Informative Blog - Digital Marketing Services

How to Respond to Reviews: Turning Feedback into Business Growth

27/10/2023

Responding to customer reviews is not just a courtesy; it's a vital part of managing your online reputation. Here’s how you can turn reviews, both positive and negative, into opportunities for business growth:
1. ** Acknowledge and Thank: For positive reviews, express gratitude. A simple thank you can go a long way in building customer loyalty and encouraging repeat business.
2. ** Address Concerns: Negative reviews provide a chance to showcase your excellent customer service. Address concerns promptly and professionally. Apologize for any shortcomings and offer solutions to rectify the situation.
3. ** Stay Calm and Professional: Regardless of the tone of the review, maintain a calm and professional demeanor. Avoid getting defensive; instead, focus on resolving the issue and ensuring customer satisfaction.
4. ** Learn and Improve: Negative feedback often highlights areas that need improvement. Use this valuable information to make necessary changes, demonstrating to customers that you value their opinions and are committed to enhancing their experience.
5. ** Encourage Follow-up: After resolving a customer's issue mentioned in a negative review, encourage them to revisit and share their updated experience. This can showcase your dedication to customer satisfaction and turn a dissatisfied customer into a loyal advocate.
By responding to reviews thoughtfully and professionally, you not only address individual concerns but also show potential customers that you care about their experience, ultimately building trust in your brand.

The Power of Reviews And Why Your Business Needs Them

12/10/2023

In today's digital age, online reviews can make or break a business. Potential customers heavily rely on the experiences shared by others to make informed decisions. Here's why you should consider reviews as a crucial aspect of your business strategy:

**1. ** Building Trust: Reviews from real customers act as testimonials for your business. Positive reviews build trust and credibility, making new customers more likely to choose your services or products.

**2. ** Understanding Customer Needs: Reviews provide valuable insights into what your customers love about your business and what needs improvement. This feedback is priceless for enhancing your offerings and customer service.

**3. ** Boosting Visibility: Positive reviews can improve your search engine ranking, making your business more visible online. When potential customers search for a product or service, businesses with higher ratings often appear at the top of the search results.

**4. ** Encouraging Loyalty: Responding to reviews, both positive and negative, shows customers that you value their feedback. It fosters a sense of community and encourages customer loyalty.

**5. ** Free Marketing: Satisfied customers often act as brand ambassadors, recommending your business to others through positive reviews.
This word-of-mouth marketing can significantly expand your customer base.

Incorporating a review management strategy can help you harness the power of customer feedback, leading to increased sales, customer loyalty, and improved online visibility.

We at miomobi.com are working on a tool that will help businesses to generate a response for those that leave a review, with the help of AI. Come back soon for more info.

How To Submit For ERTC, Employee Retention Tax Credit

12/1/2023

Some good news for business owners who suffered during the pandemic!

If I told you I could get you/your business a large chunk of cash, without having to repay it back, how fast would you say, "YES"?

Listen, I know that it sounds too good to be true, but it’s very true. And there’s money for all small to medium size businesses up to 500 employees, including you, right now that’s being left on the table.

Here’s what I can guarantee you.

Try our free calculator now

Are you familiar with the PPP? If Not then there could be even more money for you!!

Your CPA may have called you about the ERTC. It came out before the PPP but most CPAs decided to go with the PPP because it was so much easier.

They didn’t want to do the ERTC because it was super complicated and convoluted to figure out. The average CPA didn’t want to have anything to do with it because it’s just too hard to calculate.

Here’s the good news.

Even if you got the PPP, there’s a lot of money being left on the table. But here’s what happened. In March of 2021, they made a change with the American recovery plan that they would still honor the ERTC, even if you got the PPP.

Your CPA may not have called you about it because it’s so complicated you need a specialist to do it. Most CPAs don’t want to learn a whole new program and put their license on the line.

We have three 100% US based CPA teams, that are specialists for the ERTC, working on recovering these funds for small businesses.

We’ve seen rebates from $20k-3m.

Even with people who received the PPP, there’s still that much money left on the table.

