Mobile App Marketing - Plans and Strategies
When most people consider making a mobile app, they assume the most difficult part of the process is making the mobile app itself – that is, mobile app development. Certainly, this cost is significant, often ranging from $50,000 to more than $1 million. Unfortunately, though, building an app is only half the battle.
Equally important to mobile app development is mobile app marketing. Marketing is the only way to reach and convert your target users, build your user base, and eventually create profitable mobile app. When it comes to the app world, the old phrase “build it and they will come” does not apply.
So how do you market a mobile app? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. There are nearly endless potential options for marketing a mobile app, and different strategies will work for different companies. You’ll need to create a mobile app marketing strategy that fits the specifics of your app and user base.
No matter what you’re building, though, the first step is to understand what that user base is.
Determine What Your Mobile App Market Is
If you want to effectively market your mobile app to users, the first and most important step is to understand your core target user. This is the archetype of the person who most wants to user your app – the person with the problem that your app solves, the person who most loves your mobile game, and in general, the type of person you’re building an app for.
How do you start to understand this target user? One of the most powerful techniques is to create something called user personas.
User personas are character portraits build to represent your average target users. They’re a profile of someone that includes all information relevant to your app and marketing plan and represents a certain segment of the market that you want to penetrate. At Rootstrap, we regularly create user personas as a part of the Roadmapping process.
When building user personas, it’s important to be specific. Make this person as concrete as possible, using a fictionalized name, a real hometown, and as many specific details as you can think of. Include this person’s interests, education, hobbies, likes, dislikes, how they spend their time, and anything else you can think of. Here’s a list of some of the qualities you should include in your user persona:
This list is by no means exhaustive. There’s a nearly infinite range of information you could include in your user personas, and in general, the more details you include, the better. This will serve as a tool for the rest of your marketing process, helping you spend money efficiently and bring in as many target users as possible on a small budget.
Often, it’s a good idea to create more than one user persona. Most apps will have a number of target user archetypes, so you should create a user persona for each of these groups. The more specific your user personas, the more actionable they’ll be when it’s time to create a marketing plan.
Marketing Your Mobile App
With user personas in hand, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty of marketing your mobile app. This is where your personas come in handy.
Take a look at one of your user personas and note where this person gets media and spends time online. What news outlets do they follow? Are they a part of any Facebook groups? Do they follow particular subreddits or other interest-based forums? What podcasts do they listen to? What do they spend time reading?
The answers to these questions, quite literally, tell you exactly how to market to this user. If they love fly fishing, they may be a member of a fly-fishing group on Facebook or participate in an online fly fishing forum. This means you can reach them by advertising on this forum or buying social ads targeted to members of the Facebook group. Purchase ads in fly fishing magazine or dedicated fly fishing websites. You could even seek endorsements from influencers in the fly fishing community.
The specifics of this aren’t important. What matters is using your user personas to find out where your target users spend time and consumer media, then reaching them there. In mobile app marketing, you need to reach users where they want to be reached – user personas tell you how to do that.
Trends in Mobile App Marketing
As always, the specifics of how you market your mobile app depend on what kind of app you’re building and the users you want to reach – but learning more about mobile app marketing trends can help you evaluate the different options available.
In the early days of mobile app marketing, banner and display ads reigned supreme. Display ads still have their place, as they can let you reach vast numbers of potential users with no prior contact or work – all you have to do is pay a major display advertiser and have your mobile app shown to thousands or millions of people.
Increasingly, though, mobile app marketing is about specialization and personalization. The mobile app industry has become extremely competitive with more than 2 million apps on the market, and that means the battle for new users is more intense than ever.
The best way to compete in this environment is through targeting. Get as narrow and specific as possible in defining the user you want to attract, then run ads that target only that population. This will make it cheaper to acquire users, as you’ll have to pay less to reach this smaller population. As you begin to build a user base, it’ll be easier to branch out and attract a wider range of users.
Beyond targeting, another major trend in mobile app marketing – and digital marketing in general – is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing has proven to be one of the most effective new marketing techniques available today, with some studies reporting ROI of over 500%.
