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The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Marketing in 2022

Mobile app marketing includes applying various techniques and tactics to acquire, retain and engage users. It comprises all the stages before and after the app development that ensure awareness of the app, its ranking in different stores, consumer interest in the app, engagement, and retention. This blog will take you through several marketing strategies that can work wonders for your app if implemented correctly.

With over four million apps present in app stores, the intense competition becomes tricky to deal with. When you have created a great app that solves a necessary problem, the only way to use marketing strategies is to acquire and retain users. Well-ordered marketing provides you with a stand-out in today’s world is a carefully planned and executed marketing campaign. While the focus on app building and development is primary, the app’s success largely depends on the data to understand the needs of your consumers.

Mobile app marketing includes applying various techniques and tactics to acquire, retain and engage users. It comprises all the stages before and after the app development that ensure awareness of the app, its ranking in different stores, consumer interest in the app, engagement, and retention. This blog will take you through several marketing strategies that can work wonders for your app if implemented correctly. These strategies can be divided into 3 phases –

  • Awareness/Pre-launch stage
  • Acquisition/Post-launch stage
  • Engagement and Retention
Awareness Stage

Awareness is all about making people aware of a product and building a brand.

Awareness/Pre-launch stage

After creating a well-functioning app, how do you think people will get to know about your product? This will be made possible by creating awareness. Awareness is all about increasing product visibility and establishing a brand. This starts in the pre-launch stage when brand values and positioning are being decided and continues beyond the launch. This stage is about the early introduction of your app to potential customers. It is imperative to start an early buzz for the concept and idea of your app to ensure that the target audience acquires enough knowledge of the app to take action. Your pre-launch campaign should include the following efforts:

1. Determining the problem-solution concept

  • What problem is the app trying to solve?
  • Deciding what needs does the app satisfy
  • What services will address the pain points of the potential customers?

Finding a problem-solution statement brings out the brand messaging of the app. It brings out the app’s essential features and helps present their corresponding benefits to the interested prospects. It helps in knowing why people should download the app, which can further help set the tone of the whole brand messaging. Once the need recognition in the target audience is done, it paves the way for creating awareness about the solution. Diving deeper into the problem helps the marketer understand the pain points to keep in mind to skillfully address the problem and win user confidence by making them believe they are in the right place.

 

  1. Target Audience
  • Who is the app for?
  • What are their demographics, geographics, interests, psychographics, behaviors, pain points?

Finding the target audience helps you realize your potential customers and how to reach them in your campaign. This can also help you build extensive user personas to answer most of the required marketing questions.

 

User Persona

Who is the person? – Their name, age, social demographics

What are their interests, hobbies, and passions? – Psychographics

What is their occupation? – where do they work, how much do they earn

What is their worldview? – Their life targets, problems, pain points, present solutions

Which social media platforms do they use? – social networks, average time spent on them

Which devices do they use? – Mobile or laptop

 

Everything, from branding to in-app content to monetization strategy, must align with the target user. User Persona will help answer many questions such as their pain points and what type of operating system they use, iOS or Android.

What content and brand voice will attract them, which influencers do they believe in, do they make in-app purchases or not, and so on. These questions are crucial for building the foundation of any marketing strategy during any funnel stage.

  1. Market research

Market research is essential for launching any app as it will introduce you to data and statistics related to your target audience and key competitors in your industry. It will help you evaluate the requirement of your app in its sector and give you vital information about how to level the playing field for your concept and the app. It helps you understand factors like:

  • Need of the app in the market
  • Potential customer size and scalability
  • Existing competitors
  • Similar services available
  • Conducting online and offline surveys to verify the idea and services
  • Formulating the most feasible monetization plan

Well-executed market research for a mobile app will include collecting information from your potential customers across all target segments. Speaking and collecting surveys and polls will provide you with better insights into how marketing and app development should proceed. Including the mediators, such as agencies who can recommend your app, is also an essential part of the market research journey. To read more about market research for a mobile app, visit the Imaginovation blog.

