Category Mobile Apps

The best strategies of mobile app marketing are primarily about increasing the awareness of your app and getting potential users to install and interact with it meaningfully. In order to achieve these goals it is essential to dial in on your ideal audience, their online behaviors, their primary interests, where they may be geographically, and how to get your app in front of them.

Think of mobile app usage as a “funnel.” There are many funnel stages, but here’s a simplified view:

• Acquisition is the first stage in a user’s interaction with your app. How do you get them to download and install your app in the first place?
• Activation is next. The exact meaning of “user activation” differs from app to app, but in general, activation refers to a user’s first actions, such as adding their email address or making an initial purchase.
• Engagement begins when brands are personally and respectfully able to engage with their customers and begin to monetize the app.
• Loyalty is earned through relevant experiences that drive satisfaction and advocacy.

The funnel concept is useful, but in reality users often go back and forth between stages. So you may also hear this referred to as the mobile engagement loop or customer app lifecycle. Each phase of the lifecycle requires different strategies and tactics for engaging your customers.

Each stage of the funnel deserves in depth treatment. In this article, we will focus on acquisition.

Mobile App Acquisition

The first part of building a successful app is getting people to download it. From a messaging perspective, you need to convince a prospective user that your app can solve a problem they have. Some of the most common channels for sending these messages include:

• Social. It’s one of the most popular app acquisition channels. Unless you already have a large audience, paid social advertising is likely to be the most effective channel. An even more effective channel, once your app has traction, is getting users to recruit their friends.
• Real-world incentives. Offering a product giveaway, sweepstakes entry, or some other tangible reward in exchange for an app install is a common strategy. One pitfall of using real-world incentives is that users who sign up this way may end up immediately removing your app as soon as they’ve received their reward.
• Search advertising. Ads appear when users search for specific app keywords. For example, ads for mobile payment apps might appear when a user searches “send cash.” You can also purchase search advertising through platforms such as Google AdWords, so someone searching “buying a home” sees an ad for your real estate app. The link then goes directly to your app store page.
• App cross-promotion. If you have more than one app, a good way to acquire users is to use one app to promote the other. For example, if your company produces a restaurant database, you can put ads in it that refer to your travel app, since users who are interested in one might be interested in the other.
• App store listing. App stores require text and picture descriptions of every app. Writing your listing thoughtfully is critical to convincing users to download it. The text in your listing influences, among other factors, whether users will see it as they look for apps in your category.

In determining an acquisition strategy, it’s important to keep track of your cost per acquisition, or CPA. Some channels — such as your app store listing, a web page or organic social posts — don’t cost anything, but are time-consuming to manage. Others — such as paid ads — can be expensive, but are easier to optimize and scale. Determining the right balance of acquisition activities is critical for the long-term success of your app.

Comparing the CPA to the lifetime value of your customers will tell you whether an acquisition strategy is worth the money and time you’re putting into it. And the lifetime value calculation depends heavily on whether you can activate, and then retain, the users you’re acquired.

There are general digital marketing trends for anyone conducting a campaign in 2023, and then there are new trends for websites and apps in 2023. In this article, we will tackle the top trends that will impact the optimization and conversion capability of your website or app based on industry changes, future consumer behaviors, and the needs of the market.

1. Form Building Will Dictate Zero-Party Data Gathering

Big data has become significantly more important to businesses than ever before. However, the way we gather data has had to change due to privacy laws in place across the globe.

When it comes to digital marketing, a hot trend in 2023 will likely involve businesses being more proactive in gathering intel through various practices. For example, form building can help find out information from your customers that could influence your next product launch or service.

2. Email Marketing is Still Huge

Email marketing is, by far, one of the best marketing methods currently being used. With 89% of marketers using email marketing primarily for generating leads, it’s a trend that will continue thriving into 2023. Almost everyone has an email account, making it highly accessible for brands and businesses to connect with their customers.

Regarding product launches, it’s beneficial to use email subscriber lists to reach existing customers and those that have perhaps signed up but not bought anything yet. Product launch emails for small businesses can help significantly widen the profit margins you make as a business during what is often a critical time for a new company.

