25 Highly Effective Mobile App Marketing Strategies to Grow Your App

Mobile app marketing is hard — there’s no doubt about it.

There are hundreds of ways to acquire new users.

There is extremely high competition in the app stores.

There are dozens of data points stacked up against you (like 77% of users uninstall your app within 3 days).

It’s a miracle mobile app marketers are able to acquire, retain, and engage new users every day — how do they do it?

This question was the impetus for this post, and why I’ve compiled 25 of the best mobile app marketing strategies I could find to help you grow your app. Most of which are contributed from experts across the app marketing spectrum including app store optimization, user acquisition, retention, and analytics.

Enjoy!

Mobile App Marketing Sections:

Section 1

App Store Optimization (ASO)

1. Use video previews for a CVR boost in the App Store

Sylvain Gauchet | Co-Founder Apptamin

Now that App Preview videos autoplay on the App Store in both the Search Results and the Product Page, leverage video to grab visitor’s attention quickly. Your App Previews (you can have up to 3 but having 2 videos seems to be the most performing combination) should:

• start strong;
• show something that is both visually appealing and illustrates your app’s value proposition;
• be easy to understand even when the video is shown at a small scale;
• use (large enough) copy as the videos autoplay on mute.

Apple seems to be getting a bit more “loose” with enforcing the guidelines, however you still do not have total creative freedom and your video should remained mostly based on captured footage. If you experiment with backgrounds, special effects or showing elements that are not directly within the app then make sure you have a backup plan in case of a rejection.

2. Enjoy a quick CVR boost by testing and optimizing your first impression frame

Shira Leffel | Head of Marketing StoreMaven

With more than 5 million apps available in the Apple App Store and Google Play combined, it’s becoming crucial for developers to incorporate a strong App Store Optimization (ASO) strategy as a way to differentiate themselves from competitors. A key aspect of this ASO strategy involves testing app store creative assets.

The challenge when launching an app is finding the right combination of creatives and messaging that will convince your target users to install. A/B testing platforms like StoreMaven address this challenge by offering an easy way to test multiple variations of your app store page—such as different icons, screenshots, and videos—and providing insight on how visitors interact with your store. This data is imperative to know exactly which assets are working, and which aren’t.

But, where should you start? Based on analyses of over 500M user sessions on the App Store and Google Play, we’ve found that an optimized First Impression Frame (everything above the fold) can increase conversion by up to 26%. For most visitors, the assets within the First Impression will be the only content they’re exposed to before they decide to install or drop.

To give some context, 100% of your app store visitors are exposed to the First Impression, and about 50% of installs come from it. Therefore, it’s important that you convey your strongest value propositions in this frame to encourage visitors to install as soon as they land on your app store page.

In order to effectively optimize your First Impression Frame, you need to focus on the dominant assets of each platform. On the App Store, it’s the First Impression Gallery, which includes either a landscape video or the first two App Preview videos/screenshots. On Google Play, it’s the Feature Graphic, which sits at the top of the app store listing. Optimizing these assets will help increase CVR while lowering cost per install.

3. Localize your app store listings the right way

If you’re new to the world of ASO, localization is the act of customizing your app to fit with the local language, culture, and dialect of a given region or country. The reasons why you want to do this are pretty obvious.

At the most basic level, english-speaking users will want to interact with your app in english and Spanish, Chinese, and other language speakers will want to interact in their native language. So what do most app developers do? Machine translation. Most commonly seen in Google Translate.

The problem is, Google Translate is often far from a perfect translation. Not to mention you miss the subtle nuances of truly ‘localized’ translations.

Take for example basic vocabulary like ‘computer.’ In Mexico the common term is ‘computadora’ whereas in Spain the common term is ‘ordenador’.

Another example in English is ‘lift’ vs ‘elevator’ – both are correct, but one sounds silly depending on where you live. And that’s just it — you want your app experience to feel as customized to the current user as possible.

With 85% of app users unwilling to give an app a second chance after a poor experience you could be losing massive amount of users every day because of poor translations. So what can you do?

• (Good) – Hire a local native to do your translations
• (Better) – Hire a local native with an understanding of ASO

For more on this topic and other actionable tips around localizing your app, check out this article from Priori Data.

4. Align your App Store for every holiday to boost engagement and conversions

As marketers we all know that personalization works. Targeted, relevant messages are clearly more engaging than generic and boring copy.

