Addressing Visually Impaired Needs

This week Sama and I were thinking about the type of users that our app might have. As our app will provide information about hospitals and health care clinics, we may encounter people with certain disabilities using the app. So this question came up: Is our app prepared to serve visually impaired people?

We hadn’t considered this possibility in our past discussions. However, this is something that we want to encourage and promote not only in our app, but also among the rest of websites and applications. These types of practices help the visually impaired gain integration into the society.

How can we make a website or app accessible to visually impaired people? You might think that doing this involves a lot of cost and work. However, it’s not that complicated. You only need to follow some basics tips:

• Allow users to select the size of the text. Some visually impaired people might only need to make the text larger in order to use the application.
• Don’t let the color do the entire job. A colorblind person won’t know the difference between two buttons, if you are relying on color to communicate the message.
• Consider to offer two versions of your website or application. One version will serve visually impaired people, and it should be designed using contrast between elements.
• Keep it simple.  Displaying the information in logical order will help impaired users to identify the sections of the website or application.
• Use descriptive link names to provide meaningful information to users.
• Finally, make the application compatible with other assistance applications, such as: VoiceOver, TalkBack, Siri, Speak Screen, Dictation, Zoom and more.

Currently iOs and Android support a number of applications that assist the visually impaired in everyday activities. We would also recommend reading this article from Reuters that explains the problems, new softwares and developer’s challenges in this area.

Free vs. Paid Marketing Tools

Last week, Sama and I were thinking about the right marketing tools to use for our application. The decision is not easy. There are an increasing number of marketing tools available in the market, each one serving different purposes for marketers.

This chart attempts to provide an overall view of the number of tools available, and the complexity of selecting the right options for your strategy. In general, we can say that we found this chart to be a good representation of our current feelings.

Source: http://www.curata.com

Find more marketing tools here.

However, if we break our findings between free and paid marketing tools, and then we evaluate the performance: the decision seems to be less difficult.

Now you must be wondering why. So we found that paid marketing tools are easier to use, the interface is nicer, and offer more extra cool features. However, regarding the functionality and performance, paid tools do not add much more value indeed.

For instance, SEMRush is a paid tool that allows you to track keywords across both paid and organic search campaigns. SEMRush also provides additional information such as: search trends, competition, and campaign spend. However, its limitations are:

• Local data is not always available, which is terrible for us, as our project needs data with focus on the Chicago market.
• It only offers a limited list of keywords because SEMrush only analyzes the first 20 Google search results.
• SEMrush is not an analytics tool. Therefore, it offers traffic and ads spend estimations that can be very inaccurate.

Now, Google Adwords can give you Keyword information and generate a list of related keywords using local dat. All for free. In addition, Google analytics provides accurate traffic information.

Another example is Hubspot. This is a great paid tool that allows you to plan and execute end-to-end a marketing campaign. Most of its attractiveness is because it offers landing page templates, form templates, email templates call-to-action templates, etc. All these resources make marketers’ life easier… But having used this tool, we can say that this tool is not helpful enough, because marketing is about originality and differentiation, and templates constrain your ability to create something new.

In addition, we still need designers and developers to work on the templates and campaigns. Sometimes, trying to adapt the campaigns to these templates, results in more work, cost and worst performance. In conclusion, as this article states, you have to be very disciplined and create a lot of content in order to see the value of this tool. Otherwise, it is better that you use several free marketing tools combined according to your needs.

In conclusion, before engaging with a paid marketing tool, we recommend evaluating your needs and goals, and based on that, select the right marketing tools. In our case, we don’t believe it is necessary to pay for SEMrush. However, the basic plan of Hubspot might be worth a try, as it offers all the functionalities that we need, we have previously worked with this tool, and we expect to save money by automating our campaigns.

Does Google Adwords truly deliver ROI?

As a team, we were discussing how to market our brand-new mobile app. Of course Google Adwords is a great tool, easy and fast to implement. However, is Google Adwords a good investment for all kinds of online-based business?

Our project consists of a mobile application that provides information about health care institutions and services in Chicago. Now, lets consider the cost to be associated with a simple Google Adwords campaign:

• Approx. Cost per click: $2.11
• Approx. Total Clicks per day: 18
• Approx. Total Budget per month: $1,100 (This is a very conservative budget amount).

Sama and I were looking for the standard conversation rate in the industry, and there is not such thing as a standard conversion rate. Conversion rate are subjected to different variables such as devices, type of product, price, budget and segment market, just to name a few. All these variables make it very difficult to have a good estimate of what our conversation rate would be. As our application will be downloaded mostly on smartphones and tablets, we will base our calculations according to a study made by EQ3 that specifies the average e-Commerce mobile conversion rate in the health industry is 3.33%.

3.33% of conversion rate means that for every 100 clicks, only 3 or 4 clicks will results in sales. In our case, we are expecting 540 clicks per month, resulting in 18 sales of our application.

This doesn’t sound good! Our application will be sold for a price no greater than $5.00. Let’s do the math:

•  Investment: $1,100
•  Sales Revenue: $90
• ROI: -$1,010

Based on our budget, we will need a conversion rate of 41% in order to perceive a positive return. Even the best conversion rate doesn’t exceed 30% according to a study that analyzed AdWords accounts with a combined $3 billion in annual spend.

Source: Everything You Know About Conversion Rate Optimization Is Wrong.

Conclusion

We are true believers that Google Adwords offers a great tool to advertise products and services and generate brand awareness. However, this method doesn’t apply to all type of products.

As a marketer with professional experience working with Adwords campaigns for B2B, I can say that 5% of conversion rate is perfectly fine because products and services are sold by more than $500. For instance, cloud companies can spend an average of $2,500 on Adwords campaigns monthly (Approx. 1,000 clicks). Every click that is turned into client means at least a $500 contract.

In our case, Google Adwords might work for brand awareness and to position our application in the market, which we will explore in depth throughout our marketing planning.

No matter how good your landing pages are, or how good your campaign is planned, Google Adwords is not for everybody.