you address. Using these tests, you can optimize your campaign configurations.
If you are new to contextual advertising, start out with smaller budgets. Your first small-scale campaigns will give you an idea of what works just fine and where improvement is needed – so that you can get the expertise you need before embarking on major launches.
Targeted advertising helps you boost your posts on social media by making them appear in the feeds of people who meet certain criteria such as gender, age and geographic location.
You can also target the audience based on their interests or pick users that are similar to your followers. Retargeting campaigns for users that have visited your website or app are also an option.
Tips on how to launch targeted advertising:
A good option for new products, contextual and targeted advertising can also work to attract the audience to existing products or to bring users back.
Activation is a stage where users are already aware of your product, i.e., they have registered on your website or downloaded your app. Now you need to increase their engagement: introduce them to all the functions available, get them to sign up for your newsletter, or have them allow push notifications.
Content marketing and SMM can be used both to attract and activate users. The goal of any piece of content should be to take a user down the content funnel at the end of which they will complete target action - sign up, register, purchase, etc.
Here's when you need to think about your content funnel and what your content's goals are. For example, an online store selling clothes can first feature an article on the 10 best looks that are all the rage this spring and then create another article where they create those looks from their branded clothes.
Most of the articles on the MyTracker blog end with a CTA: read another article, sign up, try our free products or order a demo of those available for a fee. Articles on our blog are based on a content funnel:
If your product is available for a fee or has premium functions, the best way to demonstrate its value to users is to provide them with trial access to paid functions for a limited period of time. This way, users can decide whether the premium version lives up to their expectations and whether they are ready to pay for it.
Duration of the trial period will depend on the specific product. In the case of a fitness app which offers two-week workout and meal plans, a two-week or one-month trial period would make sense and enable users to appreciate the differences compared to the free version.
For paid products of MyTracker, such as Personalize, or advanced options of Fraud Scanner, we will offer a trial period based on client needs.
In some of the MyTracker services that run on ML, it takes one to two months just to train the model, so offering the standard 30-day trial period would defeat the purpose as the client won’t have enough time to see the value of the functions. As a result, clients may end up feeling the functions are half-baked or simply fail to do their job, which will be bad for additional sales in the future. At MyTracker, we decide on the duration of the trial period depending on client needs and technical aspects of specific functions.
Maxim Grigoryan, Business Development Manager at MyTracker
An email newsletter is a very personal communication channel that at all times requires user consent. As a result, users who have signed up for a newsletter about your products are already a loyal and engaged audience that will be waiting for quality content.
A newsletter can create value in various ways:
To get more people to sign up for your newsletter, you need to offer them something in exchange, for example, guidelines, an e-book, webinar record, or access to a private community.
Push notifications are short messages that inform users about certain in-app events or actions. It is a versatile tool you can use to activate and retain users.
To activate users, there are mass pushes and triggered pushes. Mass pushes are sent out to all users at the same time. These include notifications that a campaign has started or is about to end. Triggered pushes respond to certain actions made by users within the app, such as adding a product to the cart but not completing a purchase.
Maxim Filin, Research Programmer of the MyTracker predictive analytics team, shares his ways of using push notifications:
In 2023, we already see certain trends you might want to bear in mind when approaching pushes:
Personalization: leveraging data about user behavior and preferences to create more targeted and relevant pushes that are more likely to have an impact on key metrics.
Contextual notifications: delivering the right content based on user location, time of the day, or other contextual information.
Segmentation: creating push campaigns for different user segments, such as new users, those likely to churn, or paying users.
Interactive push notifications: making pushes more interactive by enabling users to take actions directly from the notification.
Content generation: creating ideas and texts for push campaigns using generative neural networks, as well as generating images and videos for rich push notifications.
These are just some of the trends, and they are all set to change and evolve over time, so it is super important to stay on top of all developments and be ready to experiment with new tactics and approaches.
To learn more about how push notifications work, check out our guide.
If you want to put together a notification for your push campaign, use one of our 12 mobile app push notification templates.
Retention is the stage when a user has become your customer. Now you need to make sure they stay for as long as possible. To do that, share information about simple ways of interacting with your product, send notifications to keep users aware, and contribute to a positive user experience through personalization and trouble-shooting swiftly via the help desk.
Your efforts to retain users begin the moment they first launch the app. According to Upland, one in five users abandon an app within 30 seconds of opening it, and one in four never go back after first using the app.
