Category: Mobile App Marketing

In order to be successful in any business, you’ve got to always keep your finger on the pulse.

Stay updated with industry trends in addition to researching your competitors. It’s no secret that our world is moving in a mobile direction.

That’s why every business, regardless of the industry, needs to stay updated with new mobile trends. This is especially important for companies with a mobile presence, such as an app or mobile site.

Whether you’re a mobile app developer or you run a local pizza shop, it’s important to stay educated in the mobile space.

This statement holds true for those of you who don’t have a mobile app as well. That’s because you should be thinking about mobile application development if you’re not already in the process.

But with so many channels of information at your fingertips, it can be difficult to determine what trends are legitimate and which ones are just a fad or fake news. That’s what inspired me to create this guide.

As an industry expert in the mobile space, I’ve narrowed down the top 17 mobile technology waves for the coming year. Here’s what you need to know.

Continue reading “23 Mobile Technology Waves for 2024”

If you’ve developed a mobile app, it’s your responsibility to market and promote it. 

App marketing can be challenging because there are so many apps available today that you’re competing with. However, with effective promotion techniques, you can easily get noticed by potential customers and increase downloads for your app.

We’ve created a simple guide for how to market your app online. It covers everything from social media ads to SEO, email marketing, influencer campaigns, and much more.

Know Your Audience

The key to effective marketing is knowing your audience. This includes understanding what they need and want, where they hang out online, how you can reach them, and even when the best time to talk with them would be. You’ll be targeting different audiences depending on which platform you choose for advertising.

Choosing the right platforms to market your app is not as simple as many people say it is. You’ll have to consider the differences in the platforms, which vary depending on several factors. 

You must choose a platform that matches your audience’s interests. For example, Instagram is good for fashion; Facebook has more of an older demographic, and Snapchat is great for reaching out to younger generations. There are advantages and disadvantages for each.

Check out this detailed social media usage by demographics chart: 

You can’t just blindly decide to start marketing your app on Reddit because it’s your favorite social network. Based on this data, it would only reach a fraction of potential users across all demographic categories. 

Even if you’re just deciding between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—each one caters to a different audience, so you’ll want to pick the ones that best fit your target market. Ultimately, you’ll be marketing your mobile application on a variety of channels. But it’s best to figure out where your audience is spending the most time and start from there.

It’s not enough to know who you’re selling to, but also how they speak and what they expect.

When you’re creating marketing content, it’s important to remember that your audience is likely not experts on the subject. Keep in mind what they might already know and what they don’t. So your audience will help you decide what your content should look like. 

Next, take into account any “hooks” that might be needed to get someone interested in downloading your app. If you’re targeting young adults, offer them prizes if they download it on a certain day or time period. This will encourage them to check out the app because they’ll want those rewards. 

The best hooks appeal to the emotions. They make people laugh and discuss something relevant. Try using a combination of hooks. Think about being funny or touch on current events, and then share the features that make your app unique. But at the end of the day, the best way to connect with potential app users is by using the right tone of voice. It’ll make you more memorable and help build a stronger relationship between yourself and the customer. That’s why identifying your audience always needs to be the first step.

Create a Marketing Plan

In today’s world, mobile app advertising has become more prevalent than ever before. But it all starts with a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is the most important part of any business, including a mobile app. A well-thought-out and planned campaign will have you reach your target audience—the people interested in what you sell. 

It’s essential to create a marketing plan that will include the following:

• Define your target audience 
• Determine what you want to achieve with the marketing plan 
• Create a list of goals for each campaign and identify how they will be measured 
• Identify which social media platforms are best suited for your needs (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) 
• Develop a budget that includes all expenses related to the marketing plan

I’ll break down some of these components in greater detail below.

Target Audience 

Who are you trying to reach with your marketing campaign? Do they have an interest in or use for your product, and how can you best reach them?

This part will be easy since you’ve already taken the time to understand your audience back in the first section of this guide. But now, it’s time to take that information even further by creating a customer persona. 

App users are more than just a number on a screen. So this will help you understand who they really are as people. A persona is a representation of your ideal customer, based on research and analysis, which you can use in your app marketing strategy.=

Give your personas a name, and really dive into detail. Here’s an example:

Joe is a man in his early 40s who had grown up in a small town and raised by strict parents. He now lives in the city with his wife and kids, where he makes an average salary as an insurance agent. Joe always wanted to be more than just “average” but has never been able to make any big changes because of work or family priorities. He sometimes thinks about what life might have been like if he had more free time. There’s nothing that interests him more than watching TV shows about aliens living on other planets, but he’s too busy at work to attend any meet-ups or go out for drinks with friends after long days at home taking care of the kids.

If you were launching an app that helps people manage their time more effectively, this could be a viable persona. Then you’d just need to figure out how to reach “Joe” based on this information.

There are even differences between Android users searching for apps on the Google Play Store and iOS app users downloading from the Apple App Store. So you might experience different conversion rates on these platforms. 

Marketing Goals and Measurement Metrics

What else does it take to have a successful mobile app marketing plan? You’ll need to make a list of goals and identify how they will be measured. When you do this, it can help you better gauge your success.

It’s important to know what you want from your marketing campaign and how you will measure it. For example, if one of your goals is to increase the number of new customers, you would measure this by tracking how many people download the app after being targeted by a marketing campaign or ad.

Bust out your pens and paper; you’re going to need them. Research ahead of time is crucial when it comes to app marketing campaigns. Look at your target audience’s demographics and make sure you know what platforms they are most likely using before diving in headfirst into your campaign strategy. Your research helps ensure that you don’t make too many mistakes when marketing your app.

Here are some examples of potential marketing goals for any mobile application:

• Create an app landing page on your website
• ASO (app store optimization)
• Run ads in the App Store
• Increase social media presence
• Run social media ads
• Create blogs for SEO
• Partner with influencers

Just make sure that your goals are measurable, or you won’t be able to track your success.

Which data points are most important when looking at whether or not the campaign has been successful (e.g., number of likes vs. shares)?

Any time you’re marketing an app, you should also consider any competitors that are available and what they’re offering. This is another way to measure your goals and track KPIs. 

Marketing Channels

What types of marketing channels will work best for reaching your target audience? Think about what type of content resonates with this group and what social media platforms they frequent. 

How often should updates be posted on each channel, and how much time should be spent creating new content per day/week/month? 

The marketing channels you choose will have a direct impact on your content marketing strategy.

For example, look back to some of the potential goals that we discussed earlier. The content needed for an Instagram post looks very different from a blog that drives traffic to your website. Let’s say you want to drive app downloads with an influencer marketing campaign.

Based on the data from the chart above, it’s clear that some marketing channels are clearly better than others if you’re going to use this strategy.

App Marketing Budget

Finally, you’ll want to think about how much money your budget will allow for advertising the app as well as any other costs associated with creating it.

Start by outlining what your desired ROI is and how much money you can invest in advertising for it. Remember that certain platforms like Facebook and Instagram sell ad space, so research which ones are best for reaching your target audience.

As an entrepreneur who has launched many products before, I know that it’s very important to plan ahead with regards to funding as early as possible. When it comes time for app launch day, having a more concrete idea of how much money will be necessary for advertising and other costs can help ease some stress-inducing financial burdens down the road—especially if funds start running low unexpectedly during implementation or after release.

Your app marketing budget will ultimately include the cost of any advertising you want to do. This includes offline methods like radio and TV ads, as well as online efforts on social media, in print publications, or via email campaigns. An app’s first impression is critical, so make sure it looks good with a great logo, graphics for app icons and screenshots, and professional photography. The same goes for any other content that will be on your website, like videos. All of this must be accounted for in the budget portion of your app’s marketing plan.

Solve a Problem For Your Target Audience 

Developing an app that will solve a problem for your target audience is not easy. You need to identify the problem, analyze what type of solution would be best, and create a prototype that can be tested. Once you have done all these things, you can develop the app with the knowledge of what will work best. 

The first step in developing an app marketing campaign is identifying the problem. It sounds simple, but it’s actually quite difficult because there are many problems to choose from, and sometimes people don’t know they have a problem until it’s pointed out to them. 

The next step is analyzing which type of solution would work best for this particular person or group of people based on their needs and wants as well as their lifestyle and goals (refer back to your customer persona). Creating prototypes allows app developers to test different solutions so they can find one that works really well for most users without being too expensive or time-consuming to make changes later on if necessary.

As a mobile app marketer, your job is to find the problems in people’s lives and make them better. If you can do that, your app will be successful. Every marketing campaign for your app needs to clearly identify and solve a problem for your target audience. Otherwise, it just won’t be effective.

Check out this example from Hinge:

Hinge is a popular dating app that competes with lots of other big names in this category. All of their app download campaigns follow a similar theme. The app is designed to be deleted.

This is a really unique approach to marketing an app, but it works well in the online dating space. It speaks to a target audience of users who haven’t had success with other dating apps and were forced to keep going back and using them. But Hinge claims to solve this problem by providing real connections between people.

Mobile App Promotion Strategies

There are lots of ways to promote an app and tons of platforms to do it. Earlier, we talked about your app marketing budget, but not all of these strategies require upfront costs. In fact, there are plenty of free app marketing strategies that you can use as well. 

It’s important to understand that you should start marketing the app before it’s released. So if you’re still in the development or pre-development stages, it’s not too early to get started. 

Launching a new app is always an exciting time and one that can be made even more special by giving your customers “special” deals. You don’t want to launch your app without any sort of promotion—so get creative. Create a buzz on social media and offer exclusive offers to the first people who download it. Then make sure you celebrate when you launch by rewarding those who were with you from the beginning. Start collecting email addresses and promote your app on your website. 

Here are some of our favorite app marketing strategies for you to consider:

• ASO (App Store Optimization)
• Blogging
• Connect with bloggers for guest posts
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Paid social media ads
• SEO (search engine optimization)
• App referral programs
• Encourage app reviews
• App Store ads
• App screenshots
• Press release

The list goes on and on. If you’re on a tight budget, check out our list of 33 create ways to promote your app for free. 

Bonus: Where Can I Find the Best Developers For My Project?

As previously mentioned, app marketing should start before your app has been built. So some of you are likely still in the market for a developer. There are a lot of developers out there, and it can be hard to find the best one. The search is made even more difficult because so many companies offer mobile app development services. 

If you’re looking for help with your next project, here’s what you need to know: 

The first thing to do is figure out what kind of developer you want. Do you want someone who specializes in design or coding? Or do you just need someone who has general skills? 

Once that’s decided, look at the company website and see if they have any testimonials from previous clients. This will give an indication as to how good their service is. You should also check if they have any awards or certifications which show that they’ve done work on projects similar to yours before.

Finally, make sure that the company offers competitive rates, as well as flexible payment plans.

Hiring a developer from scratch can be expensive and time-consuming. You don’t know if the person is going to do it right or even finish it at all. 

Instead of hiring a developer, consider using an alternative solution—like a mobile app development platform. 

BuildFire is easy for anyone who has a basic knowledge of how apps work but also gives advanced users the ability to customize their mobile apps beyond just the standard components offered by other development platforms. This saves you money and makes your life easier when building your own custom mobile application.

Conclusion

When it comes to mobile app marketing, we’re not just talking about what you do on the first day of operation. You need a long-term strategy that will set your company up for success in today’s ever-changing business world. 

Start by identifying your audience and understanding what they want from their apps. Once you have that information, create an appropriate marketing plan for them. Keep an eye on your budget, and don’t forget about testing out different strategies if things aren’t working out as planned.

In summary, mobile app marketing is the key to success. Follow the tips outlined in this guide, and you’ll be on your way to a successful campaign. Good luck!

Thousands of mobile apps are released each day on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. But each of these apps follows a unique path to development.

Using a mobile app development platform to build your app is the easiest, fastest, and most cost-effective way to bring your app to market. For those of you who don’t know how to code, you can still create an app on your own with an app builder.

Most people don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around for app development.

That’s why using an app development platform is so appealing. These tools give you the ability to create an app for a fraction of the cost compared to traditional development.

More than 10,000 apps have been built using the BuildFire platform.

If you’re considering an app builder for development, it’s common to have some questions. Lots of people don’t know what to expect from an app development platform, which is what inspired me to create this guide.

Expect Choices

One of the first things you should expect from an app builder is the option of choice. The more choices a mobile app development platform gives you, the better it is.

Do you want to build for iOS? Android? Or Both?

The best platforms let you decide for yourself. Some app builders on the market restrict you and only allow for iOS development. Even if you only want to launch on one operating system today, this will limit your growth down the road. So stay away from those app builders.

You should also expect choices for how your app gets built.

• Do you want to build an app by yourself?
• Would you like some assistance with the initial setup and design?
• Are you looking for a team of experts to build it for you?

With some mobile app platforms, it’s either all or nothing. You’re either completely on your own or you’ll pay someone to do it for you. Again, those choices are a bit restricting.

You’re better off choosing an app development platform that gives you as many development paths as possible. Even if you’d rather build it on your own, you’ll definitely enjoy the convenience of having some assistance if you eventually need some.

Here’s a brief overview of the different development choices you’ll have using our platform.

You can get started today and select the option that best fits your needs.

A great app builder gives you the freedom to create any type of app you want. Other platforms might only support certain types of apps. Those cookie-cutter solutions aren’t really scalable or suitable for businesses.

For example, do you want to build an ecommerce app? What about an app for employee communication? Maybe you want to develop an app for your restaurant, school, religious organization, or an event.

While these apps are very different, the best app development platforms can support all of them.

Some app builders are industry-specific. Those solutions won’t be versatile enough to accommodate all of your needs.

Check out the thousands of apps built by our customers. You’ll see that these apps cover a wide range of industries, purposes, and use cases. That’s the power of choice that you should expect.

Expect Helpful Resources

Even if you’re building an app by yourself, you should never be truly alone.

Surprisingly, there are lots of app development platforms on the market today that force you to figure things out on your own. But spending hours, days, or even weeks trying to complete a basic task is not an efficient use of your time.

Imagine trying to do anything new without getting instructions. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Don’t waste valuable productivity time and allow the final version of your app to suffer. Go with a mobile app development platform that provides helpful resources.

• Videos
• Webinars
• Ebooks
• Learning Centers
• Customer Support

These are the types of resources that you should have at your disposal when you’re building an app on your own.

For example, let’s say you’re using BuildFire to create an app. BuildFire University has everything you need to teach yourself how to use the platform.

Here’s a quick screen capture from our tutorial on how to customize your app’s login screen.

Like most of our guides and resources, it starts with an in-depth video to walk you through the entire procedure.

As you continue scrolling, you’ll the tutorial takes you through the step-by-step process for different functions. Here’s a section from this resource about adjusting the login screen background color.

With detailed instructions, videos, and screenshots like this, anyone can learn how to use a mobile app platform.

Even with plenty of self-service tools, the day might come when you’ll need further assistance. When that day arrives, who will you call?

Find a mobile app development platform with a reputation for excellent customer support. Whether it be via phone or email, you want to make sure that you have some way to get an answer fast and efficiently.

Design Templates

Some of you might have experience using website builders. Platforms like Wix make it possible to create a website on your own without much technical knowledge or the ability to code.

You started with a design template and then customized different elements on each page to make it unique for your brand. Simple, right?

A great mobile app development platform functions the same way.

Expect an app builder to have you select a design template in the first step of development.

Remember our first expectation? Choices.

Not every app should have the same look, feel, and design. Find an app development platform that gives you lots of choices, like the example above.

A restaurant app, gym app, and ecommerce app will all look very different.

You should be able to browse for a design template by category. Within each category, there should be plenty of options to choose from.

Once you select a template, your design journey should not stop here. Expect your app development platform to give you dozens of custom design choices. Examples include:

• App icons
• Loading screens
• Fonts
• Colors
• Menu alignment
• Backgrounds
• Graphics
• Button height
• Button width
• Button placement

The list goes on and on.

It’s also a nice bonus when the builder gives you preset color schemes to choose from. This ensures that your color scheme is visually appealing, and you can find a preset that matches your brand’s image.

Your app’s design will have a direct impact on its success.

This goes beyond the way it looks. The right design adds functionality to an app, which affects the user experience.

As you can see from the graph, nearly 50% of users are less likely to use an app after a poor experience. This is something that can’t be corrected, which is why your app must have a high-quality design from day one.

That’s why choosing a mobile app development platform with a wide range of design templates is so crucial.

Adding Features Should Be Easy

What’s an app without features?

Expect a mobile app platform to offer a wide range of choices here as well. These will become the driving functions for your app.

Using an app builder with a plugin marketplace will give you a significant advantage.

Basically, any feature you could imagine can be achieved by adding a plugin to your app. All you have to do is maintain the plugins. The technical work behind the scenes will be managed by the app platform.

Examples of feature categories include:

• Social media integration (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.)
• Content
• Media
• Forms
• Ecommerce
• Customer loyalty

Check out our guide on the top plugins that will make your app successful for some specific suggestions.

Your expectations for a plugin should be very straight forward. Adding a plugin can be accomplished in just one click.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to add a contact function to your app. Simply browse the plugin marketplace and click the add button.

Once added, you can completely customize the plugin with your own information.

Add your address, phone number, images, and even display the location on a map. Then you can preview your app to see the changes in real-time.

With a plugin like this one, you can add a high-functioning contact page to your app in less than five minutes.

To be clear, not every app development platform has a plugin marketplace like this. So make sure you find one that does.

You’ll also want to make sure that adding a new feature can be accomplished in one or two clicks at most. Once the feature has been added to your app, expect a wide range of customization options.

Don’t Expect to Build an App Overnight

While app builders are generally simple, straightforward, and easy to use, it’s important that you set realistic expectations for yourself.

Expect the development process to take time.

If you think you’re going to build an app in a few days or a week, you’re mistaken. Plan to build an app over the course of at least three months. More sophisticated apps with advanced features and functions could take closer to a year. The majority of you will fall somewhere in between.

In fact, roughly half of apps take about 4-6 months to build.

You can review our guide on mobile app development timelines to get more information about this.

Here’s a simple analogy that relates to this process. How long does it take to build a house?

It’s a loaded question. The answer depends on dozens of different factors.

You could probably put up four walls and a roof in less than a month. If it’s a 900 square-foot manufactured one-bedroom home, the process will be quick.

But if you’re talking about a 5,000 square-foot home with six bedrooms, a custom kitchen, pool, and in-home movie theater, it’s going to take significantly longer.

I realize that these are both extreme examples, but app development is very similar. You can build a calculator or flashlight app very quickly. But it would take years to build something as sophisticated as Facebook or Uber.

Just make sure you have realistic expectations about how long it will take to build your app.

Fortunately, an app builder will be much faster than coding an app from scratch. So you’ll have a significant advantage here if the project is time-sensitive.

Expect Publishing Assistance

Let’s fast forward a few months. You finally finished building your app; now what?

Getting your app published on the Apple App Store and Google Play store isn’t the easiest process. But if you’re using a reputable mobile app development platform, you won’t have to worry about any of this.

For those of you considering BuildFire, our team will take care of your publishing needs for you. Just let us know when the app is done, and we’ll handle the rest.

What happens when Apple or Android releases a new version or software update? We’ll take care of that too.

Check out this quote from one of our customers who built an app on their own.

You can read more about the Fastercise mobile app and its success here.

By using an app builder, you only have to focus on the actual building process. Adding plugins and customizing them with your information, colors, and logos is easy for anyone to do.

Don’t expect to publish an app on your own. Leave the heavy lifting to the experts.

Expect a Learning Curve

App builders are easy to use and allow you to build an app without any coding experience.

With that said, there’s still a learning curve. Don’t expect to master the building process on the first day. You’ll need some time to get used to the dashboard, layout, and custom features.

It’s like anything else in life. Whether it’s starting a new job, learning a new skill, or even getting a new computer; there’s always a learning curve.

That’s why it’s so important for you to choose an app development platform with helpful tools and resources. Videos, tutorials, how-to guides, and everything else that we discussed earlier will drastically reduce the learning curve.

Prepare for any potential obstacles as well. Something might come up in your personal or professional life that could delay the progress.

In these circumstances, your app will still be here when you’re ready to continue. You’ll be able to pick up right where you left off.

Don’t Expect Your App to Ever Be Truly Complete

Your app isn’t done after the initial launch. There is always room for improvement. Even the most popular apps in the world come out with updates on a regular basis.

This is good news for you. You can probably get your app to market quicker than you initially thought if you focus on the core features first.

Get your app into the hands of users, and then worry about expansion or adding new functions down the road.

For example, the American Saddlebred Horse Association (ASHA) built a mobile app centered around improving an annual event that lasts for one week.

But if you review the ASHA mobile app customer success story, you’ll learn that they have big plans to improve the app in the future.

Another great example is the Ninja Zone mobile app. They make updates and edits on a regular basis as well.

So don’t delay the launch date to make sure your app is “perfect.” Focus on one or two core functions, and you can always add more down the road.

Conclusion

Building an app on your own is exciting.

With the help of mobile app development platforms, anybody can create an app in today’s day and age. You don’t need to know how to code or have any technical experience to do so.

Thousands of happy customers have built successful apps using BuildFire’s platform. You can check out our customer case studies to see additional examples.

There are certain things that you should expect with any great app development platform. This guide will help you find an app platform based on those expectations.

Get started building an app today. It’s free to try and takes less than one minute to sign up.

A mobile app reseller program is an excellent way for agencies to add value to their clients and generate recurring revenue. But sometimes getting your program off of the ground can be challenging.

I’m sure you’ve researched all of the benefits and reasons to become a mobile app reseller, so why isn’t the program working?

One thing is for sure—the demand is there, and it’s not going anywhere. Individuals and businesses alike are want to build apps. They are just looking for the right partner to accommodate their needs.

Even if you’re off to a slow start, there are some quick ways to fix your reseller program.

As someone who has been building, selling, and marketing app development for the better part of my entire career, I know what it takes to succeed in this space.

I’ve identified some of the most common problems with agency reseller programs and how to fix them. You can use this guide to identify potential problems with your current offering and make the necessary adjustments to have a profitable white label mobile app reseller program.

1. No Marketing Plan

Reseller programs can fail if they aren’t marketed properly. You could have the best product or service in the world, but it’s useless if nobody knows about it.

Generally speaking, becoming a white label reseller doesn’t require a huge upfront investment. But you still need to put some money into marketing your services.

You can’t expect clients to come find you or stumble upon your website by accident. You’ve got to put yourself out there and develop a complete marketing plan for your mobile app development services.

For this type of service, the majority of your marketing strategy should be digital. You’re probably not going to print flyers, run radio ads, or put up billboards.

Invest in a mix of both inbound and outbound marketing tactics.

The B2B technology space is a highly competitive industry. A recent study highlights the top reasons why marketers in this space are increasing their budgets.

As you can see, an increased priority in marketing ranks first on this list. Customer expansion and product expansion both fall within the top four factors.

If other companies out there are spending more money on marketing, and you’re not, how can you expect to compete?

Even if you’re operating on a tight budget, there are still plenty of cost-effective marketing tactics that you can be using.

Increase your blogging frequency and prioritize SEO. Create video content to explain how your app development program works. Take advantage of social media, email marketing, and other low-cost, high ROI tactics.

For those of you who have been marketing your service but still haven’t found success, it might be time to-revaluate your strategy. Switch up your campaigns and advertising channels, if necessary. Just make sure that you have a clear plan in place.

2. Wrong Pricing Strategy

One of the best parts about being a white label reseller is the ability to set your own prices. You’ll usually pay a fixed rate for the platform you’re using, and the reseller profits can be as high or as low as you determine.

But your prices can make or break the success of your services.

If you set your prices too high, people might be unwilling to pay. If you set them too low, prospects might think the quality is subpar. You need to find that sweet spot that’s the perfect medium between the two.

How did you come up with your pricing strategy? Believe it or not, most agencies can’t answer this question. If you pulled your numbers out of thin air, then it’s unlikely that you guessed the perfect figures.

You need to do some research to see what people are actually willing to pay for the app development services that you’re proving.

My recommendation is to offer tiered pricing based on features and functionality. It should look something like this:

These plans will accommodate the needs of a wide range of potential customers. From individuals to large-scale corporations, there’s an option for everyone.

You can also offer incentives for long-term commitments. For example, the price per month should be higher in a month-to-month plan than an annual commitment.

What would you rather get? $200 a month for two months or $150 per month for 12 months? Obviously, you’d choose the latter.

Your pricing should also be based on your target market. For example, a Fortune 500 company will likely have greater spending power than a college student. We’ll talk more about figuring out who to target as we continue.

3. Failure to Identify the Right Target Market

Who is your app development service for? If you said, everyone—that’s the wrong answer.

This is an agency reseller mistake that I see all of the time. They are convinced that their offering is for everyone and anyone. So their marketing plan and pricing strategy (both previously discussed) are in no man’s land.

I know what some of you are thinking. Anyone can build an app, right? That’s true, but that doesn’t mean that everyone should be targeted.

With that same logic, everyone who eats food should be targeted by McDonald’s. Or anyone who wears clothes should be targeted by Gucci. That’s not the case for either scenario.

There is no such thing as a marketing campaign that’s designed for everyone. So if you don’t have a clearly defined target audience, your marketing efforts will suffer.

You should be able to describe exactly who you’re targeting with a reseller program. These are the components of a target market.

It’s impossible to accommodate the needs of prospective clients if you don’t know who they are. You’ll struggle to reach them in your marketing efforts as well.

For example, let’s say you’re targeting small to mid-sized enterprises (SMEs).

If you’re running social media ads on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok, you’re essentially lighting money on fire. Nobody in your target audience is going to see those. Even Facebook would be borderline in this scenario.

To target SMEs via social media, you’d need to create highly targeted ads on LinkedIn, aimed at CTOs and CMOs.

Your marketing strategy and would look very different if you were targeting small business owners instead.

If you haven’t taken the time to properly identify your target and understand their needs, it could be the reason why you’re having problems with your marketing campaigns and pricing strategy.

4. You Don’t Have a Niche

I’ve heard people say that the difference between target market and niche is just semantics. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Once you’ve identified a target audience, you can take that one step further by carving out a niche.

Let’s continue using my previous example of targeting SMEs. The person of interest at those organizations would be different depending on the type of app they want to build.

For example, if they wanted to develop a human resources app, you’d likely be dealing with the CTO. But if they want to build an app to improve the customer experience, you’d probably be dealing with the CMO or director of marketing.

You can get even more specific in that space as well. Maybe you specialize in a particular industry, like healthcare, manufacturing, retail, or food and beverage.

How do you find your niche? Look to your existing clients. If your agency has been around for a while and offers other services, what types of businesses or people have you been working with? If 90% of your current clients are small business retailers, then that’s your area of expertise.

For those of you starting a mobile app reseller agency from scratch, look to your own background to come up with a niche. Maybe you have a legal background—target law firms. Or maybe you have a fitness background—target gym owners and personal trainers.

This will be much easier than trying to target hospitals without any knowledge of the healthcare industry. So stick with what you know best first, and then branch out from there.

5. You’re Not Nurturing Leads

Your mobile app development service won’t necessarily sell itself. But once you’ve identified your target market and niche, it’s easier to align your marketing strategy with your sales strategy.

Understand that there are two forces occurring simultaneously. You are trying to sell while your leads are interesting in buying.

But those leads must be nurtured through the buying process. Just because someone lands on your website or gives you their contact information, it doesn’t automatically mean that they’re going to convert.

Even if they’re interested in what you’re offering, finalizing the sale usually takes a bit more convincing.

Take a look at the different stages of the B2B sales funnel.

The content required to reach a prospect at each stage of the journey will vary depending on where they fall within the funnel.