Influencer marketing works because on a base level, consumers trust influencers. Even if a consumer is skeptical of advertisements, many trust the influencers they follow, so an endorsement from an influencer is a powerful way to drive new users and conversions to your app.
Another powerful option for mobile app marketing is paid search. Paid search campaigns can provide a broad reach similar to display and banner ads, but stronger targeting. With strong keyword research, it’s possible to narrowly target a paid search campaign to only reach members of your target user base. Plus, with a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you only spend money when someone clicks on your ad, helping to improve ROI.
Video ads are also important to consider in a mobile app advertising campaign. Crafting engaging video ads and showing them on YouTube’s advertiser network is a powerful option, particularly for mobile games – many gamers frequent YouTube to watch play through videos and other gaming content, so you can target them by running ads in front of these videos.
Finally, social advertising is among the most powerful and deeply customizable options for mobile app marketing. Social ad campaigns let you reach a finely-tuned set of consumers, targeting your ads based on the interests and demographic data of your target user personas. Plus, social advertising provides robust analytics and reporting tools, giving you a comprehensive understanding of how your ad spend is generating ROI for your mobile app. Combined with A/B testing, this allows you to create strong ads inexpensively, serve them to a narrow base of target users, and continuously refine the ads to improve conversion rates.
Some of the Templates for Mobile App Marketing
Once you’ve created user personas and selected a few primary channels for marketing your mobile app, it’s time to get down to business and create the assets you’ll need to market your mobile app. Generally, the most important assets you’ll need are copy for social and search ads, graphics for any display ads you’ll run, and – most importantly – a landing page for your mobile app. Thankfully, though, you don’t have to start from scratch.
Some quick Google searching will bring up templates for just about any type of advertisement you want to run for your mobile app, making it easy to get a high-quality mobile app marketing campaign running inexpensively.
Perhaps the most difficult element to create, though, is also the most important: a landing page. Unless you’re an experienced web developer, you’re probably unsure how to go about creating a landing page for your mobile app. This is where templates and landing page building services can come in handy.
To start, take a look at a few landing page templates to get a feel for what’s out there. Themeforest carries a range of landing page templates made specifically for marketing a mobile app, as do many other websites.
Templates can give you a feel for what design elements to include in your landing page, but they won’t build the page for you – for that, you’ll need to turn to a landing page tool. There are a number of products on the internet that make it fairly easy to build and launch a landing page, even if you have no prior development knowledge. Here are a few of the most popular landing page builders, all of which will let you get a functional landing page up and running without investing too much time:
While each tool will differ in the specifics of its feature set and pricing model, they all do basically the same thing. Choose the one that seems easiest to use and most powerful for you – the most important thing is to get started.
An Example Case Study
Marketing a mobile app can be difficult, but with the right combination of research, targeting, and testing, it’s possible to effectively market a mobile app on a budget and build your user base.
While Starbucks is a large corporation with resources unavailable to most app startups, their mobile app marketing campaign can still provide an instructive lesson to anyone trying to market a mobile app. Many enterprise companies have built apps only to see them stagnate with no users, but the Starbucks mobile app has some 19 million users and now accounts for 30% of transactions in the US. That’s a significant source of revenue and an impressive user base – and it’s no accident.
The key features of the Starbucks app marketing campaign were special offers (in other words, free drinks), loyalty programs for rewards, mobile pay, and personalization features. The benefits for special offers and loyalty rewards are obvious – after all, who doesn’t love free coffee? But each of these factors is actually custom-tailored to the intended user base of Starbucks customers.
The mobile pay feature is powerful because it enhances the value proposition of Starbucks as a business – convenient, good coffee. Mobile pay allows users to order and pay ahead of time, meaning their drink will be ready for them immediately when they walk into the Starbucks to pick it up. If the Starbucks business model was based on great conversation, a homey environment, and friendly service, customers might not react positively to this change – in fact, it might feel downright rude. But Starbucks understands that their customers don’t go their for a relaxing experience, they go their for quick coffee. Accordingly, they designed their app and marketing campaign to build on that promise.
