Users’ continue to turn challenging for app marketers. Thanks to their multitasking habits – at the same time, they are watching TV, scrolling through Facebook’s news feed, checking out notifications and chatting with friends. Due to their too busy day-to-day activities, it has become a back-breaking task to make users quit from all activities and let them focus only on the one – that must be your mobile ad. I know it’s difficult, but not impossible. It’s time go beyond the app marketing strategy. A blend of strategy and creativity will help you come up with user-attention-grabbing challenges. Here are the four trends explaining how app marketers can boost their marketing strategies using strategy and creativity, simultaneously. 1. Mobile Videos Remember Facebook, the social giant first arrived with live video concept. Ok, I agree Periscope and Meerkat was the first to brought live-video-streaming concept in existence. But I breathe the power of videos through Facebook. Those videos are effective enough to make me forget everything and concentrate on what the particular video is displaying. And if that video is relevant to my interest, no one can dare to distract me. Believe it; your users are like me. And also believe it “2016 is the year of videos”. “In terms of mobile video, developments move so fast that it’s strange to consider that this time last year, Meerkat and Periscope hadn’t even launched. It seems ridiculously perennial to say that 2016 will be “The Year of the Video,” but with this newfound freedom to live cast anything and everything, any marketing initiative that doesn’t have a live video component attached will quickly feel extremely static.” social media director of 180LA, Andrew White said. Hence, it’s time to create videos to reveal your brand. 2. GIFs GIFs bring words to life. An image equals to thousands words while a GIF equals to ten thousand words. An image can let the people know who you are while a GIF let the people feel who you are. So, make them feel, make them laugh, make them aware of your brand using various GIFs. 3. Mobile Chats This one is good for shopping apps. Users trust users. Users are getting smarter now. They are not going to impress by your images captured under various light sources. They know the difference between the captured image and the real thing. That’s why they will ask others first who have purchased the particular product. Previously, reviews were helping new buyers regarding purchase decision. But now they expect something more helpful like real-time mobile chats. You must have heard about Flipkart’s chat feature on app with ping. “While shopping offline, customers have always been creating a validation by taking suggestions from their family and friends. Online shopping, on the other hand, has largely remained a solo experience. Ping aims to transform online shopping by allowing users to talk to each other real time in order to make decisions and decide on what to buy,” said Punit Soni, chief product officer, Flipkart. You should get ready to go Flipkart-way. 4. Personalize Marketing with In-store Beacons and Wearables Smartphone is providing enough information about users, making it easy for app marketers to provide personalize experience. In-store beacons and wearables are giving a boost to context data. Beacons help marketers connect with users’ current location so that they can provide offers based on the places where users are hanging around. Wearables are taking a step further by offering users’ “self data” including their physical and emotional indications on the basis of which marketers can provide context-driven experience. The more you provide personalize experience, the more you can avoid chances of being avoided. So, it’s time to be more personal with the help of data provided by in-store beacons and wearables. Conclusion It’s all about visuals and personalize experience. If you include these two as an indispensable part of your app marketing strategies, no one can stop you go higher than your competitors. Image source: freepik.com
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Mobile apps are highly favoured when it comes to brand building. Study found that apps are more effective in engaging users than desk. Users prefer to stay with brands having a mobile app due to handy visits. Businesses without apps don’t exist. And it is also a fact that apps without marketing never find users. Hence, in today’s digital era, if you want to build a brand, you need an app and to sell your app, you need app marketing. It is quite simple to avail your business through app by submitting your app to app stores, but to use your app for branding purpose is tricky. You have to learn sharp-witted things to get your app noticed by millennial. Of course, learning app marketing, app store optimization, app monetization, and tons others are not a trivial matter. But, as you probably know, brand building needs constant updates or upgrades. So, routinely including a few in your list is what a brand needs. And this time, to your list, add the 3 below given ways to make your brand unforgettable. 1. Listen it, Implement it Listen what they say. Who? The users, of course. Users are the nucleus of every brand building strategy. They are your way towards success. This is how they show you directions.