For example, a landing page with some basic information about your mobile app services would be a top of the funnel campaign strategy. This page could include some client testimonials and clearly explain who would benefit from your services.

If that person fills out a lead-gen form, provides their email address, or sets up a discovery call, they’ll move down the funnel. Now you can provide them with additional information in the form of whitepapers, case studies, or something along those lines.

Continue with follow-up calls and emails to qualified leads.

Most people don’t land on a website on a whim and commit to spending hundreds or thousands of dollars per month for the next few years without taking some time to think about it.

Consider hiring a dedicated sales manager or put someone in charge of this process if you don’t have a strong background in sales. Having highly effective closers will be crucial to your success.

6. Unprofessional Website

This is another common problem that I see with mobile app reseller programs that aren’t working. You could be the top expert in your niche and give away gold for free, but if your website doesn’t look good, it’s going to kill your program.

We live in a day and age where you can’t afford to have this issue. People will judge your brand before they even know what you’re offering.

It takes just 50 milliseconds for visitors to form an opinion about your website. That first impression will be a driving force behind their decision to do business with you.

Take a look at these statistics about web design:

Over 90% of first impressions are related to the design of a website. Nearly eight out of ten people will judge your brand’s credibility based on that design.

In short—your website can make or break your reseller program.

If the site is full of ads, clutter, flashing lights, and other spam-like promotions, people won’t want to work with you. If the site loads slowly and looks like it hasn’t been updated in the last decade, you’ll struggle to sign clients.

We all know what a credible website looks like. And we most certainly know what bad websites look like.

Follow the formula from global leaders like Apple. Keep your site simple, clean, and professional.

Use open space to your advantage. Make sure it has a simple navigation. Your services should be clearly defined with a CTA visible at all times.

Monitor the analytics of your site as well. This information could give you a clear indication of how people feel when they land on your pages. If you have a high bounce rate, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and consult with a professional web designer.

7. You’re Using the Wrong White Label Reseller Platform

Sometimes the product itself is the problem with your reseller program.

Even if you’ve done everything else right, this could crush your agency’s chances of success. You have a great marketing strategy. You’ve identified your target market and carved out a niche. You have an effective sales strategy, and your website is top-notch. But the actual service is no good.

Your clients will eventually find out if the app development platform doesn’t meet the standard they were anticipating.

If they don’t figure it out in the free trial or demo, they’ll quickly learn once they start using it.

There is no substitute for quality. This is definitely not something that you can fake. So don’t choose a white label reseller platform just because it has the lowest prices and gives you the potential for higher profit margins. That won’t be helpful if nobody signs up or everyone is canceling after one month of use.

The best reseller programs need to benefit your clients just as much as they benefit you.

Use a program that has lots of out of the box functionality. The platform should be easy enough for anyone to use, even if they don’t have any experience with development.

Your program should support iOS, Android, and PWA (progressive web apps). There should be unlimited customization, as well.

If your clients feel limited, restricted, or just can’t build what they anticipated with your current platform, it’s probably time for you to shop around for another mobile app reseller platform.

8. Poor Customer Service

In a perfect world, your clients will sign up for your reseller program, pay forever, and you’ll never hear from them again. But you and I both know that’s not realistic.

People are going to have questions and need assistance, especially when it comes to using technology and building a mobile app.

Agencies that can provide excellent customer service will have a massive advantage in this space. But failure to provide quality service will cause you to lose customers.

Furthermore, 86% of people are willing to pay more money for a better customer experience.

The level of customer support you’re able to provide has a direct correlation to our last point about choosing the right reseller platform.

The best mobile app reseller platforms will provide you with excellent support, so you’re able to pass those benefits along to your customers.

For example, you need to know how the platform works yourself. Otherwise, how can you possibly assist your customers with it? If you’re part of the BuildFire mobile app reseller program, you’ll benefit from training and consulting for how everything works. You’ll also get dedicated white label support via phone and email if you have any questions that require an immediate response.

BuildFire will get your clients’ apps published to the app store once they’re done building everything. So you and your customers won’t have to worry about this.

Make sure you’re part of a reseller program that sets you up for success. Otherwise, you’ll have trouble giving your clients the support that they’re expecting.

9. You’re Reactive Instead of Proactive

This reason is often overlooked because it’s not as tangible as some of the other points on our list. But being proactive is something that you really need to pride yourself in if you want to be successful.

What do I mean by this?

You can’t just have the “set it and forget it” mentality. Even if you’re experiencing some success with your program, it could be short-lived if you lack initiative.

The best mobile app resellers are always looking for new opportunities. They follow the latest technology trends and keep up with news in their specialized industries.

Research your competitors to see what kind of changes they are making to their prices or product offerings. Start blogging on a regular basis as a way to generate leads as part of your long-term SEO strategy.

Instead of just assuming that your clients are happy with your services, follow-up with them once a month or more to check in on their progress.

This type of initiative is what separates average agencies from excellence.

10. Your Clients Are Churning

Signing new clients is just a fraction of what it takes to have a successful app reseller program. To get recurring revenue for years to come, you’ll need to make sure that those clients aren’t churning.

I’ve seen this happen all too often with agency resellers. They get so excited about signing a new client, and they end up neglecting that customer moving forward.

Think about all the hard work it took to close that client. It’s an expensive problem if they churn. Just look at your customer acquisition costs.

Your agency needs to prioritize retention. Once you have a few clients on board, you could argue that retention is more important than new client acquisition. Just a small increase in retention can yield significant profits.

It’s also much easier to cross-sell or upsell your existing clients compared to selling to a new client.

Maybe your agency offers other services. You can take one of your app development customers and sell them your social media marketing services or SEO services. Or you can convince your mobile app development customers to upgrade their plan to a higher pricing tier.

Conclusion

If your mobile app reseller program isn’t going as well as you thought it would, don’t get discouraged. You’re not doomed—you just need to identify the problems you’re having.

Use this list of the ten most common reasons why your app reseller program isn’t working. Follow the tips and best practices that I’ve highlighted to help you fix those problems.

If the platform itself is holding you back, you should seek an alternative solution. The BuildFire reseller platform has everything you need to succeed. Check this reseller case study to see how other agencies have benefited from this program.

Uber has revolutionized the way we travel.

This ridesharing mobile app connects riders with drivers in just a couple of clicks and charges the rider’s credit card automatically. No cash or currency is exchanged in the vehicle.

Uber is a more convenient and affordable way to get around than a traditional taxi cab. Plus, it’s a way for drivers to earn some extra money on the side, while driving their own vehicles.

The Uber business model is very simple. They connect riders with drivers and take a percentage of all transactions.

But at the end of the day, Uber is just a mobile app.

Users download it from the Apple App Store and Google play store, the same way they would download any other app — including yours.

So for those of you who have a mobile app or plan to build one, it’s always a great idea to follow the lead of those who succeeded before you. To say Uber is a success is an understatement.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that you’ll be the next Uber or completely revolutionize an industry the way they have, but don’t sell yourself short. Either way, you can still learn from their business model and path to success.

This guide will cover the latest Uber revenue and usage statistics. You’ll see how this business has been booming, and how you can apply those same concepts to your own app.

Continue reading “Uber Revenue and Usage Statistics”

Today, thanks in no small measure to platforms like BuildFire, there are more successful mobile, SaaS and marketplace apps in the market than ever before.

While there are numerous different kinds of monetizable applications that can be sold—for instance, marketplace apps like those for Shopify and Magento which are often third-party “add-ons” and SaaS apps which are typically hosted in the cloud and accessed through a browser or proprietary client—mobile apps tend to be more universal in nature and refers to any application deployed locally on a laptop, desktop or mobile device.

Here, we will refer to these universal apps as we focus on how to value an app. Continue reading “How to Value a Mobile App?”

Your app has finally launched. You’ve got lots of users who are active and using your app on a regular basis. This is great news.

But if your download rates are starting to plateau or even possibly taper off, you’ll need to come up with creative strategies to get your app in the hands of new users.

There are lots of ways that you can approach this. But one of my favorite ways to get new downloads is by getting your current users to recommend your app to other people.

Why would anyone do something like this? You’ve got to give them a reason to. Implementing an in-app referral program is the way to make this happen.

For those of you who aren’t that familiar with this concept or need some help getting steered in the right direction, you’re in luck.

As an industry expert, I’ve got plenty of experience with in-app referrals. I’ll show you how to implement a mobile app referral program that actually works.

Here’s everything you need to know before you get started.

Continue reading “Implement In-App Referral Programs for Your Mobile App”

Do you want to communicate with the people who downloaded your app even when they’re not using it?

Push notifications can accomplish this.

You can send notifications directly to each user’s device, and it will appear on their screen as if they just received a text message.

Sounds like a great way to engage with your audience, right?

There’s not a clear black and white answer here. Push notifications can be helpful, but only when they’re used properly.

If you’re improperly taking advantage of this tool, then it’s going to have the opposite effect. Instead, users will mute your notifications.

That’s a place that you don’t want to find yourself in.

So whether you have an app that’s already been launched or you’re still developing a mobile app, you need to be thinking about push notifications.

On average, more than half of app users enable push notifications.

More Android users enable push notifications than iOS users, but Android dominates the global market share. So it’s safe to say that the majority of people want to get push notifications.

But with that said, there are certain reasons that force a user to turn these notifications off.

If you’ve been getting muted or you’re trying to avoid getting muted, this is the perfect guide for you. I’ll explain why app users mute push notifications and how you can send notifications without getting turned off.

Continue reading “Why Users Mute Push Notifications”

Everyone makes mistakes.

Launching a mobile app doesn’t always go according to your plan. You’ll hit some bumps and bruises along the way.

It’s even possible that your app was a complete failure. This is a disheartening reality for some people, but you’re not alone.

In fact, 30% of mobile applications fail within 12 to 18 months of their launch. Furthermore, technology projects as a whole tend to run over budget by 45% and underdeliver by 56% in terms of projected value.

More than 60% of apps on the Google Play Store see an 80% decline in downloads after their first week of launching.

Here’s something else to consider. The majority of smartphone users don’t even download one app per month.

This makes it extremely difficult to be successful in this industry if you aren’t taking the proper steps in your planning, development, launch, and maintenance stages.

Let me be clear. I’m not telling you all of this information to discourage you. I’m actually trying to do the complete opposite.

I know that it hurts, but you shouldn’t feel ashamed that your app failed. It happens to more people than you probably realize.

So you made some mistakes. Rather than feeling sorry for yourself, it’s important that you learn from them.

When you take this approach, all of the time and money that was spent ends up being valuable rather than being a waste.

I know lots of people who have launched failed apps. They were able to bounce back and become successful.

That’s why I came up with this guide. I want to teach you how to do the same.

Here’s what you need to know if you want to turn your mobile app failure into a success story.

Continue reading “How to Turn Your Mobile App Failure into Success”

It’s easy to come up with an idea.

But following through with that idea and building a mobile application is not the easiest process.

Fortunately for you, I’ve been through this before.

I know what it takes to validate an idea and turn your app into a reality.

It’s absolutely essential that you go through the validation process. Otherwise, you could start dumping money into an idea that won’t give you any return on your investment.

I’ve seen that happen to people as well.

If you want to develop a successful app, you’ll need to be ready to put in the time.

It’s not really something you can just do as a small side project.

Mobile applications are a business, and that’s exactly how you should treat the process.

One of the biggest problems I see from people who have failed app development projects is that they get in over their heads.

They think their idea is great, so they tell a couple of friends and they hear, “You should totally make that an app!”

So they hire a developer and start building, but they skipped the validation steps.

If you follow the procedure that I’ll show you, it will make the process much easier and minimize the chance of failure.

At worst, you’ll learn early on that your app isn’t a viable business before you pour too much money into it.

Here’s what you need to do.

Continue reading “How to Validate and Turn Your App Idea Into Reality”

Creating a unique mobile app nowadays is challenging. With so many similar apps out there, it becomes hard to stand out and differentiate yourself from others. You not only have to make sure your app is functional, but it must also be relevant to a particular audience. Otherwise, who’s going to use it? Picture this: You’ve spent so much time developing your app, constantly refining and testing it, and you’ve finally reached a version that satisfies your vision. Great, now you can finally sit back and relax while you watch the number of downloads shoot through the roof. Those daydreams of rolling around in piles of cash seem a bit more tangible now, right?

Well, apologies for busting your bubble, but you’re missing a crucial piece of the puzzle that’ll make your daydream a reality: marketing. Your mobile app isn’t just going to get up and sell itself; you need to have a strong mobile marketing plan in place. If you’re just starting out, you might want to check out these crucial app design tips to keep in mind to promote your product. However, if you already have an existing marketing strategy in place, you might be wondering what more you can do to market your app. This is where you might consider content syndication.

 

What is Content Syndication?

Simply put, content syndication can include repurposing content or creating content for the sole purpose of external publication. This is an important strategy to implement into your mobile marketing plan because you’ll be able to spread your content to a wider audience – an audience who might have never heard of your product otherwise. In this way, you’ll be able to increase engagement around your product as well as increase brand awareness. After all, the more content that is available, the more likely it is for your product to be found! Even though only 14% of companies use content syndication as a distribution method, it actually ranks third in effectiveness at 45%, following SEM and promoted posts.

So what exactly are the best ways to syndicate your content? Here are 10 tips that will help you market your mobile app:

 

1: Know Your Goal

Similar to creating your app, you have to have a clear, focused point of view and know what you want to accomplish. Are you trying to drive traffic through SEO? Increase your customer base? Just building product awareness? Discovering the answers to these questions should be the first step you take in establishing a syndication strategy. With content syndication, you can either syndicate full articles or just a headline, description, and a link back to the original piece of work. Just make sure you know exactly what your goal is so that you can determine for yourself which form of syndication may be best. Keep in mind that this may not depend on you though, as some websites have strict guidelines that they follow.

 

2: Choose Your Partners Carefully

Before you go out and ask others to publish your content, you have to do a little research. Again, the whole point is to capture more leads based off of their existing customer base. Make sure that your syndicated content will do more than just reach this new audience; make sure to intrigue and induce them to check out your product or site as well.

You might want to consider the following: Are these websites relevant to your industry? How do they distribute their content? Who is viewing their content? Know what type of content is posted and which receive the most engagement; the more relevant your content is to their audience, the better the opportunity for lead generation. Ideally, these other sites would have a higher authority than yours, affirming you as a credible author and thereby improving your website ranking. Just keep in mind that outcomes vary amongst different partner sites, no matter how high their authority may be.

 

3: Tailor Your Content for Your Target Audience

Image Source: Aumcore

You need to know your audience (and your partner site’s audience) in order to know what content to present to them. Are they technically savvy? Are they an older generation? Do they respond more to videos rather than articles? Whenever a range of age groups utilizes the same service, it’s best to optimize for each so that everyone can comfortably interact with it, increasing your chances of conversions. If creating graphic content, note that older generations prefer muted colors and larger text as opposed to younger generations who respond well to bright colors.

According to the digital marketing agency, Aumcore, “Part of knowing your audience involves analyzing the apps you’ll be competing with, both directly and indirectly.” You need to be aware of what’s relevant to your target audience, and when posting on a third-party site, be sure to keep their audiences in mind as well. Whatever you do, remember to tailor your content. You don’t want to waste your time publishing things that are irrelevant!

 

4: Syndicate Third-Party Content

With permission from a third-party website of your choice, you can feature their content on your blog. Although this may not be original, incorporating others’ relevant work will help diversify your content and keep ideas fresh. Not only that, but you may also be able to leverage their strengths in order to fill a possible content void in yours.

Similarly, you can have your content published onto another’s website as a guest post. The goal here is to “capitalize on their established audience,” as mentioned by Lead Forensics. In this case, your partner site asks you to tailor something that is more suitable for their site and audience. For instance, you may be asked to change the angle of your content to make it more relevant, or even just make smaller adjustments like tweaking the word count or headline.

 

5: Syndicate on Social Media

It’s no secret that social media platforms are some of the best ways to share your content. In the United States alone, 79% of people use Facebook, and 128 million have registered for accounts on LinkedIn. If you didn’t already know, posting an article on LinkedIn sends each of your connections a notification; this makes content distribution a breeze. If using Instagram, make sure you focus on the visual appeal of your content. Stay consistent with the images you post on your feed; a crisp and clean display of high-quality images on your Instagram account does wonder for your brand image, whereas the opposite could severely harm it. While sharing your content on sites like LinkedIn or Instagram can provide a free way to mass share your content, you can also opt to pay for services such as Taboola or Zemanta that can make your content available to a range of sites.  However, if you want to implement a low-cost content syndication strategy into your marketing plan, engaging regularly with your audiences through your social media accounts can result in high organic distribution through reposts.

6: Choose Your Content Wisely

The content you choose to syndicate should be the very best you have to offer. According to Position², “unlike advertising, the purpose of syndication is not to get audiences to click through to buy, but to click through out of interest.” The goal is to have content that is so engaging that visitors want to learn or view more about your app. We’re not just talking about blogs or articles here either; think about all the other types of content out there! If the goal of your content syndication is to gain more customers, then you should really consider where your visitors might be in their research process. Perhaps they have already been comparing other products when they discovered your campaign. Maybe your content is the first that they see. Either way, you need to be strategic in choosing the content that you share so that it aligns to the audience’s needs as closely as possible.

 

7: Make a Promo Video

Nothing makes consumers more excited about a new release than an awesome teaser video. After all, videos get 4x more traction than articles or blog posts and generate 1200% more shares on social media. Facebook specifically is a great place to put promo videos because you can follow up with ads that convert people into actual consumers. Videos are a pretty powerful marketing medium because once you are able to effectively tap into the emotions of your audience, they are more likely to remember your brand because the story that your video depicted actually means something to them. Eliciting some type of reaction from your audience (e.g., making them think), making them laugh, or influencing them to take some sort of action will not only increase your chances of being remembered, but also your chances of going viral. Since 92% of mobile video consumers share videos with others, why not market your mobile app on a medium that most mobile users utilize?

 

8: Don’t just Republish…Repurpose

Don’t just think sharing the same link on every digital media outlet out there will help you gain a bigger following. Excessive sharing of the same thing is boring! I know you’re thinking, I already wrote a piece on digital marketing, what’s the point of putting the same content in a video? While repurposing your content into another form can be a little annoying, changing up your angle or media type can work in your favor. For instance, repurposing an article into a video or displaying statistics in an infographic are terrific ways to target various audiences. After all, not everyone uses Facebook, and not everyone has a LinkedIn or Pinterest account. So having a link posted on a platform such as Twitter that links to an infographic on Pinterest that links back to your site can immensely aid in increasing the likelihood of brand discovery. That’s three forms of content on three different forms of online media platforms. Imagine the possibilities! So definitely don’t solely rely on one form of content. Switch things up and get creative!

 

9: Monitor Your Leads

Don’t leave your leads unattended! New prospects aren’t guaranteed customers. They may have found your product on your site, yes, but conversions will definitely not be immediate. Be sure to nurture the relationship so that they end up as loyal customers. Monitoring the journey from start to finish will help you figure out what marketing strategy is most effective and will allow you to determine what works and what doesn’t.

 

10: Always Analyze and Adjust Your Strategy

As the idiom goes, you never know until you try. When it comes to figuring out the best way to engage and attract audiences, don’t be fearful of new strategies. What might have worked last year may not be as effective today. If you don’t constantly monitor and tweak your strategies, your business risks being surpassed by others, and your product will be forgotten. By analyzing your marketing plans regularly, you will be able to learn more about your customers and improve your offers. Always remember to measure your results, not matter how successful your syndicated content has become.

 

A Refresher

Syndicate your content if you’re looking for a different approach to drive traffic back to your site. Just note that you can’t solely rely on this method to market your products. Here’s a quick refresher of what we covered:

1. Know Your Goal
2. Choose Your Partners Carefully
3. Tailor Your Content for Your Target Audience
4. Syndicate Third-Party Content
5. Syndicate on Social Media
6. Choose Your Content Wisely
7. Make a Promo Video
8. Don’t Just Republish…Repurpose
9. Monitor Your Leads
10. Always Analyze and Adjust Your Strategy

So if you find yourself wanting to switch up your marketing strategy, give syndication a shot. However, you must remember to do more than just duplicate your content, but repurpose it in different forms to allow for an increased amount of user engagement. Really understanding the behaviors and needs of your users is vital in making sure that any marketing campaign you employ is successful. Once you’re able to establish meaningful connections with your audience, you’re one step closer to achieving your marketing goals!

 

It’s high time you integrate geofencing into your business. It’s proven to get you more sales, engagement, and loyal customers.

Geofencing is a location-based service that businesses use to engage their audience by sending relevant messages to smartphone users who enter a pre-defined location or geographic area.

There are smart companies that send product offers or specific promotions to consumers’ smartphones when they trigger a search in a particular geographic location, enter a mall, neighborhood, or store.

Do you desire to improve your customer experience? I’m sure you are, considering that 90% of customer experience decision-makers have agreed that a good customer experience is critical for their success.

And with customers being the major source of revenue for every business, delivering high-quality service through geofencing is important. If you’re into any form of digital marketing, you need to take this seriously as it’d help you acquire new customers and convert them into paying customers.

A Study by Bain & Company shows that a little increase of 5% in customer retention, can lead to a profit increase of 25% to 95%. Trust me, these numbers are worth paying attention to!

Since customer retention is too challenging, knowing how to interact with your potential leads in a more personalized manner will definitely help.

A research report by Experian shows that personalized emails sent to consumers have a great effect on open rate, triggered open rate, promotional click rates, and triggered click rates.

So, the earlier you start reaching out to potential and loyal consumers at the most relevant time, with the relevant product/service, the better the results you’re likely to get.

So how do you achieve it?

Simple: Integrate “geofencing” into your marketing strategy and you’d be amazed at the consistent results that you’ll get. Creating geofencing campaigns can truly transform every facet of your business.

Does it work? Well, Papa John’s is renowned for their Super Bowl ads, but they ran a mobile ad triggered by Geofencing solutions from ThumbVista, to promote their Papa Loyalty Programs.

At the end of the campaign, the brand recorded over 68K impressions with 469 actions taken resulting with a .69% CTR. They also gained a brand awareness with the rewards program in a new market area.

You might have heard of it, or this could be your very first time to hear it — and I guess you’re now wondering what it’s all about.

Having been introduced to geofencing and how it can help with customer service, let’s consider a few definitions.

 

What is Geofencing?

According to Techopedia, geofencing is described as:

“A technology that defines a virtual boundary around a real-world geographical area.”

While Wikipedia defines it as:

“Virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area.”

It’s not some complicated programming language or complex development tool.

Geofencing is a technique of serving smartphone users with ads that are relevant to them, by creating a virtual perimeter or boundary around your business location which notifies users as soon as they enter the boundary.

In other words, geofencing can be regarded as a mobile marketing optimization strategy. So far, you could see the bright side of your business as you leverage on mobile ads that are targeted to your customers within a geographic location.

People are always ‘on the go,’ but they always have their smartphones with them — which they use to research products and services before buying them.

A report by the Office for National Statistics revealed that 58% of internet use ‘on the go’ is on mobile phones or smartphones.

For this reason, you’re no longer at a crossroad on whether you should start building geofencing campaigns or ignore it. Right now, it’s an important aspect of your marketing strategy.

 

Is Geofencing Right For Your Business?

Why is geofencing so important today?

You may not fully be aware, but let’s review some of the reasons that will make you kick yourself in the butt for not leveraging it:

i) Easy customer reach: When it comes to reaching out to your customers, geofencing is an option you shouldn’t neglect — because it notifies your customer about your product/services whenever they’re close to your business location through their mobile phone. That’s cool, isn’t it?

There’s no doubt as to the results it will generate, especially when you consider how addicted people are to their mobile phones.

ii) Instant consideration: Can you call the attention of your customers instantly when they walk by your store without shouting at the top of your voice?

I doubt.

Through geofencing, you’re able to trigger instant messages that pique a customer’s interest and nudges them to come check out the latest deals in your store. Remember that 90% of SMS are read within 3 minutes — so, geofencing campaigns help consumers make informed and instant decisions.

iii) Grows brand awareness: The mobile marketing strategy that leverages on geofencing provides local and multi-channel businesses, the chance to communicate with their potential consumers who are close by and ready to purchase through mobile phones.

These messages serve as a reminder to your consumers to choose your brand out of the thousands of other similar businesses around a particular location.

iv) Reduction in cost of marketing: With the high cost of creating ads campaign, using geofencing is sure to cut down the cost and still produce a great result — since it only focuses on local consumers and these consumers are likely to buy from you.

Geofencing is more like an extension of your restaurant, store or shop. And with geofencing you don’t need to stand in front of your store to call anybody that passes by, because you’ve already known your potential consumers.

You’re also provided with the opportunity to offer your products/services to your customers at the right time when they’re in need of it.

With the availability of GPS on virtually all smartphones and tablets, efficient tracking is now easier for both marketers and consumers.

This new development has also given rise to new marketing opportunities for online entrepreneurs, because they can now locate their potential consumers right on the go.

A lot of brands have recorded success through their geofencing campaigns — especially those with highly classified data that need utmost security.

Here are some of the business models or organisations that can make use geofencing application:

i)  Asset management: The application will notify a network administrator when a company asset, meant to be used within the firm goes out. And from there, they can track the location and also lock it from being accessed.

ii) Fleet management: In this field, geofencing is used to notify a dispatcher when their vehicle goes out from its route.

iii) Human resource management: Here geofencing is used to restrict staff from having access to some spaces within the firm, without a second authentication.

iv) Drone management: It’s used to create a temporary restricted area for drones, during a sporting event.

v) Marketing: A brand can use geofencing to notify their customers of their coupons, new product, or ongoing promo when the consumer enters a specified geographical region with their mobile phone.

vi)  Law enforcement: In this instance, geofencing can help the security authority when a person under house arrest goes out from the building.

 

How Does Geofencing Work?

So far, we’ve covered a lot about geofencing and what it can do for your business. Do you know how it works?

It’s simple though. Geofencing helps you to keep in control of your business by notifying you when a potential consumer is passing by your store, by a competitor’s, or entering into a predefined area.

To get it working, you need to use a mapping product like Google Map to map out the regions you want to geofence. This region can be in a circular or polygon shape in most cases.

Once your desired region is mapped out for geofencing, you can then target your consumers via their mobile phone’s GPS.

Then, you can monitor your geofence through the day for potential prospects or customers who might be interested in your offer. It keeps to track them until that parameter is breached — either they’re trying to enter or to go out.

In fact, for a successful geofencing to be attained, you also need to incorporate a definite customer targeting, and personalized messages.

Solely depending on technology is not effective.

Benefits Of Geofencing

The need to leverage on geofencing cannot be overemphasized. Though it’s still a new practice, but the rate of success achieved with it is immeasurable.

A study shows that consumers love receiving location-specific offers right on their phone, due to its location relevance and interest.

That said, here are some benefits you wouldn’t like to miss:

i) It serves as an ads portal: This is obtained when potential consumers are close to your store and you’re notified of their presence. Sending your new products to them, free giveaways and discounts, will definitely get them to consider your store.

ii) It targets your potential consumers: Social media has a bigger marketing opportunity since it’s populated with a lot of consumers that are ready to read your messages and stick to your brand.

But with the help of geofencing, you can focus your campaign to the user that are more likely to convert — especially those local consumers.

Interestingly, these are the consumers that will be excited to walk into your store and make a purchase after seeing your ads.

iii) It links your offline business to your online presence: With geofencing, you can notify passersby to look you up on social media for better customer engagement.

In fact, it serves as your gateway to your social media and internet identity.

iv) It provides real-time analytics: No doubt, a good marketing requires a to-and-fro conversation between the customers and the marketers.

Geofencing makes it a lot easier and more effective.