Try the FREE Calculator now!

I just have a few questions for you:

*At any point in 2020 or 2021 were you mandated to shut down?

*When the pandemic hit did you have any of those quarters that you lost revenue?

*Well, let me ask you something. Did you have any supply chain issues?

If the answer is yes, well, through my specialist accounting firm, it sounds like we could get you approved and you left money on the table.

It’s going to take about 90 seconds for us to get a rough estimate of what you’re going to make.

So, we can get you this money back, but it takes up to 18 weeks to 5.5 months. But that’s if we can get you in line right now. Two weeks from now it might take twice as long.

What is this going to cost? That’s the best part. Nothing.

Fees.

Remember when I told you it didn’t cost anything. Yes, it won't cost anything until you decide to work with us once you know what you are entitled! We will then need a work order from you.

So you know how personal injury attorneys offer you 100% contingency? No money upfront. You win, we win kind of thing. If we don’t get you money you don’t pay anything. And they do all the work without any money upfront but then charge you 40% or more once the case is won?

We’re one of the only companies in the country that can offer something similar to this. But we’re much less than that.

And that’s 100% contingency. We go to war, we put all the money out, and you only pay money if you receive it.

So when you asked, “how much does it cost?” It doesn’t cost you anything. This is all found money.

Now if you want to save a significant amount of money, we have a plan for that as well.

Once you get your calculation back. (Not the estimation but the actual one done by the CPAs.) You can choose to put down a small work order deposit and the percentage drops down all the way to 25%.

Now I’ve told you that we’ve gotten rebates back from $20k-3m. If you choose to pay upfront, that fee drops all the way down to almost half. It goes down to 18%.

You might ask, “why would I want to take the risk of paying that all upfront?” Well, depending on how much we find out you have coming to you, you might want to save as much of that as possible.

Here’s the best part. Because you don’t have to choose until we get the exact amount, to the penny, of what you’re going to get.

It’ll take 90 seconds to get a rough estimate of what you’re going to get. However you will need to fill in a form!!

Do you have any questions you would like to ask me?

So here’s what’s going to happen next. You’re going to get a call from our specialist team. They are going to ask you to provide them some docs. If you drag your feet, it can take much longer. What the time frame is today, may not be the time frame two weeks from now. It could take twice as long. We’re getting a massive influx of new requests every day. Don’t drag your feet on these docs. If you have them we can set it up right now.

After you upload the docs you’re going to need to sign a work order agreement.

Again, You aren’t required to pay any money upfront to get your calculation but we do accrue hard costs to get your final calculation for you and you will be expected to do business with us.

Try our FREE calculator now!

FEEL READY TO MAKE IT BIG WITH YOURDROPSHIPPING BUSINESS?

21/5/2020

IT'S BEAUTIFUL OUTSIDE, SO LEAVE YOUR WORK BEHIND.

If you are selling on eBay and need more time to yourself and/or are looking for a software that will upload your product, monitor it for price or if it goes out of stock, buys the item for you from your supplier (not all suppliers) and uploads tracking, what more do you want? And if you don't have products to sell or don't know what to sell, it will find them for you!

Watch the video below to get a better idea. Soon, it will work for all Shopify store owners too!

ONE STOP SHOP THAT AUTOMATES YOUR SUCCESS

It's a complete timesaver! What you get with Autods:

PRICE AND STOCK MONITORING
Autods will monitor every hour supplier’s prices and stock changes. When a change is detected we will update your products.

AUTOMATED ORDERS

Save hours of tedious work and prevent cancellations & losses due to changes in product’s price and stock. When an order is received, it will be ordered automatically within few minutes.

FULL CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Stop jumping between eBay and your monitoring system. Use our customer support system to manage everything from one place: Messages, cancelations, and returns, to all of your stores, at once! You can save pre-made messages and respond with one click.

HOT DROPSHIPPING PRODUCTS FINDER

Dropshipping tool that helps you to get HOT products! Increase your store’s profitability by listing our hot, rapid selling items with a click of a button.