But doing personalization well, and at scale, is really hard. As a result, most of us don’t even try. But this strategy is too good to pass up on.

Every few months there is a new national holiday that is on the minds of everyone in your target demographic. The easiest example is Christmas.

Not only is every store selling Christmas decorations, neighbors are stringing lights a month too early, and you’re struggling to think of gift ideas. Because Christmas is top-of-mind from November-January, it’s an easy way to add relevance to your App Store listing.

Whether you update your icon, your copy, or go as far as changing your in-app experience doesn’t matter. Something as little as adjusting your app’s icon can provide a 40% increase in installs!

Split Metrics showed demonstrated this with the app Dragon City Mobile by testing their old icon vs a Christmas-themed version:

All it took was some adjusting a few hue’s, adding some face paint, and changing the background to snowflakes to see these incredible results.

For more tips on optimizing your App Store Listing for the holidays, check out this guide by SplitMetrics.

5. Find the keywords that generate downloads, optimize them and… TO THE MOON!

Daniel Peris | CEO at TheTool 

Let’s face it: we all want to find out the keywords that are bringing us downloads and optimize (or even include) those search terms in our mobile app or game’s listing.  

Some time ago Google Play Console introduced an updated revealing to only 1% of developers the data about keywords that bring installs to Android apps on Google Play Store. Months ago, at TheTool we found the way to extract this data 100% accurately (as it is coming directly from the console) and make it available for every developer out there.

In order to implement your ASO strategy in the right way and help your app to rank higher for the most relevant and high-performance keywords you need to find out:

• What are the keywords that are bringing downloads.
• What keywords perform better in terms of Conversion Rate to Download.
• What keywords perform better in terms of Retention Rate.

After carrying out some research we found out interesting facts that should be taken into account when planning out App Store Optimization strategies, as you can read here:

• Long-tail keywords are pretty famous among users in Search actions.
• Long-tail keywords have higher CR than generic terms.
• You can get downloads coming from a competitor’s brand name.
• You really need to work on branding because half of the downloads come from branded keywords (including misspellings).

With all this information you can come up with a long list of keywords (generic and long-tail) that are highly effective for your product, optimize them in your listing and be ready to boost your business!

Section 2

User Acquisition

6. Create an effective referral program

Priyam Jha | Digital Marketer at WebEngage

The whole point of a referral program is to ‘refer’ the app to people by waxing lyrical about its benefits. Consumers trust reviews and recommendations that come from their friends and family more than ads. An effective referral program will incentivize the referral process for the user, and that will reduce the implied burden because the user (who is the initiator) will be getting something out of it.

Secondly, a good referral campaign will also be 2-sided, i.e. provide an incentive to both the user and the referred consumers. By doing so, you will create a whole new marketing channel powered by consumers who will invite more and more people from their network to try your app.

Ride-hailing giant Uber has managed to crack this problem rather effectively with a super effective referral program.

and…

7. Be Present on Search Ads

According to Google, 1 out of 4 people discover a new app using Search engines. The app store is not the only place where you would expect most people to find apps surprisingly. Refer to the infographic above – Search ads drove the maximum amount of app downloads (50 percent) compared to other mediums.

With the right advertising campaign, you can target the right set of users who are specifically looking to solve a problem that your app is designed for. By identifying those intent-specific long-tail keywords that resonate the value of your app, you can reach out to an untapped reserve of users who would find your app highly useful and create a delightful experience in the long run.

8. Hack PR for hundreds of thousands of downloads

Here is a video recording from AppMasters Connect in Santa Monica Hosted by Steve Young of AppMasters.co. The speaker is Jake Ellenburg, CMO at XMode and his advice on hacking PR is incredible. Well worth the watch!

9. Beware of mobile ad fraud draining your marketing

Kübra Külünk | Marketing Specialist at AppSamurai 

Though organic acquisition is cost-free, paid campaigns complement organic downloads by bringing users in a quicker way. Paid strategies include native ads, banner and interstitial ads, native app preloading, traditional adverts like print and TV, retargeting, and working with top influencers.

I want to focus on mobile ads – let’s say you built and launched an app and caught an organic growth pattern. Now, you should maintain and also accelerate this growth. Time to apply in-app ad campaigns!

Thanks to in-app ads, you can provide a better consumer experience, target specific locations where the user is at that exact moment and offer real time services. Also, it is easy to reach users, since most users have their phones with them around the clock.