2. Localization According to Flurry Analytics, 8 out of every 10 users are from non-English speaking areas. Users are more likely to read description if it is written in their native language. If your targeted audience include people from different languages, app localization should be there to cater everyone’s needs. A well-localised app offers worldwide exposure, more downloads and better app store rankings – all of which results into better revenue opportunity. 3. Renovate Many colossal brands exist with apps on app stores. Assume them as your teachers instead of competitors. Learn what they have, improve what they lack. Don’t be satisfied with millions of downloads bringing enough revenue to feed your company. Brand is more important than money. Keep updating or upgrading your app marketing skills to be on edge forever. Lastly Put users at centre. Listen each of their word. Improve what they are facing issue with, include what they are missing. Brands under the sun (your competitors) come next after users. You can have what they don’t. This is the way you will be able to make your app standout. In this whole journey, your skills will remain with you – they will degrade if you go with them without practicing. So, keep practising and keep revamping. Retention: Percentage of users returning to app after 7 days of app install. Sessions: An activity performed by users with unique IP address for a particular time period (e.g. 30 minutes) is called Session. It is also important to know how many sessions user attend in a day/week/month. Time-Spent: Time spent by users per session. With the definitions only, you can guess how important these things are for app marketers. Retention, Sessions and Time-spent – all the three determine the level of user engagement. That’s why all app marketers exert themselves to gain results for the three. Where one app marketer breaks his back to improve results, another one chills out without worrying about results. Both are doing marketing work, but first one is not sure about results while second one swears by good results. Why is it so? Because second one is working for apps that score high in terms of retention, sessions and time-spent categories. Yes, you heard it right. Some app categories score high in user engagement things. Here is the analysis of app categories and their retention rates by Adjust. Publications (Android) and Social (iOS) Apps won the award of being first in generating higher retention rates. You can see here, Publication and Social apps are scoring high in retention rates. Also, it shows that Android users are more interested in reading the news. While iOS users prefer to be on social media. Publication and social media apps come under day-to-day app usage category. Instead of newspaper, today, people prefer to open news and magazine apps to know what’s going on in the world. And social media is something that users can’t live without. From general to professionals, all are deeply connected with social media apps. For Sessions per user: social and games apps stay at top After social media, users are more active with games. Studies by Adjust show that users’ per gaming session on Android is 717 seconds long and 615 seconds on iOS. Today’s thought-provoking games take the users away from real world. Games also create a competitive environment which players love the most when it comes to score higher than friends just to show off. Again, Games and Educational Apps are a part of long time-spent per session. I have already explained sessions per user for games. Glad to see that even educational apps are gaining attention. It seems that after the arrival of apps, students are curious to learn with fun. It also shows that apps are the future of education. May be tomorrow, instead of books, you will see book apps in hands of each student. This trend has already started, but needs some more time to cover the earth.
Bottom Lines Now you got the idea of popular app categories gaining quick attention of users. If your app is one of them and you are not getting the expected results, make sure something is missing in your app. Analyze popular apps similar to yours to know what’s wrong with it. In this competitive app world, app marketers are facing one common problem: their well-developed app and its content have gone out of the site, behind the walls. Users love to stick with their favourite apps. They just refuse to try on something new available in the market. If the situation remains same, how would users get familiar with new apps coming with advance features? On top surface, branded apps are flowing well with great number of downloads and reviews. And looking at the hundreds of apps, I believe it’s a tough job to make your app noticeable. To tackle such issues, I came through some tactics while searching on web. I believe these tips to be extremely useful to add exposure to your app and its content. 1. Mobile App Install Ads: for Exposure and Downloads Google Play, YouTube, Google Search and Display networks, where you don’t want to spread your app. App should be there on all those networks where users are generally passing their time. But to reach on such networks is difficult as many are there already blocking the space. Here, Mobile App Install Ads will help your app get a better exposure from most popular networks and take visitors directly to app landing page. Mobile App Install Ads are gaining popularity these days. It is a type of Ad Campaign which you can add through Google Adwords interface. You can select “Mobile App Installs” from Type in Settings. After that, follow your regular Google Adwords Strategy including target, bid, budget and schedule. 2. Deep Linking: For in-app content Deep linking may recall you the memory of hyperlinks on web. Hyperlinks drive users to the web page or to the specific content. But with apps, the case is different. A web user journey includes Google search, see hyperlinks, and click on it. While the journey of an app user starts with search for app, land on app’s page, download it, open it and start looking for inside content. Deep linking plays a key role here. You must have your own offers for every season like winter sale, or summer sale. Or you must have offers on your app like discount for particular season. To let the users know about your offers, you need content. Your app takes your content to users with the help of deep linking. Deep linking creates unique link to fit it well with different types of app screens. Deep links take your users from app to the particular page or piece of content where you have put offer details. For non-app users, you need deferred deep linking works similar to deep linking. 3. Google Tag Manager: To Avoid Republishing due to single change Changes give come-back reason to users. But to update an app for every minor or single change is like inviting a headache. Better to adopt a tool that can take care of app while making changes to it and give you a sigh of relief from resubmit the app on app store after each update. Google Tag manager (GTM) is one such tool. GTM makes it possible to push updates in your app and also save it from resubmission to app store. The tool applies some parts of code from app codebase which lets you edit certain in-app contents instead of replacing the whole app. Bottom Lines You need some tools to get through the techniques. As you are already aware of various app marketing campaigns and ad networks used within, it will be easy for you to adopt these new techniques that are looking quite familiar. Image source: https://support.google.com Holiday Season is there on the wheels. I am sure all of you have great plans to spend your Christmas vacation at some snowy places. But stop!!! Especially for app marketers: are you taking a break from your app marketing work? If yes, think twice because holiday season is a golden period for app marketers.