PERFORMANCE STATISTICS AND ANALYSISGet a comprehensive picture of your business with the most advanced dashboard, graphs, filters and bulk systems, that includes everything you need.

UPDATING TRACKING NUMBERS AUTOMATICALLYStop wasting time on boring daily tasks. Let AutoDS update the tracking number for you when it’s available from your supplier.

INCREASING POSITIVE FEEDBACK PERCENTAGE

We will increase your positive feedbacks by over 60% by sending 3 automated personal messages to your customers and leaving them a positive feedback.

VARIATIONS, SCHEDULE, REGULAR AND BULK LISTERS

eBay likes daily investment in our stores. Schedule your uploads using our regular and bulk listers which include variations and automatic full item specifics.

SELL-THROUGH, PRICE, FEES AND INVENTORY OPTIMISATION

AutoDS does it all: raise the price for sold products, or decrease it if they haven’t sold for a while. The products didn’t sell for almost a month? We will end the listing for you.

Review:
I've worked with AutoDS and love the software. It really works just as it says it does. They have videos and detailed blog posts to help you with any issues you may have. The staff are always happy to help.

Just as I started getting real busy with sales coming in, eBay gave me the code MC0111. This means that eBay does a check on your account for too much activity but what I never enjoyed was that they suspended my account and requested information from me which took 2 weeks to get back to normal. In the meantime all my products weren't visible anymore and I had to re instate all my listings (800 of them) one by one once they re activated my account. Autods allows you to have up to 10 eBay stores in your account, all for the same one monthly payment.

Autods helps you save time in every way and they have a Trial offer allowing you to test the software for a whole week for just $1.00 so why not try it out? Go here now!

Social Media is Here To Stay

16/4/2018

Dear Business Owner,

Did you know as of February 2018 there are over 3.03 Billion people active on Social Media and it is growing at a rate of hundreds of millions of people each year?

Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram are some of the most powerful platforms available to generate new business.

The crazy part is less than 2% of businesses know how to use Social Media to generate consistent income!

The world is on Social Media, your clients both current and potential are on it and if you believe your market isn't you will be soon left behind.

There is a social revolution going on and it is changing the landscape of business all over the world.

It doesn't matter what industry you're in or what you sell - social media is the biggest opportunity available right now!

With 2.072 Billion people active on Facebook, it is right now the single most important marketing tool for business available, full stop, end of story. It is red hot.

1.74 Billion are using it regularly on mobile while in the car, on the train, on the bus... and even while they’re in the bath. Facebook has become a part of daily life.

But more importantly... your customers are on it and your prospects are on it... and everyone you want to do business with is on it...

And if your are not generating business from it, not only are you missing out on more sales than you know how to handle, but you very well may be obsolete within the next 2 years.

If your competition hasn't caught on chances are they will... and then you may struggle to catch up as your competition gets on board and leaves you in their dust.

Facebook's power is their ability to give businesses 3 things:

Identify

Facebook easily enables anyone with basic technology skills the ability to be able to identify who and where their potential clients are. This is game changing.

Target

Facebook also has the most powerful and intelligent tools to be able to target your most ideal clients, based on hundreds of types of behaviours and factors.

Want to target your local community?

What about Women who have just given birth a week ago, who were engaged within last 3 months, who are about to have a birthday, own a house worth more than $1M, that have a child who is 3 weeks away from their birthday, in a particular suburb, city, state or country?

Done!

The level of targeting available with Facebook will literally bend your mind.

Engage & communicate

Facebook is also the most powerful tool for engagement and gives you direct access to communicate to your audience and community.
There are thousands of people who want what you have, and once upon a time you needed to have to spend over $100K in production and TV ads to access these numbers.

Now all you need is a Facebook account and something of value to communicate that your market will listen to and you have a captive audience.

All you need is a Facebook strategy that empowers you to:

Identify your best customers on Facebook
Precisely target them while they are using Facebook
Engage and communicate with them effectively
And (most importantly) convert them into leads and sales

Why Your Business Should Launch a Loyalty Program

20/3/2018

Why Your Business Should Launch a Loyalty Program

Let’s start with something worth remembering:

Selling to your existing customers is a lot easier than attracting new ones. In fact, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. In addition, existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% morecompared to new customers. So how do you get your current customers to come back to your business?