That said, Starbucks has always been about personalization. Many loyal customers have a specific drink they think of as “my order,” and Starbucks is famed for having a plethora of add-ons and additions available for its drinks.
Again, their app and marketing campaign enhance this value proposition. The app lets users save their favorite drink, making it more convenient to get personalized service. Furthermore, customers can see the playlist of music playing at the Starbucks they’re in and save songs they like – an addition that builds brand loyalty and creates an even more personalized experience for users.
Importantly, these strategies aren’t effective in themselves. They work because they’re well suited to the target users of the Starbucks app, which are Starbucks customers. By building the app marketing around target user preferences, Starbucks was able to create a healthy enterprise mobile app where many other companies have failed.
Mobile App Marketing Services
If you choose not to run your mobile app marketing campaign on your own – which, for most founders, is a good idea – there are plenty of mobile app marketing agencies out there to help. In choosing a mobile app marketing company, look for an agency with a proven track record acquiring users for apps similar to yours.
Importantly, be careful to scrutinize the results – in addition to user growth, it’s important to look at other metrics like retention, usage statistics, marketing strategy, and if possible, revenue generated. After all, paying for illegitimate downloads does nothing to further your business.
Here are a few resources for finding an agency to market your mobile app:
At Rootstrap, we also offer mobile app marketing services. Generally, we’re focused on growth user acquisition. This means that we specialize in taking new apps and using growth hacking techniques to acquire as many users as possible on a small budget. We serve clients of any size, but we particularly shine when taking new apps and building an initial user base on a budget.
Ultimately, there’s no one right way to market a mobile app – the most important thing is to do comprehensive user research, narrowly define your target market, and structure your marketing campaign to reach your core target user. With the right targeting and a continuously evolving approach, you can effectively market your mobile app and build a growing user base.
Equally important to mobile app development is mobile app marketing. Marketing is the only way to reach and convert your target users, build your user base, and eventually create profitable mobile app. When it comes to the app world, the old phrase “build it and they will come” does not apply.
So how do you market a mobile app? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. There are nearly endless potential options for marketing a mobile app, and different strategies will work for different companies. You’ll need to create a mobile app marketing strategy that fits the specifics of your app and user base.
No matter what you’re building, though, the first step is to understand what that user base is.
Determine What Your Mobile App Market Is
If you want to effectively market your mobile app to users, the first and most important step is to understand your core target user. This is the archetype of the person who most wants to user your app – the person with the problem that your app solves, the person who most loves your mobile game, and in general, the type of person you’re building an app for.
How do you start to understand this target user? One of the most powerful techniques is to create something called user personas.
User personas are character portraits build to represent your average target users. They’re a profile of someone that includes all information relevant to your app and marketing plan and represents a certain segment of the market that you want to penetrate. At Rootstrap, we regularly create user personas as a part of the Roadmapping process.
When building user personas, it’s important to be specific. Make this person as concrete as possible, using a fictionalized name, a real hometown, and as many specific details as you can think of. Include this person’s interests, education, hobbies, likes, dislikes, how they spend their time, and anything else you can think of. Here’s a list of some of the qualities you should include in your user persona:
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Race
- Income level
- Location
- Profession & place of work
- Political beliefs
- Hobbies
- Favorite sports teams
- Favorite books
- Favorite TV shows & series
- Favorite podcasts
- Sources of news
- Favorite media outlets
- Most frequented websites
- Favorite celebrities
- Facebook groups
- Online forums
- Favorite products
- Other mobile apps they use
- How they find new mobile apps
This list is by no means exhaustive. There’s a nearly infinite range of information you could include in your user personas, and in general, the more details you include, the better. This will serve as a tool for the rest of your marketing process, helping you spend money efficiently and bring in as many target users as possible on a small budget.
Often, it’s a good idea to create more than one user persona. Most apps will have a number of target user archetypes, so you should create a user persona for each of these groups. The more specific your user personas, the more actionable they’ll be when it’s time to create a marketing plan.
