Mobile App Marketing is one of the most important Digital Marketing skills in any digital marketing certification course as well as one of the most useful ones too. Mobile applications have become increasingly popular among users these days. There are billions of downloads and this makes it a good source for marketing experts to dive into and use it as leverage to drive their businesses and product sales from this channel too. Mobile app marketing strategy is very important in today’s world of highly competitive digital marketing strategies. So, read on!
In this blog on mobile app marketing, we will be discussing the following aspects:
Also, make sure to check out this introduction to Digital Marketing video on our YouTube channel:
We are sure you have a question – What is mobile app marketing? Let’s begin and check out just that!
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Introduction to Mobile App Marketing Strategies
One of the most important things that drive customers to get into using apps has a lot to do with mobile app marketing. Having a good Content Marketing strategy helps you with good Mobile App Marketing Campaigns. There are mobile app marketing ideas, methodologies, and techniques that are implemented and experimented with within the industry to see how companies can do the following:
- Attracting potential customers
- New customer engagement
- Existing customer retainment
- Acquiring application users
A well-rounded application on its own might not have the capability to market itself effectively in this world of cut-throat competition. Think about it, your application may have the best functionality and aesthetics to complement it, but at the end of the day, if it is not visible to new users or if it cannot be discovered by potential users in time, then it would not add value to the application or the company’s goal.
Steps in Mobile App Marketing and Monetization Strategy
There are many ways one can go about performing mobile app marketing, and the following section discusses the most important steps that have proven to work in the industry:
Step 1: Pre-launch mobile app marketing
This refers to the period when an app is still in its development phase, and as a marketer, it is your job to create awareness of the application or create the ‘buzz’ that is required.
Step 2: Post-launch mobile app marketing
This phase comes when the application is completely developed and is now ready to be sent out to customers. In this phase, you must use methodologies that encourage the customers to download the application.
Step 3: Customer engagement and retention
The goal of this step in mobile app marketing campaigns is to make sure that the customers do not just use the app once and uninstall it, but rather keep coming back to the application and engaging with it.
Step 4: Mobile App monetization
Mobile Applications should involve provisions of exclusive services and paid subscriptions for users. The addition of attractive in-app purchases to provide move features or deliver a rich user experience will help drive finances easily.
Now that we had a quick idea about the four very important steps that are involved in mobile app marketing strategy, we can now dissect each of them and take a look at them in detail.
Step 1: Pre-launch Mobile App Marketing (Detail)
Pre-launch marketing is extremely vital to a brand as it attracts the attention of customers even before the actual launch of the application.
What are some of the customer details you can obtain at this point in time? Here you go:
- Customer location
- Business feedback
- Application feature suggestions
- Industry requirements
- Pricing strategies
These just happen to be the top given in a long list of insights you can get at this time. It is not just these that have an impact at this stage. The following concepts are vital as well:
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research plays an extremely important role in the first step as you can use this to understand what customers are searching for and work on a channel through which they can reach out to your application upon its launch. It always pays extremely well to understand the audience to which you are catering and the methodologies you can use to achieve the best results.
2. Mobile App Naming
A catchy name is always something that is experimental but has seen a lot of traction in today’s world full of trends. Customers always like to be a part of the trends, and if your application has a catchy name that goes well with what you do, then it is a win-win in terms of onboarding new users and business goals.
3. Competitor Research
A good understanding of what competitors are doing in similar segments will help you assess the market better. These could be anything from application features to the most simple things such as naming the app or using attractive marketing methodologies.
4. Outshining the Market
In this section, you would be working on how best you can prompt your users to accept the application that you are building. There are billions of applications that are already being used by users across the globe. So, you need to figure out what makes your app stand out in a way you would want these potential users to install your app and engage with it.
5. App Description
An important aspect of explaining your app is how you put up attractive and concise app descriptions on your website. The entire process, from bringing customers to your site where they read the descriptions to making them sign up in your app, should be seamless.
6. Content Marketing
We are still at the pre-launch aspect of things. Although, assessing the environment and the playing field will give you a lot of clarity about what to expect post-launch. Nonetheless, to get there, you need to generate a good amount of accurate content that you can show to potential users and see what benefits it offers.
Following are some of the benefits of a good Content Marketing campaign:
- An exponential increase in leads
- Creating brand awareness and product traction
- Driving lots of organic traffic
- Cross-selling and increasing visibility
Step 2: Post-launch Mobile App Marketing
In this stage, your mobile app is already gone through development and testing and is now live for customers to use and give their opinions on the same.
