Leveraging Mobile Apps as a Marketing Channel
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Check out this presentation by Mike Berger as part of Marketo's Definitive Guide to Mobile Marketing series, to discover how to ma
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Leveraging Mobile Apps as a Marketing Channel
- 1. Leveraging Mobile Apps as Marketing Channels Michael Berger Director, Product Marketing @ Marketo
- 3. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Agenda • Mobile App Strategy • App Types • Pricing Models • App Design and Development • App Promotion • In-App Engagement
- 4. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Poll • I do not have a mobile app • I am thinking about creating a mobile app • I currently have a mobile app
- 5. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Selecting the App Strategy Team • Executive Leadership: Vision and buy-in. • Marketing and Product Marketing: Go-to- market planning, app marketing strategy, and customer insights. • Sales: Customer knowledge and requests. • User Interface and User Experience Experts: App flow guidance and design expertise. • Product Management: Sharing data-based customer insights and market data. They may project manage the app build. • Engineering: Either builds the app or helps source developers to build your app. They may project manage the app build.
- 6. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Determining Your App Strategy • Acquisition: Your app provides useful functionality in exchange for the user providing contact information. • Engagement: The activities and associated actions in your app drive the user to engage with the app and your brand. • Conversion: The activities and actions in this app may have components of engagement, but ultimately, they drive to a conversion.
- 7. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Types of Mobile Apps
- 9. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Retained Engagement App Primary goal of gaining and retaining the attention of users
- 11. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Mixed-Use Cases Pandora Marketo
- 12. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Payment Models and Pricing • The different pricing strategies: • Free • Freemium • Paid • Paymium
- 13. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Payment Models and Pricing • To determine the best model to use, look at your: • Cost and value (or return) • Estimated demand • Competition • Cost to acquire mobile app users
- 14. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Payment Models and Pricing Free Over the past five years, app prices have dropped year over year, with more and more apps offered as “Free” or “Freemium”. Flurry
- 15. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Current Favorite Free App • Bitstrips
- 16. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Current Favorite Free App • Bitstrips
- 17. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Payment Models and Pricing Freemium More apps are moving toward a freemium model, as it offers app developers much more flexibility in how they monetize their apps. Freemium App: Plants vs. Zombies 2
- 18. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Payment Models and Pricing Paid More apps are moving toward a freemium model, as it offers app developers much more flexibility in how they monetize their apps. FlightTrack 5 By Mobiata
- 19. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Decline of Paid Apps According to Flurry research, paid apps account for just 10% of apps on the App Store.
- 20. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Payment Models and Pricing Paymium Users are charged up front for their download and can then subsequently make in-app purchases to boost revenue further.
- 21. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Poll • Which pricing model might be a best fit for your business? • Free • Freemium • Paid • Paymium
- 22. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Design
- 23. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Considerations for App Design Functionality Development Cost Time
- 24. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Functionality and Flow • App functionality and flow determines how a user interacts with your app
- 27. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Design • Utilize Social Proof, or “herd behavior”
- 28. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Solicit Feedback and Reviews • To ensure that you get positive reviews and are found at the top of app store rankings, encourage your best customers to submit reviews.
- 29. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Design - Personalized Content
- 30. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Design – Location-Based Content
- 31. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Development
- 33. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Finding the Right Development Partner According to Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering at Pivotal Labs, there are 3 things to consider when choosing an app development partner: • Culture Fit • Communication Style • Track Record
- 34. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Development – Cost The breakdown for a moderate app, according to PadGadget, includes: • One week with a designer: $12,000 • Two weeks for the developer to sort out server services: $5,000 • Two weeks writing the app: $12,000 • Project management and hosting fees: $5,000 Total estimated budget: $35,000
- 35. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Development – Cost The breakdown for a complex game or app, according to PadGadget, includes: • Design: $30,000 • Development: $150,000 • Hosting and fees: $30,000 Total estimated budget: $200,000
- 36. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Development – Time • Simple Apps: This app takes, on average, two to three months to complete. • Moderately Complex Apps: This app takes, on average, three to four months to complete. • Complex Apps: This app takes, on average, six to twelve months to complete.