One strategy is to launch a loyalty program.

It might seem like loyalty programs only suit restaurants and retail stores, but in reality, any business can craft a loyalty program to rewards their best customers and make it worth their while to come back and spend more money.

For example, a personal trainer could offer their clients a free session with every 10th class they take. Or maybe they get a free T-shirt if they work out with the personal trainer 5 times in the same week. If you get creative and understand what motivates your customers, you can create a loyalty program for any type of business.

Besides focusing on selling to your existing customers, there are various other reasons why you should launch a loyalty program.

1. Collect valuable data

Data is crucial to growing your business, you need to know who your customers are and how they behave in order to appeal to them. A customer loyalty program will allow you to collect such data. Luckily, 56% of consumers are willing to share data to receive better service. In other words, you will be trading an amazing loyalty program for some data about your customer. This will allow you to put a face and a name to your customer, including when they buy and how much, especially if they are racking up points and redeeming rewards on a regular basis. The gathered data will allow you to create campaigns and products that are targeted at individual customers or groups of customers.
With Bizness Apps’ newest release, North Park, we have integrated customer data like never before. You can see who is coming into your business, how much they spend, and when they redeem rewards.

2. Enhance your customer experience

According to Forbes, 79% of customers would take their business to a competitor within a week of experiencing poor customer service. But it’s not just about customer support, it’s also about the way you show your customers that you value them for buying from your store.

So, how can you increase the likelihood of a good experience with your business?

The answer: make customers feel like the money they spent was worth it.

A loyalty program provides the perfect vehicle to do this.

It’s all about perceived value. If a customer can get something extra for their money, besides the product they purchased, they will experience the “wow factor”.

According to persuasion expert Robert Cialdini, this positive experience also invokes a desire to return the favor, grounded in the power of reciprocity.

In other words, “if a customer receives positive treatment – like a loyalty program – they will be more likely to ‘return the favor’ in the form of more visits, purchases or referrals”, Smart Insights says.

3. Maximize brand advocacy

Loyalty programs are meant for your best customers.

These are the top 20% of all your customers, who drive 80% of your total revenue by spending more over a longer period of time.

A well-designed loyalty program can deepen their engagement with your brand, as well as make them feel appreciated by a business. Now here is the important part, the more they engage with your business, the more likely they are to promote your brand to others.

Compared to non-advocates, they are 2-3 times more effective in persuading others to purchase from you.

We all know that people love to talk about things they love. Think of traditional word-of-mouth, as a happy customer tells two people about their experience, and those two people each tell another two people.

According to Entrepreneur, word-of-mouth is triggered when a customer experiences something far beyond what was expected. In addition, Nielsen states that 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising – 10 times more effective to be exact. Word of Mouth Marketing, then, is the most powerful form of advertising a business can have, as each happy customer can steer dozens of new ones their way.

It is important to make it as easy as possible for them to share their thoughts with others, whether it be on social media, your website or your app.

4. Build your online reputation

Speaking of brand advocacy, a loyalty program is also a great strategy to build your strong online reputation.

88% of customers trust online reviews, so it’s crucial to devote resources to gathering these reviews on relevant platforms.

There are two ways to do this with your loyalty program: reward your customers for leaving a review or ask your customers to leave a review after redeeming a reward.

With the first, you can trade a reward (be it extra points or special goodies) for leaving a review. With the second, you are zoning in even more on the positive experience your loyalty programs brings to the customer.

In this case, you wait for the perfect moment in which your customers’ feel the most positive towards your brand and then ask them for a review.

When is that perfect moment? When customers have just redeemed a loyalty reward!

Maybe they just just received their free slice of pizza or were rewarded with $5 off their purchase. If you ask customers for a review at this positive point in time, there will be a higher chance that it will be a positive one.

Miomobi Apps does this with the review campaigns feature, where customers get prompted automatically to leave a review through a push notification.