Marketing Your Mobile App
With user personas in hand, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty of marketing your mobile app. This is where your personas come in handy.
Take a look at one of your user personas and note where this person gets media and spends time online. What news outlets do they follow? Are they a part of any Facebook groups? Do they follow particular subreddits or other interest-based forums? What podcasts do they listen to? What do they spend time reading?
The answers to these questions, quite literally, tell you exactly how to market to this user. If they love fly fishing, they may be a member of a fly-fishing group on Facebook or participate in an online fly fishing forum. This means you can reach them by advertising on this forum or buying social ads targeted to members of the Facebook group. Purchase ads in fly fishing magazine or dedicated fly fishing websites. You could even seek endorsements from influencers in the fly fishing community.
The specifics of this aren’t important. What matters is using your user personas to find out where your target users spend time and consumer media, then reaching them there. In mobile app marketing, you need to reach users where they want to be reached – user personas tell you how to do that.
Trends in Mobile App Marketing
As always, the specifics of how you market your mobile app depend on what kind of app you’re building and the users you want to reach – but learning more about mobile app marketing trends can help you evaluate the different options available.
In the early days of mobile app marketing, banner and display ads reigned supreme. Display ads still have their place, as they can let you reach vast numbers of potential users with no prior contact or work – all you have to do is pay a major display advertiser and have your mobile app shown to thousands or millions of people.
Increasingly, though, mobile app marketing is about specialization and personalization. The mobile app industry has become extremely competitive with more than 2 million apps on the market, and that means the battle for new users is more intense than ever.
The best way to compete in this environment is through targeting. Get as narrow and specific as possible in defining the user you want to attract, then run ads that target only that population. This will make it cheaper to acquire users, as you’ll have to pay less to reach this smaller population. As you begin to build a user base, it’ll be easier to branch out and attract a wider range of users.
Beyond targeting, another major trend in mobile app marketing – and digital marketing in general – is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing has proven to be one of the most effective new marketing techniques available today, with some studies reporting ROI of over 500%.
Influencer marketing works because on a base level, consumers trust influencers. Even if a consumer is skeptical of advertisements, many trust the influencers they follow, so an endorsement from an influencer is a powerful way to drive new users and conversions to your app.
Another powerful option for mobile app marketing is paid search. Paid search campaigns can provide a broad reach similar to display and banner ads, but stronger targeting. With strong keyword research, it’s possible to narrowly target a paid search campaign to only reach members of your target user base. Plus, with a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you only spend money when someone clicks on your ad, helping to improve ROI.
Video ads are also important to consider in a mobile app advertising campaign. Crafting engaging video ads and showing them on YouTube’s advertiser network is a powerful option, particularly for mobile games – many gamers frequent YouTube to watch play through videos and other gaming content, so you can target them by running ads in front of these videos.
Finally, social advertising is among the most powerful and deeply customizable options for mobile app marketing. Social ad campaigns let you reach a finely-tuned set of consumers, targeting your ads based on the interests and demographic data of your target user personas. Plus, social advertising provides robust analytics and reporting tools, giving you a comprehensive understanding of how your ad spend is generating ROI for your mobile app. Combined with A/B testing, this allows you to create strong ads inexpensively, serve them to a narrow base of target users, and continuously refine the ads to improve conversion rates.
Some of the Templates for Mobile App Marketing
Once you’ve created user personas and selected a few primary channels for marketing your mobile app, it’s time to get down to business and create the assets you’ll need to market your mobile app. Generally, the most important assets you’ll need are copy for social and search ads, graphics for any display ads you’ll run, and – most importantly – a landing page for your mobile app. Thankfully, though, you don’t have to start from scratch.
Some quick Google searching will bring up templates for just about any type of advertisement you want to run for your mobile app, making it easy to get a high-quality mobile app marketing campaign running inexpensively.
Perhaps the most difficult element to create, though, is also the most important: a landing page. Unless you’re an experienced web developer, you’re probably unsure how to go about creating a landing page for your mobile app. This is where templates and landing page building services can come in handy.