- 38. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Don’t Forget Time to Publish! 2 Hours 5 Days
- 39. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Promotion
- 40. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Promotion – Cross-Channel • Events • In-Store • Print • Television • Website • Blog • Email • SMS/MMS • Paid Search • Review Sites • Social Media • Public Relations • Sales (if applicable) • Customer Advocacy Platform
- 42. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo App Promotion Optimizing App Store Presence • Title: Having your primary keyword in your title helps improve your ranking. • Description: Include your keywords in the description. • Keyword volume changes: Track volume for you and your competitors. • Ratings and Reviews: In our Marketo Mobile Benchmark Survey, almost 60% of respondents said they found the apps they download by recommendations of friends.
- 43. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo In-App Engagement
- 44. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Push Notifications
- 45. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo Push Notifications • Content is King • Make it Compelling • Drive Cross-Channel Interactions • Know Your Customer • Don’t Overdo It Marketo Mobile Benchmark Survey
- 46. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo In-App Messaging • Introducing new features
- 47. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo In-App Messaging • Engage with Specific Content
- 48. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo In-App Messaging • Drive Conversion
- 49. #MarketoGuide @mikedberger @marketo 5 Key Takeaways • Assemble the right cross-functional team in order to drive your mobile app strategy • Having goals for your app in place will help guide key decisions that shape the outcome of your app. • A thorough wireframe and flow will help developers better estimate development cost and time. • Creating and publishing an app is only half of the challenge, you need to keep your users engaged • ASO, cross-channel promotion and positive reviews are important ways to cut through the noise
Editor's Notes
- Okay, before I get started, here are some twitter references if you care to tweet out some of your thoughts or takeaways from this webinar. I’m @mikedberger, and the company is, of course, @marketo, and the hashtag for our definitive guides is #MarketoGuide.
- Okay, let’s jump right in. Since you’ve joined us for this webinar, you probably have already thought about how a mobile app can support your business goals, whether that’s to extend your product, drive engagement, or support commerce. Mobile apps provide an opportunity to drive extremely deep engagement with your customers. However, a lot goes into the creation of an app, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today, including overall mobile app strategy, the different types of apps you can create, and how they’re priced, designed and developed. I’ll also touch on the different ways of promoting apps, and lastly, how to keep users engaged.
- Before formulating a mobile app strategy, you need to decide whether or not a mobile app is right for your business, and to do that, you need to assemble a cross-functional team of stakeholders to determine whether or not an app will deliver enough value to justify its development. When assembling a team for your app, you’ll not only have a large committee of involved stakeholders for key decisions, but depending on the size and scope of the project, you may also want to split the committee into sub-groups focused on individual tasks. For example, maybe your engineering and UX teams act as a sub-committee to project manage the development of the app, while marketing and sales works together to create an effective plan to launch and promote the app. As you think about who to include, here is a list of stakeholders to consider, Including executives, marketing and sales, UI and UX, and product management and engineering.
- Once you have your Team in place, you and your team will need to create your roadmap and define the app’s goals. Having goals in place is important as they can help guide key decisions that will shape the outcome of your app. To start, you and your team need to understand why you want someone to use your app. What is he or she in the app to do? The majority of apps have one of these three goals in mind: Acquisition, where an app provides useful functionality in exchange for the user’s contact information. These types of apps are typically promoted in the app store and via paid channels to drive downloads and subsequent sign-ups. Engagement, for which the activities and actions in your app drive the user to engage with the app and your brand. These types of apps build relationships and loyalty. Or Conversion, which may have components of engagement, but ultimately the goal is to drive toward a conversion of some sort.