There are two simple ways in which you can drive traffic to your mobile app landing page:
- Free mobile app marketing
- Paid mobile app marketing
1. Free Mobile App Marketing
This is a technique that does not require any sort of finances. Organic methods are used to drive traffic to your landing pages. Some of the simple things that you can do to create an effective free marketing pipeline are discussed below.
App Reviews
Did you know that over 80 percent of new users head straight to the review section of the app before actually downloading it? Therefore, it is extremely important that you have customers who not only enjoy the application but also leave you ratings and organic feedback.
This creates a chain of new users being interested in the app and might just be enough to sway their opinion toward your app and install it. Not just this, honest app reviews and feedback from customers will also allow for the further development of the app itself.
Next up on understanding mobile application marketing, it is vital that you know about App Store optimization as well.
App Store Optimization
The first and the most important thing you have to work on after launching your app is to make sure that the listing on either Apple App Store or Google Play Store is optimized to its best. Since there are millions of applications, both Apple and Google always sort their apps based on a lot of things, such as popularity, features, reviews, and more.
Hence, to increase your app’s visibility, it is extremely important to work on the methodologies that will completely optimize your app for the App Stores.
2. Paid Mobile App Marketing
To further increase your outreach and add more support to your organic marketing campaign, you can leverage paid marketing methods. The following are some of the paid marketing methods that have proved to be fruitful.
Paid Outreach
Paid outreach comprises everything from press releases to the creation and publishing of advertisements to other proven offline methodologies that help increase product visibility to your potential customer base.
Influencer Marketing
In this world of social media and the ever-increasing engagement on social platforms, it should come as no surprise that influencers play a huge role in the outreach of an application. Did you know that over 60 percent of the initial app users come through influencer channels? So Influencers use Social Media Marketing platforms.
Step 3: Customer Engagement and Retention
Unless your app drives a lot of value and provides interesting and catchy content, it is very difficult to retain customer engagement. The more personalized the app feels to each user, the more the chances of the customer staying in the system.
The following are some of the things that you can do to work on customer engagement and retention:
1. Customer Onboarding
As of this moment, customers might have only heard the buzz around your app, and they have not used it first-hand. To understand it better, you will have to use the strategies mentioned in Step 2 to get them on board with the app. Not just this, you will also have to provide adequate documentation and easy-to-use tutorials through which your customers can start using all of the functionalities of the app, thereby, adding more value to it and your business.
2. Exclusive Features
Making your customers feel special about the application they are using will always have an upper hand in bringing success to your business unit. Giving the customers a tailor-made feel when they use the application will help drive in-app sales. The provision of exclusive offers and running special discount campaigns can benefit your business as well.
3. Marketing Pipeline
Using methods like push notifications to subtly notify users regarding the latest offerings, updates, and even timed deals will play an important role to get people engaged with your app, making purchases, and even leaving reviews about the same.
Step 4: Mobile App Monetization
With the extent of many companies launching more free mobile apps than paid ones, it is very important to convey the advantages of your application to your customers who are in the paid app cycle.
If your application has a subscription, then the users who have paid will definitely be more inclined to like your application and stay loyal to your architecture as they would have used the application extensively, and they have understood and leveraged the app features that have helped them with particular tasks.
Another important thing about mobile app monetization is that it is very dependent on all of the above steps. Especially if it is a paid feature, you must have the right marketing to make sure that the customers feel that they are paying a good price and getting a lot in return.
One thing that you might have noticed is that advertisements are shown while you are using a free application. This is done to drive in a bit of finance to help support the free app. This, of course, can take two paths: Either customers altogether ignore the presence of these ads, or they make use of the ads. Meanwhile, on the other side, some customers would really prefer an ad-free experience.
If it is the latter, then it is easy to charge them a nominal amount to upgrade to a ‘pro’ version in which they are exempted from the ads, thereby, driving customization to users and, to you, more up-front finance.
Conclusion
Mobile app marketing is a concept that has definitely been perceived to be convoluted and sophisticated in terms of planning and delivery as it involves everything from promoting an app initially before the launch to guiding customers through marketing the app’s updates.
One thing you must know is that if done right, mobile app marketing strategy proves to be one of the fundamental concepts that have a lot of impact in the life cycle of app creation and delivery, thereby, adding nothing but immense value to the business and its rapid growth in this competitive world.