To start, take a look at a few landing page templates to get a feel for what’s out there. Themeforest carries a range of landing page templates made specifically for marketing a mobile app, as do many other websites.
Templates can give you a feel for what design elements to include in your landing page, but they won’t build the page for you – for that, you’ll need to turn to a landing page tool. There are a number of products on the internet that make it fairly easy to build and launch a landing page, even if you have no prior development knowledge. Here are a few of the most popular landing page builders, all of which will let you get a functional landing page up and running without investing too much time:
While each tool will differ in the specifics of its feature set and pricing model, they all do basically the same thing. Choose the one that seems easiest to use and most powerful for you – the most important thing is to get started.
An Example Case Study
Marketing a mobile app can be difficult, but with the right combination of research, targeting, and testing, it’s possible to effectively market a mobile app on a budget and build your user base.
While Starbucks is a large corporation with resources unavailable to most app startups, their mobile app marketing campaign can still provide an instructive lesson to anyone trying to market a mobile app. Many enterprise companies have built apps only to see them stagnate with no users, but the Starbucks mobile app has some 19 million users and now accounts for 30% of transactions in the US. That’s a significant source of revenue and an impressive user base – and it’s no accident.
The key features of the Starbucks app marketing campaign were special offers (in other words, free drinks), loyalty programs for rewards, mobile pay, and personalization features. The benefits for special offers and loyalty rewards are obvious – after all, who doesn’t love free coffee? But each of these factors is actually custom-tailored to the intended user base of Starbucks customers.
The mobile pay feature is powerful because it enhances the value proposition of Starbucks as a business – convenient, good coffee. Mobile pay allows users to order and pay ahead of time, meaning their drink will be ready for them immediately when they walk into the Starbucks to pick it up. If the Starbucks business model was based on great conversation, a homey environment, and friendly service, customers might not react positively to this change – in fact, it might feel downright rude. But Starbucks understands that their customers don’t go their for a relaxing experience, they go their for quick coffee. Accordingly, they designed their app and marketing campaign to build on that promise.
That said, Starbucks has always been about personalization. Many loyal customers have a specific drink they think of as “my order,” and Starbucks is famed for having a plethora of add-ons and additions available for its drinks.
Again, their app and marketing campaign enhance this value proposition. The app lets users save their favorite drink, making it more convenient to get personalized service. Furthermore, customers can see the playlist of music playing at the Starbucks they’re in and save songs they like – an addition that builds brand loyalty and creates an even more personalized experience for users.
Importantly, these strategies aren’t effective in themselves. They work because they’re well suited to the target users of the Starbucks app, which are Starbucks customers. By building the app marketing around target user preferences, Starbucks was able to create a healthy enterprise mobile app where many other companies have failed.
Mobile App Marketing Services
If you choose not to run your mobile app marketing campaign on your own – which, for most founders, is a good idea – there are plenty of mobile app marketing agencies out there to help. In choosing a mobile app marketing company, look for an agency with a proven track record acquiring users for apps similar to yours.
Importantly, be careful to scrutinize the results – in addition to user growth, it’s important to look at other metrics like retention, usage statistics, marketing strategy, and if possible, revenue generated. After all, paying for illegitimate downloads does nothing to further your business.
Here are a few resources for finding an agency to market your mobile app:
- Clutch.co Top Mobile App Marketing Agencies
- HackerNoon Top 10 Mobile App Marketing Agencies
- Cheesecake Labs Top 12 Mobile App Marketing Companies in the US
At Rootstrap, we also offer mobile app marketing services. Generally, we’re focused on growth user acquisition. This means that we specialize in taking new apps and using growth hacking techniques to acquire as many users as possible on a small budget. We serve clients of any size, but we particularly shine when taking new apps and building an initial user base on a budget.
Ultimately, there’s no one right way to market a mobile app – the most important thing is to do comprehensive user research, narrowly define your target market, and structure your marketing campaign to reach your core target user. With the right targeting and a continuously evolving approach, you can effectively market your mobile app and build a growing user base.
