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To make your app reach maximum potential users, you need an in-depth knowledge of mobile app marketing. In this blog, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about mobile app marketing to exponentially grow your app’s user base.
Mobile apps have become an integral part of our daily micro-moments. Whether you want to watch your favorite show, log your fitness routine, finish up your daily office tasks, or other things, apps play a vital role. Today, businesses are noticing the surging demand for mobile apps, so they seek the best mobile app development services to gain a competitive advantage over others.
People download apps every day, but many apps get overlooked. Do you know why? Because they all lack effective mobile app marketing. With over four million apps available in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, it’s not easy to stand out. However, a meticulous app marketing strategy can be a great way to gain a competitive edge.
What Is Mobile App Marketing?
Mobile app marketing is the way to reach your users at every stage of the marketing funnel. In other words, app marketing is in-app advertising that drives awareness, downloads, and daily active user growth and user retention.
Mobile app marketing is the process of interacting with users through their entire life cycle – from when they first hear about your app when they become loyal users. It includes:
- Discovering your app
- Downloading your app
- Completing the onboarding process
- Staying engaged
Why Is Marketing So Important for Your Mobile App?
Many businesses ask, ‘Why is mobile app marketing crucial for my app’s success?’ As per ‘The Manifest,’ most app developers and marketers dedicate more than 31% of their total app development budget to marketing only. Per Techcrunch, the app economy will grow to $6.3 trillion and the user base to nearly double to 6.3 billion by 2021.
The influence of mobile apps is increasing day by day. With more and more people using smartphones, mobile apps are considered the best for advertising and making businesses succeed faster than older forms of marketing.
What Is the Marketing Funnel for Mobile Apps?
App marketing funnel, also referred to as a purchase or sales funnel, is a model that breaks down the customer journey stages. It usually begins with general awareness and ends with leads converting into customers. Let’s get to know about all essential mobile app marketing funnel.
Awareness
The awareness stage introduces your app to its potential users. In this stage, your goal is to attract your target users towards your mobile app. There are multiple ways to do so, including ASO, organic search, social media, content, paid advertising, affiliate marketing, community, press, forums, referring links, email, direct, word of mouth, and more.
Consideration
Like exposure and awareness, this stage is focused on providing leads with trusted content to guide their decision. Consumers will look for trust signals such as influencer referrals, 5-star ratings, reviews, app videos, press, blogs, and more to help them throughout the consideration stage.
Conversion
In this stage, customers and your specific leads decide to take a necessary action to increase monetary value to your business. Conversion usually happens when a user installs your app, sets up an account, makes in-app purchases, increases app usage, and many other things.
Customer Relationship
Building customer relationships is crucial in businesses. Once you’ve generated a conversion, it’s time to provide value for customers beyond the initial sale. Marketers can utilize personalized in-app messaging, email communication, push notifications, consistent updates, customer services, rewards, and more.
Retention
Keeping your mobile app users is crucial for your business. The cost of acquiring new customers is five times more expensive than retaining one, which is why the retention stage is so significant. There are some approaches to improving mobile app retention, including in-app messaging, push notifications, loyalty programs, and customer surveys.
3 Crucial Steps of App Marketing Process
Now that you know about the marketing funnel for mobile apps and its importance, it’s time to consider the three crucial steps involved in the app marketing process. Let’s have a look at those essential steps.
Step 1: Determine Your App’s Purpose
What’s the purpose of your app? What do your customers want with your app? Asking such questions can give you a better insight on how to make your app successful. If your app is not useful to your target audience, then it’s of no use. No matter how active your distribution channel is, if your mobile app is not something people want, then the purpose is missing.
Defining purpose doesn’t mean that your mobile app has to be out of this world to fulfill a specific purpose; it just means your app must bring a clear benefit to users. The purpose should be the fundamental focus of your app.
Step 2: Validate Distribution Channels
The ever-growing demand for mobile apps shows that people love mobile apps. Though there are various reasons but personalized assistance, all at one place, and people connecting resonate. Using the right distribution channels to get the app directly to the targeted users is a must.
Validating your distribution channels can help your app reach its potential users. Analyzing customer needs, establishing channel objectives, identifying significant channel alternatives, and evaluating major channel alternatives are some basic design of distribution channels.
Step 3: Choose the Revenue Model
The end goal of any business is making money out of it, and your app is no different. Choosing the right revenue model of apps is a daunting task for many mobile app developers. ‘Free + in-app purchases’ revenue model is a considerable approach when monetizing your app.
Monetizing an app is easier than a website because of its two-way communication approach. Mobile apps allow a digital connection between the user and the brand to connect two parties.
9 Best Mobile App Marketing Strategies Proven for User Acquisition
Building an app is an easy part; getting it to the top of the app store charts is the real challenge. Marketers suggest various app marketing strategies that increase downloads. Keeping that in mind, we’ve handpicked some proven app marketing strategies to get your app in the top charts.