This is great, but the mobile advertising world has a big issue of “ad fraud”. Mobile ad fraud is a practice of cheating advertisers by fraudulently representing online advertisement events.

To understand it wrap around the digital world to what degree, let’s dig into numbers

• Association of National Advertisers (ANA) reported that advertisers lost $7.2 billion globally to bots in 2015. Again in the same report, it was said total spending was $12 billion that means 60% of all digital display ad budgets are lost due to ad fraud.
• Another report by Adage every $1 of $3 spent on online advertising goes to fraud’s pockets.
• Last research I want to show is conducted by ad verification company Adloox estimates advertisers could be wasting $16.4 billion due to fraudulent actions in 2017.

The problem with mobile ad fraud is that you can only fight it using sophisticated tools. At App Samurai, our tools fight ad fraud with machine learning to prevent wasting your money. Our in-house anti-fraud system analyzes your results by monitoring your ads’ data in detail.

10. Viral email marketing with KingSumo

Email may feel archaic but here’s the truth: it’s not going anywhere. Here’s another fact – Email has an average ROI of £38 for each £1 spent. 

But this strategy isn’t as simple as “email your users” and adds an inexpensive viral component. What I’m talking about Running a viral giveaway campaign with KingSumo. 

Kingsumo is a free tool that allows you to run viral giveaways to grow your email list. It’s pretty straightforward – people need to enter their email address to enter the giveaway, and they can earn extra ‘entries’ for every social media platform they share the giveaway on.

To get started, all you have to do is:

1. Choose something to give away
2. Set up your campaign on KingSumo
3. Promote your giveaway
4. Watch the email addresses roll in

First things first, what do you give away? Since we’re talking about mobile apps, what would be a good prize?

Well it doesn’t matter whether you’re marketing a game, a utility app, or social network, what you need is something that is relevant to your target audience. If you want everyone and anyone, then an iTunes (or Google Play) gift card may be your best choice.

But if you want to attract 20-30 year old gym-goers for your fitness app, you could offer a $500 package of GymShark brand clothing.

Next, get the ball rolling by inviting your current users to the giveaway or running a paid promotion. Then, watch the email addresses pour in.

Now what do you do with all of these email addresses? Email them of course! Email is a great opportunity to offer special discounts, promotions, and even just a link to download your app.

For a ton of information on how to run successful viral giveaways, head to King Sumo’s blog.

11. Get your app hunted

Product hunt averages around 240,000 website visitors PER DAY. Yea, you heard that right. If your app is up-to-snuff, a popular launch on product hunt can generate you thousands of app downloads on day one.

This will have the dual effect of sky-rocketing your app store rankings and getting you some much needed early reviews. 

How to launch on Product Hunt is a topic that’s been covered in-depth plenty of times so I will leave you with this list of posts if you want to dig in. deeper:

How to Launch on Product Hunt (Official Guide from Product Hunt)

The Ultimate Guide to Blowing Your Product Hunt Launch Out of. the Water

A Product Hunt Launch Case Study (Ipad App)

12. Build a community within your app to generate referrals and keep users coming back

Vanhishikha Bhargava | Marketing Specialist at GetSocial

The best way to get your users to share your app or participate in referral marketing programs, is to create a community. To drive more shares, you need to create a platform for your users to connect on – just like on social media. The more they start treating your app as a networking platform, the closer you get to getting more shares from them, because they would want more people from their circle on it.

For example, the Activity Feed in Castle Cats. It’s like the regular social media feed – just within your app. It lets the players keep in touch with one another, see each other’s progress and updates in the game, and also instills gamification that keeps them actively competing one another. The social feature didn’t just boost the app’s retention rate, but also got its users to send more invites to their friends, with a conversion rate of up to 25%!

Having worked with games across different genres, we have realized that a community is what keeps users engaged with the app. Growth is possible only when you’re able to keep your users hooked for a longer period. If they see value in sticking to your app, they become more likely to recommend it to their friends and family as well.

13. Finding and speaking to target users in emerging markets

I couldn’t resist sharing this talk with you. The story of how Paul Malicki and Flapper used Influencers on various social platforms to build Flapper’s brand and acquire new users is incredible.

This talk was given at Adjust‘s conference Mobile Spree in Berlin Last year.

14. Use content marketing to drive app downloads

We have an awesome post coming out next week outlining how Blinkist uses content marketing to drive thousands of app downloads with content marketing. If you’d like to get that post delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter!