Positive reviews will help you build a positive brand image and reputation. They will also bring in new customers who picked your business over a competitor because of positive reviews.

Conclusion

A loyalty program can benefit your business in many different ways.

It makes sure your loyal customers feel appreciated, as well as encourage them to come back to your business over and over again. With the data you gain, you will be able to refine your marketing strategies and tailor your loyalty program even more.

Grow your business in 2018 with the help of a simple, yet effective loyalty program.

Want to speak to me? Then call me on 01451 798265 in Gloucestershire, UK

30/1/2018

We are always looking for new ways and what works now, to get promotional messages for local businesses in front of buyers!

How?

By putting their marketing messages in their prospects pocket.

We use the hottest technology in mobile to help businesses get new customers and keep them coming again and again.

We also provide ordering and reservations (booking appointments), loyalty and push notifications, reviews, Google My Business services, social media management and mobile apps.

Tel. 01451 798265

www.miomobi.com

5 Ways PWAs Can Improve Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

20/11/2017

We’ve been stoked about Progressive Web Apps leading the future of mobile and our team has been experimenting with PWAs over the past months to see what these babies can do. And boy, they can do A LOT!
Progressive Web Apps are an even better mobile marketing tool for small businesses than native apps, as they can be shared and used in seconds. Shareability has recently become a core marketing strategy for businesses big and small. While shareability is often connected to content, the same principles stand for marketing your mobile app. When creating content, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to access and share. The more shareable, the bigger the impact for your business. Along those lines, making an app more shareable is a solid basis for your mobile marketing strategy.
How?

Let’s start by comparing the shareability of native apps vs. progressive web apps. While a native app can be shared with a link or by name, a user needs to open the app store, find the right app, and wait for it to download, before being able to use it. With every step of the native app download process, 20% of users are lost. Consumers find it tedious to jump through all these hoops, drastically reducing a native app’s ability to be effectively shared by the business or its customers. Instead of going through 5+ steps, the PWA launches straight from a link – with no wait time! Think of all the new marketing possibilities…

1. Launch from a URL

The most straightforward way to launch a PWA is from a URL. A user can simply type or paste the URL into the browser search bar, ending up straight in the app. But you can get a lot more creative with it; read on.

2. Launch from QR code

Users can simply scan a QR code that brings them straight into the app’s home screen or a specific app feature. With the new iOS11, it’s even easier for iPhone users to scan QR codes. All they need to do is open their camera, point at the QR code and voilà! (Note: Android users have been able to do this for a while now.)
How to use this for your business:

Attach the QR code to the receipt, so that customers can launch the app and collect their loyalty points after purchase.
Include the QR code in your direct mailers, so that customers can place an order directly after receiving the flyers.
Display the QR code on advertising posters, banners and flyers, so users can check out the app instantly.
Print the QR code onto your menu or catalogue, so consumers can jump straight into the ordering feature.

3. Launch from Google search

The Google search bar will be the new app store search bar with Progressive Web Apps. In other words, consumers can find your app simply by finding your business in the Google search results. In fact, 61% of searches are now from mobile devices. So you will not only be making it easier for users to find you on mobile, you will make it easier for them to become paying customers. Tip: Make sure that your Google My Business account is set up and completed, so both your business and app can be discovered and ranked.

4. Launch from text message

Launching the app from a text message can be valuable in two cases: business to customer and customer to customer. First, if you have curated a contact list that includes phone numbers, you can use text messages to send your new app directly to your customers. They will be able to launch it directly from the message and use it within seconds. Second, your customers can easily share the app with their friends and family, allowing them to market the app for you.

5. Launch from third-party profile

You can include the PWA link in any third-party profile that can help to improve the user’s overall experience. For example, you can link out to your app in your Yelp profile under “Menu” or “Website” or you can even include it in the “Order Now” context. This is possible for any third-party online profile, including Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, Instagram.

These are only a few examples of how you can share and spread your business’ app with potential customers. You can get creative with this and test different scenarios to find out which ones are most effective in capturing your customers. Progressive Web Apps are extremely linkable and shareable, allowing businesses to make the most out of their mobile solution as a marketing tool.