If I talk about myself, I remain more active during holiday season. I have much time during these days as I remain free from office work. Also, I love to look for deals on apps available during holidays. Holidays are the season when users constantly remain in touch of their handheld device 24/7. They are looking for something new available at discounted price that won’t break their banks. Now, you may change your mind for taking a break from work or the best option is to enjoy your holidays with your work. Prepare a good plan to implement during holiday season while keeping the below given tips in mind 1. Define Goals First
A shopping app must find a good opportunity within holiday season, but Utility apps may not find any difference between vacation and regular days. Hence, before you put your steps forward, make sure your app is eligible for extra ordinary benefits during holiday season. Define your expectations and identify your goals accordingly. Total social media shares, total number of content, types of content, etc., make a list of everything that can add to your plans. 2. Target Audiences Create a data of existing users, new users, high-engaged users and users with low engagement. The data will help you get a clear vision of users highly valuable for your business. You have to create a special offer for your loyal users and other offers to grab attention of new users. Also, some offers for low engaged users in order to increase their loyalty level. 3. A Wealth of Users versus ROI Some app marketers have a goal of large user base with a purpose to increase app store rankings while some struggle hard for a better Return on Investment (ROI). What’s yours? For ROI focused marketers, it’s essential to make every user profitable at their max. For this, you have to keep track on holiday offers. Make sure you have a good ROI plans even at deal price. Large-user-based-focused marketers can put their focus on ideas grabbing attention of more and more users. But they have to save themselves from loss. Otherwise, the holiday season will prove to be a curse. 4. Go Back to Past Get a run through holiday period of 2014 to renew ideas for 2015. Christmas, New Year, Black Friday or everything that involves holiday in it – refer them all in terms of data like number of users, download activities, purchase activities, etc. 5. Create a Holiday Inspiring Content Yes, that’s a holiday, that’s a Christmas, that’s a New Year or anything that can remind users for precious days they are passing through. Create holiday rich content to inspire users. For e.g. insert a colourful picture of snowy Christmas along with your deal. Conclusion Holiday is a good period to buy new devices. Am I right? It’s best opportunity to jump in. Increase your user engagement and sales activities. Offer great deals to your users as a gift for their newly purchased device. Make them feel how happy they are with new device. Believe me, they feel lucky to have you as one of their favourites. It’s time to play smartly with your app marketing strategies. Get ready with your plans to implement on this holiday season. You must have read about app marketing tricks, tactics, strategies, etc., but have you ever read about marketing lessons. Like others, you will find many articles relevant to app marketing lessons. While reading the headline, your first thought would be: “one more article on app marketing strategies”. No. Mind generates tricks, while experience generates lessons. So, this article is based on app marketing lessons learned by experts having an ample amount of experience. “Build it and they will come”. If you are still depending on this 2010 idea, make sure the result will be your worst nightmare – because its 2015 when app market is saturated with tons of apps. Let’s learn something from experienced marketers to change your track and to avoid the nightmare. 1. Market Research
Instead of building an app, take your first step towards market research. You need to know: do users really need your app? Is there any demand of app similar to your idea? Dig deep in app store to fill the gap. Find category relevant to your app idea and read the customers’ reviews. Try to find what they want or what they are unhappy about or what they are complaining about. 2. Start Making Fans Don’t lock yourself in the room until your app gets ready. If you are sure about your app idea, then why don’t make users sure for the same. During the time when your app is under construction, spread the word for it. Aware users about what you are going to release with features introduced. Get feedback (suggestions), implement in your app, promise users that they will get what they are looking (if possible) and make a good list of fans for app. 3. MVP (Minimum Viable Product) Minimum Viable Product is the least you can insert in your product that provide true value to your customers. It’s like “less is more” concept. You have to build an MVP around your app. MVP provides a minimal functionality value to your product. MVP forces you to produce something that is truly meaningful and useful to customers. To build an MVP, you have to take help from your targeted audience. By spreading the words of your app and by reading reviews, you will get better idea of what you should build for your targeted audience. 4. Multiple Ways to Acquire Users Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Articles, Blogs, Press release, landing page or do anything to acquire users from multiple sides. Build a marketing strategy that doesn’t require the deep pockets to reach the top charts. Instead rely on several free channels to build word-of-mouth. Personal discussions with social media users and forum discussions will help a lot. 5. Make a Right Pitch Bloggers and journalists are connected with great number of users. That’s why they are requested to write blogs on products. Your job is to find bloggers and journalists that will be interest to write for apps. Try your best to convince them, so that they can write for your app. Reveal them everything about your app like its elements, features and benefits. 