  1. Competitor analysis

One of the biggest mistakes one can make while formulating a marketing strategy is not maintaining a record of their competitor’s moves. An in-depth analysis of who my top competitors are, their product/service differentiation, their strategy, etc., will provide you an edge over your competition. It will also allow you to validate or improve your ideas and marketing strategy. 

The key is to collect extensive data on how often your competitors update their services and product, what kind of content they put up on various social platforms, what forms of marketing they are engaging in, chatbot the crowd, and understand the prospective users better. 

To learn basic how’s and whys of competitor analysis, you can refer to Semrush

  1. Creating a Website/Landing Page

 

The first and essential step of the pre-launch campaign is to have a full-fledged working website ready. This informative website will make people aware of your product and service and provide relevant content that they can engage with. 

If people can’t find your app online, haven’t heard about it, or are not reaching the right target segment, it doesn’t matter how extraordinary your app is; it might not end up being a great success. This is why you need to build a website/landing page. To learn how to build a website for your app, learn the basics from WP Beginner

If you think that your app doesn’t necessarily require a wholly developed website, then an extensive landing page will work just fine. Your landing page needs to be a clear and intriguing representation of your brand story for the app. You can also include features like a blog, chatbot, etc. Learn the best strategies for creating a landing page from the Unbounce blog. 

  1. Robust SEO Strategy

SEO for your application isn’t possible, but nothing stops you from creating a robust SEO strategy for your website to promote your app. The higher your app website ranks on search engine pages, the more is your app’s discoverability. It would help if you also remembered all SEO begins with the right keywords. You can start by researching all the keywords that your target audience might use to find similar services to what your app provides. 

And, it’s an ever-known rule that content is the ruler when it comes to SEO. You need to produce content with essential keywords consistently. This will only be possible if your content is aligned with the interests and passions of your prospective user base. The traction your content acquires will result in higher chances of awareness for your app. 

Another thing you need to keep in mind for SEO is that you start your efforts a minimum of 60 days before the launch of your app. This will help you rank in some keywords when your app is launched.

  1. Building a Social Media Presence

While marketing an app, social media platforms are not missed out on. The data suggests that in 2020, users spend about one hour and 22 minutes on social media platforms every day. By posting regularly on social media networks frequented by your target audience, you can create awareness for your app and build credibility by addressing user pain points. 

With the help of the proper market research, you can identify the social platforms you need to use optimally and understand what type of content is generally helpful in engaging prospects. 

It would help if you didn’t forget that people perceive your brand by presenting it on social media. Having links that direct users to your website or app can significantly increase user acquisition. So it would help if you kept in mind that your content and design should rightly represent your uniqueness and brand messaging.

  1. Influencer Marketing

Aggressive influencer marketing can help you boost your app downloads and visibility. The research found that 49% of users downloaded an app after it was recommended by the influencers they believed in. Finding reliable influencers across social platforms is the first step. You need to pick the right influencers based on their following by your target audience, their overall perception across the platform, and whether their personality is compatible with your brand voice.

Influencer marketing works on the principle of value addition from both sides. When making an offer to the influencer, you need to ensure that your offer is lucrative enough to attract them. You should keep your pitch simple and explain to them the goal of your product and why you chose them as the right fit for the promotion. The promotion done by the influencer will appear all the more genuine if they can believe in the product’s capability.

 Without wasting any money on pointless ad spend. 

The whole marketing industry has undergone a significant transformation in recent times. Marketing is an area of profound growth and a great deal of opportunity in the modern world. But it requires a different approach to achieve its goals. There is a need for a significant shift in the whole concept of marketing to ensure that companies can stay in the race. More and more companies are adjusting to the new normal after the pandemic recovery. They are adopting performance marketing as their go-to strategy, the most efficient method in marketing today that must be carried out by both big and small businesses alike.

Focus on app user acquisition for success. This method should enhance app visibility and downloads.

