Here’s the uncomfortable truth about mobile apps: Building a great app is not enough.
If you have a good idea, the competition is already close behind or even ahead of you.
As a mobile app professional, you are constantly fighting against low traction and therefore low revenue.
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There is a lot of money to be made in the mobile app market. That’s great if you’re already established in the space, but there’s a problem that comes with it: If there’s a lot of money, competition is going to be high. You need to stand out amongst the crowd.
Hence, a lot of app makers are looking at mobile marketing to increase app installs. But what are the advantages and disadvantages of mobile marketing?
Mobile Marketing Advantages
There is no doubt that the success of many apps are built on paid ads.
Mobile marketing can:
- Increase app installs
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase engagement rates
- Increase retention rates
Sounds great – but if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s very easy to overpay for ads. If the cost of the average install is too high, you will be losing money instead of earning any.
Mobile Marketing Best Practices
There are some core concepts that you should keep in mind while designing your own mobile marketing campaign.
Speed
Your user hasn’t much time. Keep it short and easy.
Simplicity
Don’t give your users time to think. Be direct.
Memorability
Being memorable does not exclude being simple. Be creative.
Call to action
A short call, information or sentence that leads your users to the next step.
These are best practices that might sound like they are easy to implement, but mobile marketing is more complex than that.
Next, we will discuss some of the pitfalls of mobile marketing.
Mobile Marketing Disadvantages
Here are the mistakes that you will make as a beginner in the space:
- Choosing the wrong target group
- Setting up ads incorrectly
- Unable to measure ROI (Return of Investment)
- Choosing the wrong ad creative
- Choosing the wrong ad format
- Measuring the wrong metrics
If you feel 100% comfortable that you are an expert and will avoid making all of these mistakes – go ahead and start doing mobile marketing for your app!
In case you don’t feel like you’re an expert, you’re stuck between two choices:
1. Don’t do any mobile marketing and watch the competition move ahead
2. Outsource the job
The best way to outsource mobile marketing is through an agency. In the following you’ll see how these agencies work.
Mobile Marketing Professionals
The market leading agency in this industry is called Udonis. Let’s look at how they do mobile marketing to see if we can learn from them.
The success of Udonis speaks for itself. Overall, their ads had 6B+ impressions worldwide and achieved 21M+ app installs. Udonis is recognized as a top industry leaders by institutions like BusinessofApps and the Digital Agency Network.
How did they achieve all of this?
Case Study
Let’s take the approach they took with an app called Adswapper as an example.
Adswapper is an app that ensures that users get paid for the ads they are presented with. The problem: Cost-per-install used to be too high for Adswapper.
Strategic Approach
Udonis first started with initial research to identify the target group. They found out that the audience are primarily millennials and post-millenials. The target group is getting bombarded with ads every day.
In order for Adswapper to stand out, Udonis needed to take a different approach. They went with a news format to position Adswapper as the “next big thing” in technology.
The result was a -79,46% decrease in Cost Per Install, a 2,047% increase in user base and a 3,019% increase in engagement rate.
This goes to show that great results can be achieved with mobile marketing. However, expertise was needed to come up with the right campaign. The same goes for the execution.
Conclusion
Mobile Marketing can increase your app installations significantly. However, a lot of thought and experience needs to be put behind a mobile marketing campaign to find the best approach to increase app installs. You are going to need to understand the space with a holistic approach.
P.S. Our friends at Udonis are taking clients again. Schedule a short call here.