6. Quality with Quantity Quality should be your first priority from beginning to the time till your app exists. But also, you have to maintain quantity. Improve your app to maintain its quality and update it with improvements to maintain its quantity. Don’t forget to alert users about upcoming update or upgrade. Start it Now If your app is under construction and you haven’t yet started anything, then jump now on Google to begin. Create a blog, write something, spread something, start talking with your friend circle, create a blog, create a Facebook page and do everything to gather a good stock of users. App marketers are already too busy in mapping out strategies for obtaining more and more mobile users. And now, another turbulent technology is here to make the job more challenging. Yes, you are right – we are talking about wearable technology. All of us have seen the arrival of wearable tech with Apple watch, Android watch, Google glass, etc. These devices are forcing app marketers to create strategies for their apps, so that they can also shine like smartphones. After the emergence of wearable tech and their constant pressure of app marketing, things have turned out to be more arduous for app marketers. Let’s see what they are facing on. Challenges confronted by app marketers with wearable technology The more we get closer to wearable tech, the more we will see changes to services like emails, notifications, messages, etc. For e.g. Google is making a new version of Gmail to make it compatible for wearables. But it seems to be bad news for app marketers because tech is not yet ready to redesign the whole structure of app marketing.
Wearable tech is something more than just watching emails and deleting the useless one, it is something more than just looking at notifications and avoiding the pointless one, and so on. It is something where you have to track location, physical health and daily routine of users like where he spends his maximum time. If we assume what wearable users would like to have in their small screen devices, we can take the below given points for granted.
It means the base of your app marketing campaign will be your brand familiarity + strength of words you choose to send notifications to your customers. It also means that you have to put tough effort to minimize the chances of rejection. What marketers should do to deal with challenges?
Final Words Never make a mistake by taking responsive ideas as your permanent solution for wearables. There is vast difference between wearable tech designs and responsive designs. We will discuss about this later on. For now, concentrate on wearable designs, effective subject lines, productive offers to compel users to take immediate action, voice based marketing, etc. Till today, we have shared with you various tricks to utilize available resources for your app marketing campaigns. So, today, we thought to bring you something different, fresh and useful techniques that you can add to your campaign. Being an app marketer, it’s mandatory to stay updated with app marketing trends and utilize them to keep continue with user engaging process. Through this article, we will bring light to two newly introduced technologies that will play a key role in your app marketing program. These technologies are based on location-based and chat-based marketing services. Location-Based Marketing Services It doesn’t seem a new concept, but the technologies entered within this concept are totally new. They are: Mobile device location tracking, awareness and beacon technologies. Mobile Device Location Tracking and Awareness: First, you have to obtain permission from users for tracking their location – your work starts once you get it. Track their location, determine where they are and create awareness among them about nearby stores, restaurants, malls, etc. Alert them about available discounts at their nearby locations. This is called serving users with maximum relevant information. And this is the best way to make users fan of yours. Beacon Technology: Beacon technology can be a boon to your app marketing campaign, if you learn to use it correctly. Deploy beacon devices to your stores, booths, events, or anything that is your business or a part of your business and let the users know what’s going on within. As you know Beacon is a small device sends alerts on nearby Bluetooth enabled devices, so whenever any user pass by your store, he/she will receive a message about your store, products, offers available, etc. By fixing beacon devices to store, you will become a custodian of those users (with Bluetooth enabled on their smartphone) passing nearby your store. Chat-based Marketing Services Guess the one and only area where millions of people from all over the world spend an ample amount of time – its chat or messaging apps like Facebook messenger, Whatsapp, Wechat, etc. Am I right? If I am right, then why are you not leveraging the maximum advantage of these channels or their users? This is the thing you are searching for everywhere is right under your nose. Here’s what you can offer at various chat or messaging apps. Customer Service: Make your users’ favourite messaging apps as your service platform. Let them know that you are there on their mostly used platform to sort out their issues. Offer them whatever you have on their app, so that they don’t require going anywhere. Marketing: Start promoting your products or services once you get familiar with favourite messaging apps of your users. That will be a perfect time to sell your stuff at discount rates as big quantity of purchasers will not let you suffer from loss. But make sure that you are not disturbing them again and again. Keep it limited. Closing Some of the above points must be familiar to you as app marketing is a field where concepts remain same with different technologies introduced daily. Now, you have read this article, you should start adding these fresh ideas to your daily marketing regime. We will be back with more concepts. Your app has some unique selling points that make it stand out of the crowd. You have to recognize those points and tell the same to users seeking for similar features. For this, you have to answer three major questions that take you close to your app and give you effective ideas to make the app close to your users as well. 1. What are the unquestionable advantages of your mobile app?