Because it notifies you as soon as a consumer enters your marketing region so that you can properly prepare to receive them in your store.

v) It offers a service: Since the mobile use rate is high and users are highly interested when they’re online, offering a free WiFi in your Restaurant, Bar, and Hospital will definitely improve customer experience.

This can be achieved by simply sending messages to passersby via geofencing, and notifying them of the free WiFi they can enjoy while in your place.

And don’t forget this has its benefits.

vi) It secures your products: Since you can keep track of people’s location with geofencing, it can also be used for tracking your employees and products.

With this technology, you get notified when an employee leaves his/her duty post or when a product is illegally removed.

 

Case Studies From Companies Using Geofencing

The use of geofencing is gradually becoming popular, though it’s a new marketing practice. Good news is, businesses have recorded lots of success with it. Let’s see:

i) Elle Magazine successfully increased sales with ‘shop now!’ mobile pop-up to connect potential buyers to selected stores, using the location-based offer. All thanks to geofencing.

ii) Uber Car Hiring Service also used geofencing at LAX to notify people around that they can get a cab to wherever they’re going within a minute, just with a click.

iii)  Wal-Mart is another brand making it real big with geofencing. Their app comes with a store mode that picks up signals when a buyer is within the store, and delivers coupons and e-receipts.

 

Geofencing Tools

Getting appropriate marketing tools will help you get things done on time and more efficiently. Below are some of the best tools you can use:

i)  xAd: This tool eliminates every form of assumption in marketing, because it serves messages based on your potential consumer’s location.

xAd has a proprietary platform that automatically creates boundaries around places often visited by a consumer. For example, a Restaurant, Shopping mall.

It’s with these insights that marketers can target ads to their customers when they’re within those locations.

ii) Koupon Media: This tool prompts a targeted offer to shoppers when they’re within the store.

Koupon Media has features that study the behavioral attribute of buyers within the geofenced locations, and uses it to present the buyer with offers they can’t resist while they are shopping.
iii) NinthDecimal: This helps marketers to target consumers near their own stores or competitor’s locations, with tangible media ads through phone calls, appointment requests, and couponing.

It also has a walking and driving map to easily lead your customers to your nearest sales point.

 

In Conclusion

“In today’s modern world, people are either asleep or connected.”

– Janice H. Reinold said.

Your customers are attached to their mobile phones all the time. It’s your responsibility to engage these customers when they’re not asleep.

For an app developer or a development team, the biggest moment in their life is to launch the app once all the development task is completed. Do you know that there were only 500 apps in the Apple Store when it all started in 2009? Trust me, you will be surprised by the numbers today in Apple Store and Google Play Store.

So let’s keep it simple – It would have been just a walk in the park a few years back when there were only just hundreds to compete with. Things have drastically changed today and it is no more a joke to grab the top position in the app list. The main reason for this is that with millions of apps out in the market only a few succeed to attract the visitors.

So, all you have to do is to make your pre-launch successful by avoiding certain pitfalls and get all the attention before the app hits the market.

 

1. Failing To Invest in Market Research

You can get some of the valuable insights by researching the important aspects about the category of your app. These insights will help you know what your target audience expects from you. What are the names of other apps? Are they easy to memorize? What are the categories you plan to target? Proper analysis will help you present your target audience with the right app.

To begin with, you can make a list of the important features on the excel sheet about your app as well as from your competitors. You can mention the things like categories, price, device compatibility, and features.

With this analysis, you will get a rough idea about the features you have and what you have missed compared to your competitors.

Another important yet neglected thing is customer reviews. You can get a clear idea about the competitor’s app by getting the good and bad customer reviews. This will help you know what the users like about the app as well as what issues they face while using it.

 

2. Absence of A Feedback Loop

Your development team spend hours on the app to come up with amazing features. The next thing you do is send the app to everyone on your team and ask them to provide you with a feedback, right? But, are they the real users of your app? No, right? Then it is time you go for beta testing to get some unbiased reviews from your target audience.

Look out for your target customers. Once you have them get some as your beta testers. Now make use of every opportunity to engage with them and know what they think about your app. Make sure you reward your beta testers as well as put them on the top of the sign-up list so that they are the first to know about the app release.

iOS apps can be tested on TestFlight before they are released on the Apple Store. You can invite as many numbers of beta testers you want for the task.

 

3. Not Marketing The App Sooner

Completing the development process and then releasing it is definitely an important thing. But then, on the other hand, you need to make sure that the app gets noticed by your target audience too. Most of the app development companies neglect this crucial step when they start with the development process.

Then there are others who opt for marketing strategies at the later stage of app development. Now, this can turn out to be a blunder as your marketing team is supposed to come up with the right strategies to launch the app in the market at the right time.

 

4. Not Using The Pre-Launch Marketing Strategies

As said above you can start the mobile marketing strategies at the earliest. There is no need to wait for the completion of the development process for the same. You can invest a good amount of your time to build some pre-launch marketing strategies like promoting your app on social media or opting for email marketing.

 

5. Not Making Your App A Star Before It Becomes One

Developing an app and then submitting it to the app store is not everything. Simply thinking that you will have better downloads as other apps on the app store is doing well does not make sense.

You will fail to get noticed if you fail to market well. One of the best ways to do it is by creating a landing page for your app on the website and promoting your app there. You can even do the same on other marketing sites.

 

6. Failing To Invest in ASO

For your users to find and download your app they need to find the app on the app store search. So something that is equally important for a successful app launch is opting for App Store Optimization as a part of mobile marketing for your app. Most of the successful apps out there in the app store had a dedicated budget spend on ASO. Some of the key elements that you need to optimise are:

App Name: You can either use a branded name or go for common search terms to name your app. You can even use the combination of the both for the same.

Keywords: First of all look for all the words that relate with your app. Now start choosing the ones that are specific as well as unique to the app. Don’t hesitate to choose the long-tail keywords too. Once you have them start doing the keyword research regularly.

Description: For any app description, the first three lines are very important. So make sure you use them rightly and mention all your key features therein using the right keywords.

As most of the apps get traffic from organic search, keyword optimization can definitely help to achieve that on search results.

 

7. Failing To Set The App Release Date in Prior

We all want the app to be released on the day the last line of code is written but, something more important is to plan the app release in advance and come up with a release date. This will help you get a better press coverage.

Moreover, when you plan an app release date just make sure that it does not coincide with any major release in the tech world as it will take away all the limelight. Moreover, Sunday is the best day for app launch according to TechCrunch. Even if you plan to release your app on any other date there is no issue. Just make sure having a fixed release date will help you build anticipation among the users before the release. You can even ask the experts to preview the app before it hits the market.

 

8. Ignoring The App Store Creativity

When it comes to app development, you take even the smallest thing into consideration, right? You invest good time and efforts on the app icon before you make the launch. You spend hours deciding the icon colour, design, colour combinations and test them from time and again. So when you do so, take some time off your schedule and invest them for some app store creativity too. No doubt, attractive screenshots and appealing videos previews will create the anticipation among the users and help go a long way to increasing conversion rates.

 

9. Ignoring To Get Maximum Through Web Presence

Like any other app developing company, you have put in some efforts and money to plan advertising campaigns to let your users notice it on the app store. But let me ask you that have you tried to get the maximum out of your web presence to increase conversion in the form of downloads? Now, this is something everyone forgets and ignores. So plan out the strategies to create a microsite for your app. You can even take up the option of blogging to spread the word and increase the app visibility in the search results. This will go a long way to get a steady traffic to your app on the app store.

 

10. Failing To Promote Your App On Social Networks

We all are active on social media sites and have even found ways to connect with the target audience there. But have you any time thought about having a special social media marketing strategies to promote your app? If yes, then well and good.

If not, then here is your chance to do so and get the maximum conversion rates once your app is launched.

Offer incentives – We all love it, so your target audience too. In case you are having a gaming app, you can offer extra lives or levels. When it comes to in-app purchases just check out the free things you can give away to promote more downloads. This will also help you get more follows on social media pages.

Give a human touch – Gone are the days when the robotic tone was used to communicate with the audience. So try to find a tone that matches with your target audience. Once your audience will be attracted towards you, they will find it interesting to stay on the app.

Schedule your posts – If you feel that it takes the time to post on social media sites, better start scheduling them. This will save you enough time and will let you have time for other activities.

You can even make use of social media ads to attract your audience and for this, you must first know on which social media site your audience spends more time. So accordingly spread the word about your app through the ads.

 

11. Underrating Reviews And Ratings

Many app developers think that ratings and reviews matter only when the user download the app on their mobile devices and start using it. The fact is that this is not at all necessary. When it comes to the ranking algorithm, ratings and reviews are very important. Moreover, positive reviews about your app will confirm it is beneficial thus increasing the number of downloads.

 

12. Failing To Pitch Your App On Quality Blogging Sites

It is a bitter truth that your app will not get all the attention the moment it is released. One of the main reasons for it is that your app is not talked about by any credible blogger. So waste no time and get it pitched today.

Simply sending an email will not work. You have to take care of certain things to convince the blogger to write for you.

• Keep the email short with all necessary information.
• Let the editor know why he should be working for you.
• Offer them a beta version so that they can use and test the app on their own.
• Try to build a personal connection with the editor rather than simply talk about the app.

13. Thinking PR is Everything

There are a number of developers out there who think that once your app is on MobileMinute, Mashable or TechCrunch you are done. No doubt PR is very important when it comes to implementing marketing techniques, it does not mean that you will be doing fine. If your app is good then it will get better coverage which will help you drive sales. One of the advantages of PR is that it will help you get reviews and comments which you can put in your app description to boost sales.

At the end of the day, something matters is the quality of your app. If your app is good enough you will definitely get great sales.

 

14. Not Concentrating On The Features

Whether it is Google or Apple, they both want quality apps in their app store. But there is one more thing that they want to have in the apps. They want to showcase the best of technology through the apps. If your app focuses on some distinctive features or has some functions that make you use specific keys, they will love your app for sure. Even though it does not guarantee success but it is definitely a wise move.

The app store platform is evolving continuously and so for the same reason, you have to keep yourself updated as marketers. To be safe, just keep these pre-launch pitfalls in mind whenever you plan to launch a new app. You can even create a checklist and make sure everything is tried at different stages. Just remember that every small detail matters when it comes to app marketing.

 

Are you reading this post from a mobile device? I’m certain, considering that 80% of internet users own a smartphone.

Both marketers and consumers begin their web services on mobile. Digital marketers in particular are excited to run mobile campaigns, because they know that mobile users are motivated buyers.

According to Salesforce, “68% of companies have integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy.”

The earlier you start reaching out to them, and solving their problems, the more results you will get in your business.

It’s no secret that building a successful online business has its challenges. One of such is knowing how to interact with potential customers on different platforms and devices.

Not only will you get the best results out of mobile, but a good understanding of how mobile marketing works will put you in total control of your marketing.

Let me get you started with a quick definition.

 

What is Mobile Marketing?

Andreas Kaplan defines mobile marketing as:

“Any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device.”

Wikipedia defines it as “marketing on or with a mobile device”.

Margaret Rouse defines it as:

“As a promotional activity designed for delivery to cell phones, smartphones, and other handheld devices, usually as a component of a multi-channel campaign.”

I define it as marketing for mobile users.

Mobile phones are changing the way your target audience and customers engage with your brand. People visit your website on their phones, open your emails on smartphones, and buy from your store through their phones.

Putting your business right where your customers are – on the go – is what mobile marketing is all about. Any marketing plan today that ignores mobile marketing is a failed plan.

 

A Brief History of Mobile Marketing

The history of mobile marketing links back to the time when the first commercial mobile SMS and shortcodes were launched in 2003.

Pontiac and Nike were the first two brands that launched SMS campaigns in 2005. This was the time when both brands realized that mobile marketing is the future because people were crazy about mobile phones.

By 2007, there were 2.4 billion SMS users throughout the globe. Apple launched its first iPhone in the US and QR codes were incorporated into mobile marketing in 2010, which led to the beginning of a new era in marketing.

By 2011, mobile marketing was a $14 billion dollar global industry.

By 2013, Android and iOS had dominated the market and it’s the time when apps were becoming popular and smartphones were replacing traditional mobile phones.

By 2014, the number of mobile phone users exceeded the number of computer users and people were accessing the internet from their phones.

Today, 89% of mobile time is spent on apps while the remaining 11% is spent on websites. This is the number one reason why 71% marketers say that mobile marketing is core to their business, while 68% brands have integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy.

Brands that lack a mobile marketing strategy must rethink their marketing strategy, because all such brands are losing customers every second.

Why Mobile Marketing?

Why is mobile marketing so important today? You may not fully be aware, but let’s explore some of the reasons to pay undivided attention to it:

1) Reach: When reach is a concern, there’s nothing easier than a mobile phone to reach your target audience. 79% smartphone users reported that their phone is the first thing they check in the morning, and they keep their phone near them throughout the day.

But that’s not all. An average mobile phone user spends 90 minutes a day on their phone, while the US consumers spend as much as 220 minutes a day on their phones. This average time is increasing every day.

There couldn’t be any other easier way to reach your consumers. You can reach them anywhere, anytime, as long as you have a solid mobile marketing strategy in place.

Mobile marketing reaches where other marketing channels simply don’t. So you can come up with a new app idea.

2) Personal: A mobile phone is a personal device. According to a research study, 91% mobile phone users keep their phone within one arm’s reach throughout the day.

When you connect with your consumers through mobile, your brand is put in the same category as the friends and family of the user.

People connect better with brands that establish a one-on-one connection with them,  and there’s nothing better than a mobile phone to build this personal connection.

3) Instant: If you have to send a message instantly to your customers, what medium would you choose?

Research shows that 90% of the text messages are read in less than three minutes,  while in another study it was shown that text messages have 98% open rate.

Mobile marketing doesn’t just have tremendous reach but it delivers the message instantly. Unlike email marketing where response rate is just 6%, text messages have an exceptional response rate of 45%.

Text messages are delivered instantly, are read instantly, and produces staggering results for brands.

4) Mobile ecommerce: Consumers prefer buying from their mobile devices. More than 44% of time spent on the internet is on mobile phones. As much as 78% of mobile phone searches resulted in a purchase.

Mobile commerce is rapidly growing and is expected to dominate ecommerce in the future. Mobile commerce attributes 34% of global ecommerce in 2016, and it’s expected to grow 31% by 2017.

There is no excuse for businesses to still ignore mobile marketing. Or what do you think?

5) Cost-effective: Mobile marketing is extremely cost-effective as compared to other marketing techniques.

For instance, running an ad on TV is way expensive than running a SMS campaign or creating a mobile optimized website. So you’ll make more money in the long run.

6) Customer engagement: Your customers will trust you better if they have a good experience with your brand on their mobile phones. Research shows that 61% of people develop a nice opinion of brands when they do not face any issue visiting the website from their mobile phones.

While 30% of customers will leave your website if it isn’t optimized for mobile.

Mobile optimized website and better mobile marketing strategy will not just increase sales, but you will have a pool of happy satisfied customers who will stick to your brand for years to come.

 

How Mobile Marketing Works

Mobile marketing works similar to other types of marketing. There’s only one difference – your customers use their mobile to find and reach your business.

In a nutshell, you target, connect, and communicate with them through their mobile devices.

Right now, Smartphones, Tablets, and Games Console are the emerging devices that people use to connect to the internet. In fact, 80% of internet users use smartphones.

Your customers are already on mobile, therefore you need to be there. If you aren’t putting your brand in front of them through their mobile phones, your competitors will (most of them will be doing it as you read this).

So let’s briefly look at how mobile marketing works:

i).  Develop a mobile marketing strategy. (discussed below)

ii). Choose a relevant mobile marketing type based on your objectives and business strategy (discussed below)

iii).  Track, analyze, and tweak to the strategy to make it better.

 

How to Develop A Mobile Marketing Strategy

Mobile marketing includes a whole set of activities that are linked to the business strategy and overall marketing strategy. Mobile marketing doesn’t work the same all the time for all the businesses. It varies – it varies a lot.

Here are the steps that brands must stick to in order to make mobile marketing effective:

• Define objectives for mobile marketing
• Define mobile target audience and market
• Go mobile
• Integrate

1) Define objectives for mobile marketing

It begins with a goal, an objective. You can’t go far without it.

Do you want to capture leads from mobile audience? Do you want to run a mobile ad campaign? Do you plan to send coupons to your target audience via text to increase sales in certain geographical locations?

Keep your goals realistic yet challenging.

The campaign by Unilever Hindustan for Kan Khajura Tesan is really an interesting mobile case study. The objective was damn clear and simple:

“With consumers in key regions of rural India lacking access to television and uninterrupted electricity, Hindustan Unilever needed to get creative to earn more share of voice.”

Unilever launched its own mobile entertainment channel which was accessible through a toll-free number.

As a result, the advertisement for three Unilever brands was heard more than 20 million times, and within just six months, Unilever gained 8 million new subscribers with its channel having more than 12 million subscribers.

As long as you have a clear objective, you can get it done with mobile marketing.

2) Define mobile target audience and market

The target market and target audience for your mobile marketing campaign can be same or totally different from your business’s target audience.

Question: How do you tell if it’s the same or different?

Answer:

• Research.

The simplest strategy is to develop buyer personas. Ask questions, conduct surveys and interviews, and create roles.

Google Analytics and Alexa are two nice tools to get started with collecting information about your existing customers.

3) Go mobile

Make your website mobile responsive – if it isn’t already.

Why?

Because when you reach out to your target audience via mobile, they are most likely to visit your website before taking any action.

Not having a website optimized for mobile means you are wasting your money and losing customers. You may even annoy your audience.

More than 57% of customers will not recommend a website to others if they had a bad mobile experience with it. Do you want to irritate your potential buyers or you intend to serve them?

A mobile responsive website isn’t necessary for your mobile strategy, but it has several benefits such as improvement in organic search rankings, reduction in load time, better user engagement, etc.

Irrespective of whether you’re going wild with SMS marketing, app marketing strategies, or mobile ads, your website must be optimized for mobile and must display perfectly on all devices.

4) Integrate

Finally, integrate your business activities with the mobile strategy so your customers get what they expect.

Some 44% of millennials want their favorite brands to maintain a human interaction with them on mobile while another 39% want their brands to have an active social media presence.

Mobile phones are primarily used for socializing. Integrate your social networks, customer support, digital content marketing, and other business activities. Your customers are eager to relate with you via mobile.

Do not disappoint them.

 

Types of Mobile Marketing Strategies

Mobile marketing strategy has different types. The choice depends on the objectives and the overall business strategy.

For better understanding, let’s consider an example. Carl’s Jr. ran a text message campaign in 2013. The Restaurant sent a text message to its customers offering $6 burger for $2.99. The campaign had a whopping 19% redemption rate.

Do you know why Carl’s Jr. use text message strategy and why not any other? Because their objective was to boost sales.

The simple rule is to link your mobile marketing strategy to the business’s objective and then choose the most appropriate type.

Here are some of the types of mobile marketing strategies that you can test:

i) App-based marketing: It’s the type of mobile marketing that uses mobile apps. It can take one of the two forms:

a). App creation

b).  Mobile app ads

Creating your own app is the best choice since 90% of the time on mobile is spent in mobile apps.

Having a dedicated app for your brand has other advantages like:

• Customer engagement
• New channel for marketing and communication
• Brand awareness

The possible downside that restricts businesses from having their own app is its cost. A reliable and professional app will cost you no less than $38K. Though you can have one for $5k to $10K, such an app will do more harm than good. You’re best off either going with a higher end custom developed app, or an app built using a platform like BuildFire for $19/month – $89/month. The middle ground apps, unlike the high end apps and a do it yourself platform like BuildFire, tend not to have a robust backend to support a great customer experience.

What else can small businesses do then?

App mobile ads is basically for running your ads. Google AdMob and Facebook’s promoted post ads are the two leading app ad platforms.

Your ad will be shown to the third-party mobile apps. This is a great technique to send targeted traffic to your landing page.

How about running an app ad campaign for promoting your own app.

The ideas are potentially unlimited.

ii) SMS Marketing: Sending relevant offers to your customers via text is known as SMS marketing. Over 96% of smartphone users use SMS. This shows how powerful this mobile app marketing technique could be – if done right.

With a reach of 98%, you should not ignore SMS marketing.

Just as you capture email address in email marketing, you have to collect the mobile number of interested customers as well. This is the hard part. You have to build a database of interested individuals who have allowed you to send them text messages.

This is the only way it will work for your business.

Domino’s Pizza promoted its Facebook group and increased sales with the help of text messages. The franchise owner and area director, Ryan Swanson, says:

“The sales at the store, when we send text messages, or [use them to] drive people to Facebook, are unprecedented.”

iii) Mobile search ads: How about running a search PPC ad campaign for mobile users. You must have seen mobile ads when searching something from your mobile phone, these are mobile search ads.

These types of ads can be used for several purposes which include:

• Generate leads
• Increase sales
• App downloads
• Website clicks
• Geographical targeting

A mobile search ad campaign can be set up from your PPC ad network such as Google AdWords or Bings Ads. You have to choose mobile ads specifically if you plan to run this type of ad campaign.

According to this study, 68% of users get directions from the mobile search and 50% of people visit a store within a day of their local search from the smartphone.

70% of smartphone users say that call button is important in mobile search ads.

These statistics show how your potential buyers find you on their phones and what they expect from you.

A mobile ad campaign can be best used to share your phone number and give directions to your local store to the people in a specific target location.

You can also do this directly in an app store with Apple search ads.

iv) In-game mobile ad: An in-game mobile ad appears in the mobile game when a user is playing the game or has the game opened. An in-game mobile ad can be a banner ad, a video ad, or an image ad featuring on full screen.

It can take any form.

The global games market is $86.1 billion industry. Gamers love spending money on games.

In-game mobile ads aren’t for everyone. They don’t work for all the niches, so before setting up your ad campaign, make sure you do your homework. Your product or brand must be related to games or gamers.

These ads can be used for creating brand awareness. Showing your brand name multiple times to your target audience in a day will help them remember you.

You have to be smart or should play smart with in-game mobile ads else, it can backfire.

v) QR Codes: QR codes are still mysterious for the fact that the user scanning a QR code from the mobile doesn’t know where it will lead him or her.

A Quick Response (QR) code is a kind of matrix barcode which is a combination of numbers, bytes, alphanumeric, and kanji. It’s used to store data.

The user scans the QR code from the mobile’s camera. The code is scanned and is translated into a URL and redirects the user to the desired website.

The users don’t know where the code will lead them and this is what makes them mysterious. They have to trust the description of the QR code.

Despite the mystery, they are famous among people. iOS users worldwide use QR codes without any hesitation.

Sending traffic to your website isn’t a good idea instead consumers love scanning a QR code if they receive a coupon or discount or a deal. Over 87% of people will scan the QR code to get a coupon.

California is the leading QR code scanner state in the US with 12.5% scans. There are still quite a few states that aren’t very popular in terms of QR codes.

This gives you a nice idea of how to use QR codes and when to use them.

QR stuff (free) and Custom QR codes (premium) are the two best places to get your QR code now. Once you have the QR code, you need to share your offer with the customers.

vi) Mobile image ads: An image ad appears on websites when a user is browsing on their mobile device. These ads are similar to the ads that you see on other websites powered by Google display ads.

Google AdWords is the premium ad network that allows you to set up and run mobile image ads. The ad spending has increased year after year, which shows it’s one of the leading mobile marketing techniques that businesses prefer and still use to this day.

Remember: Mobile image ads can be used for all types of businesses.

vii) Location-based marketing: These are extremely targeted ads which are triggered when the target user is in a specific area, for instance, you can set your ads to trigger when someone is within two-mile radius of your local restaurant.

This mobile marketing type works well for all types of businesses since 88% of smartphone users do a local search from their phones before buying something.

There couldn’t be any better time to show your ad to a user when he/she is actually searching for a product.

Starbucks used location-based marketing back in 2014 successfully. It tracked user location based on their device ID and soon as they are near a Starbucks branch, they received a very personalized ad.

If you receive an ad from any brand, you won’t ignore it, right?

Starbucks saw a whopping increase in its sales. The chances of a user visiting the store increased 100% after seeing a location-based ad.

Customers love seeing location-based ads. According to a study, 67% of smartphone users want to see ads based on their location, whereas 61% smartphone users love seeing ads customized for their immediate surroundings.

Location-based ads don’t just drive sales but they make your customers happy. They love when brands send them customized ads based on their location. Why not take full advantage?

 

Mobile Marketing Best Practices

Mobile marketing shouldn’t be done for the sake of marketing. Your purpose should be to engage with consumers at a personal level. How?

Learn how to promote your app with some of the mobile marketing best practices that have helped businesses all over the world. It’s now your turn to ride on the success bandwagon.

a) Make your website mobile-friendly and link to it: A mobile-optimized website is the prerequisite of mobile marketing. You don’t just need a mobile-friendly website but you must link to your website.

Around 74% of people will return to your website if it works well on mobile.

In another study, it was reported that 61% of users will leave a website if it doesn’t work on mobile. How sad?

If there is one thing that you have to do – make your website mobile-friendly. Period.

Always link to a landing page when you run a mobile marketing campaign because 63% of consumers prefer shopping from their phone and the number is expected to increase in future.

People are in the buying mode when they are using their phones and that is the most appropriate time to send them to a landing page that’s optimized for mobile.

b) Permission-based mobile marketing: There are several definitions of this, but MarketingMag defines Permission-based mobile marketing as:

“Consent from consumers in advance of a continuing marketing dialogue taking place on mobile devices and in return for some kind of value exchange.”

The number one reason why you should go for permission-based mobile marketing is that it leads to better customer engagement, higher ROI, and a better response rate.

It makes sense, right?

Nobody will appreciate your SMS if they don’t know you, your brand, or has never allowed you to send messages. When you are allowed to contact a customer, that’s the point where you will get better response.

It’s a two-stage process:

1. Get consent
2. Database management

Consent

Instead of buying mobile phone numbers in bulk, the best approach is to gain customer consent first. Allow users to share their mobile numbers with you and they should know what the terms of the permission are.

The consent can be obtained on paper, email, website, text message, or over the phone.

Allow them to change and update their preferences and opt out whenever they need.

The procedure to opt out should be available with every message.

Of course, they will not share their personal details with you unless you offer them something of value in return, such as a discount coupon, freebie, or enrollment to exclusive offers.

 

Build A Meaningful Database

In simple words, segment users based on their interest, location, demographics, attitudes, and behaviors.

At the time of obtaining consent, brands do not know much about the users but over time as they create and analyze mobile marketing campaigns, they learn about their subscribers.

Statistics show that 53% of marketers segment subscribers on the basis of their purchase history while 55% segment on the basis of engagement behavior (email, though).

Without segmentation, it will get very hard to send personalized offers, which consumers actually love.

 

Use Geo-Fencing

Geo-fencing or geofencing is a feature that uses GPS and/or RFID to define and track geographical boundaries. A geofence is a self-created radius or area around a specific location such as near a store or a school.

The four circles in the image below show four different geo-fences.

It’s used in location-based marketing where as soon as a person enters a geo-fence, a pre-defined message, ad, or offer will be delivered to the user.

Geo-fencing has several benefits such as an increase in sales, customer loyalty, and brand awareness.

It’s one of the best mobile marketing strategies that improve user engagement and will help to build long-lasting relationships with the customers. Patrick Leddy, CEO of Pulsate, says:

“Physically interacting at the right place and time with immediate value builds loyalty and drives sales.”

Consumers love receiving location-specific offers right on their phone because these are relevant to their location and interest.

Time to get serious about location-based marketing.

 

Create an App For Your Business

The total time spent in apps grew by 63% on Android in just one year. By 2020, the global mobile app downloads will cross 284 billion.