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Or, check back in next week and I will add in a condensed version here with a link to the article.

15. Experiment with new platforms for low CPI campaigns

The world of paid user acquisition is constantly going through cycles. A new. platform with a huge amount of. attention emerges, creates an ad-platform, and starts allowing advertisers to reach their audience.

In the early days these advertising platforms offer a massive opportunity because of the supply and demand nature of their costs. The less advertisers there are, the less it costs to reach a single person. In the early days if you bet on one of these platforms early it can transform your business from an online bookstore to the largest company in the world – like Amazon using Google Adwords.

But eventually Adwords became saturated and now it takes a seasoned CPC pro to get a good return on ad spend. We’ve seen this again and again with successful platforms like Facebook, Youtube, and Pinterest offering incredibly underpriced advertising.

Soon enough advertisers will stop spending so much  money on billboards and TV ads. When they do there is going to be a massive shift in the demand for advertising on social platforms like Facebook and prices will skyrocket. (They already are)

To start experimenting with new advertising platforms, check out these two posts by LiftOff -.

Looking for a New User Acquisition Channel to Test? Try Quora.

What Poshmark’s Director of Growth Learned Running Ads on Snapchat

Section 3

Retention

16. Create highly effective push notifications to engage and retain valuable users

Talia Van Everdingen | Marketing at Taplytics

So. You’ve gone through all the effort of finding and acquiring new users. They use your app a couple times, but then they stop visiting. All of the precious time and money you’ve spent has just gone to waste and you’re back to the drawing board.

An effective retention strategy is a must-have for mobile app marketing plans. Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one!

Unfortunately, it’s harder said than done. On average, mobile app retention after 90 days is 29%. If you feel like you’re having a difficult time holding onto users, a really effective way to increase your app’s retention is through push notifications.

Why push?

We obsessively check our phone whenever there is a ding or buzz. The average person unlocks their phone 80 times a day, which points to the fact that they’re extremely responsive to pings that grab their attention.

This is exactly what a push notification can help you do: help grab your user’s attention to send them back into your app. Et voila, you’ve re-engaged another user!

So how do I create effective, open-worthy pushes?

This section will walk you through 5 best practices for creating push notifications that have a high open rate, but more importantly, high engagement rate.

• Make them Timely

I’m going to let you in on a secret: there’s no silver bullet for the right or best time to send push notifications.

When you schedule a push, you need to ask yourself not only when your users would want this information, but when are they most likely to act on it. Depending on the information and value you are providing, the consumer habits you need to cater to will vary.

Taplytics conducted a study on how push notifications are used across a variety of industries. One particularly insightful finding was that the average time pushes are sent differs depending on the app’s user norms. For example, weather apps typically send push notifications first thing in the morning at 5:30am to help users decide what to wear. Conversely, most quick-serve restaurants send their pushes at 4:30pm when people start to think about what they will eat for dinner.

Foursquare sent this push notification early in the morning to catch users who are waking up and thinking about breakfast. Customers won’t have to think twice about what they’ll grab on their way out the door thanks to Foursquare’s timely message.

• Personalize them

89% of marketers attribute an increase in revenue to their investment in personalization. While including the user’s name is an excellent first step, you will need to take the level of personalization a few steps further. For instance, using purchase history to personalize push offers and messaging would adhere to an expectation that 63% of customers have already formed.

Netflix doesn’t only include the user’s name in the push notification, but also recommends shows based on their preferences and viewing history.

• Have an effective trigger and purpose:

Did you know that there are different types of push notifications? Each serve a different purpose and target users in a more relevant, contextual way. Here are a few examples:

1. Transactional pushes update your users on what’s happening within their account, keeping them interested and engaged. These push notifications are personalized extensions of the customer journey that provide value that users don’t have to search for themselves. They’re useful to let the user know that their bill is overdue, or their package has shipped.
2. Behavioral pushes are triggered based on user action or in-action in the app. They can be used to gently nudge users along their customer journey and demonstrate that you’re paying attention to where they are finding value.

• Location-based pushes are triggered when a user enters a specific geographic area. If there’s a sale going on at your store or an event nearby, use location to make your notifications hyper-personal.

1. Promotional pushes aren’t necessarily triggered by user behaviour, rather by deals or offers you have that are related to the customer’s interests based on previous in-app behaviour or purchases. A flash sale on the shoes they were looking at, new subscribed content available or a bonus points event are all reasons for the user to re-engage.