You can impact user retention on day one through onboarding, or helping users to get to know the app. In some cases, having onboarding processes in place can drive retention up by as much as 50%.
There are two very different approaches to onboarding:
TikTok onboarding sequence includes a splash screen, interest selection and a simple onboarding screen. This is followed by sign-up or log-in options.
For tips on how to create effective onboarding for your app, check out these 7 Inspiring App Onboarding Examples That Will Help You Retain Users.
According to a study by Pathwire, 84% of users check their mailbox at least once a day. Another study by Salesforce, says that 62% of clients expect companies to adapt to their actions and behavior.
An email newsletter can be used as a powerful user retention tool by configuring an automated process of sending personalized emails. Trigger chains with personalized emails can be initiated in response to certain actions or if users stay inactive. For example:
Also, this way, you can classify users that no longer use the product’s paid version into a separate segment to target them with specialized offers and news about product updates.
Push notifications can be used not only to activate users but also for retention purposesjust like email newsletters: by configuring the sending process based on trigger events. In this case, push notifications have one major benefit — you don’t need to open your mailbox to interact with them. Notifications appear directly on the device screen and, when clicked, take you to the necessary screen within the app.
An example of creating triggered push notifications:
User action: has not opened the app for XX days.
Push notification: “Check out what’s new: a new collection of products you may like”.
The market has ready-to-use solutions to send pushes and optimize and measure their efficiency:
You can combine push notifications and an email newsletter. If a user has not responded to a push, feel free to send out an email with the same content. This way, you increase the chances that your message will finally reach the user.
Personalization is a retention practice that helps boost user experience and trust. A Marketo study found that 79% of consumers are only likely to engage with an offer if it’s personalized to reflect the interactions they have had with the brand so far.
Ways to personalize:
In 2023, personalized offers in the digital goods market are based on machine learning models that apply user data and preferences in order to personalize communication, optimize pricing and rank products by relevance.
Tips from Dmitry Krasnov, Product Manager at MyTracker Personalize:
You don’t have to go straight for complex personalization models. Try starting with simple solutions:
- add the username to the communication;
- factor in the user’s previous purchases, for example, by showing a Buy It Again list.
These basic tools alone can increase your app revenue. Once you’ve put them in place, you can move on to more advanced models.
Learn more about personalization models in our article How to Use Machine Learning Models in Mobile App Personalization.
If there are technical issues, users contact the support team. This is a crucial point for the user’s engagement: fast troubleshooting can significantly increase user loyalty.
Tips from Sherzod Mirzadykov, manager at MyTracker support team:
Take into account the business context. If you run a B2B product, it’s important to bear in mind that every business has its own needs and objectives. General advice will not do – the right solution requires a deeper understanding of the customer’s business.
Clearly identify the issue. Technical problems are usually described based on the customer’s understanding, which may at times be inaccurate. Before troubleshooting, it’s best to find out what actually happened and get all the details so as to avoid the issue in future.
Knowing what result is most desired for the customer sometimes helps find a faster and easier solution (for instance, by offering an alternative product).
Even if all retention tactics are applied, a certain number of users will leave your app anyway. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are lost forever. Since these users are already familiar with your product, bringing them back is much cheaper than attracting a new audience.
Retargeting is a mechanism designed to show ads to users who have performed certain actions on the brand’s website, app or social media. It employs the regular tools of contextual and targeted advertising but focuses on existing users; for example, users who stopped paying for a subscription and left the app may be sent a promo code for a discount or a special offer along the lines of Pay for Two Months, Get One Free.
Apart from contextual and targeted techniques, you can send retargeting ads using email and SMS campaigns. It’s important not to be too intrusive, and so causing annoyed users to unsubscribe from your newsletters or block your messages.
At the revenue stage, your product brings profits as a business. For that to happen, the customer needs to be familiar with your entire offering and the ways it can be utilized to reach their goals. You can set special terms at first in order to introduce the customer to the product and then offer additional goods or services.
Content marketing can be used to both attract an audience and boost sales by influencing purchasing decisions.
According to Maxim Grigoryan, Business Development Manager at MyTracker, content to encourage purchases should be:
Informative. Make sure that at first encounter the customers get a short and clear description of your business. To make a better impression, show data proving you’re trustworthy and professional (for instance, number of customers, their size and significance in respective industries, staff expertise, industry awards and other key figures).
