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What is Mobile Marketing?
January 16th, 2021
by David Quinn
VP of Strategy & Partnerships at Gummicube, Inc.
What is mobile marketing? Even in 2021, marketers in every industry find themselves stumped trying to figure out what channels feed into which funnels.
In the mobile industry, any developer with an app should know the very foundations of mobile marketing, no matter what stage of development the app is in: Pre-launch, soft launch or live.
So, what is mobile marketing? How can it help shape an app’s entire lifecycle? Where does App Store Optimization come into play? With over 5 million apps existing in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play store, an understanding of mobile marketing will help you find a way to stand out.
We’ll divide this up into a few different categories to help you find out what you need to sustain your app in the app stores.
Mobile Marketing - Overview
Mobile marketing is the process of utilizing multiple channels to reach a target audience for a single product for a mobile device. The different facets of mobile marketing will help determine the success of that product, for however long it exists.
In the scope of the apps, mobile marketing strategies encompass:
- Email marketing
- Influencer marketing
- User Acquisition
- Organic marketing
Email Marketing
Emails are one of the most basic forms of communication (in this day and age). While text messages can instantly update someone on-the-go, but they can only hold so much information. An email can have rich formatting and is a great tool to tell any of your users that your app has a new feature. Email marketing can help with user retention, targeting your current user base (if you’ve stored their emails) and letting them know the latest and greatest.
Emails enable you to link to relevant web pages from your own website, relevant resources or even directly to the app itself, possibly increasing your app usage or re-engaging the users who would have otherwise forgotten about you.
Influencer Marketing
If you’re looking for an easy way to expand beyond your currently established user-base, but want to reach an extremely relevant audience, influencer marketing is another tool you can consider.
With influencer marketing, you need to reach out to notable people in the space. If you’re a fitness app, you’d be speaking directly to a personal trainer with a large following on Facebook or Instagram. They would then post directly on their page, referencing your app, helping to drive users to your app store page.
This kind of marketing is likely going to bring new users who would be more engaged in your app over time. However, with influencer marketing, it can be harder to track unless you’ve instructed someone to posted a tracked link or have promotional codes to use to track user engagement.
User Acquisition
User acquisition comes in many different shapes and sizes but will ultimately be one of the biggest factors for app success. User acquisition involves buying ad placements and driving users directly to an app page on their mobile device.
While it does sound similar to email marketing, user acquisition is a bit more intricate. User acquisition involves constant maintenance and monitoring of respective algorithms in order to ensure success, no matter what your metric is.
The three most common (and most efficient) user acquisition channels are Facebook Ads, Google Ads and Apple Search ads, but there are many other channels out there.
Each channel involves the creation of campaigns, creative and strategic bidding practices in order to directly drive in users who are likely to download your app, use your app or even buy in-app purchases. With this level of granularity, it makes it easier (and harder) to sustain your app and business with user acquisition.
User acquisition plays a huge role in organic success. When driving traffic to your app through these channels, you will likely see similar increases in traffic from organic downloads, as paid traffic can help drive indexation (ranking of keywords).
If done correctly, user acquisition channels can become your most valuable tools, with learnings and data to help fuel your mobile marketing efforts across every channel.
App Store Optimization
User acquisition may be one of the biggest factors of app success, but the biggest factor is App Store Optimization. ASI is the process of refining app metadata and creative to ensure that an app appears for relevant user searches within the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. If you’re not looking to pay your way to the top of every chart or every keyword search, supporting your app with ASO will help it in the long run.
With every learning gathered from the other facets of mobile marketing, you can absolutely fuel your ASO strategy. What types of keywords are users converting on your app for? What kind of creative is the most successful in your Facebook campaigns? What kind of marketing strategies are your competitor apps utilizing?
App Store Optimization can fold all of these layers into one place, allowing an app to surface for the most relevant keywords in the store, and convert. The best part of this is that ASO is virtually free. So long as you are measuring and maintaining your app store presence, App Store Optimization can become your biggest mobile marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Mobile marketing is a vast world, with thousands of moving parts. Incorporating every facet of mobile marketing is a surefire way of success for your app and your business. Combined with the organic efforts of App Store Optimization, mobile marketing efforts will keep new users downloading, or coming back for more.
Want to learn more about App Store Optimization? Contact Gummicube and we’ll help get your strategy started.
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