Does it offers pleasure, a healthy lifestyle, beauty tips, life spirits, weight loss tips, dance moves, anti-stress techniques, information on resources, etc. For you, these are the features of your app, but for users, these are the values that your app delivers. Apps that receive great responses from users are the apps that offer values to the users. Because of these values, apps make a strong place in users’ heart. Determine the below given checklist to know the values your app can offer:
Answer all these questions and know the exact values of your app. 2. Unique Qualities of Your App Find out the unique qualities of your app with the help of below given questions:
Answer these questions and reveal the same in front of your users’ via potential app marketing channels. 3. Your Competitors Search for the apps that contain features closely assemble to your project because they are your real competitors. You need to make sure that your app is something more than all those apps available at app store. Recognize the below given points of your competitors in order to beat them:
Apart from this list, compare all your app features including design, graphics, and characteristics with the competitors’ apps. Conclusion Count your app’s numerical characteristics and reveal them in a way that users’ like it and don’t get bored of it for e.g. you can show maximum five unique features of your app which is easy to absorb for users. Later you can inform users’ about other features one by one with a confirmation that it is not overwhelming. App marketers are continuously looking for ways to grab more and more users. When they meet with the one with same profession, they ask the same question: tell me some new ways to grab users that I don’t know about. Very few app marketers know that the answer of their common question lays within users not the one working in same field. Yes, your users are your answers. Their changing habits will tell you thoroughly about changing strategies you must adopt to keep going with app marketing campaign. Here is how you can blend your strategies with users’ daily mobile habits. Illustration No. 1
Users believe that the great way to use the power of having a smartphone is to take the photos of moments, events, places or anywhere they are. If you dive a deep in users’ smartphone, you will see that quantity of images is more than anything else like apps. They don’t stop at just taking pics. They post their images on social media and remain curious to get feedbacks. Here comes your job. You have to integrate your products at the place where your users come daily and perform some activities. Like users come to social networking sites to post images and get feedback, so this is the perfect place to make your products pop up at the right time. Illustration No. 2 To save time from noting down anything like business addresses, meeting posts, whiteboards, etc., users directly capture the images of all. They use these images to read later and understand the words written peacefully. With this habit, your job is to improve their experience. You can avail them facility to arrange their notes cum images in a good manner so that they can understand their captured images clearly. For e.g. you can manage a list of notes captured today and a separate list of notes captured yesterday. You can give them an option of changing colours, inserting tags for easy search, etc. Illustration No. 3 Smartphones are considered as personal tiny-computers of users. Apps make users feel like having a whole world in their hand. Your job is also the same. With your app marketing campaigns, you should make users feel more personalized with smartphones. Provide a product to users that allow them to express themselves. For e.g. the global leader of beverage industry Coca-cola offers personalized coke bottles with “Share-a-coke” selfie campaign. This idea results into million+ images of people with coke products. This concept worked like “having users to promote your own products”. Illustration No. 4 Mobile is a very different thing in different countries. At Singapore, Whatsapp is used to keep in touch with people. At US, Whatsapp is used while travelling. In China, people use WeChat as a major chat network. To engage users from different countries, marketers require localizing their mobile strategy to give it a shape that users are seeking for. For e.g. Inspiration of Athletes Nike realized the importance of App Localization. The company developed an amazing campaign where Chinese are welcomed to capture an image and send it via WeChat. Results: Greater engagement and shareable experience. Key Points Finding users’ mobile habits is a key to successful app marketing campaign. To grab users’ attention, you have to understand them and their habits and create something that fulfils their habits in an easy manner. |
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