Is your business prepared for the future?

It’s the perfect time to develop an app for your brand. It will build brand awareness and it will increase customer loyalty – because 85% of people prefer an app instead of a mobile-optimized website.

Even if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you can still have loyal customers if you have an app. In any case, an app lets you connect with your customers via mobile throughout the day.

 

Update Subscriber Data

Another important mobile marketing tip stems from updating subscriber data. For an effective and targeted mobile marketing, it’s critical to update subscriber details regularly.

A simple text message asking them to reply with their current location, types of offer they want, etc., will help pull the latest information.

Sending irrelevant offers is a bad idea.

86% of consumers reported that they find it beneficial if they receive relevant and personalized offers on their mobile while they are shopping in the stores.

Your customers expect a lot from you. They want to receive nothing but personalized offers that they are interested in. It feels great when someone is able to read your mind.

 

Google Mobile Ad Extensions

A Google ad extension is an ad format type that shows additional information about your business with the ads. It offers extended information beyond the text ad. These extensions make your ad prominent in the search results on mobile.

There are two types of Google mobile ad extensions:

1. Automated
2. Manual

The automated Google extensions are added automatically, you don’t have to do anything for it. The manual ad extensions are the ones that you have to add yourself.

Here are the different types of mobile ad extensions that should be added manually:

1. Click to call extension
2. Mobile app extension
3. Offer extension
4. Site links extension
5. Location extension

a) Click to call extension: This mobile ad extension makes your phone number clickable. Users can click the number to call you instantly. This extension is helpful for generating leads and sales immediately.

Surojit Chatterjee, Group Product Manager of Global Mobile Search Ads at Google, says:

“When an advertiser uses click-to-call ads with call extensions and location extensions, we see an average CTR increase of 6 – 8%.”

The numbers say it all.

b) Mobile app extension: This mobile extension is similar to the click to call extension. With this extension, you can send interested people to the download page of your app.

You can only link to an app with this extension. You can’t offer other downloadable items such as PDFs. It works best for brands having their own apps or if you’re promoting an app.

According to Google mobile ads blog:

“The mobile app extension gives advertisers a new distribution channel for their mobile apps and users a new discovery medium. Beta participants saw a 6% lift in CTR for campaigns using Mobile App extensions, compared to control campaigns.”

c) Offer extension: This is my favorite extension. It allows advertisers to attach an offer with their ad. The offer is displayed beneath the ad. You can link to redeemable offers such as coupons and instant discounts.

Coupled with location extension (discussed next), it can be a killer. For instance, you can offer a special discount to consumers that are close to one of your stores. The ad will compel people to visit your store to avail the discount.

Increasing sales with offer extension isn’t a big deal. You must target the right people at the right time with the right offer.

d) Site links extension: This mobile ad extension creates links to multiple pages of your site. Users can choose to click on other relevant pages on your site.

Create multiple site links for your ad since Google AdWords shows site links randomly on the location, interest, and query of the user. You cannot choose site links. The best performing site links replace the poor performing ones.

e) Location extension: More than 40% of searches on Google mobile are for local information. This makes the location mobile ad extension something worth trying if your business can take advantage of the local searches.

Let people find you with the location extension and give your sales a nice boost.

 

Mobile Marketing Tools

Access to appropriate mobile marketing tools will help you get things done on time and with perfection. The list has some of the best tools for you.

1. Mobile app tracking by Tune

Tune helps monitor, analyze, and track marketing campaigns with multiple mobile ad networks.

It offers a whole lot of solutions for the marketers such as in-app marketing, app store analytics, marketing intelligence, attribution analytics, and others.

The marketing console is a very powerful tool for mobile marketers.

2. AdMob

The official mobile ad network by Google.

It’s used to monetize apps. Mobile marketers who wish to monetize their apps or who plan to advertise their app within other apps should use AdMob.

3. Localytics

This is a premium mobile app analytics tool that provides a whole lot of features such as real-time analytics, CRM, smart targeting, campaign management, multichannel engagement, and others.

The Localytics works for all types of apps on all networks.

4. Flurry

Flurry helps you analyze, grow, and manage your apps. It has some of the nicest features such as monetization, app comparison, user segmentation, and funnel analysis.

It is a must-have mobile marketing tool for brands that have their own app(s).

5. Mixpanel

Mixpanel can be used for both mobile as well as web analytics. Instead of having different analytic tools for web and mobile, why not use a single tool that does a great job of integration.

You can link mobile and web users and perform analysis such as retention rate comparison and engagement differences.

6. Yelp

This should be surprising.

No, it is not. Yelp receives 72 million monthly mobile unique visitors and 25 million monthly app unique users. Over 74% of searches on Yelp are done on a mobile device.

The moment you devise a mobile marketing strategy, make sure your business is on Yelp.

7. Countly

Countly is an open source mobile app analytics tool. It works for all devices and apps including android, iOS, Windows, and blackberry.

Not just mobile, but it offers web, game, and IoT analytics. It’s an all-in-one analytics tool for businesses.

 

Conclusion

Your customers have mobile phones, never leave them alone.

Janice H. Reinold said,

“In today’s modern world, people are either asleep or connected.”

Make sure when they are not asleep, they are connected with your business. You’re bringing your brand story where they are. Isn’t that great?

Now that you know what mobile marketing is and how it works, I’m certain you’ll use it to grow your business. Will ya?

Do you know how to promote your mobile apps?

What if there are tens of thousands of apps already in your niche, is it still possible to get lots of people to download your app?

Absolutely.

But don’t take my word for it. In this in-depth guide to mobile app marketing, I’ll show you how to build a useful app that people will be quickly download and use.

If you truly want to grab the attention of smartphone users, you need more than a mobile responsive website. You need a mobile app.

With nearly 70% of the global population having a smartphone, you can see that the future of mobile marketing lies with the apps.

The term app is short for “application software.”

The use of apps became in promoting a brand or product became necessary when mobile technology exploded few years ago, with more people using mobile devices to access the internet than desktop.

When this application software lives inside your phone or tablet, it provides seamless access to vital information that a particular website, portal, channel or API offers.

Since May 2012 ComScore have reported that more mobile subscribers used mobile apps to browse the web. In fact, a study by Flurry found that the U.S. Mobile Apps use has grown beyond Web Consumption at 94 minutes a day.

Mobile users love apps because no web address is needed, and all the tedious navigation menu of large media sites are bypassed.

The competition within mobile app developers is high. As I write this guide, more than 1.2 million apps resides on both Google Play store and Apple App Store.

Unfortunately, roughly 700,000 of these apps are considered dead – they’ve never been updated. Specifically, 65% iOS apps, 41% Android apps, and 69% Windows apps are dead.

And since these apps are dead, only few people get to see, download, and use them. It’s wise to always keep your apps updated, and don’t relent on promoting it.

Because it doesn’t matter how powerful and useful your app is, unless you actively market it, it’s as good as nothing.

Before we look at the 31 powerful mobile app marketing strategies to promote your mobile apps, let’s consider the 3-step process:

Step #1: Define The Purpose of Your Mobile App

Do you want to know what customers want in your product?

According to Harvard Business School,

“Marketers should think less about market segments and more about the jobs customers want to do. A Harvard Business Review excerpt by HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen, Intuit’s Scott Cook, and Advertising Research Foundation’s Taddy Hall.”

While validating your idea for an app, bear in mind that unless it’s useful to your target audience – you’ll be wasting time.

To justify the cost of creating a mobile app, you really need to define its purpose. No matter how effective your distribution channel is, if your app isn’t something people need, no one will be interested.

Hence, the purpose of your mobile app must be connected with the value it’ll provide for users.

Yes, you may use your own app, but ultimately you want the target audience to download it. They need it more than you do.

Remember that your mobile app doesn’t have to be out-of-this-world to fulfill a specific purpose.

What your mobile app represents MUST be clear to users. You can make a simple and clear introduction of your app in one sentence.

An example of a kitchen app with a definite purpose is Thyme:

So it’s a kitchen timer, which means that it can help chefs and cooks get more done on time.

Another useful app is Lumosity. It’s an educational mobile app that helps improve brain and IQ. See the purpose in red highlight.

With few exceptions, every mobile app should sync with social media to enable people share useful content or offers with their friends. But that’s not all. It should equally help people understand your brand better – even though you can’t easily measure the impact of your branding.

When you’re armed with this, then you can tell it’s time to design a mobile app that’s precisely targeted to do the job. In other words, the purpose, not the customer, is the fundamental focus of your app.

If you’re going to sell your mobile app, no matter how much you love the customer – nothing happens until you communicate clearly the “reason” why your so-called loved audience should download and use it.

Step #2: Validate Your Distribution Channels

We love mobile apps. There are several reasons why we can’t stop talking about them. I’m sure these 3 reasons will resonate with me:

How did you find your favorite mobile app?

Is it through a friend, from the Google Play store, Apple store, or someone sent you a direct link?

It doesn’t matter how. It’s obvious the app developers and marketers were keen in distributing it. They used the right distribution channels to get the app directly to you.

You should do likewise.

The ultimate measure of your mobile app success is when users find success as they download and use it. Period.

If you’re obsessed with a vision for transforming markets, helping your ideal customers, making real impact in a troubled world with your application software, and you’ve the insights and courage to make your idea a reality, you can’t fail.

Having transformed markets, take a look at Starbucks Weekly Mobile App Transactions. That’s $6 million in the Q2 2014. Mind blowing!

And guess what? It begins when you validate your distribution channels.

MaRS defined distribution thus:

“Distribution refers to the process of getting your product into the hands of your target customer, whether that is an individual consumer or a business user. Entrepreneurs need to identify effective distribution channel(s) to reach their target customer.”

Notice that knowing whether or not your mobile app will be a success isn’t connected to the customer, but the purpose.

As mobile use continues to grow 58% year over year, it’s your duty to identify the distribution channels that are bringing in these results.

Copywriters can relate with this. As a copywriter, you may recall that when writing product benefits, you’re not necessarily looking to understand whether or not the customer will like it.

What you’re concerned about are the “needs” or “questions” which they’re asking. Providing answers to them is what sets your copy apart from others.

To successfully market your mobile app, you need to validate your distribution channels.

But what does this mean exactly?

Well, I thought you should know by now.

Anyways, you already know that not all channels are created equal. For example, Facebook is a distribution channel, Twitter is, and so is Pinterest and LinkedIn.

In other words, any website or platform that allows you to promote your application software is a channel.

But here’s the fact:

All these distribution channels may not be ideal for your app marketing. You see, if your app is business-related, then I’m sure LinkedIn will play a big role – because there are more business people on the platform.

Facebook and Twitter are great too, but you have to filter thoroughly to find the right audience. With LinkedIn, you may not need filters.

Need more evidence?

Okay, let’s me illustrate with a concept you already know.

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay didn’t build the platform for the “auction psychographic.” Instead, he built the platform so that people can sell personal items easily.

What about Facebook? Well, if I’m wrong, correct me. But I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg developed the social site for the purpose of PPC advertising. He wanted to create a portal where people can connect with other people. Simple.

In like manner, Google was developed for the purpose of finding relevant information, not for those who love to search.

In validating the distribution channel, you’ve got to know what a particular site that you intend to promote your app stands for.

Doing so will help you produce and position your ad copy, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and more.

Step #3: Choose Your Revenue Model

Yes, you can make money from your mobile apps.

For example, In a post at Bluecloudsolutions.com, Carter Thomas shared a case study of how he and his team members built an app business from zero to $70,000 per month.

Okay, I get it: you may not earn that much, but even if your app brings in $10,000+ per month, it’s worth it.

Everyone looks for inspiration. It could be an inspiration for the day, for the week, a month or the one that lives with you 365 days a year.

In like manner, the motivation to continue with mobile marketing will fizzle out if you don’t have a source of income.

Even if you’re generating income from other sources other than the app, there’s a prestige that comes when you know that your project, product or idea is worth it – and people are actually eager to pay for it.

Unfortunately, many app developers have sleepless nights trying to choose the right revenue model. Don’t get me wrong: not all apps are developed to make money. This usually happens:

• When your app is borne out of your hobby. You’re doing it for fun.
• If you want to promote a “premium app” with this free one. It’s totally fine.

Apptamin has done a great job at clarifying the different app revenue models:

I’m particularly intrigued with the “Free + in-app purchases” revenue model. This month alone, I’ve spent $85 already to buy upgrades for my favorite action games. And I’m not compelled to do it – it seems necessary that I do it.

If you ask me, I think you should seriously consider this approach when monetizing your app.

Don’t make people see you as a desperate marketer. Instead, offer them valuable features for free, but give the option to upgrade if they like the app.

Do mobile apps make money?

Well, data doesn’t lie. At Google I/O, the largest Android developer conference, Google said that 150,000 developers are responsible for over 800,000 apps on its platform.

Although Google didn’t state the revenue numbers on their apps, recent data in their financial filings point somewhere around $900 million in pay-outs to developers “over the last 12 months.”

More so, here are Key App Revenue Statistics from Statista:

• Total app revenues are projected to increase from $45,37B in 2015 to $76.52B in 2017

• Paid-for app revenues growth forecast for 2017 – $1,95 billion

• In-app purchase revenues will grow to $28,9 billion by 2017

• The in-app purchase share of the total app revenue is projected to hit – 48.2% in 2017

• Apps contribution projection to overall iTunes revenue will hit 20% by the year 2020

And here’s the chart:

One of the core reasons why monetizing an app is easier than a website is because of its two-way communication approach.

Yes, a mobile app allows a digital connection between user and the brand so that both parties can connect, communicate and share thoughts with each other.

For example, if I download your app on my iPhone or Tablet, you can send me direct messages and I can respond.

You can even alert me of latest offers, discount codes, or new features and when I take advantage of them, you’ll know.

Through the GPS feature in mobile apps, an app developer can know exactly where users are downloading from and how they use the apps.

A website isn’t a two-way communication channel. Except you’ve live chat features and other interactive components.

Customers are obligated to visit your website to know what you’ve in store for them. Application software (i.e., mobile apps) are not like that – there’s no need to visit the business website. The app provides all the answers.

With this brief explanation, you can see the potentials of your mobile app. If you decide to monetize today, you’ll make extra income to support your business.

That being said, let’s explore the 31 powerful strategies to market your mobile apps and get significant results:

1. Take Great Screenshots of Your App Interface

It’s no longer a news that mobile apps are great for boosting your customer engagement and branding.

Since a lot of people now use the internet like never before, apps for mobile devices shouldn’t be option, but a necessity.

A 2013 survey confirmed that 48% of people around the world can’t check their emails and lots of other things without a mobile app.

Fortunately for you, you’ve succeeded in creating your business app, designed to help satisfy customers with their daily activities. You’re filling the gap. Be happy about that, because without your mobile app, people will find it difficult to live a happy life.

This tells you that your target audience are willing to download your app, only if they know about it.

And a good way of attracting them is by showcasing what your app can offer. Take great snapshot of your app interface, just like the one shown below.

Once your screenshots are ready, pin them to your Pinterest boards, share on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and use them on your blog.

Visuals are powerful ways of letting your audience have a clue of what they stand to get with your app.

2. Do App Store Optimization to Get More Downloads

It’s no longer about building your business app, but how to get them to your target audience.

A recent statistic by Appfigures shows the high population of mobile app in the three mobile app leading stores.

The competition can be scary, especially for beginners who are just starting out in app marketing.

How sure are you that your app will be seen in the midst of hundreds of thousands of other apps?

This has been a general problem among mobile app publishers. With more than 1.5 million mobile apps in the mobile store currently, getting yours a better visibility,  though a tedious task, is very important.

And with search being the most common starting point for mobile research, it’s important that your app ranks highly for its primary keywords and key phrases.

As much as you can, make sure you use the main keyword that you want to rank for in the app title. For example, if you want your mobile app to show up on Apple Store, assuming that your main keyword is “flight booking,” then your app’s title should flow in this direction:

• Flight Booking App
• Hush Flight Booking
• Quick Flight Booking

It doesn’t have to be exactly these titles. But you know what I’m talking about.

An effective app store optimization (ASO) allows you to attract more users and get a lot of downloads, all you need is to know your target customer base, and keywords they are searching for.

Use these keywords on the title, description, and on the tags.

A report by Forrester revealed that 63% of apps were found via app store search.

Remember that app search optimization isn’t limited to the keywords alone. You also need to promote your mobile apps as well.

Share the link on relevant discussion boards, give the app away so that authority sites can send you backlinks. Share on social media to garner some social signals, too.

3. Use Guest Blogging to Promote Your App

Guest blogging is as old as blogging itself, but it’s very effective. For example, GrooveHq, a digital marketing company that offers help desk solutions generated over 1 million people by guest blogging.

Take a look at the huge traffic from guest posts:

You may not get 1 million downloads on your apps through guest blogging, but you’ll definitely attract tens of thousands of new app users.

You just have to get serious with guest blogging. It’s a lot of work.

The mobile app industry is one hell of a competitive zone, with more than 1.5 million developers.

Despite the difference in areas of specialization, they all strive for one thing – recognition.

Guest blogging is a form of inbound marketing. Therefore, build your app visibility with inbound marketing, and trounce your competitors.

A recent post by Ryan Ghods on HubSpot revealed that 93% of companies using inbound marketing have generated more leads.

Inbound marketing can be done in so many ways, but guest blogging happens to be the most effective.

You want to know why?

Well, guest blogging provides a situation whereby the blog owner gets valuable content, and the guest blogger gets access to a new audience. It’s a win/win for both parties.

If you wish to gain authority, qualified traffic, relevant links, leads and sales in your business, you need to start guest blogging today.

Though it’s not a short cut, extra effort is required to create creating engaging content, which has been the major challenge for most most B2B marketers.

But if you’re able to come up with an engaging content, relevant to your product/services – you won’t only increase your chances of generating more leads from your guest posts, but also from search engines – even as your posts begin to dominate organic search for long-tail keywords.

You also get links pointing to your mobile app’s page or app review page on your blog.

According to Moz, search engines like Google rewards blog that have trusted and relevant backlinks.

A lot of people believe that since Google Play Store is owned by Google, it means that you could get more app downloads and subscribers if you optimize for keywords and build links.

Because the same rules that apply for organic search rankings seem to apply in app optimization as well.

I trust you’ll start guest blogging right away. Will you?

4. Hire Mobile App Marketing Agencies

You’ve just completed a successful app design and development. And now you’re faced with marketing challenges.

Though you’ve tried integrating lots of marketing strategies, but still haven’t seen any improvement on app downloads or in-app sales.

You’ve millions of people ready to download your app. Statista estimated that global app downloads will surpass 100 billion in 2016.

Is it possible for an app to get drowned and not enjoy a slice of this downloads?

Absolutely.

But don’t feel bad about it.

There’s is good news.

You can hire a mobile app agency to support you.

A mobile app marketing agency is a company that specializes in helping business owners get their apps to their target audience. They have got the right networks, expertise, and tools to promote your mobile app.

You could make do with these agencies:

• Pulse Mobile
• AMA: App Marketing Agentur
• On The Mob
• GameBerry
• M&C Saatchi Mobile

With the increase in mobile usage, especially for accessing the web, rooting yourself deeply into it will definitely boost your mobile downloads.

It’s now a clear statement that companies should also be driven by mobile-first  approach, and not just building mobile presence.

This is why you need a mobile app marketing agency, instead of depending on your in-house efforts.

In order to attain a great success, you need to leverage on what other agencies have built over the years. Relying on a trial and error method will waste your time, energy and money.

But by hiring a mobile app marketing agency, you can rest assured that your app marketing is in the hands of professionals.

5. When You Launch, Make It Big

It’s obvious that mobile app is the trending item nowadays. Companies of different kinds and sizes are now embracing mobile marketing.

That’s good news.

Because it’s the direct result of growth in mobile technology, and consumers wish to remain connected on the go – and spending more time on mobile apps.

As the mobile app market has increased dramatically, it’s very important to have your brand’s presence on this platform.

Having developed your app, bringing it to your audience is very important. That’s why you don’t just have to launch it, but make it BIG.

Get the right tools, promote the app, send press releases, leverage social media marketing, and if your app is truly awesome (and it should), you could launch a kickstarter campaign to get more traction.

Why not?

It’s not so difficult to get the downloads rolling in on the launch date. Get the attention of your target audience by sending out a newsletter, and hit virtually every part of social media.

Below is a statistic showing the  number of seconds spent on links by various social media referral sources:

The above statistic should also serve as a guide – letting you know which social media platform is best for building momentum with your app.

You and your team should devote time in hyping your product prior to the launch. First impression matters a lot. The first wave you put in move gives you insights on how best to adjust your hype – if there is need.

6. Maintain The Hype: Get a Steady Stream of Review Websites to Cover Your App

Launching a successful app into the various platforms may sound easy, but it’s actually complicated. The most disappointing aspect is not getting people to download the app.

One of the ways to inspire people that your app is right for them, is through online reviews. According to Search Engine Land, “72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from real people.”

With the level of mobile app market currently, consumers are mostly after apps that can help resolve their problems, and make internet use easier and fun.

Unfortunately, as most app developers rejoice as they see hundreds of their apps downloaded, the rate at which users uninstall apps is huge.

A recent statistic by Apsalar shows the global average uninstall rates of app over time.

I’m sure you wouldn’t want your app to be one of them.

Get a steady stream of review websites to talk about your app.

Even after the launch still maintain the hype. Keep promote your app and the results will overwhelm you.

When reviews sites talk about your mobile apps, it positions your app where the right audience can find it. It also helps to improve your organic search rankings as a result of the review ratings and stars.

A post by Adrien Montcoudiol that shows how to grow your mobile app user base, made it clear that description and review has optimum effect on mobile app marketing.

7. Design And Share Interesting Infographics

Mobile app marketing has become a resourceful means of growing revenues for most marketers. In fact, mobile apps have led to increase conversion rates for these brands, according to Bob Bentz.

Yes you can grow your app visibility and increase downloads by designing and promoting your app idea or topic through infographics.

This can be done by finding events and topics related to your app features, and developing interesting data points on them.

Research has found that man has a shorter attention span, and information presented in visual is easily absorbed by the human brain.

Does infographics work?

Yes the do. Don’t you need proofs?

Okay, in 2010 when Neil Patel started releasing infographics on the KISSmetrics blog, they generated an additional 2,512,596 visitors and earned 41,142 quality backlinks.

In 2012 Copyblogger published an infographic titled 15 Grammar Goofs.

It’s unbelievable, but till date, that infographic alone has generated 6,000+ tweets, 49,200+ Facebook likes, 1,700+ LinkedIn shares, 1,700+ Google+ shares, a gargantuan 176,500+ pins and well over 230 comments.

I could go on and on to show you countless case studies from brands that have successfully used infographics to grow their business.

These examples, though not related to mobile apps marketing shows how powerful infographics can be.

If you want to use infographics to promote your apps, make sure that your content is closely-related to the app features (and benefits) and you must promote it as well so you can get consistent backlinks and viewers.

8. Apply For App Awards

Does your app stand a chance of standing out from the rest?

Data from Statista shows that Apple’s app store being one of the most prominent mobile app store gets more than a thousand apps published per day.

You can increase your chances of getting a better visibility among millions of apps in the app store, by engaging in a contest.

Apply for app awards such as BMA, and lots of other app awards, to get your app internationally recognized if you eventually win.

Of course you’ll have to strive to emerge the number #1. That’s the best way to enjoy multiple benefits like exposure, feedback and credibility. No doubt it’s a good app marketing strategy.

A statistic by Data Charts reveals that 33% of apps recommended by people gets downloaded.

9. Resolve Negative Reviews Promptly

There are lots of apps out there, about 1.5 billion in the Apple Store and 1.6 billion on Google Play.

You can see the consumers have to be smart when choosing an app to download.

Yes, every company wants their app to be downloaded, installed, and used. But how many of these companies are ready to resolve negative reviews promptly?

A case study commissioned by ITR  to identify the reason for the high rate of uninstalled app shows the following:

Obviously, the chances that your app will be uninstalled is high. That’s why you need to put every users’ complaints into consideration.

Remember that a loyal customer today could switch to another brand as a result of unresolved complaints. Tell me, who wants to lose a loyal customer?

Several studies have found that it takes 7x more to acquire a new customer than to retain already existing ones. User acquisition is obviously crucial, but retention is equally important.

Treat your customers like kings. Because they are.

And don’t forget that customers who complain are more likely to make a purchase, and use your service again if their reports are properly resolved.

10. Contact Adminds of Related Facebook Groups to Mention Your App

Let the world know about your app.

Using Facebook to achieve this is a great strategy, since Facebook is the most frequently used social media platform on a daily basis.

Despite its popularity, most marketers are yet to fully utilized all the features of this social media site, like the Facebook groups.

A Facebook group is easy to create, but it can help you build up a business and grow your fan base.

You should leverage on this Facebook feature, and get your app much bigger exposure.

Contact admins to related group to mention your app in their groups. You could offer the incentives (e.g., free apps download, discounts).

To learn more, see this guide:

• How To Network with Facebook Groups
• How to Use Facebook Groups to Get More Traffic and Traction for Your Blog

11. Consider Offering a Promotional Price

When it comes to marketing as a whole, several studies have proven that customers are more likely to make purchase when offered promotional offers.

You can entice your customers with promotional offers. Though it might look like you’re losing money – but it pays to build a loyal audience first, before cross-selling or upselling them.

The power of promotional offers is magical. When customers get things for free or at a discounted price, they’ll feel obligated to your brand, use more of your products and services and eventually tell others about their offers.

All these you stand to gain when you give away promotional offers.

And it’s more like creating awareness for your app, which is very effective when you’re looking for more downloads.

12. Promote Your App Graphics on Pinterest

Are you leveraging Pinterest yet?

With Pinterest, you can share irresistible graphics, discover new interests by pinning images or videos to boards. You can also browse what others have pinned.

Pinterest is developed to handle visual content only. So you’re on track to promote your app graphics on this platform if you make up your mind right now.

Discovering your app among millions of apps in the app store is the biggest challenge of marketers. But you can make a difference by sharing your mobile app graphics with others.

If you’re tight on budget and you’re looking for an inspired audience, Pinterest is best for you.

Fishes only thrive in water.

Your app graphics may not thrive in other social media sites, but it’s a huge chance of going viral on Pinterest. It’s a good place to promote and advertise your app graphics and related images.

Here’s an example:

Pinterest has one of the most active social media users. These users are passionate about visuals. It’s like they’re trained to respond to these images willingly.

Interestingly, these people are ardent shoppers.

A Report from Sprout Social stated that 93% of Pinners shopped online in the past 6 months.

By sharing your mobile app graphics on Pinterest, you’ve the opportunity to network with your industry peers as well as potential customers.

13. Know Your Audience And Recruit Them Manually

Where do you customers hang out?

Discussion boards. Blogs. Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. Reddit. You just name it.

The moment you become aware of where they spend their time at, it’s your responsibility to get into the conversation. It’s high time you know your audience. Don’t promote your app blindly.

Ask yourself this question, “who do you think will be needing your mobile app and where do they visit to ask questions?”

I just thought about…

Quora.

You can connect and communicate with a lot of your target audience on Quora – the best and most popular Question & Answer social networking site.

Once you have known who your audience is, and where they hang out to discuss pressing issues, it’s time to start creating awareness of your mobile app.

Answer questions related to your topic – it doesn’t have to be particularly relevant to my app.

As much as you can, woo as many of your interested audience to your mobile app’s page or website and build relationship with them.

14. Run a Contest

Using contests can skyrocket your mobile apps business. In addition to getting user-generated content, contests quickly help people answer the question, “what’s in it for me?”