These 5 Simple Tips for Small Business will Boost Social Shares

19/10/2017

Shares have become the social media marketing equivalent of gold, especially for small businesses. Each share is a chain reaction where brand messaging is relayed to an entirely new audience, which can greatly help generate leads and sales. As it stands, Facebook is the undisputed king of social shares, making up for over 90% of shared articles in the first half of last year.

Shares are what can bring brand messaging to a worldwide level. Take Poo-Pourri for example: they started off as a small company that sold toilet deodorizers, not exactly the most glamorous or exciting product. But after releasing some humorous video content, they quickly gained popularity. One of their YouTube videos boasts over 39 million views!

So what are the tips and tricks to help boost your content strategy and take engagement to the next level, like Poo-Pourri?

1. Create Compelling Headlines

One of the most important elements, if not the most important, of your social content is the headline. This is what grabs people’s attention. Creating bland and boring headlines is one of the biggest sales-killers of online business. Your headline needs to be enticing, but also clearly explain what sort of information you will be sharing. This is one of the best ways for small businesses to set themselves apart on social media.
Buzzfeed is a site that has truly mastered the tantalizing headline. They post multiple articles a day, and each one features a title that is designed to grab attention by using humor, asking an enticing question, or providing unusual or interesting information.
The reason that Buzzfeed articles are so popular and are shared thousands of times per day is because the site utilizes the concept of “thinking fast and slow” with their content. This model means the headline allows readers to think fast, meaning it’s short and simple to understand, and typically piques some interest. Then the body of the content requires a slower, more concentrated thinking, like reading the full-length article.
This tactic attracts audiences because it is easy to browse through and read headlines quickly without much effort before diving into the deeper content.

This simple example illustrates the importance of nailing the headline. With attention spans shortening even more thanks to the ever-increasing amount of distractions online, using a striking headline will do wonders to increase clicks and shares, as long as you don’t fall into the clickbait trap.

2. Choose Effective Visuals

Including a visual element like a picture, video, or gif exponentially increases engagement. In fact, Buzzsumo found that updates with images resulted in 2.3 times the engagement than those without.
Like the adage says, a picture is worth a thousand words, so make sure that including a visual really does add something of value to your post. And don’t limit visuals to just images; adding videos to your post grows your organic reach by as much as 135%!
Southwest Airline’s feed offers a great example of utilizing beautiful and eye-catching content that highlights their brand and “wows” your customers; their posts incite wanderlust with professional shots of captivating, travel-themed visuals:

3. Research Industry Issues

When you are releasing content, it is vital to provide something that is beneficial to your audience. If what you share is purely self-promotional or you’re just sharing boring and irrelevant content, it won’t get you very far. Before you start creating, you need to conduct a little research to find out what is buzzing in the industry.
Think With Google is an incredibly user-friendly tool that allows you to conduct market research so you can check out what’s trending and what searches are being made by your customers. If you notice your audience is consistently searching for specific information, consider providing a solution to their problem by providing relevant social content.

4. Post at the Right Times

Scheduling out your posts so they are released during high traffic times can really help to boost shares and views. There has been a good deal of research conducted in regards the best times to share content on social media sites. Interestingly, the data concluded that each social media site has differing peak times.
For instance, Facebook posts receive higher engagement on the Thursdays, Fridays, and the weekends and between 1 to 4 pm. Twitter, on the other hand, is more active during the day from 12 pm to 5 pm, with higher activity during the week. Instagram has better engagement in the mornings and on Mondays, with lower engagement during the afternoon hours.
It’s important to create a reliable system that keeps your marketing plan on track so you can carefully craft content for the right platform and distribute it at the right time. For this purpose, utilizing a task management software like Workzone ensures that you never miss a deadline, and enables you to seamlessly collaborate with your entire marketing team – including copywriters, graphic designers, and media outreach staff – so you can keep your content plan on schedule.