- While apps can be categorized in a variety of ways, there are three main categories that almost every app fits into— productivity apps, commerce apps, and retained engagement apps. In some cases, an app will obviously fit into one category, but have elements of another. While the categories can help you define what type of app you’re going to create, think of them within a Venn Diagram framework, where categories can overlap. Let’s talk about each type.
- Productivity apps help consumers do exactly that— be more productive. Some productivity apps, such as Google Maps, provide services that run standalone on a mobile device. Other productivity apps are an “add-on” to a primarily non-mobile service. These include apps like Dropcam, where the app augments the in-home video recording experience, or Dropbox, where the app provides a mobile view into a service primarily used via a desktop or laptop computer. Productivity apps also host a variety of enterprise business apps. For example, Citrix GoToMeeting provides a free app as an extension of its paid online meeting service, The app gives users—often business users—access to the meeting tool on their platform of choice. You can imagine how useful this app might be when a user is on the go, and in fact I’ve used it myself on my iPhone while traveling.
- The next category of app is called a Retained engagement app, which have the primary goal of retaining the attention of their users. Often, these apps support businesses that generate revenue from advertising…so these apps aim to keep users engaged with their content for longer and longer periods of time to expose users to more advertising or to build brand affinity and awareness. Now, because retained engagement apps rely on engaged users, they need to find a way to be ‘sticky’ by providing features that drive users to continually re-engage with the app. Some examples include social networking apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and news apps like The New York Times or ESPN. Also, mobile game apps—especially those that are ad-supported—typically fit into the retained engagement category and represent the largest type of app in the category. And those that offer in-app purchases overlap with the next category, commerce apps
- Commerce apps support businesses looking to make a sale through their mobile apps. Success of the app is primarily determined by driving revenue and converting customers at checkout. Examples of these types of apps include most ecommerce apps, such as Pizza Hut, Nordstrom, Target, or even your local frozen yogurt shop. The ultimate goal of your commerce app is determined by you—the marketer. End goals for commerce apps might include a purchase, a recommendation, or enrollment in a loyalty program. Ultimately, you want to focus on what drives commerce for your business, both in the app and outside of it. So in this Pizza Hut example, the actions that a user can take in-app are designed to drive conversion— in this case ordering a pizza—through delivery, carry-out, or dine-in. As you can see, mobile actions in a commerce app can go beyond just driving in-app purchases— commerce apps can also drive commerce activity in another channel. For example, the Target Cartwheel app on the right almost exclusively drives in-store commerce by engaging customers with personalized coupons, which they can then use later in a store. Marketers looking to drive revenue through their mobile channels are in good company. According to a recent Skava report, growth in mobile shopping revenue has climbed, especially on key dates like Cyber Monday, with 76% growth from 2013-2014.
- As you saw in the Venn Diagram, some apps don’t fit neatly into only one category. For example, retained engagement apps can be a lead-in to a productivity app. For example, when a user first downloads the Pandora app, he is offered free music streaming if he will listen to advertising. To avoid advertising, users are offered the ability to upgrade their accounts to a premium membership. By upgrading, the Pandora app transitions from a retained engagement app—that uses advertising to drive revenue—to a productivity app—an extension of the Pandora service. Another example is Marketo’s event app for our Marketing Nation Summit. This app was created with the goal of both retaining a user’s engagement—in this case using the engagement to offer promotions to events and booths—and as a productivity app—offering attendees a place to store their individual agenda and activities, see a map of the venue, and scan QR codes in order to get more information on various topics while at the event.
- Once you’ve decided what type of app makes the most sense for your business, you need to decide how to price it. There are a number of pricing models and strategies that are available as you think about how to achieve a return on your investment. First, consider the type of app you’ve decided to create, and then determine the pros and cons of each pricing strategy. Remember that revenue from your app is not always the best metric to use, And make sure that you continuously test to discover which model allows you to maintain a high number of engaged users and drive toward your goals. There are 4 models we’ll cover today. Free, frreemium, paid and paymium.