A study conducted by Buffer showed that 35% of Facebook fans liked Facebook pages specifically to compete in contests. Contests obviously nudges people to enter it.

In fact, In Buddymedia’s report, we found that contest-related words like winner, win, entry, contest, enter and promotion seems to engage users more.

Running a contest, especially on social media is a wake-up call for people who have always desired to promote your content – but couldn’t find the best possible way.

People will promote your app on their own private social media channels, especially if the contest involves the need for votes.

When entrants post their content on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, it’s an endorsement of your personal brand.

Shoeboxed Messy Desk Challenge is a perfect example of a contest. The company asked entrants to send a of their messy desk.

Shoeboxed devise a strategy and promoted the messy desks on its Messy Desk Gallery and Pinterest Board.

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What’s the reward?

The focus is on the messiest desk. The entrant that sends it would receive an iPad mini with the Shoeboxed app installed. Isn’t this relevant to app marketing?

The result:

Shoeboxed received well over 200 messiest photos within 48 hours of making the contest live. What’s more? The press release that was sent out garnered 155 quality links, too.

You could even give away products that you offer for sale on normal days, as a reward to get more people to enter your contest. The reward doesn’t have to be a mobile app download alone.

How about a great meal?

It’s time to maximise your presence in social media platforms, by running a contest, that challenges people to enter and tell their friends to do same.

Contests are great for marketing your mobile app and giving it that initial boost that will increase its chances of going viral.

15. Create a Facebook Group

Contact Facebook groups’ admins to mention your mobile app is great. But how about creating your own Facebook group?

Why not create the group on LinkedIn, rather than Facebook?

Well, here’s why we recommend Facebook:

Massive audience!

I guess that’s exactly what you’re looking for, right?

What you need do is – gather like-minded people and build a community. Don’t make the mistake of promoting your mobile app at every given opportunity.

On the contrary, answer questions, create interesting and rich content, and only recommend or talk about your app when necessary.

When people are engaged, you know you’re ready to use your group to market your business.

If your mobile app is related to “Running” then create a Facebook group that unites Runners under one umbrella.

As these people socialize and feel important, they’ll convert into app users or customers.

16. Leverage Push Notifications Marketing

What are Push Notifications?

Here’s how Urbanairship.com defines it:

“A push notification is a message that pops up on a mobile device. App publishers can send them at any time; users don’t have to be in the app or using their devices to receive them.”

And there are several types of these push notifications that you can use, both for eCommerce, mobile marketing, and digital marketing in general.

With Push Notifications, your app can notify a user about your new update, post, event, and more, though the user may not be actively using your app.

For instance, if a user is using Android device, your logo appears on the status bar immediately the device receives a push notification.

Does that sound strange?

See, you have to know that technology is advancing at the speed of thought –  marketers, entrepreneurs, large, and small businesses are on the lookout for opportunities like this – to supercharge their business.

Push notifications work. In fact, this study reported that it produces a 97% response rate.

Technology today is simplifying the way people live, do business, and travel. You don’t want to be left behind. Do you?

As a marketer, you can decide to send push notifications to your target audience or selected group of people.

Read what David Cheesewright, Wal-Mart International President and CEO said about technology:

“Wherever we operate, everything starts with the customer, and I see customer’s shopping habits changing more rapidly than I can remember.”

He added…

“Customers are shopping more online, with mobile devices, and they really like convenience. If our customers changes fast, we have to change even faster if we want to continue to exceed their expectations.”

Some elements to ensure that push notifications yield results:

• Title: It shows push notification sender.
• Icon: It shows the symbolic identity of the sender.
• Text: It shows the message of push notifications with the first 60 characters if it’s  iOS banner and 45 character If it’s an Android banner.

If your Push Notifications notify “a-user-using-another-app” of your message, the tendency of the user closing the message is high – unless the message is compelling.

17. Use QR Codes

QR Code is one powerful technology for marketing our mobile apps. Here’s what each letter stands for:

• Q – Quick
• R – Response

To use QR Codes, you must have smartphone equipped with camera, QR code reader, or scanner application feature. New smartphone types available today often have an app pre-installed on them from the factory.

And how will QR codes help you promote your app?

A QR Code scans A smartphone’s camera scans a QR code to reveal codes, passwords, websites, and other essentials.

These codes are great marketing tools for today’s business. It can help bring your mobile app to limelight.

The illustration below shows you the basic steps required to scan a QR Code:

When you’re ready, you can generate QR codes from goqr.me.

18. Take Advantage of Mobile Advertising

Mobile advertising has redefined how business market their business.

Trust me, it can only fail when you have an ineffective strategy and use a wrong approach. When your approach is not workable with your specific campaign goal, it’s bound to fail.

A report from Yahoo! Inc. states that Tablet, a mobile device is the Number #1 contender for screen dominance.

Infact, 20.3 million tablets grew to 82.1 million by 2015. iPad, a family of tablet also received growth in sales by 36% in US alone.

Mobile is a fertile ground for digital product promotions, especially your mobile apps.

Don’t believe me, read the report from IAB yourself.

This successive growth year after year is phenomenal. Mobile advertising is the right place to advertise and promote your digital product and services.

Therefore, take the advantage of mobile marketing growth rate, effectiveness and dominance to project your app to your target audience.

19. Feature The App in Your Emails

In content marketing, it’s expected that you post, update, and send newsletters to your target audience for branding and building stronger customer relationship

Do you by any chance know the power of email marketing?

A study by Email Monday found that email delivers ROI of 3800%, and 83% of B2B and B2C marketers use email marketing.

That’s why it’s very necessary that you keep growing your email list. Create an avenue to inspire audience to subscribe to your newsletter.

As you send newsletter, updates, and post, feature your apps in your emails so that your target audience can become aware, and make attempts to download, install, and use your app.

An app that’s invisible to users can never get popular or generate income.

It’s a smart choice to make your customers get used to your app, they will download and install it someday.

But make sure you keep them updated on what’s going on with your mobile apps. Give your app the exposure it deserves – through emails.

Already, 82% of marketers are leveraging email marketing technology to grow their business.

20. Consider Alternative App Stores

The fight for visibility is getting messier. The duo: Google Play store for Android and Apple App Store for iOS, are the most popular app stores.

More so, they’re the biggest distribution outlets for mobile apps.

App store users are in their millions according to a report from mobyaffiliates.

What do you expect?

Popular app stores are extremely competitive.

You need to look for alternatives. They may not be as popular, but you can quickly dominate the front page or category pages with your app.

The competition isn’t too intense in these alternative app stores. It’s practically possible to grow visibility faster.

These apps stores offers a lot of benefits for marketers, and they’re starting to gain new grounds as strong app marketing and distribution channels.

Some of the app stores that you can try are:

• slideme.org
• apps.opera.com
• appslib.com
• appbrain.com

21. Take Advantage of SEO For Your App Review Pages

The question you should be asking yourself is, what makes content rank highly in the organic search listings?

Remember that if you rank at #1 in Google’s first page, your app review web pages can drive up to 35% of the entire first page traffic.

Until you’re able to clearly answer that question, you’ll be going in circles without making headway.

One of the effective ways to rank your app review pages in Google top organic results pages is by optimizing your primary keywords.

When writing your app reviews, feel free to use long-tail keywords, but avoid keyword stuffing. Provide value, and increase your chances of being selected from app store as a viable search result.

There is need for you to write a review that defines and describes what your app does to your target audience. In your app’s review, obey SEO rules and you’ll generate more traffic and increase your app downloads.

No matter how vast mobile marketing is going, organic traffic can never be ignored. The No. 1 driver of traffic to content sites is still Google search.

22. Create Irresistible App Icon

After designing your App icon, can you boldly say, “I am happy with my end product?”

Designing an app icon that users can’t ignore is hard. You must be good at what you do to create an icon that represents your app well.

It’s often said that “first impression matters.” What comes to mind when you see these brand icons?

Humans are visual creatures. People are drawn towards beautiful visuals. That’s why we gaze at good houses or cars and appreciate them.

We are irresistibly drawn beauty. Therefore, designing an icon that speaks and represents your app should be the first step to promoting your app. And it has to be done well.

Consider the shape and size, the color, avoid irrelevant wordings, incorporate borders.

Funny enough, looking over your competitor’s app icons would be a smart decision you can make to kick off. Here are 5 Steps to Designing the Perfect Icon for Your Mobile App.

23. Begin Marketing Within Your Mobile App

State the problem your app solves. The solution your mobile app offers in clear terms make it easily discoverable by your target audience or customers.

Your mobile app marketing can be enhanced via the following:

i). Be helpful. In garnering attention initially, focus on helping people with their questions. Don’t be overly promotional. It doesn’t work.

It’s important to search for users who have a problem you can help them with, give advice and other assistance as much as you can. And your app downloads will flow in naturally.

ii). Focus on one user per time. When you’re able to attend to a user satisfactorily, the person is bound to tell another, and your app marketing can make do with such word-of-mouth.

The multiplying effect of this practice can birth a small group of users of your mobile app. Make sure to keep them engaged.

Keep the conversation open, promptly attend to their questions, listen to their feedbacks etc.

iii). Offer trial versions. In a bid to obtain your potential app users data, it’s important to offer trial versions of your mobile app that are free. This is one way to get them to sign up for a paid plan when the trial period elapses.

iv). Promote your app yourself. Use your app name as your bio on the different social media forums where you have active accounts.

And also try to provide answers to people’s questions across other discussion forums like Reddit, Quora, etc. That way you’re seen as a go-to authority, and your mobile app will be most desired.

v). Build your subscriber list. Above all, make sure you continually capture email address and grow your list. This makes it possible for you to send your mobile app marketing updates across to a good number of people.

In addition, encourage your app users to leave a rating on app stores. People like mobile apps, and can easily do this once they’re satisfied.

24. Make Your App Visibile Online

Social media is the lifeblood of your mobile app marketing. Don’t ignore it.

To make the most of social media, you need a deliberate, actionable plan. Mashable is a good case study.

This is how you can engage people via social media to improve your app online presence:

i). Engage your community. Go beyond just having a profile on Facebook, LinkedIn etc., to creating groups. It’s not just a way to build a community of like-minded people, but the best way to improve your app branding.

ii). Create and share interesting content. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, content that’s visually enhanced is compulsory.

There are tools that can help you produce the compelling content. Tools such as Canva, Pictaculous, Slideshare.net, and so forth should never be ignored.

Actively take part in discussions and comments on interesting content.

iii). Connect with your circle. Keep your Google+ circle members updated on your most recent mobile app launch, feature, or giveaway, every step of the way, and on time.

iv). Make contributions to other online conversations. Don’t sound promotional when you answer questions, or give valuable comments on forums. Remember that you’re indirectly building your online reputation.

That being said, your app stands a good chance to be selected for awards, if and when you do apply for these awards.

There are a lot of organizations that give prizes to new and inventive applications for their capability, composition, and more. An example is the Webby Awards.

25. The Unique Aspects of Your App Must Be Consistenly Emphasized

Who cares about your mobile app?

All your potential mobile app users care about is the problem it can help them solve. Therefore, state state the unique solution that you app brings clearly. This way, you’ll attract even more users.

Getting on, your mobile app is better off with personalized logo stamp and a slogan.

Use wallpaper layouts and posters that your mobile app users will love. Share among those who will actually care to put these wallpapers up. What a great way to promote your app?

Carefully choose your app’s caption and keywords. They’ve been tested to boost your mobile app rankings in specific categories, which is one reason why you need to get it right with app store optimization.

There are contests often organized by companies involved with mobile app discovery services. Apply and get involved.

Try and partner with another app or developer. Take turns promoting your apps. It establishes you as a reliable team member, and a worthy team player.

26. Your App Message Must Be Tweetable

Why twitter, you may ask?

Most of your influencers are probably more on this social media channel.

Within the top 100 global brands, 42 of these brands have top-level marketing executives with Twitter accounts. Twitter proves to be a far better social media platform for your mobile app marketing.

In all of your conversations, especially when you use hashtags, make sure you include links to your app website, blog, and social media channels as many times as possible.

Your mobile app campaigns can be effective offline as well. It only require a high concentration of your target customers. All you need do is show up with solutions that are relevant to their needs per time.

27. Reach Out to Your Mobile App Influencers via Email

Email marketing has much more potentials than what the average mobile marketer can make of it.

This is true, especially where your emails are optimized and segmented, your mobile app marketing has a greater chance of yielding a significant ROI

You can also influence your local community. Assuming the solution your mobile app provides is targeted to address a localized problem, consider a local mailout.

There are a handful of strategies to reach out, in order to make the most of such local influence. This includes the following:

i). Organize a challenge. Let your audience know how they can participate, in order to complete a certain task or tasks and tag themselves with hashtags on social media platforms.

This defines your mobile marketing as trendy, which can go beyond the roofs like the messy desk contest we talked about earlier (still remember?).

It’s easy to replicate the success of Shoeboxed. It all boils down to rewarding your contestant’s effort publicly.

ii). Giveaways have become easy. Your mobile app marketing can take advantage of giveaways, to gain traction.

People love free stuff, which is now quite easy to generate with the assistance of the likes of Rafflecopter, PunchTab, et al.

Also discounts and cheaper prices on certain days can pay off big time for your mobile app marketing – but remember to let your mobile app users know via push notifications, and your email newsletter.

iii). Prior users of your mobile app should be engaged again. Not only would you succeed in regaining the trust of your app users but retain their loyalty. Thanks to Google’s engagement campaign strategy, Facebook mobile advertising, and more.

iv). Pitch for speaking engagement. Make efforts to land public speaking engagements. Your mobile marketing can benefit so much from the audience, and immeasurable support.

Though an opportunity to share your wisdom at conferences, panel discussions, and exhibitions, don’t forget it’s more about the problem that your app can solve, not about the users you want.

28. Develop an Accompanying App Video

Add a video intro to your mobile app.

Of course, you need to do this with caution because a video becomes an option when your app has proven effective on other channels or formats.

A survey conducted by Spectrecom Films showed that, “73% of respondents find videos helpful when making purchase decisions online.”

That taken, you’re bound to spend a lot of money to produce a video for your app. This may not be very convenient especially when your mobile app has changed several times since its launch. Take a look at Sandwich Video.

Create a YouTube channel for your videos. Post interesting content regularly, from series, development updates to industry news, and more.

Given YouTube’s popularity, your mobile app marketing videos can be a part of over one billion daily views from mobile devices.

In addition to your channel, your mobile app marketing can take advantage of podcasts. Your mobile app should emphasize on the problem you solve and how you solve it. Fizzle is a good case study.

But don’t be limited by podcasts. You can leverage slide presentations as well.

Your mobile marketing Slide Presentations can help someone start a project. So start creating slideshare presentations, and increase your app downloads today.

29. Prove Your Expertise by Starting a Blog

A blog is no longer a personal diary as we know it.

Truth is, you can prove your expertise through blogging and effectively market your mobile app. There are so many success stories to that effect.

For one, you can generate even more leads (in this case, app downloads) from your blog. [source]

The more you create content related to a particular subject or topic, you’re positioned as an expert.

And if you write about topics that are closely-connected to your mobile app, you’ll increase engagement and downloads.

Is a blog really that importantly?

Yes, it is. According to HubSpot, companies that blog consistently generate 88% more leads per month than those that ignore blogging.

In addition to starting your own blog, you should guest blog for other industry blogs and share your mobile marketing skills.

Use your author bio to link back to your app page. You can send guest post pitches to tech blogs, and create useful content for their audience.

Connect with other writers in your niche. This is one effective technique a handful of good writers use.

A writer who is interested in your niche can write about your mobile app solution – and link back to you.

Your mobile app marketing can’t do without content discovery tools such as Disqus because it offers the best add-on tools that powers discussions, increases engagements, and eventually, boosts your revenue.

30. One Month Before Your App Launch, Build a Teaser Website

Not a full-blown website, but a landing page. It’s solely for your mobile app marketing. It should convey the message of your mobile app in clear and simple terms. Add a form to the landing page to capture user’s email address.

Add a “tell a friend” in-app component to enable users promote your app. This makes it possible for these users to share your app with their friends, family, coworkers, and colleagues. That way, you’re able to increase your site visits.

Your mobile marketing can benefit more when you offer credits and discounts for every new subscriber someone brings. Use some tools to exchange your ad space with other mobile apps. An example is Appsfire.

31. Reach Out to Journalists to Get Needed Press

Do you have an app launch party in view?

Make one and let it be fun, interesting, and engaging. This is a great way to bring together your mobile app users get press attention, which in turn triggers responses across channels.

If you announce your app launch well, and offer some form of incentives, news media sites like Mashable, Techcrunch, Gizmodo, Lifehack.com, and the like could pick it up.

When building momentum for your app, focus on the benefits and the key features. Capitalize on the most interesting features of your mobile app, such that your audience can’t resist it.

You can also use Guerilla marketing to promote your mobile app?

One simple way to get started is to develop small app Cards and share them in Local Business Outlets, Cafes, etc.

Build important relationships with editors, and get recognized for developing a mobile app that truly helps people.

On a regular, share content that are interesting across other social media channels such as Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Make sure to use your images with your mobile app trademark.

It’s better to first share such a content on your blog, and from there sync images and share to other blogs. Interested users are certainly going to enjoy the content on your blog.

Above all, you’ll likely get press attention if you continually update your mobile app.

Conclusion

Last but not least, if you want your mobile app to reach hundreds of thousands of users, you might need to run a Facebook ad or Google Ad.

Free marketing strategies sometimes take a lot of time to produce results.

Paid advertising can get you 10,000 downloads by this time tomorrow.

Above all, marketing your app consistently is the only way to guarantee you attain long-term success. There’s no shortcut. But the rewards are worth the while. You don’t need to hire a mobile marketing agency either. Just follow the strategies listed above.

App Store Optimization is in full swing and it is getting really hard to be visible anywhere whether it’s social media, blogs and even app stores. Sure, it seems like you won’t be able to compete with the competition but that’s not the case.

Here are some mobile marketing strategies you can implement to increase your visibility and user base:

 

App Store Optimization

App Store Optimization is all about improving the visibility of your app. Most of the app marketers know its importance. There are millions of apps in the app stores and more than 60% of them have never been downloaded. One of the main reasons for that is that they are not visible for users in category and keyword search. This is what app store optimization helps to avoid. These points will help you with your app store optimization:

• Finding keywords that matter: Keyword research is your first task in App Store Optimization and maybe the most important one. Finding relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition is your objective. Due to the high competition in the app stores, it’s very hard especially when Google and Apple doesn’t provide you with data.

• Tracking Competition: There will always be competition in the app stores since there are millions of apps. ASO Tools like App Radar Keyword Tracker can help you finding out, how your app ranks for specific keywords in contrast to your competitors. Thus, you can evaluate, whether users will be more likely to download your app or your competitor’s app by analyzing app store search rankings. In fact, higher ranked apps are considered to be more relevant to the search term and therefore nick a greater number of downloads. Having an overview of your ranking statistics, helps you finding new optimization potential.  

• Creating Outstanding Assets: Create great high quality screenshots (especially the first three are the most important). When people visit your app page they should not feel disappointed by the quality of video and screenshots. Graphical elements are always helpful to convince users. Therefore, app screenshots and promo videos have a direct impact on your app’s downloads. These elements thereby should give users a quick overview of your app’s features and functionality. Updating them based on occasions and festivals is also extremely important.

Besides well-designed images, you should have a great description for your app. Edit it every now and then to remind Google that you are active and see improvements for your rankings with better keyword insertion. Keep it short and simple with strategic placement of keywords.

 

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is underrated in some industries and overrated in others but if you are able to find the right influencers, it can be a game changer. Influencer Marketing, in general, perfectly matches for App Business. Marketing apps through industry experts and entertainers on Social Media and YouTube, works well for new apps. Do some targeted research on suitable influencers and pitch them your idea. If they are really interested in your app, ask them to cover it on their channels and show it to their audience.

Fortafy is a app publishing and mobile marketing agency that you can hire to promote your app. They really has a lot of different YouTubers and Facebook stars under contract promoting their game. They also published a Color Switch game that has over 100 million downloads and was at the top of app store in around 100 countries. The game was developed with no coding expertise using a tool known a buildbox.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is something that is underutilized by small and medium sized developers but can be the most effective way to get downloads and retain your customers for a longer period of time.

Enlight app is a great example for this. As a photography app, they engage with their community on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. They regularly post great images and photography-relevant content on their social media profiles. They achieved over 134,000 page likes on Facebook, 67,7k followers on Instagram and 56,1k on Twitter over the last two years. This example shows, that you can build a great community by regularly updating content and engaging with your users.

This approach allows them to easily communicate with their audience directly with minimal efforts like in the case of Email. This will also allow them to promote a new app very easily as they already have a huge user base of Facebook.

 

Branded Apps

Branding apps is something, many app developers utilize and have great success with. Especially, apps in gaming category use the power of branding. Sure getting license and permission to use the content of a brand is hard to get for most of developers, however, there are many of them, that afforded the cost at the beginning of a brand and made a game around it.

The best example of branded apps is Pokemon Go. Ninantic, a game development company created a game around the huge brand of Nintendo’s Pokémon and it was instant success. It has over 500 million downloads and it is also the most grossing app in the world.

Even though the idea was different than most other games but the brand and marketing of the game really stood out. Since the story of Pokémon already was very popular years ago, the app achieved instant success. Due to the fact, that they allowed users to share content anywhere, they managed to create a great hype around the app though user generated content, mainly.

User generated content is always great and when you mix it with big brands that people love from their childhood, it is a great recipe for a successful app.

 

Real Life Connected Marketing

Real life connected marketing is great for online retailers with physical shops. It means rewarding people who have downloaded your app.

You can also give different offers to loyal customers. For example, Chick-Fil-A station in Jefferson station handed out free burgers worth $ 3.55 to its customers who have downloaded their app by June 11 and the offer was redeemable through June 30.

Online food order companies utilize this tactic very effectively that hand out in-app coupons only for customers to retain.

Similarly, many other companies, like Uber, handed out free rides in their taxi app. This not only helps in branding but also increase customer loyalty. However, doesn’t mean giving a bad service because it’s free but giving the best service so that you can retain customers for a longer period of time.

 

Imagine if you had access to the one thing everyone has on their phones: the short messaging service, or SMS app.

Since nearly two-thirds of Americans are now smartphone owners, marketers are always seeking new methods for connecting to their customers through them. They’ve tried developing their own apps, featuring ads for their products on other apps, and a whole range of other ideas.

But there’s one strategy that consistently delivers impressive results:

Text messaging.

Because the SMS app is the most frequently used mobile feature, marketers are using it to promote their companies and products like never before. And whether your business is a titan of industry or a mom and pop shop, you too can benefit from SMS marketing.

So, keep reading. By the time you’re done with this blog post, you’ll be well-equipped to execute a successful SMS marketing campaign.

 

What is SMS Marketing?

Put simply, SMS marketing is advertising your product to your customers over text messaging.

Such messages are sent phone-to-phone (or brand-to-phone) and are typically limited to 160 characters including spaces and punctuation.

Originally, some of the first brands to adopt SMS as a marketing tool were cellular providers themselves. But since then, countless companies both large and small have deployed their own SMS marketing programs.

Texting itself used to be a niche method of communication, but now adoption rates are estimated at well over 80 percent. As a result, marketers have seized on the opportunity to make use of the medium.

Why? Because it’s mobile, where consumers increasingly spend the bulk of their time.

And remember, it’s not just smartphones – regular cell phones (sometimes called dumb phones) have text messaging capabilities as well. If you have a customer’s number, there’s a good chance they’ll get your message.

According to VentureBeat.com, the open rate of text promotions and offers is 98 percent. By comparison, the open rate of emails is a mere 20 percent. This makes SMS marketing the most effective channel for flash sales and same-day promotions.

And while email campaigns tend to primarily drive online sales, SMS marketing is effective at both referring customers to your website and bringing them to your physical locations.

Got your attention?

If so, let’s take a look at how running an effective SMS marketing campaign actually works.

 

How Does SMS Marketing Work?

If you’re ready to jump into SMS marketing, it’s crucial that you prepare properly.

The two basic components to an SMS marketing campaign are the keyword and the shortcode. Here’s an example:

Text “BONUS” to 555555 for your weekly special offers!

In this case, “BONUS” is the keyword to be placed in the body of the message. “555555” is the shortcode and it gets placed in the recipient box.

By responding to this message as directed, customers are effectively “opting in” to your campaign. Whether you send them a single automated message or add them to a list where they’ll be sent messages on a regular basis depends on the structure of your marketing campaign.

Numbers received this way have to be confirmed to make sure a customer didn’t enter a number incorrectly. Before adding them to the campaign, you’ll have to confirm their participation by sending another message that can look something like this:

Text “YES” to receive weekly special offers!

When you create your SMS marketing campaign, your main focus will be alerting customers to mobile coupons and discount codes. Everyone loves a deal, so when you offer your customers a chance to save, many will have no problem giving you their mobile numbers.

Last May, eMarketer (a website specializing in eCommerce and digital marketing), put out a story with fascinating data related to mobile coupons. Here are some of their findings and predictions:

• By 2017, nearly half of US companies with 100 employees or more will distribute mobile coupons – via SMS marketing, email, mobile apps, and websites.
• More than two in five companies in the US would use mobile coupons for marketing by the end of 2015, up 4 percent from 2014.
• Coupons and codes distributed digitally are much cheaper than their paper counterparts, and also get redeemed more frequently.
• The number of US adults who redeem digital coupons will grow 7.6 percent to 121.3 million. Mobile coupons will see growth of 18.4 percent to 97.4 million.

However, there are quite a few other things you can do with SMS marketing aside from coupons:

• Drip campaigns: You can send increasingly better coupons depending on how long a customer has been subscribed. A 5 percent coupon after signing up, a 10 percent coupon after a month, a 20 percent coupon after 2 months, and so on.
• Customer polls: Create polls to let customers cast their vote by texting various keywords. When you collect enough responses over time, you can graph and analyze the data.
• Sweepstakes contests: If customers text a particular keyword, they’re signed up for a contest to receive free or greatly discounted products.
• Group creation: You can divide customers depending on which keyword they responded to, how they voted in a poll, and more. This helps with targeting customers for specific promotions and coupons.
• Location based marketing: Send different messages to customers based on their area codes.
• Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) Marketing: Send photos and videos to customers who can receive them – something especially useful if you have a solid creative department.

There’s little point in denying it – offering your customers promotional deals over their mobile devices is a smart business tactic. That’s why Coca-Cola spends 70 percent of their mobile budget on SMS marketing.

Now, what else should you know to have a successful SMS marketing campaign?

 

Understanding Your Marketing Campaign Goals

When you create your SMS campaign, try to take your current business goals into account. In other words, instead of thinking about the campaign as a separate strategy, incorporate it into your larger organized marketing plan.

What is your business looking for most out of the campaign? Do you need immediate sales? Are you trying to simply create a list for future SMS campaigns? Or, do you want to drive your customers to a specific action?

You need to understand that your SMS campaign will affect your business directly. If all goes well, you’ll you see more engagement from the customers who receive your SMS messages and benefit from enhanced brand recognition.

That’s why everyone involved with handling the SMS marketing campaign should always be kept up to speed. Communicating your vision, goals, and strategy as clearly as possible to your team is critical to your success.

 

Offering Incentives

The consumers who welcome you into their phone on a regular basis are probably some of your most loyal customers. And that’s not much of a stretch – our mobile devices are arguably the most personal items we own.

With that said, you should treat your most loyal customers with some extra love.

How?

Simple: by giving them something of value.

Consumers receiving your SMS messages have to see a reason to remain opted-in and participating. And if you want to convert the recipients of your messages into paying customers, there has to be a clear incentive for them to want to do so.