• Have a clear CTA – use action words!

Sometimes even the most personal, timely and creative push notifications don’t get opened. And why not? Because the user doesn’t know where they’re supposed to go and what action to take.

Make sure your push has a CTA anchored with an action word that makes it clear what to do when they open their phone to act on the message or value that you’re sending them.

This push notification from Tinder reminds the user to engage with their match, which helps them get the most out of the experience. The clear action phrase tells the user how to find this value.

• How do you know what’s going to work best? Always test!

It takes a few tries to understand which pushes will convert the best and increase your retention. To help speed up the process and learning curve, experiment with different push content, timing and personalization strategies to understand what resonates with your users.

A customer’s behavior will reveal their needs and preferences to allow you to validate and make quick decisions. A/B testing your push notifications will show you exactly what is working and what needs to be changed. Any of the things that have been covered in this section can be tested – if you’re not sure which timing or messaging is right, there is only one way to find out!

17. Use the EMBED framework to perfect your new user onboarding

Ty Magnin | Director of Marketing at Appcues

“If user onboarding is the biggest #1 of retention, than teams need to invest more time there.

As for marketers, they need to be deliberate about their role in helping onboard users. Are they in-charge of the in-product experience? Emails? Establishing who is directly responsible for activation/new user retention is an important part in improving said metrics.

For maximum impact, I recommend using the following the EMBED framework for onboarding users—Establish, map, brainstorm, experiment, do it again.

• Establish—creating you onboarding team, matching your strategy to your go-to-market, and formulating your KPIs
• Map—drawing your user journey from signup to success and implementing analytics to measure onboarding
• Brainstorm—analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data to determine where the biggest areas of opportunity are
• Experiment—following onboarding best practices to move users forwards towards success
• Do it again—applying the above framework to the next priority opportunity—a different step in the user journey, an under-adopted feature, or a different user persona

Sure, this framework requires a bit of a process, and often we want a quick win or growth hack to improve these important metrics, but it’s the only way I’ve seen onboarding really consistently drive success.

For a crash course on user onboarding and the embed framework, check out The User Onboarding Academy.”

18. Feedback driven growth

Stuart Hall | CEO AppBot

I’m a big believer in using user feedback as a way to improve your product and hence drive growth. It doesn’t mean blindly implementing everything users ask for. It’s about discovering recurring pain points and then innovating a solution that will delight.

When you break it down Feedback Driven Growth is a very simple process. Gather and read, analyse, classify, prioritise and iterate.

Gathering and Reading Feedback

I group feedback in two forms:

1. Unprompted feedback — this is always the best. App reviews, support tickets and emails are ideal. If the user has taken the time to give feedback unprompted you know it’s valuable.
2. Prompted feedback — Surveys, NPS, interviews and so on. These can be great, but are often misleading because people are compelled to think of answers to your questions.

By default we will ask the first question, get the answer we want and yell out “we are validated!” and move on to building.

Back before commercialising Appbot I built a service that would easily add a support system to your mobile app. I sent out a survey to a bunch of developers I knew. They all loved the idea and couldn’t wait to use it. I built it and not one of them tried it out. But they did give me the answer I wanted so I left them alone quicker.

Analyse – Distilling Feedback into Pain Points

Often the feedback is actually a solution the customer has come up with. “I should be able to click on x to do y”. It may take a bit and back and forward with the customer to get what the real pain point is. Why do they want to do that? What are they trying to solve?

Here’s the thought process I go through for each ‘pain point’:

• What’s the sentiment of the request, are they being positive or negative?
• Does this fit into our goal as a company?
• Is there a way it can be achieved with our existing tools?
• Is it a problem a bunch of customers are facing?

Classify / Tag

Now you need to actually record it for your backlog.

I like to think of it in a few steps:

• Is it a feature request, a bug report or a data improvement?
• What section of your product does it fit in? For Appbot it might be sentiment, topics, integrations and so on.
• Finally, what is the new pain point.

We then come up with a way to tag the request. For example a feature request about topics would be FR-Topics-New Feature Name a bug report in our Slack integration would be BR-Integrations-Slack-Bug Name.

This goes into our CRM against the customer where we can report on it and also find the customers to notify when it’s done.

Fix / Iterate

Fixing and iterating comes down to your own development process. But choosing what to build or fix next can be a tricky task.