Acquisition/Post-Launch

A particular focus is on developing an appropriate user acquisition strategy for a successful app. This strategy should increase the app’s visibility across app stores or social networks and generate more downloads. This strategy can be based on continued data collection and market research because that will add substantial value to marketing efforts after the launch. The Acquisition stage includes:

  1. App Store Optimization (ASO)

 

App Store Optimization is optimizing mobile apps on Google Play and AppStore by various techniques. It helps increase the app’s visibility in the store, accesses the top categories, and becomes featured. This process includes refining all the promotional content on Apple AppStore and Google Playstore. The data shows that about 65% of apps are discovered directly from a search in the App Store.

 

This process involves several actions such as:

  • Commencing with keywords selection
  • Filling meta tags
  • Optimizing the visual component, such as the icon 
  • Using informative screenshots 
  • Improving user rating
  • App’s ranking due to the total number of downloads 
  • In the upcoming times, app store algorithms will become more complex. Therefore, it should utilize better keyword strategies to ensure that the app appears in “trending searches” and “similar app.” App reviews are equally important. App stores apply user feedback to formulate app store ranking, so the apps with better reviews can already march ahead of the competition. To walk step-by-step through a complete guide on ASO, visit App Radar.
  1. Paid Advertising

If you are an app marketer, Paid advertising is the best practice to drive the quickest results. This will help you in significant user acquisition that can be divided into several conversions like newsletter sign-ups, free trials, or directly causing downloads and account registrations. Knowing your audience and where they are in the sales funnel benefits greatly when using paid advertising. If you have decided upon a budget for paid advertising strategies, you can promote your app through the following channels:

Paid press releases

Facebook targeted ads

Popular ad networks such as Google Ads, Unity ads

App directory listings

 

Tracking ad conversions is also a necessary step in your marketing campaign as it will help you understand which ads are working best for you and on which platforms.

  1. Creating a Viral Referral loop

 

Up to 59% of many apps are downloaded by people who search for the app by its name. This means that word-of-mouth has a significant play in the overall app installations. People trust their family and friends for recommendations massively, which is why word-of-mouth becomes essential. If your app addresses an import issue of your target segment, then the chances of organic referrals increase. Otherwise, you can apply specific strategies to increase referrals. When they refer a friend, you can provide discounts, credit points, and other lucrative offers to users. Compared to different strategies, referrals are comparatively expensive and help acquire users whose lifetime value (LTV) is significantly high. The user who installed an app from a referral will be retained on the app for a longer time. 

 

  1. Start Measuring the Right KPIs

Metrics give you a basic idea about how customers are responding. It gives you essential information about the success of pre-launch actions, user satisfaction, feedback analysis, reviews, and even app performance like crash reports, bugs, etc. Regular analysis of your mobile app KPIs will help you gain the best insights into your app performance and give you a good idea about how well your app is doing. 

Regular study of your app's KPIs will give you the best insights into its performance.

The marketer's goal isn't to drive software downloads but to "capture" the user. A strategy is created to get users to spend more time on the app.

Retention and Engagement

After you acquire app installations, what comes next? According to the 2019 statistics, 25% of apps installed all around the globe are used only once. So the marketer’s aim is not to boost the number of downloads but to somehow get the user “hooked” on the app. A specific strategy is formulated to increase how users can engage with the app and want to spend more time on it. 

  1. Push Notifications

Push notifications as a marketing tactic works like a charm for app engagement. They have the highest open rates and ensure that the customer will repeatedly visit the app during the day. From the data seen in a study by E-goi, it was unveiled that a gigantic 90% of push notifications are opened, compared to emails that are only opened 68.9% of the time.

Push notifications have various advantages, such as increasing user engagement, improving user retention rate, providing trustworthy information and insights of user behavior, ensuring high opening rates, and becoming a short and simplified communication channel between the app and the user.

 

  1. In-App Marketing

In-app marketing refers to all the marketing efforts inside the app interface. There are all kinds of ways to build marketing into your app, including excellent copy and great design. Here we will discuss 5 ways of in-app marketing.

