As the world continues to recover from the economic impact of COVID-19, app development freelancers, teams and companies need to figure out (more than ever) how to get more app development leads. First, of course, it would help if you had a steady supply of leads no matter where you are in your business to keep it functioning and raise your revenue.
But the truth is that generating app development leads isn’t easy.
Before you convert and make the sale, you must first identify and research your potential consumers, market properly, perform the right outreach, qualify, and nurture the new leads.
This is where lead generating tactics come in. These are strategies for attracting leads, guiding them through the sales funnel, and converting them into customers. The procedure aids in raising brand awareness and generating interest in your product or service. Firms that have a successful lead generation strategy generate 133% more income than those that don’t.
Beneficial Lead-Gen Strategies for More App Development Leads
These methods can help you keep your lead funnel full and produce some good conversions if done effectively.
1. Make Your Landing Page Better
It’s not tough to construct a great landing page—you can even make one for free using templates from a website builder. However, most firms struggle with the optimization portion, which leads their lead pipelines to “leak.” Improving your landing page is one of the most important yet simple tactics for increasing lead generation and conversions. Here are a few fast fixes:
– Use keywords in the title, copy, and alt text to optimize your landing page for search engines.
– Speak in the language of your customer.
– Add social proof to your website to establish credibility and demonstrate to potential clients that you can be trusted.
Make your CTA a win-win situation. Instead of “Download Now,” use “Download our free marketing eBook,” which emphasizes the benefits prospects will receive after completing the activity and so encourages consumer involvement.
These crucial factors may quickly transform your landing page from good to high-converting, allowing you to grab more leads. The idea is to continue experimenting with and testing these conversion optimization techniques until you see results. Improving your landing page will also benefit campaigns for generating SEO leads, web design leads, and even social marketing leads.
2. Rely on Data-Driven Marketing
B2B purchase choices are not made on the spur of the moment; they include numerous decision-makers, each conducting a thorough study before making a purchase.
In this situation, developing content for your company and marketing becomes critical. It assists you in simplifying your product for your audience, assist them in the purchasing process, building authority, and ranking in search engines, all of which help you generate more leads and conversions.
You can now produce the following content formats:
– Use blogs and videos to educate your top-of-funnel leads.
– Whitepapers and eBooks—to educate and nudge your leads in the middle of the funnel.
To persuade bottom-of-the-funnel leads, use case studies, webinars, in-depth tutorials, and blogs. Exhibiting your expertise on data and analytics is crucial, especially if you are after more customers for other services (Pay-Per-Click management leads and reputation management leads included).
3. Provide Free Trials or Freemium Services
One of the most effective lead generating tactics is to provide a free tool, trial, or freemium service. They enable you to entice a potential consumer with a free trial of a product or service, then sell them a paid version after they’re happy with the usage and results. There are various examples to back up the success of this method.
Take, for example, WordStream. Because their free software trial was not yielding significant results, they gave a free AdWords Grader, which they claim increased conversions dramatically.
Meanwhile, Grammarly provides a freemium service before offering a premium and paid edition to leads.
This is a popular technique among SaaS startups, and for a good reason. It allows interested prospects who aren’t ready to buy to try out products and learn about the value and benefits they provide, moving them down the sales funnel.
Furthermore, you may upsell your product by teasing premium features after they sign up—and get a percentage of those leads to convert.
4. Invest in Social Media
Social media networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are excellent outlets for marketing your product or service, building brand awareness, and engaging in social selling as a business. To target your audience, use paid advertising strategies. You can use social media for generating leads in various ways; the key is to be in front of your audience regularly and establish strong brand awareness and recall value.
5. Invest in Some Good Old-Fashioned Email Marketing
Email marketing is still a successful method for generating leads and nurturing them, even though it is more than 20 years old. There are many possible strategie. Sending cold emails might help you create leads. Outfunnel recently implemented this and saw 33%-51% opening rates and 3-6%engagement rates for their email campaigns. To make your campaign stand out, even more, you may add personalized photos, gifs, and videos.
A newsletter can help you and your prospects achieve a win-win situation. First, they will be persuaded to join up if they are promised valuable information sent directly to their email. Second, you may attract high-quality leads and clients over time by giving valuable insights and showing your knowledge.
Regarding lead generation tactics, the issue isn’t so much the number of possibilities as it is deciding which ones are the best.
The State of the Industry
Businesses need a variety of apps across divisions to function properly, and interconnection between these programs is becoming more desirable as firms strive to get more out of their systems and employees. Application providers can profit from this need for interconnectivity by addressing the problem within their own apps and including integrations as part of their overall package.
Taking Advantage of Connectivity and Integration to Reach New Audiences
Application providers can more readily expose their supplementary services to a wider user base by enabling in-app native connections with larger software providers via partner programs and application-specific shops.
Why Is Integration and Automation So Important?
Business process automation (BPA) uses advanced technologies to automate complicated business processes and activities. Email marketing automation, for example, is a typical practice in which a firm can utilize software to customize its email parameters to its needs and then set it to run automatically, such as sending an introductory email to new contacts who sign up to receive marketing messages.
