What’s Involved in Marketing a Successful Mobile App?
Brands looking to market a mobile app need to understand the key processes involved to take a business objective to a concept to a successful app.
Mobile apps can work wonders for businesses, educating staff, bringing on board new customers and engaging current consumers. These days you will notice that many business small and large are following the mobile trend and understanding that an effective mobile strategy involves more than just a responsive mobile friendly website.
A dedicated mobile app keeps your company ahead of the game and will take your marketing to the next level. A mobile app helps you to be visible to consumers at all times, it creates a direct marketing channel, builds brand recognition, provides value and improves customer engagement.
Therefore when creating an app that will meet your business objectives there are a number of key steps to be aware of, and to ensure that your agency is familiar with the process of developing and marketing your app.
1 - Mobile app raison d'être
What are your business objectives, how will the app achieve them. What platforms are you going to publish on and is there a revenue model defined (free, freemium, paid)
2 - Competitive Analysis
What have your competitors created in this space? How will your app compare to theirs in terms of content quality, ease of use, navigation, engagement, pricing, promotion?
Do you have a catchy name that has not been taken in the relevant app stores? Are you creating something unique, emulating a popular app or improving on a current app or game.
3 - Website
Yes you are building a mobile app but you still need a website or a webpage on your current site to provide detailed information for both support and marketing. This will be the base of your showcasing the app as it’s totally under your control unlike third party sites such as the app stores and review sites.
4 - Build it right the first time
Is your mobile app compliant with the various app store policies and developer agreements? Is it suited for your target audience with user friendly design? Are you building in native or a cross platform tool?
What social media integration will be included, will you include push notifications or call to action buttons for user to rate the app, offer feedback etc.
Is the app tied into a backend, what does this involve, user management, integration of 3rd party data, server side logic, etc.
Who will be doing the testing of the app and how it performs across various devices and platforms (Read more on Testing Mobile Games and Apps here)
5 - ASO – App Store Optimisation
Similar to SEO you need to ensure that your app is optimised so it can be easily found in the app stores. This includes not just the title, description and category but also the icon, screenshots, video trailer, size of app etc.
6 - Marketing (also referred to as Discoverability)
This is large section all on its own and includes various activities such as:
- Creatives – Images, app trailers, videos, gameplay video, infographics, screenshots, icons, banners
- Social Media Activities – Are you using existing social media channels or creating dedicated channels, what content will be used to highlight promote and feature the app. How to build the social networks with relevant target audiences.
- Press Kit – Create a press kit and a PR campaign to include the press releases, graphics, company profiles, app description as well as links to your apps website and social media networks
- Marketing Push – Will you be doing any mobile advertising or offline marketing and is their budget for this. Do you have dedicated staff to assist with the submission of the app to the various App Review sites and to perform a blogger outreach or any other online PR activities?
The above 6 step checklist provides an overview of what needs to be considered when building and marketing a successful app, each of the steps mentioned can then be broken down into much greater detail and often specialist knowledge is required for each section but having an understanding of the whole process will enable brands to manage their campaign and the process more efficiently to ensure a successful mobile app campaign.
For more articles by Digital Agency Naked Penguin Boy please visit our blog.