5. Look for Common Threads in Successful Posts

Take a good look at the most shared content in your field; notice any similarities? It’s quite likely that the posts share something in common, whether it’s the subject, industry focus, or even overall just style.
With some critical investigation, try to detect a common theme in your competitors’ content that viewers like. For example, even though Red Bull is just an energy drink, it found that sharing content related to extreme sports resonated well with their audience. The brand linked their product by sponsoring athletes and events, and they regularly share videos and photos of the impressive stunts performed, while featuring gear and signage with the Red Bull logo:

It’s important to find what speaks to your audience, whether it is the type of content you share or the valuable information. Once you find that niche that keeps people coming back, always be striving to improve and impress.

In Conclusion

Consistently gaining social shares is one of the best ways to bring small businesses to the next level. Simply releasing content on social media and hoping for the best is not going to bring in great results. You need to strategize your methodology beforehand and plan for maximum engagement on social media.
Capture your audience’s attention with exciting headlines and include visuals that will catch the eye. Give your audience exactly what they want by discovering the topics they are looking for and make sure you post at the most opportune time.
Once you’ve released some content and experienced high engagement or shares, you will want to keep the momentum going by continuously releasing successful posts. Do a little research and keep track of the analytics on your posts so you can continue to release high-value content that gets shared.

Author Bio:
Pratik Dholakiya is the Co-Founder of E2M, a full-service digital marketing agency and PRmention, a digital PR agency. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, Growth Hacking, Entrepreneurship and Digital PR. He has been named one of the top content marketing influencers by Onalytica three years in a row.

What are mobile Progressive Web Apps?

22/9/2017

By now, you’ve probably heard that Progressive Web Apps are the future of all mankind. They’ll bring world peace, end hunger, save the rainbows and unicorns, bring balance to the force, and a whole lot more. In the process, they might even push the mobile web forward, bring parity to web and native apps, and help mobile developers reach more users beyond the confines of the app stores.
That all sounds great…but what are Progressive Web Apps, exactly?

“A Progressive Web App uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience.”

Native app store apps do things like send push notifications, work offline, look and feel like an app (as Apple and Google have imagined them), load on the home screen, and so on and so forth. Mobile Web Apps accessed in a mobile browser, by comparison, historically haven’t done those things. Progressive Web Apps fix that with new Web APIs, new design concepts, and new buzzwords.

To be clear, I’m talking about browser mobile web apps. Hybrid apps, like Ionic with Cordova, run uninhibited in the native app environment, with all the features we expect of any native app. But pull out the web content from a hybrid app and load it in a mobile browser, and the app is thus constrained by the features of the browser (for a variety of good security and API standardization reasons).
Progressive Web Apps bring features we expect from native apps to the mobile browser experience in a way that uses standards-based technologies and run in a secure container accessible to anyone on the web.
On the whole, Progressive Web Apps describe a collection of technologies, design concepts, and Web APIs that work in tandem to provide an app-like experience on the mobile web. Let’s walk through some of the core tenets of Progressive Web Apps.