- To determine which model is a best fit, you need to look at a number of things. the first being cost. How much will it cost to create your app? How much will it cost to promote it? What kind of value is it providing, which could be revenue, but could be something else, such as brand awareness The second is your estimated demand, and in order to determine this, you need to look at • What your market research shows for expected volume of users? • What value your app provides to the customer? The third thing to look at is your competition • What is the price of competitor apps? • What is the volume of competitor apps? The last thing to look at is the cost to acquire mobile app users • In other words, how much will it cost you to engage and retain users? Once you have some, or hopefully all, of the answers to these questions, it’s time to pick the model that’s right for you.
- The first model is the Free app model. According to research by Flurry, over the past five years, app prices have dropped year over year, with more and more apps offered as “Free” or “Freemium”. The results of Flurry’s research also shows that price testing had a lot to do with this change. Developers have tested the price of their apps against demand and saw a clear trend—even at a low price point of $0.99, there was a decrease in demand – which explains why more and more apps are free these days. Of course, you can offer a free app and still find ways to make money within the app, which I’ll cover in just a minute. In any case, giving your app away for free can lead to a higher volume of downloads, which gives you the ability to look at other methods of driving revenue—if that’s your goal—such as incorporating mobile advertising to drive revenue.
- By the way, just for fun, I thought I’d let everyone know what my latest favorite free app is, and that is Bitstrips. Give it a try, it’s free after all! It lets you quickly create easily sharable emojis, starring yourself. Here’s one I created to use in case I run into a major technical glitch while doing this webinar.
- The character is supposed to look like me, so for comparison, here’s my actual picture. What do you think? Close enough, eh?
- Ok, back to business. Let’s talk about the freemium model, which is a blend between paid and free. Essentially, users can download your app for free, and then pay extra for premium features. This can include an in-app purchase or an upgrade from a free account to a premium account, with enhanced features and benefits. More apps are moving toward a freemium model, as it offers app developers a lot more flexibility in how they monetize apps. Marketers employing this app strategy need to spend a lot of time planning different types of in-app offers in order to get users to upgrade to the paid versions, assuming that’s the goal. An example of a freemium app that uses in-app purchases to drive revenue is the PopCap game, Plants vs. Zombies. The game itself is free in the iOS app store but uses in-app purchases as players seek to unlock different game capabilities. Another example of a freemium app is The New York Times app, which uses both ad revenue and subscription upgrades to drive ROI. The Times app is free to download but offers a limited amount of content, unless a user upgrades to a paid subscription.
- Which brings us to the paid model, also known as a premium app. This is the most obvious way to monetize your app - by simply charging your customers to purchase your app up front. This is a safe, straightforward pricing model— your users know exactly what they’ll be expected to pay, with no hidden fees. Apps that use a paid strategy often offer a premium service or product and are targeting a very specific audience—for example, an extension of a popular video game, with premium graphics, or a mobile version of a business product.
- According to Flurry research, paid apps account for just 10% of apps on the App Store. If you are considering a paid app, some research from Lattice Labs may be helpful. According to them, premium apps work best when: • There is strong demand for your app • You already have a strong brand • You are not focusing on reach as one of your goals
- And that leads us to our last model, the Paymium model, a play on paid and freemium. Paymium is a relatively new pricing model, which involves two revenue streams. Users are charged up front for their download and can then subsequently make in-app purchases to boost revenue further. It’s very prominent in the gaming world. As you can see here, almost half of the top grossing games in Apple’s app store also have in-app purchases.
- Once you have determined the category of app and the pricing model that best fits your business, it’s time to get started and create your app.
