Even seasoned marketers recognize that app marketing represents a distinct arena, featuring its own players and rules. With 7.26 billion smartphone users worldwide (yes, that’s roughly 90 percent of the population!), mobile app marketing is a must. To help you navigate the landscape of mobile app marketing, here is our starting lineup of seven key app marketing strategies along with eight marketing channels to complement your strategy.
Seven proven app marketing strategies
1. Focus on a handful of important KPIs
The era of gauging an app’s success solely by downloads and ratings is a thing of the past. Instead, here are five meaningful mobile marketing metrics that every marketer should know like the back of their hand.
- Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): The amount of revenue each of your active customers (on average) contribute
- Cost Per Install (CPI), Cost Per Loyal User (CPLU): CPI measures your customer acquisition costs for customers that installed your app in response to seeing an advertisement (tracking paid installs rather than organic installs). And the CPLU metric looks at the cost of acquiring an active user (defined here as anyone who launches your app at least three times).
- Engagement:The individual app and its mobile marketing strategy define this exclusively within their context. With that said, engagement is most often talked about in terms of the phenomena associated with wanting to use the mobile app longer and more frequently.
- Love Percent: Unique to apps using the Alchemer Digital Love Dialog, this metric starts with showing your mobile customers a one-question in-app survey: “Do you love this app?”
- Retention: Retention is a measurement of customer churn: How many customers continue to actively use your app after one week? One month? One year?
2. Allocate the resources your app deserves
Oftentimes, marketers undervalue mobile advertising. They dedicate only a small percentage of their marketing budget to mobile app marketing. This is a huge missed opportunity.
After adjusting your marketing budget to focus on mobile apps, you need to decide how to use it effectively. The advertisements and promotions for your app need to not only be creative and engaging to consumers, but they also have to be ongoing.
Without planning your app marketing strategy and budget accordingly, you could be running out of steam (read: dollars) by the time the big end-of-the-year push occurs. Your goal should be to maintain your app’s visibility in key marketplaces year-round. As an illustration, reallocating a portion of your budget during pivotal spending holidays can enhance visibility and ensure that your app reaches consumers when it matters most.
3. Avoid getting pulled in too many directions
As much as every company is fighting for app space and supremacy, your individual departments may be doing the same. The greater the size of the organization and the number of its distinct departments, the more individuals perceive your mobile app (and its marketing strategy) as their domain.
Rather than having internal disputes over property lines, unite these different stakeholders together into one team. Not only will this appease everyone who feels they should have a say or control the app marketing strategies, but it will end up making those strategies more successful.
Aligning the goals of all of these different departments may not be easy, but through ongoing communications and routine meetings with team members, you will stand a much better chance at hitting all of these different goals and minimizing power struggles. Moreover, you’ll benefit from additional manpower and creative input during the planning and execution of these app marketing campaigns.
4. Partner your app marketing team with a mobile marketing expert
Despite the wealth of knowledge and expertise your advertising/marketing department has (or your ad agency, if you don’t handle these tasks in-house), mobile marketing, as mentioned above, is a different battleground with a new required set of expertise and technology. Even digital marketers aren’t always well versed in the challenges that mobile faces. Some of these challenges include optimizing marketing efforts to achieve optimal ranks, analyzing app usage, buying targeted media, and more (further discussed below).
If partnering with a mobile marketing technology provider is in your budget, you may want to explore this option with the members of your team or any outside agencies that operate your app marketing campaigns. This may eat up a chunk of your budget, but this all-in tactic should provide your app with the most success and best chance at achieving an optimal rank among app stores.
5. Market the experience, not the app
In the past, when companies made apps for the sake of having an app for their customers to use, it was more acceptable to market the app itself. That is no longer true because you aren’t trying to sell audiences on the app itself anymore. Instead, you are selling them on the experience your app provides. More significantly, emphasize how that experience stands out as uniquely superior to any previous mobile experience they’ve encountered.
This is not a new concept, by any means. Modern consumers seek the simplest experiences provided by brands. In fact, 86% of consumers are more inclined to make purchases when they aren’t bombarded with confusing information. Remember this when crafting your store descriptions: focus on how the app simplifies users’ lives, rather than detailing every single function it offers.
The strategy of marketing the experience rather than the app has caused customer experience to become a front-running issue of businesses across nearly every industry. Don’t market your app—that’s simply is not enough anymore. Concentrate on the experiences exclusive to your app.
