In traditional businesses, the need for a marketing strategy arises after the product or service is developed. In the case of apps, however, marketing and product strategies that are developed in tandem often result in better success. As many apps are iterative, learning collected from marketing campaigns can be pumped back to the newer app versions. This, in turn, creates a better user experience and further improves the performance of your marketing campaigns.
From discovery to conversion, the user behavior on an app is different from that on a website or a mobile site. The app marketing landscape deviates from a standard digital marketing landscape -- your app marketing strategy should reflect this.
When creating a marketing plan, it's important to consider things unique to app marketing. Consider the different stages of an app's lifecycle and create a targeting plan accordingly. Below, we’ve outlined a few steps to success for app marketing.
An app’s user interface offers opportunities for greater personalization than a website or a mobile site. The importance of segmenting users for an app business is higher. The better you are at segmenting your users, the more personally you’ll be able to treat each group. Plus, since the industry-standard of personalization on apps is high, your customers will have certain expectations.
Path-to-purchase and marketing promotions can be customized for these user segments on your app. This will work to create a better user experience and, ultimately, result in a higher stickiness.
The focus of an app marketing strategy should be retention before acquisition. Considering that “most app users churn in the first three months” makes it integral to create stickiness with your app. You can do this by driving value in the first few days of installation. Users have limited space on their phones, if your users are not actively using your app in the initial days, they will uninstall it.
Before creating a broad acquisition strategy, an app marketer should focus on creating a robust retention plan.
With advanced tracking and attribution mechanisms that are available for apps, there is a higher need for tracking app success metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and engagement and retention rates over common advertising metrics.
Marketing platforms like Google and Facebook have advertising features that can focus on in-app engagement, tracking Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Active Users (DAU, WAU, and MAU, respectively). Mobile measurement platforms like Appsflyer or Branch can track in-app user behaviors giving marketers deeper insights.
Your app should reflect your brand’s identity as it is important to create a unified experience. A cohesive brand identity will provide your clients with consistency and provide a straightforward, memorable experience. Additionally, beyond brand identity, your app should also strive to provide a customer-centric, unified experience in regards to in-store, digital and mobile. By considering and integrating the customer experience of these three things into your app, you can remove silos, increasing app retention.
Consider the H&M shopping app. The app assists users with finding the latest styles and offers, locating stores nearby, providing membership details, and personalizing rewards. The focus here is to streamline users' experience among physical and online stores, leaving no store in a silo. Having a disintegrated experience can lead to confusion in the minds of the consumers and is, ultimately, detrimental to business growth.
When creating an app marketing strategy, it's important to work with a strategic partner who can understand your customers and business objectives in detail. Your strategic partner should work with you throughout the complete marketing lifecycle. They will assist you in defining your customers, setting up your analytics, developing a creative and content strategy for user segments and integrating it with your broad business strategy.
Your ideal app marketing and growth partner can steer you through the different stages of an app’s lifecycle and create a targeting plan accordingly.
At Major Tom, we work with you to integrate your app experience on all consumer touchpoints. This means a streamlined and integrated approach for marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and product strategy. We will help you identify your key consumer segments and create an app marketing strategy that touches on these segments at the right time with the right message. Our app marketing strategies are customized through collaboration with you, finding the best path to success that is unique to your organization.
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