Seasonal App Marketing - Your Guide for 2022

October 6th, 2022

by David Quinn

VP of Strategy & Partnerships at Gummicube, Inc.

Like a light jacket, app seasonality calls for year-round demand. Are you bundled up?

As marketers move toward a more densely concentrated holiday season, it might be time to gear up on some of the App Store Optimization (ASO) strategies that can potentially set you miles ahead of competitors with just a few simple adjustments.

From Halloween, Thanksgiving, and even Black Friday – seasonal app marketing has the potential to transform your app performance on the app stores.

What’s Seasonality – Seasonal App Marketing

Seasonal marketing in the ASO space is often referred to as ‘seasonality’, and it’s an invaluable method of cutting through app store competition. What does it look like? From seasonal icons and videos and screenshots to topical keywords and app metadata, there are numerous opportunities to capitalize on a trend-sensitive user base – something your competitors are probably overlooking.

Think of the mall during the holiday season – you stroll by all of the display windows seeing black and orange motifs, and tinsel-adorned displays – your app store listing should essentially be reflecting the same practice.

Around the holiday seasons, user search patterns often change to reflect them. Instead of “clothes shopping”, people might be searching “black friday deals”. It's up to the marketer to ensure that their app adjusts to capture that search query – the same goes for other holidays if applicable. This is where seasonality comes into the picture.

Seasonal Marketing Strategy for Apps – Consider These Tips

While many developers in the app stores may just switch around a few design elements in their screenshots, it’s important first and foremost to take a holistic look at what drives conversion.

Synergizing Creatives and Metadata Together

Through using relevant metadata, users are able to find you. Through creatives, users consider you and eventually decide to download. Changing the creatives just addresses part of the picture. Sure, they’re great for in-app events, and any retention efforts, but when it comes to discoverability, both metadata and creatives serve a vital purpose.

Take Advantage of In-App Events

Seasonal-themed events for Halloween, or Christmas are great ways to reengage users through the App Store. Players in the category like games and social networking apps often use in-app events around the holidays. With Apple’s In-App Events, developers should look into promoting their Halloween events for the upcoming season. Additionally, the recent introduction of LiveOps is also a great way to promote apps in the Google Play Store. Including details about the Halloween events in the description, promo text, or short description are all great ways of promoting fresh, new features pertaining to a seasonal category.

Optimize Early – Not a Week Before

The key to capitalizing on these opportunities is to strike while the iron’s hot. Since it takes time for the search algorithms to index your new app metadata, a quick change of copy to include, for example, ‘black friday” simply won’t cut it. To establish yourself as a strong player for a search result, the groundwork needs to be set a handful of weeks and maybe even months in advance. It’s important to ensure that you start planning for seasonal updates well in advance of the actual release.

Consider Seasonal App Marketing for International Users

For mobile game developers, in particular, this is a point of seasonal marketing for apps that should be strongly considered. A significant number of users in Southeast Asia report playing mobile games on a regular daily or weekly basis. From an audience perspective, tuning into major holidays within those countries could potentially garner more users for in-app events and seasonal updates.

General ASO Best Practices Checklist for Seasonality

Ensure you test your creatives using ASO technology
Don’t just iterate for the holidays, ASO requires frequent updates
Conduct a competitive analysis to see what elements helped competitors thrive
Make an event plan and/or paid mobile user acquisition campaign if you haven’t done so already

Overall

Don’t miss out on key opportunities to reach new audiences looking for some seasonal freshness – it could reap more downloads and revenue! With these ASO best practices, you can optimize your app performance just in time for the holiday season. If you have any more questions about seasonal app marketing strategies or want to learn more about ASO, our ASO company has over 12 years of experience optimizing apps for every season.

Want to learn more about App Store Optimization? Contact Gummicube and we’ll help get your strategy started.