Create a High Converting App Landing Page
A website is often the first impression of your business for many users. Thus, a comprehensive landing page is a must-to-have, make sure it’s appealing and user-friendly. You can use the landing page to tell your app’s story to your ideal users.
While creating a high-converting landing page, ensures the correct use of relevant keywords as landing pages are a powerful promotional tool for your app and should be well utilized.
App Store Optimization (ASO)
Like how you can optimize a website to rank higher in search engines, you can optimize your app to make it rank higher in app stores. ASO is a technique to optimize app stores to increase the app’s ranking in the app stores. App store optimization is the foundational brick for your mobile app marketing strategy; thus, it shouldn’t be neglected.
App store optimization helps your app stand out among others by leveraging various methods like effective app description, keywords optimization, and more to help it reach the top chart list. The higher your app ranks, the more users it will attract.
Leverage Influencers for App Promotion
Influencer marketing is gaining popularity all over the world. Picking the right influencer, making your offer attractive, and personalizing your pitch are some crucial steps involved that can drastically ramp up your app’s visibility and downloads.
There are various places to find trustworthy influencers such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Quora, Reddit, Pinterest, and others. Just find out the right platform that suits your business perfectly and pitch to the influencers accordingly.
Strengthen Your Social Media Presence
Looking at the growing demand for social media, it becomes crucial to be seen on it. If you want your app to reach maximum users, you need a good social media presence. Social media is the easiest and most convenient way to get found online, which provides valuable insights about your followers, resulting in boosting your app’s visibility.
Strengthen your social media profiles, including a Facebook page, Twitter handle, Instagram account, YouTube channel, and more, and be consistently active to engage with your potential users there.
Request App Reviews
Have you ever gotten the pop up saying, “How much did you like our app?” This helps developers get existing customers to review the app. This is something that can make a big difference in the app store rankings. When requesting reviews, you want to ensure the request is done at a good time, make it easy for the users to leave a review, encourage positive reviews, and more.
Submit App to Review Sites
App marketing should involve soliciting reviews from websites that review apps professionally. There is a myriad of review websites where you can submit your mobile app to review, like TechCrunch, ProductHunt, Mashable, AppAdvice, FeedMyApp, AppStorm, 148Apps, PreApps, and more.
Leverage Paid Ads
Global spending on mobile ads is growing rapidly, and the amount is expected to keep increasing for many years to come. If you want to raise awareness of your mobile application, you need to include mobile ads in your app marketing strategy.
Paid ads get your app in front of potential users. You can easily create a Google campaign for your app via Google Ads. By placing your ads on the Google Play homepage, you’ll be able to put your app in front of people.
Leverage Affiliate Marketing Programs
Whether you’re looking to increase app downloads or boost revenue from your mobile app, affiliate marketing is the most promising app marketing strategy. Affiliate marketing makes use of external partners or collaborators to drive potential leads to action.
It’s a win-win mobile app marketing strategy that has proven to be effective in the digital age. Affiliate programs usually provide cash incentives for their members.
Check App Analytics
A mobile app is not a one and done deal. Once you release it on a mobile app market, keep it fresh, relevant, engaging, and continuously evolving. Make sure you use feedback from users and improve the product over time. Once you start using analytics like a pro and acting on insights is one of the best ways to improve your app loyalty metrics.
Mobile App Marketing Metrics You Should Focus on
Number of Daily and Monthly Users
It would be best if you focused on the average number of active daily and monthly users. Tracking the number of users who take actions that generate value for your business is a great way to measure your business success. You can also measure the average number of active users over any period.
App Session Length
Your app’s session length is the average length a user actively uses your app, from login to close. Whether you need to improve in this area depends on what kind of app you have. This metric is somewhat difficult to interpret because it varies from app to app.
Cost Per Install (CPI)
Every business wants to spend less but wants better results. Considering that, marketing your app should be a cost-effective process. If you want to keep your CPI as low as possible, you should experiment with different marketing strategies for mobile apps to deliver the best results.
Acquisitions Segmented by Referral Source
Acquisition pinpoints the sources that drive the most conversions so you can decide where to invest your marketing money. For example, suppose if Quora ads generate 200 app downloads a month at $7 per conversion and Google ads generate the same at twice the cost, it would be wise to double-down on Quora as your customer acquisition costs are much lower.
Retention Rate
If you gain 100K new users in a month but almost immediately lose 99K, you don’t have a reason to celebrate, which is why you need to keep an eye on your retention rate, the percentage of customers you retain in a period.
Final Words
Now that you know everything about mobile app marketing, it’s time to implement that learning. Mobile app marketing can guarantee you a long-term success if done right. Leveraging all the tactics mentioned above wisely will improve your app’s visibility, increase downloads, and help you stay ahead of your competitors.
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