I’ve written more extensively about this in the past, but we follow a basic principle of scoring based on:

• % of customers will it benefit? — Is it something 100% of customers will use, or an integration maybe 2% will use?
• How difficult is it to implement? (100 for super simple, 0 for impossible)
• What potential impact does it have on our revenue? (100 for huge impact, 0 for no impact)

We add these scores together to find our the winner.

That’s It

The process of Feedback Driven Growth has helped Appbot bootstrap to where we are default alive. Hope it helps you!

19. Listen to the conversation around your app with Mention

You just launched your app and you want to engage with and grow your community. But how do you find the people talking about your app? Of course not everyone will @ mention your account on social media, and finding web mentions is even harder!

That’s where Mention comes in.

Mention is a social listening platform that scans the web all day so you don’t have to. It has the ability to pick up new links, mentions of specific keywords, and a ton more.

All you have t odo to start experimenting with Mention is. make a new account and (though they don’t tell you on their site) you receive a 14 day free trial.

Setting up mention is easy –

First, all you have to do is enter your brand’s name.

Then, fill in your company’s website, twitter profile, facebook page, and click on any other media networks below to add them as well.

Lastly, pick what sources you want to monitor mentions of your app on and your language of choice. If your app is new I would recommend monitoring all channels, but if you have a decently large brand already you will be overwhelmed with mentions.

What’s nice about mention is that you are able to set up more than one ‘mention’ for different categories, languages, keywords, etc…

Within minutes you can start to see alerts roll in with tons of valuable information. Take Angry Birds for example, I’ve seen a couple mentions already that contain some really valuable user research. For an up and coming app this type of information can help you inform product and marketing decisions.

To engage with your users and start to build a community you can easily jump in and start communicating with these people from directly within mention.

If you’re looking for more information on using social media to build a community around your app, check out this guest post on the Mention Blog by Taru Bhargava.

Priyam Jha | Digital Marketer at WebEngage

What qualifies as an effective mobile app marketing technique? It doesn’t necessarily have to be highly complex and multi-layered to bring in results. A solid mobile-app marketing strategy needs to be designed keeping in mind its primary target audience.

Their likes and preferences, their online behavioral patterns and the sources that they trust for picking up new mobile apps will be crucial in creating a high-performance strategy.

Here are a few techniques to help you get started:

20. Create a valuable app experience using push & in-app channel contextually

The idea here is to create app evangelists. Marketers have been criticized for overdoing app engagement via push notifications and in-app messages. If you tend to go overboard with these engagement mediums, your users will dismiss these messages reducing engagement percentage, and you will end up annoying them negatively affecting the user experience.

Instead, create a push and in-app strategy that actually adds value to your user’s life. By leveraging deep profiling, brands can figure out the motivations of each user by combining personal and behavioural attributes along with purchase history. This data will help you carry our Predictive Personalization to enhance the user’s app experience by being contextual and adding value to the user’s life.

Examples: Netflix, Waze, Amazon

The user got this push notification after finishing the second season of hit Netflix show ‘Narcos’. It has clear references to real-time events from the show’s latest season, and highlights the pending launch of the next season.

The Waze app is aware of the user’s daily commute, and notifies them about anything out of the ordinary on their frequented route with a push.

Amazon sends a contextual, personalized message to the user informing them about their shipments arrival date.

21. Leverage the power of ‘Social Connect’

There is immense power in social networks. It binds people together in unseen ways, and is responsible for shaping consumer behavior. Music streaming brands ‘Spotify’ and ‘Soundcloud’ have used this insight and integrated social network Facebook with their platform. The result?

A truly social music streaming service that lets user see what their Facebook friends are listening to, and the kind of playlists they have created. Users trust their friends recommendations more than sponsored ads, which is why there is immense traction on these platforms.

Using social connectivity and integrating it with your app will help you maximize the stickiness of your app and help spread the word to a highly relevant target audience. Take my example: I downloaded Soundcloud on a friend’s reference, and I have recommended it to almost 10 people in my friends list, and spend more time on the app because of the ‘social connect’.

This is a screenshot of my Soundcloud app, showing my Facebook friend’s track reposts on my feed. Now, I trust this particular individuals taste in music, which is why this feature is really useful in helping me discover new music.

With Spotify’s ‘Group Playlist’ Messenger feature, music discovery and sharing between a core group of people has been massively simplified.

Zynga Poker’s Facebook Integration takes the game to another level. It lets you invite your Facebook friends to play together in real-time and compete with them on a weekly basis.