Service WorkersService Workers are an incredibly powerful, and equally as confusing, technology behind a Progressive Web App. They power offline functionality, push notifications, background content updating, content caching, and a whole lot more.
At a high level, a Service Worker is a worker script that works behind the scenes, independent of your app, and runs in response to events like network requests, push notifications, connectivity changes, and more.
I’ve heard Service Workers described as a “proxy,” which I think describes them nicely. We can listen for events like fetch that happen any time a network request occurs. We can handle that event with full control, checking for cached data and returning immediately, or allowing the request to continue to the remote server. Our script acts as a proxy, or middleware, for the request.
The sheer power and flexibility of Service Workers makes them very complicated, and generally, developers will want to use pre-made “recipes” for common service worker use cases, such as offline mode. Mozilla has a great reference for service worker recipes that demonstrate the myriad applications with reusable code. For example, here’s how to do a simple offline mode that intercepts fetch events and returns data from a cache if the network request fails. Google also has a slew of Service Worker Samples.
Main takeaway: Service Workers are just a JavaScript file like any other, running in the background and triggered via events, and it’s up to you to write code to handle caching, push notifications, content fetching, etc. Since developers end up using the same “recipes” to do common tasks (like offline support), we will most likely want to use existing recipes to make our lives easier. Service Workers are available on Android with Chrome 50 and not currently supported by other major mobile browsers.
App ShellThe App Shell model is a simple design concept whereby the initial load of a mobile web app provides a basic shell of a app UI, and the content for the app is loaded after. App Shell isn’t a Web API or a framework, but rather a design approach that developers can choose to adhere to that is enhanced by the caching abilities of service workers. You might find that it’s a pretty straightforward, obvious approach, made more dramatic by a buzzword.
With the App Shell model, we focus on keeping the shell of our app UI and the content inside of it separate, and we cache them separately. Ideally, our App Shell is cached such that it loads as quickly as possible when a user visits and returns at a later date. Having the shell and the content load separately theoretically improves the user’s perception of the performance and usability of the app.
Putting this in the context of Ionic, we can load our Ionic app layout immediately (tabs, navigation controller, side menu, etc.), cache it through a service worker, and then fetch and update the content through JS after the app shell has loaded.
As we start to add more PWA support to Ionic, you can expect an App Shell approach to come out-of-the-box for all Ionic apps that are deployed as mobile web apps, with pre-made Service Worker recipes for caching, offline support, and background content refreshing.
Installability and App ManifestHistorically, mobile web apps were not installed like an app to the home screen. Sure, a user could “pin” a mobile website to their home screen on iOS and Android, but the experience was second-rate, and the app still did not come with the local features we expect out of native apps (plus, does anyone actually do that?).
This is changing. Recently, Chrome on Android added support for installing web apps to the home screen with a native install banner, just like the native app banners we’re used to.
To tell Chrome our mobile website is installable as an app, we write a manifest.json file and link to it from our main HTML page (see the second link above for a full example).
Currently, iOS doesn’t have any additional features here beyond Pin to Home screen, so the experience won’t be as fluid, but here’s hoping Apple gives us some goodies this year?
ConclusionProgressive Web Apps are equal parts new Web APIs, design patterns, and marketing fluff. The mobile web comes closer to parity with installable app store apps through app manifest and homescreen install support, background worker functionality with Service Workers, faster load time with App Shell, and a renewed belief that web developers, too, can build amazing mobile app experiences.
At Ionic, we believe the web is the future of apps: It runs everywhere, it’s the most widely known technology stack, and it powers a rapidly increasing number of apps. Today, web technologies are used by millions of app store apps, but so far, the mobile web has been a stripped-down experience driving people to the app store for the Real Thing. Progressive Web Apps change that.

Source from: ionic.io

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Who am I?
A short introduction of myself! My name is Paolo Benvenuto, and I've grown a passion for internet + mobile marketing, since the first of March, 2009. In 2012, I saw mobile marketing as the future trend for growth in mobile websites and mobile apps. Among these, my passion grew for SEM and SEO, Social Media and much more, managing company websites to achieve their goals in awesome increased sales, using web marketing strategies that proved to be successful.
A few questions that could help you or your company are as follows:
1. How do you market your product at present?
2. Is it or what is working for you?
3. What are the biggest challenges your business faces?
4. Have you planned a system which will help your business grow?

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Chi Sono?

Sono Paolo Benvenuto, e mi occupo di internet e mobile marketing dal 01 Marzo del 2009. Da Nov. del 2012 mi sono dedicato anche a realizzare siti e mobile apps. Ho una passione per SEM e SEO, Social Media ed altro.
Aiuto le imprese ad incrementare il loro fatturato usando strategie di marketing che hanno già avuto successo.
Domanda 1.
In questo momento che tipo di marketing utilizzi per la tua impresa?
Domanda 2.
Cosa funziona per te?
Domanda 3.
Quali sono le sfide più grandi che ha il tuo business?
Domanda 4.
Hai previsto un sistema per l'avvenire della crescita del tuo business?

Paolo Benvenuto, EzineArticles Basic PLUS Author