After setting settings, integrated automation can be defined as software procedures that operate autonomously and continuously with minimum human interaction. A technology infrastructure that allows systems to integrate is known as an integrated automation platform (IAP). Human tasks are copied and repeated by software or computers. IAPs will also provide API orchestration capabilities, which will enable different portions of the infrastructure to coordinate data distribution and processing.
Automation and Integration’s Advantages
Developer resources can be diverted elsewhere thanks to the introduction of integration and automation, which improves workflows and improves accuracy and consistency in operations. For numerous reasons, automation and integration are essential: They can give a business a competitive advantage, improve customer experience, and have long-term benefits like as greater value and brand loyalty.
These solutions are critical for service providers and their clients because they improve service consistency, response times, and potentially save money.
Few companies make full use of data generated by other parties, vendors, or public data sources. Data from external systems can be accessed through integrations, allowing an app to add value to current data by doing additional processing or displaying different views.
Establishing An Ecosystem
Adopting an integration platform can aid these processes and drastically impact an organization since integrated automation solutions allow employees to do more with a lot less. Increased reliability, improved performance, and lower employee turnover can all be benefits of streamlining operations. Another advantage of integrating an app is that it eliminates the need to start from scratch.
Integration can also be used selectively, allowing you to target a certain vertical market by selecting which applications to integrate with. These marketplaces can be utilized for co-marketing, allowing apps to appear on current vendor platforms (such as Capterra, GetApp, etc.)
Overcoming Technical Challenges with Low-Code Solutions
Low-code platforms provide a development environment that allows app software to be created using graphical user interfaces (such as drag-and-drop) and setup.
To use a low-code development program, you don’t need to be a seasoned programmer. Instead, a visual user interface combined with model-driven logic can be used to construct applications. The drag-and-drop capabilities of this graphical user interface allows for repetitive actions. These platforms can generate fully functional apps or allow for additional coding for certain situations.
An email marketing platform with an in-built email template creator, such as MailChimp or SendGrid, allows users to create an email exactly how they want it to look while also taking care of the fiddly stuff, such as how it renders in different email clients, avoiding the nightmares of old Outlook formatting, for example.
Business users and IT may collaborate on building apps with modern user interfaces, connectors, data, processes, and business logic using a low-code SaaS platform, delivering business results in record time. Setup, training, deployment, and maintenance costs can all be reduced using low-code platforms.
Innovate, But Never at the Cost of Security
Security professionals and cybercriminals have reached a standstill with rapid innovation and the emergence of new threats.
Many existing tools and methods aren’t up to the task, and security teams feel the strain. When you include human resources shortages and the time it takes to manually examine vulnerabilities, the study of safeguarding the modern company becomes significantly more difficult.
It’s time for businesses to take a different path. Automation can help companies eliminate security bottlenecks that restrict development teams from innovating more effectively, efficiently, and safely.
Reduce The Number of False Positives and The Amount Of Time Spent On Manual Tasks
False positives are a concern in almost every company. 45% of notifications on the average are false positives. This indicates that larger firms lose roughly 10,000 hours per year on average verifying false vulnerability alerts, costing them up to $500,000.
One option for businesses to recoup wasted time and money is to automate the confirmation of direct-impact vulnerabilities, also known as exploitable proof of vulnerabilities. Automation decreases false positives by proving direct-impact vulnerabilities such as OS command injections, path traversals, and SQL injections.
False positives cost businesses time and money, but inadequate tools and laborious processes often stifle productivity. Manual verification slows down remediation and takes time away from more critical security activities. Many application security (AppSec) experts believe there isn’t enough automation, even though it’s vital to embrace and invest in automation. Automated AppSec testing can swiftly identify, test, and fix vulnerabilities, allowing you to devote more time to high-value security and development projects.
Remove Bottlenecks and Streamline Processes
AppSec is time-consuming without the correct tools. Developers are rapidly constructing apps to stay up with the competition, while security teams are dealing with an ever-growing queue of issues to verify, analyze, allocate, and manage. In addition, organizations usually prioritize critical business assets while leaving the rest of the threat landscape open to assault. As a result, security is frequently overlooked as part of the software development lifecycle.
The truth of enterprise security is that there are seemingly unending backlogs. However, advanced tools can assist businesses in reducing false positives, embracing automation, and ensuring safety are integrated throughout the development process.
It’s Possible to Improve Appsec
The speed and scale with which apps are developed have resulted in a security dilemma. Every day, enterprise security teams make choices to keep up, despite being acutely aware that the subsequent significant data breach is just around the corner.
Professionals in the field of DevSecOps face a significant difficulty. It’s no longer enough to focus on specific flaws; web app development’s volume, speed, and complexity make this strategy unproductive and inefficient. Instead, security must be shifted to the left, and AppSec testing must be fully integrated into the development process. They must, however, scan web applications in production to defend the attack surface on the right.
It’s also a top-down problem. Many firms struggle with security implementation because leadership does not prioritize it or assumes that the security team would take care of it. Leaders must advocate cultural changes and guarantee that their employees have the appropriate AppSec tools.
Isolating security teams increases the risk by allowing other departments to bypass best practices to speed up the development process or presume another group is taking care of it. Only if firm executives set security requirements can adequate security be achieved: Everyone must be held accountable for security KPIs, and security must be integrated into development.
False positives can be reduced by implementing automation and improving workflows. These are three concepts that can help firms develop while maintaining app security.
