Efficiency is the name of the game in marketing, especially when it comes to marketing mobile apps. In today’s competitive landscape, there’s no time to waste. Targeting the optimal users with persuasive messaging in a timely manner is key.
Here are four time-efficient ways to market your app to the right users.
Encourage Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Many people are inclined to recommend apps to family, friends and coworkers. Marketers can make it easy to do so by adding an in-app “share with a friend” feature. This way, all a user has to do is tap and link to spread the word. It’s even more motivating to incentivize this behavior. Offer users credit for each mobile user they refer to encourage additional word-of-mouth marketing over time.
Of course, the only way referral marketing will take off is if your app is worth recommending. Spend some extra time assessing the user experience before incentivizing people to spread the word.
Utilize Dynamic Advertising Campaigns
What makes an ad dynamic? Well, these ads assemble programmatically in real time based on audience and user data. Using a template, artificial-intelligence algorithms personalize creative components depending on the person who will be viewing the ad with the intent of boosting installs. Furthermore, the ads are served to target lookalike audiences based on their similar characteristics to active app users. Putting a personalized ad in front of someone who’s more inclined to engage with your app in a meaningful way tends to boost post-install conversions.
Here’s one example from an app marketing expert showing how a dating app benefits from utilizing dynamic advertising to personalize their ads by demographic, behavior, device type, OS and location: A 26-year-old male iPhone user in Chicago will see an ad populated with photographs of women within his set age range and a location-based CTA like “Find singles in Chicago!” Compare this to showing someone a generic ad featuring random models and a one-size-fits-all headline and it’s easy to see how dynamic ads can boost post-install conversions by triple-digit percentages.
What makes dynamic advertising solutions a particularly time-efficient way to market your app? Dynamic advertising saves marketers the hassle of manually designing ads, buying the placements and running extensive A/B testing. Thanks to machine-learning, these AI algorithms are constantly optimizing campaigns with no extra requirement from human marketers.
Offer a Free Trial or Free In-App Credit
One foolproof way to market your app is by offering mobile users a no-risk way to try it for free. Of course, many apps now use a “freemium” model in which the install is free but in-app purchases or subscriptions cost money. If this is the case, it’s simple enough to offer credit for a freebie. A dating app might offer a one-month free trial subscription. A gaming app may offer additional levels or items for free—until the free trial ends. Then it’s crucial to turn your attention to retaining these users.
Focus on Re-Engaging Users
Mobile retargeting campaigns are over seven times more effective than user acquisition campaigns. The conversion rate is also much higher for re-engaged users than new ones: 40 percent compared to 8 percent. It’s a more efficient use of time and ad spend to focus on users who have already shown a proven interest in your app than it is to attract brand new users, although both are important in the long run. Pro tip: Dynamic ads are also well-suited to re-engagement campaigns based on past user behavior.
Your return on investment depends on ad spend versus revenue, but don’t forget that time is a precious and finite resource, too.