- There are four things that are important to think about as you create your app: • The functionality and flow of the app • The Development process • How much it will Cost to develop the app • And how long it will take to do so
- App Functionality App functionality and flow determines how a user actually interacts with your app, from initial engagement, to taking an action, to moving from screen to screen. Your app functionality and flow is critical to the success and sustainability of your app efforts. The first step for design is to layout the flow and features. Consider mapping this out on a whiteboard during a brainstorming session with your stakeholder team. Once you have a basic framework, you can put your ideas into a more structured wireframe (a visual blueprint for what your app structure will look like) to make sure that it follows a logical flow. A critical element of your app flow is ensuring that when users first download and open your app, you are guiding them to take specific actions to set up the app properly, engage them with the content, and make them want to come back for more. With this in mind, your app’s logical flow should start with some type of introduction and then, based on your app strategy, lead a user to take action—whether that’s engagement or conversion. This is also an important time to think about what app behaviors will provide valuable insights to drive further engagement. For example, with Marketo’s Mobile Engagement product, you can listen for these specific in-app behaviors and respond with relevant messages or offers either in-app or across other channels, such as email, the web, or online ads. Let’s take a brief look a the flow of a few apps to see some good examples.
- Here is an example of the app flow from Birchbox, a subscription beauty product service and commerce company. You can see that its app launch screen starts with an easily recognizable logo and then takes the user through the different offerings and capabilities that the app offers. Finally, it prompts the user to take action by offering a coupon for a mobile sale.
- Here is another example from Hootsuite, a social media management software that’s used by businesses and consumers. You can see that once a user opens the app, Hootsuite’s initial screen flow sequence educates them (in an interactive way) about the different elements of the app and then prompts them to engage in an action—associating one of the user’s social media accounts with the app to get started.
- As the marketer on your app strategy team, it’s important that you encourage the group to consider the different aspects of your app that will inspire user engagement. One of the primary roles in the development of the wireframe and app flow is to ensure that your app is sticky—that there are features that will keep users coming back for more. There are many ways you can do this. One is to Utilize Social Proof, which is getting users to use your app and continue to engage by incorporating their friends and social networks into the app experience. Social proof can be looked at as “herd behavior”, where people follow an action or participate in an activity because they see their friends or coworkers doing it. In the example here, you can see how Target’s Cartwheel app shows this user how many of her friends are using the app and saving money at Target through the app’s digital coupons. And on the right you can see that MapMyRun is engaging the benefits of social proof with this in-app message calling on the user to invite her friends that might already be connected to her through MyFitnessPal.
- Solicit Feedback and Reviews Another aspect to consider as you try to create an engaging app is the ability to iterate and provide updates that are useful, helpful, and address your users’ concerns. An app that evolves over time is more engaging than an app that, for example, has a bug that is never fixed, which can drive a user to uninstall. Feedback and reviews are an important part of the engagement flow cycle, and giving your users opportunities to let you know what they think about the app experience is critical. And Try to make it easy to obtain feedback from your users - for example, Birchbox has an app review section that is part of its menu and main app flow. One way to ensure that you get positive reviews and are found at the top of app store rankings is to encourage your best customers to submit reviews. But how do you do that? We recommend that you use in-app behaviors to determine who to target and ask for reviews. For instance, users that are continually engaging with the app are more likely to be happy users, so target these users for reviews.
- Another way to engage your users in-app and keep them coming back for more is to deliver personalized content that is specific to them and their interests. In this example, Netflix delivers personalized movie picks based on content that each user interacts with. Even the featured spotlight content is personalized based on user preferences. As you can see, Netflix now offers different profiles as a part of its service. As a Netflix customer with a wife and child, I personally find this to be a great feature.