Visualized. Present all product numbers and data in charts and dashboards because visualized data are more easily absorbed than plain text with figures. Add screenshots of the product interface and let users see what the product looks like and how convenient it is.
Relevant. Add cases that feature your product addressing actual customer objectives. If you have no real cases, build a model one demonstrating how to accomplish a certain task with the help of your product. The main goal of such content is to show potential customers that your solutions meet their needs better than those of your competitors.”
Content to encourage purchases includes blog posts, dedicated presentations or PDFs comparing the features of your and competitors' products, as well as detailed descriptions of payment plans and functions available in the product demo.
Discounts and promos almost always encourage purchases. In brick and mortar trade, discounts are a useful tool for both attracting new customers and the quick sale of warehouse stock. In the digital and SaaS product market, discounts can have other applications:
Special offers, discounts and trial access don’t impact revenue in the long run as they foster user loyalty that proves much more profitable going forward. Many businesses and SaaS, in particular, aim at long-term cooperation, where user LTV always proves higher than the acquisition cost.
Upselling and cross-selling includes techniques for selling additional products and services.
Tips from Maxim Grigoryan, Business Development Manager at MyTracker:
Upselling and cross-selling can hardly be overestimated. They are good for loyal customers who have been using your product for a while and trust its quality and your expertise. Since the initial acquisition stage is over, selling additional services to such customers is much easier and more successful.
It’s important to know what to offer. To do that, you’ve got to have a deep understanding of the customer’s business model and objectives, including the objectives of a particular customer representative to whom you pitch the services – this person is going to be a kind of brand advocate, promoting your offer within the customer company. So don’t try to sell them your entire offering. Instead, have a look at the customer profile to assess their current service package and identify growth points.
There are two main scenarios for additional sales: automated and individual offer selection.
Automated offer selection can be refined using personalization. You can do this with recommendation engines like MyTracker Personalize, which customize offers in line with user preferences, behavior and purchasing power. Individual offer selection can be improved by contacting a customer representative to discuss existing concerns and objectives and offer possible solutions from among your products.
Referral is a stage where your product acquires a community of loyal users who can recommend it to friends and acquaintances, promote it in social media and support it in the comments section.
According to a study by PowerReviews, 80% of consumers are less likely to buy a product if it has no reviews and 86% of shoppers feel that review recency is more important when considering a product or brand they haven’t purchased before.
To get reviews, you can use the regular mechanics of newsletters and rewards for an action: send push notifications and emails, and offer bonus points for reviews.
Negative reviews are also a useful tool for product development. They provide you with feedback and help fine-tune the product based on actual user experience.
Moreover, you can address negative reviews by directly contacting the users and trying to remedy the issue that caused them to write the review. When handled properly, negative reviews can do you good: users who have their problems solved become more loyal; some of them may even turn into brand advocates.
You can monitor mentions and reviews of your product online using dedicated services like BuzzSumo or Brand24.
Brand advocates are customers who use the product and recommend it to their relatives, friends, acquaintances and social media followers. In addition, they generally support the brand if there is a reputation crisis.
Brand advocates can be identified using the mention monitoring services YouScan, IQBuzz and the abovementioned BuzzSumo and Brand24. If none of your users are that loyal yet, you can nurture them through:
A referral program is a tool to invite new users to try your product via a unique link with a tracker. Once a new user clicks it, signs up or performs some other target action, the customer providing the link receives a gift (promo code, in-game currency or another perk).
Some services have full-fledged partner programs where users are paid for inviting new users. See how big brands like Tesla, Revolut and Airbnb approach their referral programs in this post.
It’s best to dedicate a special screen in the app or page on the website to your referral program containing all the conditions and a link generator.
These buttons automate sharing content on social networks. By pressing them, users can instantly share your blog posts in their profiles. Read more about the do's and dont's of share buttons in this post.
Although each of the above tactics can be applied separately, they are most effective when used as parts of a comprehensive product promotion strategy with clearly defined goals and tactics carefully selected and grouped to fit each objective.
A marketing strategy based on the AARRR framework enables you to interact with the customers at every stage of their journey as users of your product. MyTracker will help you assess the strategy performance at each stage. Learn more about this and available MyTracker reports in our article From acquisition to referral: How to analyze your AARRR funnel with MyTracker's product marketing reports.