As you build your phone number list in the early stages of your SMS campaign, start with low value offers based on small percentages or dollar-off coupons. Once you have a larger opt-in list, start using Buy One Get One campaigns, also known as “spend and gets.”

These “spend and gets” help by increasing the average order value (AOV) of your customers’ purchases, while self-funding your campaign.

And as long as you deliver value through incentives as the campaign goes on, your customers will stay opted-in and eager to get your next text.

Permission is Required

If done correctly, SMS marketing will never feel invasive.

SMS marketing operates under the permission based marketing standard. In other words, every subscriber must give their expressed consent before joining your list.

And you absolutely cannot upload random phone numbers to your database. You don’t want to be in a heap of legal trouble, do you?

Customers learning about your marketing campaign can either:

• Text a keyword to a short code
• Submit their number via a web-form.

If they’ve done neither of these, then you don’t have permission to send them anything.

Also, no one likes receiving unsolicited messages. So when you get your customers’ numbers, be clear about what you will send.

 

Compliance is Key

After you’ve made sure your customers have given consent to receive the messages, you also need your SMS campaign to be compliant with the law.

The three main entities that govern the mobile industry are the CTIA, FCC, and the Mobile Marketing Association. Everything you do while SMS marketing has to fall under the guidelines given by these entities.

And the rules don’t always stay the same. New changes to the Telephone Consumer Protections Act (TCPA) took effect as recently as October of 2013.

These changes include:

• The “established business relationship” requirement, which replaced the “prior written express consent” requirement.
• “Prior written express consent” can’t be a condition of any purchase.
• You must clearly display each of these to customers before they opt-in to your text marketing campaign.

The best way to account for “prior written express consent” is to include language like this:

By participating, you consent to receive text messages sent by an automatic messaging system.

For condition of purchase consent, you should include language like this:

Consent to these terms is not a condition of purchase.

And if you want to be extra compliant (you do), include a helpful disclaimer like, “Message and Data Rates May Apply.”

As long as you follow the rules, you should have no problem succeeding with SMS marketing. Here are some other examples of appropriate SMS language:

Opt-in confirmation

Thanks for signing up for BUSINESS NAME alerts! To unsubscribe, reply STOP. 5 msgs per month, msg&data rates may apply. Visit [URL] for help.

Opt-out confirmation

You are now unsubscribed from BUSINESS NAME alerts. Sorry to see you go! You’ll receive no further messages. For more info, visit [URL]. Msg&data rates may apply.

Double opt-in confirmation request

We have received a request to add your mobile phone number to BUSINESS NAME alerts. Please reply Y or YES to confirm your subscription. Msg&data rates may apply.

Directions on how to opt-out

Reply STOP to opt out of BUSINESS NAME alerts.

As long as you make messages like these a part of your automated system, you’ll be able to keep your customers happy and stay on the right side of the law.

 

Text Marketing Analytics

If you’re putting all this effort into your SMS campaign, you’re going to want to know if it’s working, right?

Fortunately, there are quite a few helpful metrics to follow when executing your campaign:

• Subscriber growth: Each week, monitor your growth rate. Identify which activities make the list grow.
• Subscriber churn rate: The rate at which people are opting out of your program over time. The ideal churn rate to shoot for is below 2-3 percent.
• Redemption rate: The percentage of customers that redeem your offers.
• Cost per redeeming subscriber: Based on the redemption rate, you can determine the cost of communicating with each customer.
• Cross channel engagement: The different media platforms you use should have different keywords, which will help you quickly measure which locations are performing best.

As long as you keep track of this data, you should have no problem making any necessary changes to your campaign as it moves along.

 

Timing is Everything

One of the biggest worries companies have concerning SMS marketing is that their customers will think their messages are SPAM. And for good reason – no one likes SPAM.

Of course you’re going to lose tons of subscribers and possibly hurt your brand in the process if you abuse your phone number list and send out messages at all hours of the day – every day.

So don’t do that.

Remember, SMS marketing is a permission-based marketing channel. Your customers have opted-in to receive your messages – that means they want to hear more from you.

Depending on your product and whether you have a physical location, you may want to test to find the best results when it comes to message frequency. Figure out which days of the week are best for your customers, and which times of day they’ll be most receptive to.

As you can see, there are clear peak hours of the day to shoot for when sending out your automated marketing messages.

So, if there’s one thing you take away from here, let it be this: do not send anything out before 9am or after 9pm. You’ll only be annoying your customers, and that’s the last thing you want to do.

 

Consistency for the Win

Surprisingly, one of the biggest mistakes businesses make when using SMS marketing is forgetting to send out messages on a regular basis.

Yes, you only want to send out messages when you have something of value to say. But if you go weeks without sending out any messages, you’ll probably end up with a high unsubscribe rate.

The happy medium here is to shoot for around once a week. Plus, if you have your team working on several weeks’ worth of text messages in advance, when the time comes you’ll always have content to send out.

Once you’ve figured out your ideal messaging rate, play around with it for long-term customers. Try and find what they prefer by asking them to take a survey or respond with a certain keyword.

You might even find that your customers want to hear from you more often!

 

Mastering Media Integration

If you’re putting together an SMS marketing campaign, your brand is likely already on several other media platforms. So, when executing SMS marketing, take advantage of your collective outreach potential.

Some existing media outlets to use include:

• Social media
• TV
• Radio
• Email Marketing
• Customer receipts
• Print (newspapers and magazines)
• Blogs
• Any signage (if you have a brick-and-mortar store)
• Website
• Email

Keep in mind that every piece of promotional material you send out should include a description of your SMS marketing campaign, provide a resource for more information, and explain opt-in instructions.

And here’s another figure to remember: 15 percent of Americans own a smartphone but have a limited number of alternative ways to get online. When they come into contact with these other forms of media, the device in their hands will be a portal straight to your business.

So, by using all your brand’s media platforms, you can effectively extend your outreach and interactivity with users to create continued customer engagement.

 

Having a Clear Call-to-Action

Anyone receiving your SMS marketing should know exactly where to go for more information. This means your call-to-action should be the core of the message – not buried somewhere in the text.

Here are some ways of doing this:

• Include a link or other explicit directions for how to connect and proceed.
• Any offers need to be simple and easy to understand.
• Don’t put parentheses around the shortcode. While it may seem obvious, many of those messages might not be sent properly because your customers included the parentheses when replying.

Here’s how Pepsi presented their SMS marketing campaign to customers:

While Pepsi is an undeniably huge company capable of creating images like this one for their SMS marketing, they stuck to the simplest message possible:

Text “PEPSIMAX” to 710710 for your chance to live the game.

This made it easy for anyone who saw the advertisement to clearly understand the promotion and the directions to enter. Any call-to-action you create should have the same effect if you want to convert sales.

 

Conclusion

As you’ve seen, SMS marketing campaigns are a great way to expand your brand by helping you connect directly to your customers. By making repeat appearances on their phones, you’ll be staying put in their minds.

So, has your business tried SMS marketing? Share your experiences in the comments section!

 

 

Did you get a shiny, new Android phone this year? You’re in good company. According to Nielsen, more American smartphones were running Android than iOS by a 53 to 43 percent margin. The rapid proliferation of offerings in the Google Play store is testament to that fact, with roughly 1.8 million apps currently on the market.

So, if you want to know what you absolutely need to have on your new device, we’ve compiled a list of the best Android apps for your smartphone or tablet. Some are new, some are upgraded classics, but all are worth your consideration. Why not check them out?

WiFi Mapper – Free

Image courtesy of WiFiMapper on Google Play

Who doesn’t like to cut down on roaming and data charges when they’re on the go? We like this app because it actually does exactly what it promises, which is map all the nearby WiFi hotspots and give you important information such as whether it’s free, how reliable it is, and what type of venue it’s at, complete with crowd-sourced user comments. To make it even better, the app caches recently used maps and is adding an offline map library so you can find hotspots without using data. If you’re a frequent traveler, this is a must-have app.

MORECAST Premium Weather – Free

Image via MORECAST on Google Play

A good weather app is a must-have for every smartphone user and we like MORECAST because of its attractive user interface and advanced features such as side-by-side weather comparisons for two different cities and weather route mapping if you’re on the road. It also features Doppler radar and webcam views of different cities across the globe.

Snapseed – Free

Image courtesy of Snapseed on Google Play

This popular Google app puts professional photo editing tools at your fingertips with an intuitive gesture-based interface. It also includes a useful library of in-app mini-tutorials to show you how to use each feature to best advantage. The app creates a Stack of each photo to track all your editing changes, as well as automatically stores originals in a separate folder so you never lose them. For photography buffs, Snapseed turns your phone camera into a serious artistic tool.

Google Photos – Free

Image via Google Photos on Google Play

Once you start experimenting with your device camera (and creating gorgeous shots with Snapseed), you’ll want a secure place to store them that simplifies sorting and retrieval. Google Photos does this beautifully, with the added bonus of free unlimited storage that automatically backs up your photos and frees up storage on your device. We especially like the instant sharing feature that lets you share up to 1,500 photos with anyone on any device just by clicking a link.

Pocket – Free

Image courtesy of Pocket on Google Play

This is a clean, ad-free, user-friendly app that lets you clip and save any piece of content anywhere on the web (and from any device) and return to it later even if you’re offline. You can tag and organize your articles and there’s even unlimited storage. If you don’t want to read, just turn on the text to speech feature and let Pocket read to you. There’s also a social component that shares recommended stories and content from users you follow.

Podcast Republic – Free

Image courtesy of Podcast Republic on Google Play

Unlike the iPhone, there’s no built in podcast app on an Android device, and if you’re a regular podcast consumer, that can be a real drag. We like Podcast Republic because it fills the void admirably, letting you download, search, sync, and otherwise manage your podcast downloads. It’s also easily customized to your preferences. Of note, the free version is ad supported, but you can remove them with an in-app purchase if you find them distracting.

AirDroid: File Transfer/Manage – Free

Images courtesy of AirDroid on Google Play

Once you install AirDroid, you’ll wonder how you ever survived without it. This app creates a wireless connection between your Android device and your PC, so you can answer the phone, read and respond to SMS text messages, send emails, get app notifications, and transfer files between devices without ever connecting a cable. It also supports your favorite apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat.

OverDrive – Free

Image courtesy of Overdrive on Google Play

OverDrive is the library lover’s Kindle, letting you borrow e-books, audio books, and streaming video from over 30,000  libraries around the globe. You can sync your books across multiple devices and create wish lists and holds so you can get your favorite titles. Perhaps the most exciting feature for chronic procrastinators: The titles are automatically returned on the due-date, saving you late fees. Note: You do need a library card for the participating library to borrow titles on OverDrive.

Nova Launcher Prime – $0.99

Image via Nova Launcher on Google Play

One of the things Android fans love is the way you can completely change the way your phone looks and acts by replacing the home pages, app drawers, icons, and widgets with a custom launcher app. Nova Launcher happens to be the original, and premiere application, and the Prime version unlocks a host of desirable features to really turn your phone into an extension of your personality. It’s also currently on sale for about a buck—trust us, it’s money well spent.

Accomplish To-Do List – Free

Image courtesy of Accomplish on Google Play

This app is way more than a basic to-do list manager; it is also a day planner with visual tools like a graphic day planner that lets you drag and drop tasks into a daily or weekly calendar. It also syncs with your Google Calendar and has a robust system of customizable alerts and reminders to keep you on top of your schedule and tasks. If you’re the type of person who is forever making to-do lists, but rarely actually making a plan or schedule to accomplish them, this is the app for you.

IF by IFTTT – Free

Image courtesy of IF by IFTTT on Google Play

This app sets up all sorts of “recipes” that turn your Android device into a powerhouse of performance using “if this then that” rules to do all sorts of tasks. Do you forget to arm your alarm when you leave the house? Set a recipe to do it automatically with IF. Want to automatically save your starred emails to an Evernote file? There’s a recipe for that, too. Connect with your favorite devices like your Nest thermostat or your Fitbit, too. You can choose from literally thousands of existing “recipes,” or create something all your own. This is a must-have for the tech nerd in your life.

Hooks – Alerts & Notifications – Free

Image courtesy of Hooks on Google Play

Why waste your time chasing down news and updates about things you care about when you can have alerts automatically pushed to your phone? Hooks lets you choose from over 100 channels and 1,000,000 alerts, such as social mentions, sports scores, stock prices, shipment tracking for every carrier, restaurant openings, weather changes, and even currency exchanges. Whatever you’re into, you can get info pushed to your lock screen, saving you time and aggravation and keeping you in the know.

Dolphin Browser – Free

Image courtesy of Dolphin Browser on Google Play

Most Android users default to the Chrome browser, but there are a lot of reasons to power up to the Dolphin browser on your Android device. In addition to Flash support, it’s super-fast and with a clean UI and speedy navigation. It also has an ad blocker, so you can kiss popup adds, banners, and video ads goodbye. You can also activate the handy incognito browsing function so you can browse without leaving history. If you’re still not convinced you need Dolphin, it also syncs your bookmarks and passwords and browsing history across your devices and easily switch your search engine preference for a custom experience. Oh, and did we mention you can completely customize the look of your browser?

Zombies, Run! – Free (plus Pro subscription starting at $2.99/month)

 

Image courtesy of Zombies, Run! on Google Play

We love a good fitness app as much as the next person, but some of them are downright boring. Not so, Zombies, Run! Over 2 million users have joined this ultra-immersive fitness game that begins as soon as you strap on your running shoes and plug in your headphones.

The basic app has over 200 story lines and adventures that you can take at any pace in any environment, from a stroll along a hilly trail to a flat-out run through a city park. Set your own custom playlists as a backdrop for your plot line; the story emerges through radio messages and voice recordings. And there’s the zombies hot on your trail you have to evade. The social sharing aspect adds to the fun. This is one app you really have to experience for yourself.

Citymapper – Free

Image via Citymapper on Google Play

Google Maps is so last year; savvy travelers in 2016 are using Citymapper to get around. If you live in one of the mapped cities, or are planning to visit one, you have all the information you need to get around all with a tap and a swipe. Citymapper gives you all your options, from Uber to public transportation, and even selects the best one. “Get off” notifications make sure you never miss a stop. All the info is updated in real time, with integrated Twitter alerts, bus schedules, and time tables. You can ever order up your Uber in app if you like.

Unclouded Cloud Manager – Free (with in-app purchases)

Image courtesy of Unclouded on Google Play

This app is for heavy users of cloud-based storage tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and BOX; you can search, analyze, manage, and clean all your cloud drives from one convenient location. If you don’t see the service you’re looking for in the freebie list, you can probably add it with an in-app purchase, so none of your important files are left out in the cold.

If you’ve ever wondered what is gobbling up all your Google Drive or Dropbox space, this is the app you need.

Swiftkey Keyboard – Free

Image courtesy of Swiftkey on Google Play

This app is pretty universally recognized as the best keyboard app for your Android device, with a very effective learning curve that understands your writing style and predicts your next words. It also has a truly useful autocorrect function that works with over 100 languages. You can also customize the appearance with over 80 screen options and build your own favorite emoji library. This used to be a paid app, but now it’s offered for free, so there’s no reason not to give it a try.

Twilight – Free

Image courtesy of Twilight on Google Play

Is your phone the last thing you see before you fall asleep at night? Do you find yourself immersed in your screen scrolling through your favorite apps? If so, it’s no wonder you may have trouble falling and staying asleep at night; research shows that those blue screens upset your circadian rhythm by suppressing your natural melatonin production, the hormone that helps regulate your sleep cycles.

Twilight brings science to the rescue, by filtering away the blue light with a pleasant red filter that changes in intensity to following sunrise and sunset patterns. The idea is to reduce eye strain and reset your internal body clock to help you fall asleep more easily. If you’re a little bit skeptical, you can give it a try for free—there are plenty of people who swear it has transformed their sleep cycles.

These are the 18 Android apps that made our list of favorites; of course, there were lots we like but didn’t have room to mention. Do you have any favorite productivity apps you can’t live without or an especially addictive entertainment app you’d recommend? Share your suggestions in the comments below.

 

 

 

 

Every year we see a perceptible shift in marketing trends, be it the emergence of social media marketing or the importance of mobile marketing, each year brings a new trend with it. In the recent few years, marketers have been extremely vigilant about mobile marketing as the budget and spending for mobile advertising and marketing has grown significantly. So let’s get on with the 4 biggest trends that are changing the scene for mobile marketing in 2016.

#1. Mobile Friendly Websites

When Gartner predicted that M-commerce will reach almost 50% of E-commerce revenue by next year (2017), e-commerce companies all over the world started rushing to provide a streamlined shopping experience over desktop and mobile. Customers are choosing only those website builders which offer responsive templates; this speaks volumes about the emergence of mobile-friendly websites. Also, there is an increase in the number of dedicated apps, as 2016 has seen substantial growth in app indexing, i.e. SEO optimization on Google and app store.

Tips for Marketers

• Ensure your company has a responsive website, even better if you can push them for a dedicated app.
• Design a new campaign for promoting mobile-friendly website or app.
• Optimize email marketing by segmenting mobile and desktop users and sending customized emails.

 

#2. Vertical Video Ads

In the last few years, vertical ads have become quite popular with companies like Burger King running vertical ads on Snapchat. However, the trend now is going to evolve in to vertical video ads, which to be frank has been a sensible shift as rotating the mobile screen every time you want to watch a video is quite annoying.

Tips for Marketers

• Create vertical video content and show only vertical videos to mobile users.
• Adapt old videos to vertical format.
• Use tools like Crop Fill and RVF to optimize your videos.

 

#3. Social E-commerce Integration

According to Alex Frias of Track Marketing Group, native e-commerce integration on social media websites will be the biggest market disruption. What this means is that users will be able to make purchases from their phone or desktop on a brand’s social media page. Shopify has been offering Facebook Buy Button since a long time which enables Facebook users to buy from Facebook itself and now it has come up with a Twitter Buy Button to add to its offerings. This is a great opportunity for marketers to monetize their social media platforms.

Tips for Marketers

• 60% of social media time is spent on smart phones. So while your customer is scrolling down on Twitter or Facebook, you can trigger their buying instincts with this single buy button.
• It is extremely easy to integrate buy buttons on social media pages, and you as a marketer should be able to drive more sales and generate leads via it.

#4. Mobile Marketing Automation

This is perhaps the most important trend in mobile marketing recently. Mobile marketing automation will be seen at its best with predictive analytics, user behavior testing, email marketing and personalized content will become the mainstays of mobile marketing. Companies will have to evolve in a way that they create different customer personas and then craft different content based on these personas. Even marketing automation providers are taking mobile seriously with more mobile friendly features and dedicated mobile marketing campaign platforms.

Tips for Marketers

• The sooner you adopt marketing automation, the better. Marketing automation software provides valuable intelligence on your customers so you craft better campaigns with more suitable content.
• Best part is it leaves out the guess work out of marketing, so all your campaigns perform better than expected.
• It also helps you save time, which can be better utilized for creating unique content for each persona.

 

#5. Bonus Trend

No mobile marketing trend prediction is ever complete without mentioning Snapchat. This mobile social media platform is breaking patterns at many levels. If you haven’t cornered the market on Snapchat yet, do it at the earliest.

Tips for Marketers

• Snapchat will soon be coming up with location-based ads, so be prepared to include that in your suite.
• A lot of companies have set aside budget for Snapchat advertising, this is a must do in 2016.
• Snapchat is famous for scavenger hunts, flash sales, contests, etc.; include these in your campaign.

 

Recap

So let’s do a quick recap of what we learnt about mobile marketing trends for 2016:

1) There’s no way one can go on without mobile friendly websites or apps.

2) Optimize your videos for viewing in portrait or vertical mode.

3) Marketers must focus on creating social commerce campaigns

4) Mobile marketing automation is no longer indispensable if you want a competitive edge over others.

5) Snapchat is not the future, it is the present of mobile social media.

 

 

Just about every writer has experienced it.

That nerve-wracking moment when you share a blog post, crossing your fingers in the hopes that it’ll help drive traffic to your website.

But then…

Nothing.

You wait and wait, and your blog post doesn’t get one single comment. No shares on social media either.

You dig a little deeper, look at your Google Analytics account, and realize no one has viewed the post at all.

And you’re devastated. All of that hard work feels like a waste of time because you didn’t get the results you wanted from your blog post.

Now, a lot of writers might give up after going through this a few times, but not you. You’re curious to learn how you can improve your blog posts so they drive traffic to your site, help you build a better brand, and establish you as an authority in your industry.

The answer?

Write content your audience cares about.

And that’s doesn’t just apply to blog posts – it applies to everything from website content to whitepapers, and it’ll make all the difference in the results you see from content marketing. So, let’s talk about a few strategies you can use to figure out what specific content your audience wants to read and write content that meets their needs.

Create marketing personas, and reference them during brainstorming sessions.

Marketing personas are simply fictional representations of your target audience members. They should include a picture that represents your target audience member and other things like:

• Demographics
• Job title
• Salary
• Goals (both in business and in life)
• Challenges
• Educational background

You may also want to include other information (political preferences, career path, etc.) depending on the kind of content you’re creating and who you’re targeting.

Either way, if you don’t already have marketing personas, it’s time to create some. Today.

You can get the information you need to create personas by looking through your current customer data (start using Google Analytics for this if you aren’t already), taking surveys, or interviewing your customers and prospects. If you choose to perform interviews, use this list of questions as reference.

Your final persona might look something like this example from Buyer Persona Institute:

Once you’ve got your personas (you’ll need one for each ideal customer group you’re targeting), keep them handy every time you create content. Then, before you write something, you can ask yourself these important questions:

Will my content resonate with this target audience member? What benefits will this person get from reading my content?

If the content won’t resonate with your target audience and they won’t benefit from it, change the topic you’re writing about to something that is relevant and beneficial.

Tip: Keep in mind that not all of your content necessarily needs to appeal to all of the audiences represented in your marketing personas. For example, you can create two separate lead nurturing emails if you have two different target audiences and tailor each email to fit the correct persona. By doing so, you’ll see better results from your marketing efforts because all of your content would be more targeted.

Send a survey to your current email list.

If you’ve been in business for a while, you probably have a decent-sized email list of customers you send blog posts, newsletters, and other information to. (If you don’t have a list, read this post to learn how you can start building one up!)

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you can’t use email for other things too. What I’m talking about is customer surveys.

That’s right – using this method, you’re going to figure out how to write content your audience cares about by simply asking them.

Seems like common sense, right?

It is, but far too few businesses are using this method to their advantage. Don’t be one of those businesses.

All you need to do is send your email list an email that asks this question:

“What is the #1 obstacle you’re facing in business today?”

Of course, word it in your own way, and elaborate on why you’re asking the question so you’ll improve your chances of getting lots of responses.

But wait….

Why are you asking your audience that particular question?

Simple. Once you know what challenge they’re facing, you can create content that helps them learn how to overcome that challenge.

Let’s go over an example.

Say you’re running a consulting business, and you specifically offer consultations to freelancers so they can learn how to make good money at their craft. You ask your email list the question above, and a lot of people answer like this:

“I don’t know how to set good rates because I’m not sure how to calculate what I should charge.”

With that knowledge, you could create content that helps them overcome that challenge, like:

• A freelance rate calculator
• A blog post that shows the average rates for different types of freelancers
• A downloadable resource that explains how freelancers can set a rate that works for their cost of living and financial goals

See how that works?

And you can bet that your audience would find that content useful since they’re the ones who pretty much asked for it in the first place.

So, start surveying, and use your most popular answers to create content your audience cares about. You’re sure to see a better response when you know you’re giving them exactly what they’re asking for.

Look where your audience hangs out online to see what questions they’re asking.

Maybe you skipped over that last tip because you don’t have an email list. That’s okay – you can write amazing content that targets your audience even if you don’t have a list right now.

How?

Figure out where your audience is discussing their pain points online, and start hanging out there.

Now sure how to go about that?

Well, let’s say you’re a real estate agent, and your primary target audience is home-buyers. You could look around on the Real Estate SubReddit to see what questions home-buyers are asking.

After looking through lots of posts there, you could easily come away with ideas for content. The key is to write content that addresses their concerns.

For example, maybe you’d see someone asking about the best way to buy a house while selling their current home. And maybe you’d see someone else asking about the best way to find a good realtor. And someone else asking what they should watch out for when looking at a potential home.

BOOM – you’ve got 3 ideas for blog posts right there:

• How to Buy a New House While Selling Your Current Home
• 10 Tips for Picking the Right Real Estate Agent
• 10 Red Flags to Look for When You’re Buying a New Home

Not too difficult, right?

And all it takes is a little bit of digging to figure out where your target audience is bringing up their concerns online. Here are a few ideas for places you should consider looking:

• Online forums – Reddit isn’t the only forum to consider. See if you can find any industry-specific forums that are popular among your target audience members.
• Facebook groups – Join Facebook groups that are popular among member of your target audience. Then, you can look at what they’re posting there to get inspiration for your content.
• Twitter – Start following your target audience on Twitter and looking up popular hashtags within your industry. Not only will you be able to get good content ideas – you’ll build your social presence online too!

And here’s a bonus tip for you:

Type “forum:yourtopic” into the Google search bar. Not literally, of course – you’ll want to switch “yourtopic” for the topic you’d actually like to find a forum about. Then, when you hit search, Google will show you a list of popular forums where people are discussing that topic.

Use Buzzsumo.

Buzzsumo is a free tool you can use to come up with content your target audience will be interested in. It looks like this:

See that little white box at the top of the screenshot?

That’s where you type in the topic you’re interested in writing about. Then, you’ll see popular content that others have written about that topic (including social share amounts). You can use the information to brainstorm your own similar topics – just make sure you avoid copying anyone else’s content too closely.

In Conclusion

If you want your content to drive real results for your business, you need to be strategic and make sure everything you write is relevant to your target audience. Period.

But even when you’re doing everything right, you can’t expect overnight results – content marketing is a long process that doesn’t provide much instant gratification.

Don’t give up, though. Keep writing that amazing content that gets your target audience talking, and you’ll eventually find yourself landing more clients than ever… all because you took the time to understand and address their needs.

It might take weeks. It might take months. It might even take years. But you can bet that the time and effort you put in will be well worth it.

Which of these strategies will you use to write content your audience cares about? Share your favorite in the comments section!

 

You finally did it. You spent countless hours perfecting your app and you have just launched it into the marketplace. So, naturally you should be expecting millions of downloads and money flooding in…right?

After all your app has all the right widgets and looks amazing. Plus, you invested a good amount of money and time into it. So why is your app barely getting any downloads? Well, it could be that your app is not being marketed the way it should be.

We reached out to 12 professionals and asked them for their Mobile App Marketing tips for Small Businesses. We believe their strategies will guide you towards the levels of success you are looking for.

1. Paul Manwaring

Design & Marketing Consultant
https://outsprung.com/
“I have found a couple things extremely helpful while working with a few startups and their apps”

Twitter/Facebook Ads:
Being able to hyper target users of these 2 social media platforms you can really find the perfect leads. For instance we had an app allowing users to find the best food at lunchtime in London.So we were able to target users in specific areas of London, during the hours of 11am-2pm (the busy lunch hours and when people might be looking for some food or just using their phones during their break).

Influencer Marketing:
Great way to get your app in the eyes of your audience. I’m an influencer myself in a sub-genre of music. I have been asked by manufacturers of DJ equipment, speakers, audio production software simply because I have a large following of exactly the type of people they want to target. It’s very powerful to get a good review from someone who lives and breathes the niche you are trying to break into.

2. Richard Kelleher

World’s first Marketing Sociologist

When it all starts
Marketing your appstarts before the approval process by iTunes and Google for your app. It should start at the onset of your app development.