22.  Work with influencers who are relevant to your app’s TG

Influencers hold great clout over a large section of people who place their trust in these individuals. The Influencers opinion is considered important enough to alter consumer behavior and affect purchase considerations of their followers. Influencer marketing involves the use of people who have a large, strong social following to promote an app or a product to their audience base. Their followers highly value the opinion of these influencers, often hanging on to every word that they have to say.

The logic here is to find relevant Influencers who cater to a similar target audience as your app. Secondly, the campaign has to be as organic in nature as possible. Consumers today are quite informed, and overselling the app’s advantages would be counterproductive by becoming a turn off.

The right influencer marketing campaign can help you reach newer target audiences that are difficult to convince via regular advertising channels. Secondly, It will help your app get the recognition that it needs from the right audience. The right influencer can help shorten this need gap and get your app into the phones of the right segment of people.

Examples: Kevin Hart & Pokerstars

Mobile Dating app Tinder created an Influencer Marketing campaign with the world’s top meme-fluencers to appeal more to the Millenials and Generation Z TG that they boast of.

Section 4

Marketing Analytics

23. Measure metrics that matter

Tigran Hakobyan | CoFounder and CMO Inapptics

Mobile app marketing isn’t only about user acquisition and app installs. It’s also about engaging those users and also retaining them. This may sound quite simple, but in reality, it’s a huge and complicated task for many app owners and marketers. In fact, marketing and growth expert Andrew Chen states that the average app loses 77% of its users in the three days after they install it. After a month, 90% of users eventually stop using the app. It’s huge, right? Imagine you spend $8.21 (an average CAC based on stats from last year) to acquire each new app user and you lose 77% of those users just after 3 days.

So what’s the solution? There should be one, you may think. And there is. Don’t go after vanity metrics like app installs, instead measure engagement stats to understand how engaged your app users are. Some of those metrics are: daily, weekly and monthly active users, average session duration, and also app-specific actions like completing the onboarding, clicking a certain button, traveling through a set of screens, making a purchase and so on.

But you can’t rely only on quantitive analytics data, like number of active users, number of specific events that were triggered, etc. My suggestion here is to also apply user behavior analytics tools to understand how people actually interact with your app, how they navigate and what issues they face in the app that might make them struggle and eventually delete your app. This data will help you solve some real user experience issues that you couldn’t even imagine if you rely only on standard analytics solutions.

As a conclusion, I’d state that your app marketing efforts should be balanced. First, you put some money into user acquisition, then you need to invest energy in user engagement and retention. And then the cycle repeats.

Note that satisfied and engaged users are going to become brand ambassadors for you and refer others to your app. This will eventually help you spend less money on user acquisition, as your best users, your brand ambassadors, will do the job for you.

24. Clearly define and track your user journeys

Rohit Srivastav | Head of Digital Marketing at CleverTap

Influencing user actions and driving them towards defined goals is every marketer’s dream. The approach towards contextual engagement is always backed by strong analytics. While the modern analytics tools have filled almost all gaps when it comes to tracking, using them to directly drive engagement is still a broken link.

Modern day marketers need to get out of the echo chamber of just analytics or just engagement and marry them both. For example, chalking out a conversion funnel is a time-tested approach. It tells you where your users drop out and then you can bring in your engagement campaigns to bring them back to the funnel.

The fallacy is, it begins with an underlying assumption – it is the path that we think an ideal user should follow and hence the data is never fully reliable. We need to fill this gap, we need to know what the dropped off users are actually doing? How are the users traversing the app vis-a-vis how we would want them too?

Only when we analyze both data-sources simultaneously, the gaps in our funnels will make more sense and we can have better data-driven mobile marketing strategies.

25. Measure every event possible

The average app marketer measures the basics: app downloads, purchases, and sessions on a weekly basis. With 24% of apps only being opened once, you need to be gathering as much information as possible to plug the wholes in your app’s retention strategy.

The team at Tune has assembled a shortlist of 19 different in-app events that you should be measuring like:

1. Add to Cart
2. Add to Wishlist
3. Invite Sent
4. App Opens
5. Searches
6. …..

To get the full list along with reasons why each activity is important to measure, head over to the post on Tune’s blog.

Wrapping Up

Wow that was a lot! I hope you got a ton of value out of this post and I would love if you would tell me what you think over on GrowthHackers. Also, if you want to receive more awesome content, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for new pieces each week.