After you acquire app installations, what comes next? According to the 2019 statistics, 25% of apps installed all around the globe are used only once. So the marketer’s aim is not to boost the number of downloads but to somehow get the user “hooked” on the app. A specific strategy is formulated to increase how users can engage with the app and want to spend more time on it. 

  1. Push Notifications

Push notifications as a marketing tactic works like a charm for app engagement. They have the highest open rates and ensure that the customer will repeatedly visit the app during the day. From the data seen in a study by E-goi, it was unveiled that a gigantic 90% of push notifications are opened, compared to emails that are only opened 68.9% of the time.

Push notifications have various advantages, such as increasing user engagement, improving user retention rate, providing trustworthy information and insights of user behavior, ensuring high opening rates, and becoming a short and simplified communication channel between the app and the user.

 

  1. In-App Marketing

In-app marketing refers to all the marketing efforts inside the app interface. There are all kinds of ways to build marketing into your app, including excellent copy and great design. Here we will discuss 5 ways of in-app marketing.

a. In-app Notifications

In-app notifications are beneficial and much less interruptive than push notifications. They provide app users with a short call-to-action and thus generate significant responses. These notifications can introduce users to the app’s new features and guide how to use them. These notifications can build habits among the users, which will, in turn, be exceptionally practical to increase app engagement.

b. Tooltips

Tooltips are the overlays that help users navigate through the app and use several tricky app features. These mostly come into play when a new user arrives on the app, but they can also increase engagement with lesser-used features. 

c. Splash pages

This is almost like a full-screen pop-up inside the app. This appears when a user is about to exit. Such pages consist of powerful visual representation and text copy to display disclaimer or promotional content. These are useful for pre-empting system prompts.

d. Modals

In-app modals are full window overlays that require interaction to close them. If placed right, these modals are a great way of improving conversions rates. You can use them to promote new features or ask users for referrals, upgrades with certain discounts, or ask them to log in or create an account.

e. In-app messages

These are exemplary ways of in-app communication. In-app notifications bring users to an inbox, where they get to see long-form messages from the app.

In-app messages can be used for promotions such as discounts and count-down offers, for specific call-to-actions, to provide important updates, and to remind them of previous incomplete actions taken in the app.

 

  1. In-App User-to-User Communications / Communities

In-app communities are used in apps to allow users to communicate with each other and share experiences to strengthen the bonds. Such a feature provides a feeling of belongingness to the users and genuinely makes them excited about returning to the app throughout the day. The more interaction in the community, the more humane the app becomes for the user. You can also appoint a community manager sometimes to handle and direct these interactions. Ultimately, it’s a beautiful technique to enhance engagement and retention. 

  1. Revenue Generation

App monetization is becoming more and more difficult because You can easily find a lesser expensive alternative to increase competition. A user-driven strategy can come to the rescue here to ensure successful monetization. You can use paid downloads as this means that a certain amount of money is already received as the user downloads the app. In-app purchases can further drive sales. This can include selling virtual products or unlocking particular features in exchange for payment. You can overcome the monetization challenge by using many such basic strategies.

Summing up the process

App marketing is a strategic and systematic process in multiple stages. It starts long before the app is launched and continues ahead. The cut-throat competition among all the worthy apps makes it easy to market and track the app performance throughout. But with the proper knowledge and some external help, you can properly execute the whole multilayered strategy. Again, the most important thing is to know what your consumer wants and engages with.

 

Don’t be shy to start the awareness stage at least 60-90 days before the app launch. The necessary information about the target audience and market will carry you long. SEO and content marketing will increase discoverability by multiple folds, and social media can be your brand voice. During the acquisition, leave no stone unturned in getting prospects to download the app.

 

You can use paid and organic strategies in the perfect balance struck by results. After the app is launched, traditional metrics tracking will tell you how to process further. You should ensure constant communication between the app and user to boost engagement and increase retention. 

 

Have a happy app marketing journey!

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