3. Surveys can Dial-In Your User Experience

There are a lot of applications and tools out there that can help with creativity when it comes to marketing. Creativity is what will undoubtedly become more prevalent as we enter 2023. With so much competition and content to compete with, every piece of marketing you put out as a business must have the best chance of getting noticed and engaged.

4. Consumers Love Real-Time Messaging

Consumers want everything, and they want it all as quickly as possible. With many marketing teams, real-time messaging platforms have become an excellent opportunity to reach customers quickly, and directly, and for data collection.

As digital marketers, the more these real-time messaging platforms mature, the more they can make from it when it comes to customer data. They can almost become a data hub that can store everything you’ll need to understand more about your customer than ever before.

5. Chatbots Will Help Fill the Customer Service Gap

Chatbots have become more useful for marketers and, as such, have become another source of investment. They help small businesses and those not operating all day hours to answer queries and engage with customers who might need assistance outside of working hours.

Building your website or app digital marketing strategy for 2023 with the above tips in mind will help your business in an immense way.

Digital marketing has made tailoring marketing campaigns to specific demographics and interests easier and more lucrative than ever. Presently, device targeting is a key consideration for marketing efforts. Not only should marketers design campaigns that are mobile-friendly, they should design those campaigns as mobile-first. Smartphones dominate the device landscape in the present digital age and to overlooking that usage reality could be a disaster for any digital marketing strategy.

Over the past decade, the relationship between consumers and brands has moved from the physical to the digital at an expeditious pace. Consumers interact with an average of six digital touchpoints when engaging with a brand, whether that be content on social media, payment through wallet, news from SMS, or offers via email, to name but a few. A brand cannot rely on a single source to connect with consumers. Critically, however, all these touchpoints can be directly accessed through a smartphone, making mobile the obvious nucleus of any digital communication strategy.

Andy Gladwin of Cheetah Digital provided some insights to the digital community, to stating how a comprehensive mobile strategy can furnish enterprises with the tools to build more meaningful digital relationships with consumers. This mobile strategy can empower them to gather vast amounts of consumer opt-ins, preference insights, and behavioral data, and unify and harmonize that data in a single, accessible source.

The problem of harmonizing data from multiple sources

“Always Be Collecting Data.” It’s the ABCD of marketing. However, in the data economy, it’s not uncommon to hear marketers lament that they have too much data to analyze, or that the data they have is siloed or in inaccessible formats.

Fifty-three per cent of organizations report that they have only a few of their marketing channels connected. Conflate that with the fact that, on average, marketing departments have a tech stack boasting 12 systems — the vast majority of enterprise brands are using many more. A single, accessible view of the customer seems like a pie-in-the-sky utopia.

As mammoth a task as it appears, centralization is imperative. Andy Gladwin explains:

“Modern enterprises are awash with data, but it’s fragmented from all manner of sources and siloed in disparate systems which are not integrated, nor were designed to be. Having a centralized, single source of truth of the customer serves as a complete, up-to-date record and empowers marketers to build lasting and more meaningful relationships with customers through accurate, timely, and trustworthy data. The closer marketers can get to the utopia of a golden record, the more likely they are to interact with customers through preferred channels with preferred messages.”

To cut the marketing buzzwords, the single source of truth is quite simply a unified customer profile, which includes identifying information about the customer, the channels they use to interact with the organization, their most recent interaction with the organization, and which recent offer they reacted to positively. The single source of truth also encompasses how a customer engages with the organization, including their most recent activity and lifetime value, complemented by a raft of preference and behavioral data.

This is where mobile comes to the fore; connecting brands, consumers, and touchpoints, it is an ecosystem that offers many channels and backed up with the right technology — harmonizing and actioning data.

“Devices have gone from being convenient to connected and, through this period, content has evolved from being relatively basic to incredibly rich. The evolution of the channel ecosystem where engagement has moved from transactional to conversational gives brands more of an opportunity to engage, listen, and influence customer behavior. For too long marketing has been a decidedly one-way affair, with brands seeking to push their message louder and further into more intimate contacts. However, it’s not better marketing, just better targeting. Using mobile to engage in true two-way communications with consumers through legacy and emerging channels will be the next significant paradigm shift.”