- There are a variety of ways that you can incorporate location into your app to excite users and provide relevant content. From localization—providing specific content often based on region— to very specific location mapping, accessing a users’ location to deliver specific, location-based calls to action helps the app feel much more personalized. For organizations looking to achieve a global reach, the investment to localize your app into key markets’ native languages may be worthwhile. Location-based app communications can help an app target a user with relevant content, effectively driving sales. For example, a restaurant delivery app may have the ability to request a user’s location to help him order from only local restaurants. Another example might be from a shopping app that requests a users’ location to offer them local deals and information on product stock in their local store. In the example you see here, the Banjo app promises to instantly organize the world’s social and digital signals by location, giving users an unprecedented level of understanding of what’s happening anywhere in the world, including their current location, in real time. Before you finalize your flow, be sure that you have simplified your app as much as possible. Often, app creators make the mistake of including too many features in their apps, which can confuse users attention and cause them to bounce out of the app. Make sure your app has a clear, focused set of actions you want the user to take and that it provides value.
- Now let’s talk about your app development process, which could take a few different paths:
- it could be developed internally, by an outsourced team with heavy involvement and collaboration from your team, or by a development agency with only approval required by your team. There are pros and cons to each of these choices, so it’s important that you and your stakeholder team carefully evaluate which would be a fit for your organization. To ask the right questions and evaluate which development plan can work best for your app and organization, use this worksheet. I’m not going to go through it now, but at the end of the webinar you’ll see a URL where you can download the worksheet.
- If you do decide to outsource the development effort, here’s some helpful advice from Farhan Thawar, the Vice President of Engineering at Pivotal Labs. According to Farhan, there are three things you need to consider when you are choosing an app development partner. The first is Culture Fit: Does the firm share your values and goals? This is important, as you’lll be working hand-in-hand with them on a large, strategic project—if you have a goal-oriented culture and the firm doesn’t, that could be a red flag. If you take deadlines deadly serious, and they don’t, that’s likely to be a problem. You get the picture. The second thing to consider is Communication Style: Can the firm offer you tight feedback loops to make sure development stays on track? And are they generally available whenever the need to communicate arises. And the third thing is their Track Record: Have they developed successful and popular apps before? If so, have they done it for a business like yours? After all, history is typically the best predictor of future success.
- Alright, let’s talk dollars and sense. How much does an app cost to create? Well, the answer is—it depends. The cost to create an app is dependent on the complexity. So, Business News Daily reported that app development costs can run between $5,000 and $250,000— and that’s a huge range. Before anyone freaks out, the higher end of this range is almost solely dedicated to game development, which can often require a great deal of graphics work – which quickly gets expensive. To get a better sense of costs, iPad app developer PadGadget estimates the time and cost to develop a moderately complex app and a complex app. The breakdown for a moderate app, according to PadGadget, includes: One week with a designer at $12,000 Two weeks for the developer to sort out server services at $5,000 Two weeks writing the app at $12,000 Project management and hosting fees at $5,000 For a total estimated budget of $35,000
- Here you can see how costs jump for a high- end game or more complex app: Here they estimate $30,000 for design, $150,000 for development and $30,000 for hosting and associated fees…for a total estimated budget over $200,000. According to PadGadget, you can also estimate your developer costs based on the average hourly rate of a developer (approximately $150/hr) and the complexity of your wireframe.
- Crispy Codes, a mobile software development company, has broken down the average app completion time based on the complexity of the app, and the resulting development work it will take to get the app to completion. For average simple apps, they estimate 2 to 3 months. For moderately complex apps, 3 to 4 months, and for complex apps, 6 to 12 months. Your final wireframe will help your development team assess the time, and expense involved in building your app, which is another reason why it’s so important to develop your wireframe in the first place. Otherwise, any time and expense estimates could be far off from reality.
- As an additional data point, this creative infographic from kinvey, a mobile app development platform, estimates that on average, it takes 18 weeks to develop a mobile app on iOS or Android, which they point out is the time it would take for Boeing to build 1.3 Boeing triple 7’s. I don’t know about you, but building a Boeing 777 sounds a lot harder.