Start with Focus Groups
You need to reach out to the old-fashioned marketing tools to market your app. Start with a focus group of your customers. What features do they need on their app? Where do they hear about the apps they install on their
mobile device?

Location is key
What publications do your customers read (including online ones) that you need old-fashioned public relations for? A good press release placed on TechCrunch or Mashable is like 30 years ago of getting your press released placed in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Utilize your platform to the fullest
I have a saying – Think tap, not touch – throughout the process. People touch their computer, tap their mobile device.

Do not cram everything in
You need to utilize the cloud to serve your application. Associated Press app takes about two or three minutes to download. Too much information. Web design focused, not mobile. Thirty seconds is death to a mobile app loading. Don’t try to be everything to everyone via an app. That’s the problem with websites and why they were abandoned by consumers for mobile apps.

Richard’s Final Words of Wisdom
Think of your mobile app as the sales brochure from last century. Too few people use the tap to call feature available in most app design.

3. Katie Meurin

Director of Marketing
https://www.zco.com/
@KatieMeurin

Build up your credibility
For a new developer, their marketing goals should be centered around building new reviews.If you spend a lot of money on marketing before you build reviews you will send visitors to a new listing without the credibility of seeing other reviews. I usually recommend a grassroots approach – start with your friends, family, colleagues. Maybe throw an app launch event and ask everyone to review there.

Get a business card
If you don’t already have business cards for your company, you need to. Building up your online presence is important but don’t forget who is actually behind every computer, people.

Build up credibility anywhere you go
Carry around a business card that asks people to review, give it to everyone you meet. Adding a simple line asking people to review your app will let people know that you value their opinion. The reviews will not only help you establish credibility with visitors but also with the app stores, so they will show your app more in search results and you will get more organic downloads.

4. Brady Christensen

Co-Founder
www.BookPrimo.com

Words of wisdom:
Most people are looking for a magic-bullet to market their mobile-app. They’re crossing their fingers and hoping that the answer to their marketing problems issomething like “Use Adwords!” “Do SEO”, etc. Well here is the closest thing to a magic-bullet I can give you

Know your audience:
Who is the ideal person to download and use your mobile app? Once you know that, find out where they hangout online.

Here is an example:
You own a fitness app that helps increase strength on the big lifts like bench press, squat, and dead lift. You do some research and you learn that your audience is young men, ages 18 to 25 that want to build muscle and strength. You would start by advertising on pages that cater to that demographic. You also found out that your customers are heavily involved with Stronglifts 5×5 workout routine, a workout routine highly recommended for beginners. You now know to position yourself with Stronglifts 5×5 to start bringing in even more of your ideal customers. You would then contact the creator of stronglifts 5×5 and negotiate an agreement for an advertisement, facebook mention, or newsletter blast.

The bare minimum
For anyone who is just getting started, I would highly recommend, at the very least, running very targeted ads on Facebook to people who meet your criteria.

5. Jonathan Poston

President
www.Yiveo.com

Seven ways to promote your app:

1. Improve the visibility of your mobile app through ASO (app store optimization)
2. Circulating it around your established network (email, social, website, etc.)
3. Advertising it on social media
4. PPC-Google AdWords
5. Posting a press release
6. Applying for app awards,
7. Internal incentives to download and keep the app (retention is a huge problem) might include a freemium model

6. Bob Bentz

President
ATS Mobile

The right tools, for the right game
While app store optimization is certainly important, marketers must not rely solely on promotion within the stores to maximize downloads. There are over two million apps in the stores and finding a particular app is similar to finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, despite the best ASO efforts”.

Know the game and play it right
It is not easy to get consumers interested in downloading another app on their mobile phone when smartphone users are already using an average of 26.7 apps per month, according to a Nielsen study. Too often, a company spends all of its money on developing an app and does not reserve any money for marketing the app. That is a rookie mistake. Don’t make it.

Develop a marketing plan
A company needs to have developed a structured marketing plan in advance of the release of the app. It needs a plan to tell existing customers and prospects good reasons why they need the app and where the app can be downloaded. It needs to evaluate all of its current marketing channels to determine which would be best for promoting an app.

Find the right platforms
Facebook, for instance, would probably be better for facilitating app downloads than outdoor advertising since a social media user is likely on her mobile phone already as opposed to a driver who is hopefully not on his phone. Google AdMob might be the best place since it enables an app marketer to advertise within other apps that consumers have already downloaded.

Facebook Ads
There is no doubt about the power of creating buzz on social media for an app launch. It is an important part of the initial publicity required. And, nobody does app marketing better than Facebook which earns a significant part of its ad revenue from brands pushing app downloads.

Advertise outside the web
Of course, internet advertising is not always the best source for app downloads. If the app has a huge budget, it may very well be television that results in the most downloads. *Game of War* did a great job of promoting its app with eye catching Kate Upton and Mariah Carey as the stars of the commercials.

Be in the spotlight
Acquisition costs will not always be high priced efforts like the television advertising for *Game of War*. Publicity is a major driver of new app downloads so use press releases and other public relations efforts to get the word out. Include a social media blitz as well. The ROI provided by public relations efforts will likely result in the best ROI of any of the promotional efforts.

Spread the word, fast.
When marketing an app, it is absolutely critical to get off to a quick start to break through the supply of apps in the app store. If an app is buried below thousands of others in the rankings, it is going to be difficult to get found. Therefore, app marketers must get the word out quickly about the app by using a high level of growth hacking or a large advertising budget in an attempt to gain a featured listing and benefit from organic downloads. Downloads beget more downloads thanks to the viral effect of the purchase and the improved ASO.

Advertise on mobile apps
Research from Localytics found an added bonus to advertising apps. App users that were acquired as a result of being discovered via a mobile ad network were more likely to come back for multiple uses on the app than those that found it from an organic search on the app store. This is likely due to the fact that the ad creative has done a good job in pre-selling users on the benefits of the app and that the advertising was highly targeted.

Encourage Sharing
The viral effect of apps is an important phenomenon to take advantage of. An app should encourage existing users to share the app with friends or on social media. (Think Candy Crush.) This is a great way to take advantage of the viral publicity that a mobile app can provide.

Add your app URL to your content marketing
Another great way to drive traffic to an app is to find the URL of the app download in the iTunes or Google Play listing for the app. Keep in mind, this is not the URL for the business, but the URL that is used by the app stores. Then, when the business does content marketing on its own blog or on external sites, it can link to the app store URL listings. The goal is
to get multiple rankings on the search engines for the app. Those rankings might be the page on the business website that promotes the app download and the app stores’ direct URL’s for the download.

Go International
For iPhone and Android apps, there are multiple countries where the app can be listed. If an app makes its money on advertising, there is no reason not to list the app in all countries, especially populous countries like China and India. The Apple App and Google Play stores are available in over a hundred countries so it makes sense to be listed in as many of them as necessary. Of course, if the app has an ecommerce element to it, this may not be practical.

Be present in multiple stores
There are many secondary Android app stores and therefore many places where an Android app can be marketed. Amazon, Kindle, Nook store from Barnes & Noble, AppBrain, and GetJar are a few alternate places where an Android app can be marketed in addition to its logical home base in the Google Play store.

Measure your CPI and advertise wisely
There is a defined cost to acquire app downloads and it is measured by a Cost Per Install (CPI) index. The CPI per vertical market varies, but according to Fiksu, it averages $2.98 per user in 2015 and it is rising every year as businesses expand their use of mobile advertising, thus driving CPI costs up.

7. Alice Williams

Online Content Contributor
Business Bee

Bring on the hype
Generating excitement via social media is a must*. SMB’s should plan out a social media campaign that starts approximately 3 months before the app is released. In doing this, the SMB can tease out information regarding the app to build awareness and market it in a cost efficient manner.

Create a Launch Event
Another way to generate excitement and build community relations is to throw an event to announce the launch of the app. The SMB can invite notable members of the community, bloggers and social media influencers to generate buzz and to try and attract members of the local press (which is fantastic PR for the SMB and their app)

Include your app in your emails
A way to help market the app without much extra work is to be sure to include information about the app in any email communications the SMB sends out to customers and to of course have a dedicated email announcing the app when it is live.

8. Steve Hatmaker, Jr.

Digital Marketing Strategist
@stevehatmakerjr

Start Today
One of the best ways to guarantee marketing success for your mobile app is to begin today. Most small business get involved in marketing the app when it is too late, or even worse, they completely over looking any kind of marketing.

Know your competitive edge
After you complete your marketing research for your ideal audience, you need to discover your apps unique selling proposition. What makes your app unique? Why is it better than your competitors?

Optimize your app
Also, it is very important to optimize you app for the App Store. This includes optimal use of keywords in your app name and description.

Take your time
Try to avoid the rush to get your app out immediately, you have a better chance of getting press coverage if you have an advanced target release date.

Design the perfect press kit
Be sure to offer sneak peeks and teasers such as screenshots of your app, video promo, and blog post. People love visuals. Start giving them insight and build buzz long before the apps launch.

The power of email
Be sure to send out emails, tweets, and Facebook post to your current customer list. Never underestimate the power of an email.

Build a microsite
Build an enticing microsite just for your app. Keep it updated with fresh content about your app.

Spread the word
Contact sites like App Advice (https://appadvice.com/appnn), Macworld (https://www.macworld.com), and 148 Apps (https://www.148apps.com). These are popular sites that have large audiences and can help spread the word about your app. As soon as it releases, write these sites and ask for a review.

Ask for reviews
Ask customers for reviews after your app is released.

9. Marin Perez

Content Marketing Manager
kahuna.com

Solve your customer’s problem, not your own.
First off, make sure your app is actually solving a problem. Many businesses feel like they have to create an app because everybody’s doing it but an app strategy isn’t a one-time project, it’s a long-term program. Because of that, make sure it fits with your business goals.

Use all your tools
Make sure you leverage every single touchpoint you have with the customer to promote the app. Many brands will promote their app on the website, on social, on email and on other digital platforms but don’t ignore your other connections with customers. If you’re a brick-and-mortar, use your in-store signage or your receipts to promote your apps.

Leverage your communication channels

Finally, don’t forget to leverage the communication channels you own to get the most out of your app. Brands will likely use paid media to acquire new app users and it’s important to get those users over to channels you can control like email, push notification, in-app messages and more. From there, ensure you’re delivering personalized and relevant communications to your users across every channel.

10. Boni Satani

Inbound Marketer
Panamaxil
https://twitter.com/bonirulzz

Six ways to promote your Mobile App

1. Add a link of your app on your existing website
2. Offer a Free Recharge/ Coupons to encourage users to download your app
3. Guest post on the relevant website and in a way promote your app via
   author bio
4. Encourage your existing users to promote the app by offering them some
   incentive
5. Optimize your App title and Description around relevant keywords
6. Ensure that your app is indeed adding value to users

11. Joe Franklin

https://www.franklinmarketingcommunications.com/

Focus on the Rankings
When marketing a mobile app the, it’s important to focus first and foremost on ranking. The app market is chaotic, and if your app isn’t ranked high enough, it won’t be discovered. It can be tempting to lean on ad networks that will promote your app through other apps and banners, and while this may work, it can also be costly.

Develop a Social Media Strategy
I recommend that my cash-strapped clients focus first on social media. Regardless of size, every mobile app company should have a social media strategy in place – it increases brand reach and can help drawn in the right audience for your app. It can also be a powerful communication tool between the app developer and end user, which can help keep reviews within the app store positive, thereby helping to increase rankings and visibility.

Keep an open line of Communication
If users can only complain about an app through its review process, developers are setting themselves up for failure. Keeping an open line of communication through social media fosters actionable feedback that helps with updates and cuts down on ranking-killing bad reviews.”

12. Brian Sparker

Head of Content Marketing

Be Refined by the Fire
The best tip I share with my clients is to monitor and manage your online reviews. Having a firm understanding of your customer’s feedback and pain points can make a huge difference for mobile apps as it allows a business to leverage customer feedback, track issues the customer may be having and identifying trends through data analysis and common phrases used in the reviews.

More to come…

We hope our experts have given you valuable insight into marketing your app. 

With these tips you are well on your way to getting your app to the right people at the best time.

As always we we are committed to your success and believe in your mission.

 

 You finally did it. You spend countless hours perfecting your app and you have just launched it into the marketplace. So, naturally you should be expecting millions of downloads and money flooding in…right?

After all your app has all the right widgets and looks amazing. Plus, you invested a good amount of money and time into it. So why is your app barely getting any downloads? Well, it could be that your app is not being marketed the way it should be.

We reached out to 11 professionals and asked them for their mobile marketing tips for small business apps. We believe their strategies will guide you towards the levels of success you are looking for. 

 

Paul Manwaring

Design & Marketing Consultant

https://outsprung.com/

I have found a couple thing extremely helpful while working with a few startups and their apps:

Twitter/Facebook Ads:

Being able to hyper target users of these 2 social media platforms you can really find the perfect leads. For instance we had an app allowing users to find the best food at lunchtime in London.So we were able to target users in specific areas of London, during the hours of 11am-2pm (the busy lunch hours and when people might be looking for some food or just using their phones during their break).

Influencer Marketing:

Great way to get your app in the eyes of your audience. I’m an influencer myself in a sub-genre of music. I have been asked by manufacturers of DJ equipment, speakers, audio production software simply because I have a large following of exactly the type of people they want to target. It’s very powerful to get a good review from someone who lives and breathes the niche you are trying to break into.

 

Richard Kelleher

World’s first Marketing Sociologist
Marketing your app starts before the approval process by iTunes and Google for your app. It should
start at the onset of your app development.

Start with Focus Groups

You need to reach out to the old-fashioned marketing tools to market your
app. Start with a focus group of your customers. What features do they need
on their app? Where do they hear about the apps they install on their
mobile device?

Location is key

What publications do your customers read (including online ones) that you
need old-fashioned public relations for? A good press release placed on
TechCrunch or Mashable is like 30 years ago of getting your press released
placed in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Utilize your platform to the fullest

I have a saying – Think tap, not touch – throughout the process. People
touch their computer, tap their mobile device.

Do not cram everything in

You need to utilize the cloud to serve your application. Associated Press
app takes about two or three minutes to download. Too much information. Web
design focused, not mobile. Thirty seconds is death to a mobile app
loading. Don’t try to be everything to everyone via an app. That’s the
problem with websites and why they were abandoned by consumers for mobile
apps.

Final Words of Wisdom

Think of your mobile app as the sales brochure from last century. Too few
people use the tap to call feature available in most app design.
Katie Meurin

Director of Marketing

https://www.zco.com/

@KatieMeurin

Build up your credibility

For a new developer, their marketing goals should be centered around building new reviews.

If you spend a lot of money on marketing before you build reviews you will send visitors to a new listing without the credibility of seeing other reviews. I usually recommend a grassroots approach – start with your friends, family, colleagues. Maybe throw an app launch event and ask everyone to review there.

Get a business card

If you don’t already have business cards for your company, you need to. Building up your online presence is important but don’t forget who is actually behind every computer, people.

Build up credibility anywhere you go

Carry around a business card that asks people to review, give it to everyone you meet. Adding a simple line asking people to review your app will let people know that you value their opinion. The reviews will not only help you establish credibility with visitors but also with the app stores, so they will show your app more in search results and you will get more organic downloads.

 

Brady Christensen

Co-Founder

www.BookPrimo.com

Most people are looking for a magic-bullet to market their mobile-app. They’re crossing their fingers and hoping that the answer to their marketing problems is something like “Use Adwords!” “Do SEO”, etc. Well here is the closest thing to a magic-bullet I can give you:

Know your audience:
Who is the ideal person to download and use your mobile app? Once you know that, find out where they hangout online.
Here is an example:

You own a fitness app that helps increase strength on the big lifts like bench press, squat, and dead lift. You do some research and you learn that your audience is young men, ages 18 to 25 that want to build muscle and strength. You would start by advertising on pages that cater to that demographic. You also found out that your customers are heavily involved with Stronglifts 5×5 workout routine, a workout routine highly recommended for beginners. You now know to position yourself with Stronglifts 5×5 to start bringing in even more of your ideal customers. You would then contact the creator of stronglifts 5×5 and negotiate an agreement for an advertisement, facebook mention, or newsletter blast.

The bare minimum

For anyone who is just getting started, I would highly recommend, at the very least, running very targeted ads on Facebook to people who meet your criteria.

 

 

Bob Bentz

President

www.atsmobile.com

While app store optimization is certainly important, marketers must not
rely solely on promotion within the stores to maximize downloads. There
are over two million apps in the stores and finding a particular app is
similar to finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, despite the best
ASO efforts.

Know the game and play it right
It is not easy to get consumers interested in downloading another app on
their mobile phone when smartphone users are already using an average of
26.7 apps per month, according to a Nielsen study. Too often, a company
spends all of its money on developing an app and does not reserve any money
for marketing the app. That is a rookie mistake. Don’t make it.
Develop a marketing plan
A company needs to have developed a structured marketing plan in advance of
the release of the app. It needs a plan to tell existing customers and
prospects good reasons why they need the app and where the app can be
downloaded. It needs to evaluate all of its current marketing channels to
determine which would be best for promoting an app.

 

Find the right platforms

Facebook, for instance, would probably be better for facilitating app downloads than
outdoor advertising since a social media user is likely on her mobile phone
already as opposed to a driver who is hopefully not on his phone. Google
AdMob might be the best place since it enables an app marketer to advertise
within other apps that consumers have already downloaded.

Facebook Ads
There is no doubt about the power of creating buzz on social media for an
app launch. It is an important part of the initial publicity required.
And, nobody does app marketing better than Facebook which earns a
significant part of its ad revenue from brands pushing app downloads.

Advertise outside the web
Of course, internet advertising is not always the best source for app
downloads. If the app has a huge budget, it may very well be television
that results in the most downloads. *Game of War* did a great job of
promoting its app with eye catching Kate Upton and Mariah Carey as the
stars of the commercials.
Be in the spotlight
Acquisition costs will not always be high priced efforts like the
television advertising for *Game of War*. Publicity is a major driver of
new app downloads so use press releases and other public relations efforts
to get the word out. Include a social media blitz as well. The ROI
provided by public relations efforts will likely result in the best ROI of
any of the promotional efforts.

Spread the word, fast.

When marketing an app, it is absolutely critical to get off to a quick
start to break through the supply of apps in the app store. If an app is
buried below thousands of others in the rankings, it is going to be
difficult to get found. Therefore, app marketers must get the word out
quickly about the app by using a high level of growth hacking or a large
advertising budget in an attempt to gain a featured listing and benefit
from organic downloads. Downloads beget more downloads thanks to the viral
effect of the purchase and the improved ASO.

Advertise on mobile apps
Research from Localytics found an added bonus to advertising apps. App
users that were acquired as a result of being discovered via a mobile ad
network were more likely to come back for multiple uses on the app than
those that found it from an organic search on the app store. This is
likely due to the fact that the ad creative has done a good job in
pre-selling users on the benefits of the app and that the advertising was
highly targeted.
Encourage Sharing
The viral effect of apps is an important phenomenon to take advantage of.
An app should encourage existing users to share the app with friends or on
social media. (Think Candy Crush.) This is a great way to take advantage
of the viral publicity that a mobile app can provide.
Add your app URL to your content marketing
Another great way to drive traffic to an app is to find the URL of the app
download in the iTunes or Google Play listing for the app. Keep in mind,
this is not the URL for the business, but the URL that is used by the app
stores. Then, when the business does content marketing on its own blog or
on external sites, it can link to the app store URL listings. The goal is
to get multiple rankings on the search engines for the app. Those rankings
might be the page on the business website that promotes the app download
and the app stores’ direct URL’s for the download.
Go International
For iPhone and Android apps, there are multiple countries where the app can
be listed. If an app makes its money on advertising, there is no reason
not to list the app in all countries, especially populous countries like
China and India. The Apple App and Google Play stores are available in
over a hundred countries so it makes sense to be listed in as many of them
as necessary. Of course, if the app has an ecommerce element to it, this
may not be practical.

Be present in multiple stores
There are many secondary Android app stores and therefore many places where
an Android app can be marketed. Amazon, Kindle, Nook store from Barnes &
Noble, AppBrain, and GetJar are a few alternate places where an Android app
can be marketed in addition to its logical home base in the Google Play
store.

Measure your CPI and advertise wisely
There is a defined cost to acquire app downloads and it is measured by a
Cost Per Install (CPI) index. The CPI per vertical market varies, but
according to Fiksu, it averages $2.98 per user in 2015 and it is rising
every year as businesses expand their use of mobile advertising, thus
driving CPI costs up.
Alice Williams

Online Content Contributor, Business Bee

Bring on the hype

Generating excitement via social media is a must*. SMB’s should plan
out a social media campaign that starts approximately 3 months before the
app is released. In doing this, the SMB can tease out information regarding
the app to build awareness and market it in a cost efficient manner.
Create a Launch Event

Another way to generate excitement and build community relations
is to throw an event to announce the launch of the app. The SMB can invite notable
members of the community, bloggers and social media influencers to generate
buzz and to try and attract members of the local press (which is fantastic
PR for the SMB and their app)
Include your app in your emails

A way to help market the app without much extra work is to be
sure to include information about the app in any email communications the SMB sends out
to customers and to of course have a dedicated email announcing the app when it is live.

 

Steve Hatmaker, Jr.
Digital Marketing Strategist

@stevehatmakerjr 

Start Today

One of the best ways to guarantee marketing success for your mobile app is
to begin today. Most small business get involved in marketing the app when
it is too late, or even worse, they completely over looking any kind of
marketing.

Know your competitive edge

After you complete your marketing research for your ideal audience, you
need to discover your apps unique selling proposition. What makes your app
unique? Why is it better than your competitors?

Optimize your app

Also, it is very important to optimize you app for the App Store. This
includes optimal use of keywords in your app name and description.
Take your time
Try to avoid the rush to get your app out immediately, you have a better
chance of getting press coverage if you have an advanced target release
date.

Design the perfect press kit
Be sure to offer sneak peeks and teasers such as screenshots of your app,
video promo, and blog post. People love visuals. Start giving them insight
and build buzz long before the apps launch.

The power of email

Be sure to send out emails, tweets, and Facebook post to your current
customer list. Never underestimate the power of an email.

Build a microsite

Build an enticing microsite just for your app. Keep it updated with fresh
content about your app.

Spread the word

Contact sites like App Advice (https://appadvice.com/appnn), Macworld (
https://www.macworld.com), and 148 Apps (https://www.148apps.com). These are
popular sites that have large audiences and can help spread the word about
your app. As soon as it releases, write these sites and ask for a review.

Ask for reviews

Ask customers for reviews after your app is released.

 

Marin Perez

Content Marketing Manager

www.kahuna.com

Solve your customer’s problem, not your own.

First off, make sure your app is actually solving a problem. Many
businesses feel like they have to create an app because everybody’s doing
it but an app strategy isn’t a one-time project, it’s a long-term program.
Because of that, make sure it fits with your business goals.

Use all your tools

Make sure you leverage every single touchpoint you have with the customer
to promote the app. Many brands will promote their app on the website, on
social, on email and on other digital platforms but don’t ignore your other
connections with customers. If you’re a brick-and-mortar, use your in-store
signage or your receipts to promote your apps.

Leverage your communication channels

Finally, don’t forget to leverage the communication channels you own to get
the most out of your app. Brands will likely use paid media to acquire new
app users and it’s important to get those users over to channels you can
control like email, push notification, in-app messages and more. From
there, ensure you’re delivering personalized and relevant communications to
your users across every channel.

 

Boni Satani

Inbound Marketer

https://twitter.com/bonirulzz

Six ways to promote your Mobile App

1. Add a link of your app on your existing website
2. Offer a Free Recharge/ Coupons to encourage users to download your app
3. Guest post on the relevant website and in a way promote your app via
   author bio
4. Encourage your existing users to promote the app by offering them some
   incentive
5. Optimize your App title and Description around relevant keywords
6. Ensure that your app is indeed adding value to users

 

Joe Franklin

https://www.franklinmarketingcommunications.com/

Focus on the Rankings

When marketing a mobile app the, it’s important to focus first and foremost on ranking. The app market is chaotic, and if your app isn’t ranked high enough, it won’t be discovered. It can be tempting to lean on ad networks that will promote your app through other apps and banners, and while this may work, it can also be costly.

Develop a Social Media Strategy

I recommend that my cash-strapped clients focus first on social media. Regardless of size, every mobile app company should have a social media strategy in place – it increases brand reach and can help drawn in the right audience for your app. It can also be a powerful communication tool between the app developer and end user, which can help keep reviews within the app store positive, thereby helping to increase rankings and visibility.

Keep an open line of Communication

If users can only complain about an app through its review process, developers are setting themselves up for failure. Keeping an open line of communication through social media fosters actionable feedback that helps with updates and cuts down on ranking-killing bad reviews.”

 

Brian Sparker

Be Refined by the Fire

The best tip I share with my clients is to monitor and manage your online
reviews. Having a firm understanding of your customer’s feedback and pain
points can make a huge difference for mobile apps as it allows a business
to leverage customer feedback, track issues the customer may be having and
identifying trends through data analysis and common phrases used in the
reviews.

 

More to come…

We hope our experts have given you valuable insight into mobile marketing for your app.

With these tips you are well on your way to getting your app to the right people at the best time. As always we we are committed to your success and believe in your mission.

If you have any suggestions, comments, or questions, please let us know in the comments below

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If you’ve made the decision to start building a mobile app, the time is right to start developing your mobile marketing plan. With all of the activity surrounding development and testing the app, marketing winds up an afterthought for many small business owners. And that’s a big mistake.

There are over 1.5 million apps each in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, and developers submit about 1,000 new apps every single day. Competition is stiff, no matter your market niche; in fact, about one quarter of all apps are only opened once after download. No one wants to see all their hard work end up in the land of forgotten apps.

So how do you make sure your app pays off? A solid mobile marketing plan is essential, and ideally, follows your mobile app development every step of the way, from brainstorming features and functions to post launch engagement.

If you’re a small business owner taking the plunge into mobile app development, this guide will help your marketing efforts align with your goals and get your app off to a great start.

Identify Your Target Audience and App Objectives

Before you begin, flesh out who your customers really are; your buyer personas will shape your design elements and functionality. A business designing a mobile app for a target audience that is predominantly women between the ages of 18 and 29 will have an entirely different look, feel, and set of features than an app designed for men over age 50.

The next step is identifying what you want your app to achieve. This isn’t as obvious as it seems at first glance; some of the best branded apps have features that complement the company’s main function. North Face, the outdoor apparel brand, includes a hiking and bike trail finder, real-time progress tracking, and social integration that lets users share their accomplishments with their friends, boosting engagement and brand awareness.

Thermos is another brand with value-added features: The Oasis Places points users to the nearest public fountains to fill their water bottles and provides user-generated ratings for cleanliness, convenience, and coldness of the water.

Of course, if you’re an eCommerce business or a restaurant, you’ll want functionality that lets users accomplish important tasks related to your business—placing an order and viewing products or menus, for example. But this is a good time to get creative and think of value-added extras you might include to differentiate your app from similar offerings in your market and help you achieve your marketing goals.

Do Your Keyword Research

Finding the right keywords is an extremely important part of app store optimization (ASO) and SEO for mobile app discoverability. Your app stands a better chance of being found and downloaded by your target audience if you know the language they are using to search for your product—about 63 percent of all apps are discovered with organic search.

You’ll want to put in time upfront to get the right keywords for your app; ASO best practices recommend careful keyword placement in your app’s title and description in the mobile app marketplaces, as well as on your app’s landing page or website. Google indexes app content that exists on the web in its search results; the right keywords and content can help your app float to the top in organic SERP as well as in app store searches.