6. Organically boost your app to the top
Paid media buys will certainly give your app a boost in the rankings, but ultimately you are after the users who discover and install your app on their own. In the app marketplace, ad-driven users and organic users have a sort of symbiotic relationship. The more downloads you get through your media placements, the higher your rank becomes in the app stores and thereby how visible it is to potential organic users.
Ultimately, you should aim to achieve your app’s optimal rank, by finding the best balance between ad spend, app store ranking, and organic downloads. In other words, you want to convert the greatest number of organic users possible, for the best use of your money. Optimal rank is not the highest possible rank. It is easy to throw a lot of fuel at the fire and get a big blaze, but your burn rate will be much too high to sustain and you won’t be receiving a positive ROI on your ad spending.
7. Keep iterating
You must never stop working on your mobile app marketing strategies, no matter how successful they are. The mobile app landscape is ever-evolving and dynamic. Your app marketing team should consistently convene to strategize for forthcoming updates, shifts, and methods to maintain consumer engagement and loyalty. Additionally, establishing a feedback loop with consumers is vital for monitoring and comprehending shifts in attitudes toward your app and competitors’ offerings.
Marketing channels to complement app marketing strategies
1. Affiliate marketing
One of the least used but most effective app marketing channels, affiliate marketing is almost identical to online referral marketing. Through this channel, app marketers (the ‘merchants’) can join an ad network, such as Apple’s Performance Partner Program or the Google Display Network, to create featured widgets and code snippets that other app or web publishers (the ‘affiliates’) can embed on their platforms. For each download such an app generates, the app publishers receiving the download pays the affiliate a small reward—typically in the form of revenue sharing.
2. App store optimization
The goal of ASO is to drive more traffic to your app’s landing page in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, so that searchers can take a specific action: downloading your app. Of course, App Store Optimization is an ongoing process, thanks both to the continually evolving ranking algorithms and to the competitive nature of the app stores. A successful ASO strategy requires a keen eye, a penchant for analytics, and regular check-ins, so keeping up with ASO best practices is imperative to growth.
3. Blogs and multimedia
Your favorite inbound strategies are perfectly suited for app marketing through blogs and other online mediums. This is one area most digital marketers know well, whether or not they’ve ever worked in mobile—use your knowledge to your advantage!
4. Loyalty programs
App loyalty programs seek to convert casual customers into highly active and highly profitable evangelists. In the app world, this often comes down to rewards systems, gamified achievements, or blurring the lines between app marketing and traditional marketing by allowing customers to earn and track loyalty rewards, obtained through either in-app, in-store, or online purchases, on their mobile app.
5. Paid advertising
Equivalent to search engine marketing’s Pay-Per-Click advertising in Google’s Ads or Microsoft Ads networks, mobile app’s version of paid advertising is a way to quickly grow downloads and reach a targeted audience.
6. Ratings and reviews
A cornerstone of mobile app marketing, app store ratings and reviews provide potential customers with the ever valuable assurance of quality. Just as Yelp reviews can make or break a local business, the slightest change in your app’s rating translates into dramatic changes in your app store rank, downloads, and revenue.
7. Social media
Today’s marketing toolbox integrates social media well, providing a tremendous avenue show the human side of your app by connecting with customers on their terms, in a familiar setting. The social channel(s) you use will depend solely on your brand’s goals, and look different for every company.
8. Word of mouth
This channel is the leading driver of app discovery, but it is also the hardest to measure—and the hardest to control. At the end of the day, referrals through word-of-mouth marketing come down to creating an app customers not only love, but love to talk about
It is evident that mobile plays a crucial role in the marketing mix and success of our companies. Therefore, we must move past the notion of merely having an app and instead strive to grasp its potential impact on enhancing brand awareness, boosting revenue, and driving in-store traffic.
The most effective app marketers will be those who commit fully, investing the required time, effort, and resources into comprehending and advancing this largely unexplored landscape to its fullest extent.
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Not quite ready yet? That’s ok too! Here are some additional resources to check out:
- Alchemer Digital: Learn how Alchemer Digital drives omni-channel customer engagement across digital properties.
- Customer Stories: See how organizations have used Alchemer to elevate their customer feedback programs and do more with feedback.
- Customer Feedback in the Digital Era: Read our e-guide on the importance of customer feedback amid Digital Transformation.