- Once you have created your app and a plan for its promotion, you need to start the process of submitting your app to compatible app stores. Before you submit, make sure the app fits the app parameters and specifications that each platform requires—this information is available in the developer libraries of each app store platform. Failing to meet the requirements, even for things like logo-size and age-appropriate settings, will result in your app getting rejected, so prior to submission, comb through the regulations and connect with your app development team to ensure compliance. Just for reference, According to AppMakr, the average app store approval for Google’s Android is around two hours, and the average app store approval for Apple can take around five days. In fact, based on stats compiled by Statista, the Apple app store receives over 30,000 app submissions per month—and that’s not including games. That may explain the 5 day wait. Then again, Apple simply may have a more stringent approval process, which could also explain the difference, who knows.
- Okay, After you’ve invested time and money to build an app, it’s vital that you set your app up for a successful launch by creating a promotion plan to support your app.
- Promoting your app is critical to its success—it can help you cut through the app store noise and generate demand for your app. If you effectively market your app, you can expand its reach, download volume, and ultimately, its success. To promote your app effectively, you need to create a launch promotion plan that spans all of your marketing efforts. Evaluate each of your marketing channels to determine how you plan on promoting your app. Not all channels will be appropriate for promoting your app, so make sure you plan to test and iterate. But most importantly, avoid the common mistake of relying solely on promotion inside the app store. Given that there are approximately 1.2 million apps in the Apple App store and 1.3 million apps in the Android App store, there’s a lot of noise to overcome. Therefore, you need to use other channels to drive people to download your mobile app. App Promotion Checklist As you think about creating your marketing plan to launch your mobile app, use this checklist to evaluate the promotion opportunities for your mobile app across your existing marketing activities. As with the previous worksheet, I’m not going to go through all these channels, as you can download the actual checklist in our eBook. However, I will take this opportunity to quickly mention that Marketo’s Engagement Marketing Platform, when combined with the Marketo Mobile Engagement add-on makes it easy to create such cross-channel efforts. For instance, with simple drag and drop, you can create cross-channel campaigns in Marketo that listen for in-app behaviors, and respond with specific messages across other channels. For instance, send a push notification to an app user, and if they don’t tap it, then send an email the following day. You can also listen for non-behaviors. For example, if someone doesn’t respond to an email, you can send a push notification instead. It’s a great solution and lets marketers without any technical skills create powerful cross channel campaigns that include mobile apps as a channel. You can learn more about it on our website. Okay, sorry, I had to plug our own solution at least once in this webinar.
- Let’s take a quick look at a few examples of different ways apps are promoted across channels: In example 1, Google Chrome invites users on its website to download its app after they have downloaded the desktop version. This is an example of optimizing your web experience to promote your app download. In example 2, Birchbox uses the footer of its website to encourage visitors to download its app. It links directly to the app store to get the user to download immediately. In examples 3 and 4, Game of War, a popular gaming app, uses social media channels and television to advertise its app. The app makers also employ a famous model, Kate Upton, to star in a live action reenactment of their Game – very creative.
- In addition to your cross- channel efforts, you’ll need to do App Store Optimization (ASO), which is similar to SEO, but for the app store ecosystem. Despite the fact that there are so many apps, and therefore so much noise to cut through in the app stores, According to Forrester, 63% of apps are still discovered through app store searches—making the app store an important method for discovering and downloading new apps. There are plenty of tools out there that can give you guidance on the volume of terms searched in the mobile app ecosystems. After you have identified the keywords that make sense for your app, it’s critical to use them. To increase your App Store Optimization, you should monitor: Title: Similar to SEO, having your primary keyword in your title helps improve your ranking. Description: Your app description should support your keyword strategy, so include your keywords in the description. Keyword volume changes: Track volume for you and your competitors, so you can choose better keywords and maintain a high ranking. Ratings and Reviews: In our Marketo Mobile Benchmark Survey, almost 60% of respondents said they found the apps they download through the recommendations of friends, so reviews are super important! Ultimately, App Store Optimization is a whole industry unto itself, and you can hire firms to manage this process for you, or you can manage it yourself. With so many apps out there, and so many new ones being created every day, it’s important that you have a persistent, effective strategy to help users continue to discover your app. ASO and cross-channel promotions are not a one- time effort – they must be ongoing.
- A large part of your ongoing app promotion and user engagement is going to be geared at keeping your users active within the app, and directing them toward specific actions. To keep them actively interested you need to drive attention towards sticky features within your app through notifications and messages aimed at getting users to re-engage.
- Push notifications are a key tool for marketers to drive engagement with their apps. Push notifications help marketers avoid sending costly SMS and MMS messages and grab a user’s attention on his personal device—ideally with a compelling message. The value of push notifications to the marketer is high, as they have an extremely high view and “tap” rate. So it’s very important to have a notification strategy that notifies users with the right type of message. A key benefit of push notifications is that they appear whether or not the user is engaged with the app or has it open (this is assuming they’ve downloaded it of course, and have agreed to allow push notifications, which they often do). The message is often an alert about an event, activity, discount, or something actionable that prompts the user to open the app or click on the notification to complete the action, such as is the case with these 3 examples.
- 1. Content Is King: Sending meaningful content to the right user is critical in creating engaging push notifications. Make sure that your content is compelling and your copy is interesting. For example, if you have a travel commerce app, use copy that’s convincing for your audience—$10 Off Each Night on a hotel might represent the same value as an Exclusive 10% off Valentine’s Day Hotel offer, but they speak to different motivations through language. 2. Make it as Compelling As Possible: Copy is important, but there is more to a message than just a persuasive CTA. Try to include an image or link to the offer. 3. Drive Cross-Channel Interactions: Use your push notifications to drive your customers to engage on other platforms. Invite them to participate in a TweetChat that is relevant to them or to join your Contest. While notifications typically drive engagement in the app, it’s still valuable to engage your user across other channels as long as you are continuing an conversation that your user finds valuable or entertaining. 4. Know Your Customer: Track insights from your app, such as location, login peak times, and page metrics, to know where, when, and how to send a message to your users. Then, build out these personas in order to create segments to send targeted offers to. 5. Don’t Overdo It: It’s critical that you respect your users’ preferences and privacy. It’s important that you develop a privacy policy that covers what data you collect and how you plan to use it. Transparency should rule when it comes to communicating with your customers about their data.
- While push notifications direct users to engage with an app, In-app messaging allows marketers to communicate and engage with users that are already using the app— and is used to for things such as introducing new features, offering coupons, notifying them of their usage, and more. In-app notifications can accomplish many different objectives for the marketer. Here are a few examples: On the left, The MapMyRun app uses in-app notifications to highlight new features for users. It also uses in-app notifications to drive users to find friends that also use the app. Using notifications to drive social connections and the adoption of new features make the app more sticky for users. On the right, you can see that Evernote’s app puts new features front and center on the home screen for users when they log in to the app. Not only is there an in-app message that appears for the product, but there is also a button that users can tap to learn more about the new capability, in this case their new Work Chat feature – which I must say I haven’t tried – although I am an Evernote user.
- In app messaging can also be used to drive the user to Engage with Specific Content: In this example from the Netflix app, in-app notifications take the form of an actual message. Similar to how an inbox works, Netflix sends messages to users about specific content that the user might be interested in or has become available.
- The New York Times app is a freemium app that uses in-app notifications to notify their free app users how much of their monthly content allotment they’ve consumed. This in-app notification is both a courtesy and a push toward converting users to paid subscribers. You can also see that instead of an ad at the bottom of this page, The New York Times is running its own promotion, requesting feedback from their app users.
- Creating and publishing an app is only half of the challenge. Once you have an app, you need to keep your audience engaged, which can prove to be difficult. Recent stats by Localytics show that 40% of people will open your app three times or fewer. To keep people interested, use a mix of push notifications, a personalized in-app experience, as well as web and email channels to drive people to your app.