Build Your App’s Online Presence

Start by designing an icon and overall branding theme for your app and collateral materials such as articles, banner ads, announcements, etc. As you get further along in the app development process, you’ll also want to acquire some great screenshots to complement your marketing materials.

At a minimum, you’ll need a landing page. For small businesses on a budget, online tools like Unbounce offer freemium and low-cost plans and customizable templates to help you create a well-designed landing page to announce your app, collect addresses, and provide links for download once your app is released. This is also where your app content will reside for SEO purposes.

It’s a good idea to begin working social media, as well. Some experts advocate a broad approach, blanketing all the social media platforms. Many, however, recommend choosing one or two platforms where your target audience hangs out and concentrating on a more focused social campaign. This lets you maintain a higher level of engagement and actually reach the people most likely to download your app.

You may also want to consider a paid social ad to test your landing page and ensure you are targeting the right people for your launch efforts. If you’re converting about 3 to 4 percent, you’re on the right platform and targeting the right customers.

If you have a company blog and an email subscriber list, take advantage of those channels to promote your mobile app launch, as well. Do you have a good relationship with a journalist at your local paper or in a journal in your business niche? Reach out about a week before release to see if he or she will test-drive your app and write an article or blog post.

Launch Day

It seems like a no-brainer, but sending an e-blast to your subscriber list is an important launch day first step. Depending on your target audience, Facebook app install ads are a good way to get downloads and build some momentum. If your target audience is into Instagram, consider reaching out to some influencers in your niche and asking if they’ll do a sponsored post promoting your app.

Make sure your app is listed in the app marketplaces and update all your online pages with live links to the app stores. Include signage in your brick-and-mortar stores announcing your app, as well; ask customers to text in to get an SMS message with link to your app to keep it simple.

Promoting Your App

Image via Flickr

There are two main paths to app promotion post launch: Paid and organic. Depending on your budget, your market niche, and your marketing objectives, you’ll probably engage in a combination of activities from each side.

 

Paid	Organic
App-Install Campaigns (CPI ads)	App Store Optimization & SEO
Paid Social Media Ads	Social Media Shares
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising	Company/brand website/blog
Email campaigns	Earned media

 

Here’s an overview of each weapon in your app promotion arsenal:

App-Install Campaigns

There’s no doubt that paid install ads on the major social sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) offer an excellent opportunity to get your app in front of a huge target audience. They also have the advantage of simplifying the ROI tracking process—it’s easy to see when an ad leads an app install.

For small businesses, the question is whether the app users these ads generate have a higher lifetime customer value than the cost of the ad; are they ROI positive? There is some evidence that users who convert from a paid install campaign have higher engagement and retention rates than users who find an app organically, so marketers should weigh these factors when deciding whether the CPI model is cost-effective for them on the platforms they prefer.

Paid Social Media

Depending on your target audience and your overall mobile marketing plans, paid social is a comparatively inexpensive way to get exposure for your app. Don’t overlook the smaller niche platforms if they fit with your target demographic; promoted pins on Pinterest and images on Instagram, sponsored updates on LinkedIn, and placed ads on Reddit or StumbleUpon are great options for some SMEs.

Pay Per Click

Search engine marketing is an option worth considering, especially since app stores do not offer paid search this point. If you’re handy with AdWords and Google Analytics, you can get decent results. One note, however: The new iOS 9 update released in September 2015 allows users to block ads, including Google AdWords, in their mobile web browser. In-app ads, however, will not be affected, so you should take this into consideration in your overall app marketing strategy.

Email and SMS Text Campaigns

Depending on your target audience demographics, text campaigns offer a higher ROI over other electronic blast methods. Be sure your landing page is optimized for mobile if you choose this approach. Email blasts to your subscriber lists are a good way to drive downloads, but be wary of purchasing lists, since these traditionally have poor performance metrics and are less cost effective. 

Organic Mobile App Promotion

For many SMEs, organic promotion, through SEO, ASO, social media hooks, and other inbound marketing tactics is the most cost effective option for building momentum and driving downloads.

Give special attention to your brand website; remember that people will land on different pages depending on search terms and outside links. Prominently feature your app and download links throughout your website, especially on those pages that contain content appealing to your app’s target audience.

In addition to your own company blog, reach out to other sites your target audience visits and ask if you can submit a guest post. While most won’t allow you to overtly advertise your app, many will allow you to link to it in your article or post, as long as the content provides value to their readers.

Don’t overlook the huge power of social media for building awareness and engagement; the trick is to give your followers a hook, or reason to share your app. Nike’s app, for example, lets users share information about their runs—their route, the distance, and time. Think about the features in your app you could use to encourage social sharing. Some social media tips:

• Monitor your social accounts and respond promptly to comments and feedback.
• Create a promotional video of your app; video is one of the most popular types of content on social media.
• Give followers an incentive like extra loyalty points, for example, to promote or “like” your app.
• Don’t forget to ask your followers to rate your app to help your ASO efforts.

A Word About App Store Optimization (ASO)

Image via Flickr

ASO is your best shot at organic discoverability; over 60 percent of all apps are found through organic search in the app store. Here are a few tips to make the most of your ASO efforts:

• Put effort into identifying the right keywords and make sure they are properly placed into your app store descriptions; feature one in the title and the first 25 characters of the description.
• Create the most eye-catching icon you can that fits your brand image and use it consistently on all your app promotion efforts.
• Add compelling screenshots of your app’s best features—for many users, these are often the deciding factor for downloading or not downloading an app.
• Factors such as number of downloads and ratings and reviews are out of your direct control, but they do figure in ASO. Be sure you offer an in-app channel for feedback so you can address any issues with your app to minimize the potential for negative ratings and reviews.

Keeping Your Users Engaged

It’s not enough to meet your download goals; you need to keep users engaged with your app and prevent uninstalls. A recent survey showed the top reasons people uninstall apps:

• The app wasn’t useful/didn’t provide value.
• They got too many ads or alerts.
• There were too many technical glitches.
• The app was difficult to use.

Push notifications are a great way to re-engage users, but they should be used judiciously. A generic “You haven’t opened your app lately” is not going to be as effective as a notification that is contextualized to where the customer is and what he is doing, as well as what the app can do to help him. Consider a location-based message giving the user a special discount at a nearby store, for example.

Ultimately, marketing your app is an ongoing process that starts with—and builds upon—an effective online presence, including appropriate social channels and a branded blog. Remember to choose the right mobile app analytics tools to measure your progress and build on the efforts that return the best results. And don’t forget to keep the momentum and engagement going with well-timed push notifications and re-engagement campaigns.

 

If you’re marketing for an SME, you’re probably familiar with the phrase “mobile first,” especially as it applies to your customer’s buying journey. After all, this is an era driven by mobile devices—according to a recent survey, 90 percent of shoppers actually used their smartphones in the store.

Customers love the convenience of shopping with their mobile devices, even in local brick-and-mortar stores. In fact:

• 54 percent used their smartphones to compare prices.
• 48 percent researched product features.
• 42 percent checked online product reviews.

More importantly, however—

• 76 percent said they’d be more likely to shop at a store with a loyalty rewards program, and
• 57 percent said they’d be more likely to shop at a store if they got a push notification about a deal or promotion.

What this tells smart marketers is that, far from being a detriment, “showrooming” is actually a mobile behavior can leverage to their advantage. To stay competitive, brands need to see the mobile device as an extension of the shopping experience and develop a marketing strategy that captures its potential.

What does that mean, exactly, for the marketing director of an SME? For starters, it means remapping the customer buying journey with an emphasis on the behaviors of your target demographic, which in most cases leads decisively to a mobile first mentality—from your website to your marketing spend, and ultimately, a mobile app.

Mapping the Mobile Customer Journey

The path to purchase has undergone a seismic shift in the past decade or so. Take a look:

Then	Now
Go to the mall or supermarket	Identify a need (personal, gift-giving, occasion)
Discover a need (personal, gift-giving, occasion)	Check online reviews and recommendations
Compare products in-store or between stores in mall	Select a product or service to purchase
Select a product or service to buy	Compare merchants, prices online; select supplier
Purchase in store	Make purchase, either online or in person

Mobile is with the consumer every step of the way; it’s more about behavior than technology, and here is where a mobile-first marketing strategy really pays off:

• It’s contextual—you are getting the right message to the right consumer at the right time in the decision-making process.
• It’s constant—consumers have their devices with them all the time, a virtual bridge between the digital and physical world.
• It’s personal—new technology lets marketers customize the experience at each point in the buying journey.

Does Your Small Business Really Need a Mobile App?

Image via pcworld.com

In a nutshell, most likely. Let’s look at another parallel between then and now: The year is 2000, just over a decade ago, and a web designer walks into a local bakery for a donut and coffee. He looks for the owner…

Web Designer: Hey, love your shop. Do you have a website? I can build one for you.

Owner: Nah, I don’t need all that fancy stuff.

Web Designer: Why not? How will people find your shop?

Owner: I have a sign, I advertise in the paper, I’m fine.

Web Designer: But how about online? How will new customers find you on the Internet?

Owner: The Internet? That’s for the big guys. I have my regular customers, I don’t need the Internet.

Sound familiar? The owner of 2000 couldn’t see into the future; he didn’t know what he didn’t know—especially about the way the Internet would change the world of commerce. And so it is with mobile apps.

The truth is, most small businesses will benefit from building a mobile app, especially with today’s cost-effective app-building platforms. Here’s why apps work, especially for small business:

• Downloaded on a smartphone, your mobile app gives your brand constant visibility and increases brand recognition.
• You have a direct communications channel with your customers; no spam folders to bypass.
• Your app can be a value-added service, giving your customers a convenient, personalized buying experience.
• Providing new ways for your customers to interact with your brand builds engagement.
• Digitized rewards programs in your mobile app build customer loyalty.
• Mobile apps help you stand out from your competition.

A mobile app may not be a necessity—yet—but given mobile’s increasing dominance, and its increasing role in the path to purchase, the time is right to explore your options.

Making the Mobile App Decision

Some SMEs believe that their mobile website accomplishes all of their mobile marketing goals; perhaps it does. But before you stop reading, let’s look at some ways a mobile app is far superior to a mobile website:

1. Mobile apps offer better personalization, and personalization is a key driver of conversions.
2. In-app and push notifications are a great alternative to email, with its low (and dropping) open and click-through rates.
3. Apps integrate smartphone capabilities (phone, contact list, calendar, camera, GPS, for example) for a more personal, interactive, and interesting experience.
4. Many mobile app features and functions work offline, and they work more quickly than mobile websites.
5. A mobile app icon serves as a constant branding reminder on a user’s mobile phone—it’s a one-step link to your business.

In the end, developing an app often comes down to these questions:

• What do your customers want? Mobile-dependent millennials, for example, keep about 35 apps on their devices and spend about 90 percent of their mobile time using them.
• Can you afford it? This depends on the features you want and the path you take to develop your app. Thanks to today’s DIY app-building tools, even a small business can build and support a mobile app on a modest budget.
• Will it help you achieve your marketing goals? For many SMEs, a mobile website and a mobile app work hand-in-glove to advance mobile marketing goals in a way neither option can achieve on its own.
  

Must-Have Features for Your Mobile App

Every business has unique goals and objectives, but there are some mobile app features that have universal appeal. When you’re brainstorming your app, don’t forget these features in your list of must-haves:

• Local context. This is extremely important for SMEs with brick-and-mortar shops, since customers are much more likely to visit a store when they get an alert or notification. Local context is also key to personalizing the app experience.
• Smart push notifications. Push notifications based on the user’s behavior or circumstance, and transactional notifications, provide unique value to your customers and let you more selectively target your communications.
• Social integration. Extend the reach of your social media and mobile marketing by integrating these capabilities in your mobile app.
• Offline capabilities. One advantage of apps over mobile websites is their ability to work without Wi-Fi. Give customers access to important content even in offline mode.

Planning Your Mobile App

Once you’ve made the decision to build a mobile app, it’s time to assemble your app team and begin spelling out your plans. It’s a good idea to include executive management, sales and marketing, and IT in your app team; you can balance your needs and wants against your in-house capacity and budget. Here’s a simple 8-step plan to get you started:

1. Write down what you want your app to accomplish. A food truck owner, for example, may want to let customers know where he’ll be and provide directions, view the day’s menu, place an order, and accumulate loyalty points.
2. Check out successful apps for other businesses in your market niche and list the features and elements you like.
3. Establish your budget and timeline; decide what you can accomplish in-house and what you’ll contract out.
4. Sketch out your app and map out its navigation. There are several free online wireframing and mockup tools available to help you create an interactive prototype you can test and refine until you’re happy with the way your app looks and functions.
5. Create your app marketing plan (covered in detail in the next section).
6. Decide how what you’ll need on the backend and whether you’ll build it in-house or use a cloud-based backend service (BaaS) platform.
7. Complete the actual coding to build the app. If you’ve hired an app developer, you’ll want to set milestones for deliverables. If you’re using an app-building platform, this is where you’ll actually start putting your designs together into a functional app.
8. Test your completed app and make sure every feature works in real-world scenarios. Work out any technical glitches and navigational dead-ends. Submit your app to the appropriate app stores.
9. Release your app and start tracking your success.

Marketing Your Mobile App

Your amazing app won’t make a return on investment—let alone achieve your marketing goals—if no one knows it exists or how to find it. Don’t make the mistake of thinking marketing is an afterthought or a once-and-done activity. Your marketing department should be involved in app promotion from day one.

Your first marketing tasks include choosing a name for your app, designing a logo, and doing keyword research. You’ll need keywords for app store optimization (ASO) and SEO, both of which work together for app discoverability and getting people to download your app. Remember, not all apps will be an extension of your business name: Chamin, for example, has an app named “Sit or Squat” lets people rate public restrooms, share their reviews, and find the cleanest facilities nearby.

It’s important to add a landing page to your website announcing your app; include a subscription form so you can run an email campaign prior to launch. As your app is built, add screenshots and a video promo to generate excitement. Include links and app store logos once you’ve released your app, and include a section for ratings and reviews.

Leverage all of your marketing channels to get people interested in your new app. Add progress reports to your company blog, promote your app’s features and release date on your social media channels, and send out an email blast. You may even want to reach out to social media influencers to enlist their help in promoting your app.

Once you release your app, pull out the stops promoting it. Announce it with signage in your stores, banners on your website, and across all your digital channels. Offer people an incentive to download your app—a one-time discount, free trial, or bundle of loyalty points are all attractive options.

It’s also important to reward and engage people once they’ve downloaded your app; don’t be the app users open once and never touch again. Use push notifications to share relevant content and work your social media channels to keep people engaged.

Most importantly, don’t assume that your customers will download your app just because you created one. Your app has to provide a unique value or service to your customers, entertain or excite them, and give them a personalized experience. If you accomplish that, your marketing efforts will be much more successful.

Launch Day KPIs

Of course you’ll want to track the number of downloads, but that figure gives you just a glimpse into performance. The sad truth is that almost a fourth of all downloaded apps are only opened once, so your first priority should be engagement and retention. In order to get there, you need to know the Ws of usage and adjust your strategies accordingly.

• Who is downloading your app? What do you know about demographics of your users? When you know who your audience is, you can better target them with relevant offers and content.

• What device are they using? Drill down to a granular level, beyond just tablet or smartphone, so you can tailor your updates and features to the device’s specs.

• Where and when are they using it? We know that smartphone users “showroom” when they shop, which suggests they want quick access to info and solutions to problems. Is your app delivering the answers they need?

For SMEs today, taking the plunge into the world of mobile app development is a much easier decision than in years past; new app-building tools, better insight into mobile behavior and mobile marketing, and a clear path to ROI means nearly every small business can benefit from having a mobile app. What’s holding you back from taking the next step?

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in and what industry that enterprise falls under, there have been a few historical bumps in what were once traditional business cycles that have changed the game forever. With a new batch of catch phrases like the new normal and disruptive technologies dotting the post 2008 business landscape, businesses both big and small have been left to rely on innovation and technology like never before to pad their bottom lines. At no time before has technology played such a central role as one of the biggest drivers of the push to capture new geographic and generational markets.

Consider this. A large chunk of the world’s population uses the Internet. In fact, three billion people which is almost 40% of the world’s population is online and a full 80% of those users own a smartphone. There are other numbers from Smart Insights.com and similar resources that all point to the new digital tsunami in mobile that you need to stay on top of if you want to ride the wave to new sales, either with the millennials in your target market or a whole new group in the developing world. There’s a modern funnel developing as websites are under increasing pressure to make themselves mobile friendly, and the gateway to that world of information, or the vanguard for that information, is increasingly becoming the mobile app. Research analysts IDC report there will be 982 million smartphones shipped by the end of this year. In turn, that will mean app downloads will rise to 184 billion within the next four years.

 

Disruptive Technology Set Loose

It’s another disruptive technology set loose on business like the cloud and data analytics, but this one is more personal in the sense that if these are properly designed and understood, mobile apps are the new improved tool to inspire customer loyalty. Experts from all corners of the ecommerce world are seeing the new importance of mobile apps for the firm that wants to ride the cutting edge. Allan Pollett is a SEO consultant based in Toronto who understands the significance of this new thrust in the world of ecommerce.

“The reason I like mobile apps as a marketing tool and as a way to build business is these create loyalty,” says the SEO/SEM with web development experience. Pollett has been in business since nineteen ninety-eight. “What happens is when we download an app we are basically tied to it.”

 

Apps funnel the Internet

He goes on to say that apps funnel the Internet searching experience into one easy method that becomes familiar and comfortable for users. Pollet also suggest that people enjoy simplicity with apps and don’t want to get more than one with the same function.

“Once consumers make a connection to whatever product through a mobile app, they are committed to it since that same user doesn’t want to download the next company’s app that does the same thing,” he says.

Pollett also points out that even the latest mobile versions of websites aren’t always as consumer friendly as a well-designed application.

“There’s a big difference. When you go to a website, you generally need to go to multiple pages and logins,” he says. “There’s a process that you need to go through. With an app, that’s generally streamlined where you usually get just the functionality you need.” He cites the banking industry where the apps have specific functions like processing checks. They quite often parallel things that you can do by phone.

 

 

Mobile tipping point  

Statistics point to the fact the move toward mobility and away from the desktop is well past the tipping point. The amount of time Americans are spending online using mobile devices is 51% whereas the time they spend on desktop devices has dropped to 42 percent according to eMarketer 4/15 ( 2011-2015). The implication here is different from the early days of ecommerce when industry experimented with social media as a business tool but was not convinced there was a substantial ROI to be had. Mobile is a juggernaut that’s spreading across the North American continent and other parts of the developing world (Morgan Stanley Research reports the number of mobile users surpassed desktop users sometime between 2013 and 2014 ) and the business that wants to stay on the cutting edge needs to get onboard with the mobile app.

 

Successful Leap

Of course, there are those firms that have already made the successful leap and they are in various industries right across the spectrum of companies looking to transition to using this technology to full advantage. Michelle Johnson is the external communications director with obrella.com, an online company geared to provide expertise and support in home and auto insurance. She notes that the availability of the mobile app has been a boon to the industry she works in, allowing customers to seek support, speak with agents more directly, read up on their polices and even make claims through their smartphones or other devices.

“Consumers expect simplicity and efficiency with their providers. The easiest way to keep this relationship strong is by creating user-friendly customer service through the human sidekick to us all- our mobile devices,” she says.

Still, there are some elements of this new world that harken back to other times and client retention was another area that Pollett, who has helped over 800 clients achieve top rankings on all of the major search engines, talked about.

“If you can transition your online visitors or your users to an app, you’re more likely to retain them for future business. It’s a big issue for most companies because they want to retain their clients.”

 

Learning Curve

While there’s always a learning curve in the beginning, the goal of the developers is to make an app that will make the user’s online experience easier. It stands to reason the best of these applications take this into account. They understand the nature of today’s online consumer and how these folks expect an interactive experience in everything they encounter on the Internet.

Aalap Shah is another one of these professionals who works with IT generally, social media specifically and understands the importance of mobile apps for success in today’s cybermarkets. He says that some of the bigger companies like United Airlines and Starbucks have already blazed a trail by offering mobile apps that give clients all the preferences they want, as well as locations, rewards and offers you might not otherwise get. Shah is the cofounder of the Chicago Social Media Agency, SoMe Connect, and he’s been following the rise of mobile apps for some time.

“The app that has a compelling offer is the one that gets my attention,” he says noting apps that engage people through great content and provide something unique that’s tied to a favorite brand with specific rewards are the ones that separate themselves from the competition.

“A good example would be a toy store that notices I’m buying toys for a three-year old and offers suggestions or discounts.”

He says small to medium businesses should be enticing prospects by interacting with the local neighborhood or the city and town where they are located, even going so far as to ask their customers what they want in an mobile application that suits their purposes.

Technological Thrust

 

In the end, there’s really no way to avoid this latest technological thrust whether you’re a corporation looking to increase your brand recognition or a smaller business looking to alert potential clients about special offers.

Remember, as the most popular path to the Internet changes you need to stay abreast of the innovations these mobile apps offer since they are the new bridge to existing clients and new demographics. It’s been some time since CNN reported way back in January of 2014 that Americans were accessing the Internet with smartphone and tablet apps more than computers and the snowball keeps rolling downhill.

Still not convinced in the need for a well designed business app? If you’re still thinking you can get by without this icing on the cyberbusiness cake, remember the fact Smart Insights reports that a full 80% of Internet users own a smartphone and each one of those devices represents a possible sale if you entice them with the right mobile app.

On Tuesday, April 21^st 2015, Google rolled out its ‘mobile-friendly’ algorithm update. With an increasing number of people conducting searches on mobile devices, Google has determined that in order to maximise user-experience on mobile, they need to prioritise mobile-friendly websites, ensuring that searchers are getting an optimal experience through search matches. The announcement has sent many into a panic with some even dubbing the update ‘mobile-geddon’, fearing their Google referral traffic would fall away entirely if their website was not optimised for mobile users. And it’s true, as noted in Google’s official announcement:

If your site’s pages aren’t mobile-friendly, there may be a significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google Search.

If your site’s not optimised for mobile searchers, you’re likely to lose some of that Google traffic. So what do you do? Here are three options to consider:

1. Make your website mobile-friendly

As part of their official announcement, Google offered two tests where users can check the mobile-friendliness of their websites. How much does it cost? They are free. In the first, you can test individual pages of your site to check their mobile compliance. It’s worth noting that Google’s update is a ‘page-level’ change, not ‘site-level’ – so if ten of the pages on your site are not mobile-friendly, but the rest of them are, only those ten pages will be affected by this algorithm update (the update does not impact on desktop or tablet search rankings, only mobile searches).

The second test Google provides checks the mobile-friendliness of your entire site using Google Webmaster Tools. Based on the information provided in this report, you can update and optimise your pages accordingly, then either wait for Google to re-check your site and re-index your pages, or you can submit your site to Google to get them to re-check your content immediately. Even if you opt not to go down this route, it’s worth checking these reports out to see how much your site is likely to be affected by the change.

You could also consider building a mobile version of your existing website, though given the massive increase in mobile usage; it makes more sense in the long term to build a site that one mobile and desktop-friendly.

2. Forget the website and build an app

This is one of the more common, modern-day business dilemmas – an app or a mobile site? The business case for either will depend entirely on your organisation’s goals and what you’re hoping to achieve through your online presence, but the basics of the argument are this:

• If you’re looking to provide content that can be easily viewed, shared and found via Google, then you really want a mobile-friendly site
• If you’re looking to engage your users through interactivity, provide them with something they can use and, ideally, help make their dealings with you simpler, then an app might better serve your needs

Apps are everywhere these days – the saying ‘there’s an app for that’ came about precisely because there is an app for virtually everything you can think of. Right now, you can download apps that enable you to turn on the lights, TV and heating in your home as you drive home from work and you can do your shopping from the comfort of your own kitchen. Apps are the future and they’re how we’re going to interact with the world around us and communicate with customers. You can even build an app for your church. But the question is, would your products and services specifically benefit from an app?

To answer this, you need to understand how your customers are finding you online, what answers they’re seeking from your web presence. If you’re getting a lot of Google traffic it probably makes more sense to maintain that via a responsive website. If you’re looking to showcase products, that’s also easier done on a page. If you have an idea for an app that builds interaction – something that enhances brand value through fun or task-based processes like those available from airlines or banks – an app could be a valuable option.

The key thing to remember with an app is it needs to be compelling, so it needs to be both extremely user-friendly and it needs to be shareable by inspiring others to talk about it and its benefits. For an app, you need a great idea and you need to be willing to experiment and refine it until it delivers what your audience wants, or it won’t be worth it.

That said users are spending an increasing amount of time in apps, a trend that’s likely to continue so it’s worth considering how you might be able to align with this shift.

3. Make your Facebook page the focus as your mobile landing page

This is an interesting perspective, one which has been pushed by Facebook executives (and was reinforced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his most recent Q and A session). As described by Zuckerberg, most mobile activity is on apps, not via browsers, and most people aren’t likely to download apps from small businesses. And many small business websites are not mobile-friendly and as a result, an increasing number of people are looking to Facebook pages to get information they’d normally get from a website.

What we are seeing is that people’s Pages on Facebook are actually becoming a more and more important presence, where customers will actually go look them up to see hours that a restaurant or store is open, to see what their friends think about it – typical types of things that you might have previously gone to the website to see.

This is a theory worth considering. As social search becomes more prevalent – particularly as Facebook looks to improve its internal search capabilities and Google partners with Twitter to deliver real-time tweets in search results – it’s likely that more people will be finding your business via social media, as opposed to Google search. This is particularly relevant in the case of Facebook, which is in charge of the most widely used apps in the world. As Facebook looks to increase the amount of time people stay on their platforms, it also increases the likelihood that users will come to your site via The Social Network. Maybe, rather than focussing on the mobile friendliness of your site, you should focus on improving your Facebook page and the user experience there. While it may not provide an entire mobile solution, as such, it’s an interesting consideration, particularly in light of Google’s algorithmic shift.

Really, there’s no right answer on how to maximise your customer’s mobile experience, the solutions are based on individual offerings and the needs of your audience. What is important is considering the options available; thinking about what might be the most beneficial approach for your brand. The methods of outreach and communication are increasing every day, there are new possibilities, new opportunities that should be taken into account. Not all of them will work for you, but some of them will – and locating those that best fit could have significant benefits for you and your brand.

Creating an app is both an expression of our self and a reflection of what we see is missing in the world. We find ourselves digging deep into who we are, what we would enjoy working on, and what needs still need to be fulfilled. Generating an app idea for the first time can be extremely daunting. Especially with an endless amount of possibilities such as building a church app.

The uncertainty has always spawned a certain fear inside creators. The fear of creating something no one will enjoy. Spending hundreds of dollars and hours building something which might not bring back any real tangible results. The fear of losing our investment to a poor concept is daunting but not random. But simple app ideas are actually pretty easy to come by.

Great app idea generation is not a gift given to a selected few, instead, it is a process by which any of us are able to carefully explore step by step methods to find our own solution to any problem. Whether you are a seasoned creator or a novice, we have provided a few recommendations to challenge and aid you as you create your next masterpiece.

We will begin by recommending you first explore your own resources, then expand to studying your competition, after which you will conduct a broad analysis of your industry, and lastly we challenge you to expand your vision by exploring industries completely unrelated to your own. All of this will help you come up with creative mobile app ideas.

We hope that by the end of this article you may have a clearer grasp on the idea generation process. So that you may continue to challenge both yourself and those around you to a higher standard of innovation.

If you can get good coming up with new mobile app ideas, you can white label them and generate a profit with the right development company.

Take a Closer Look at Yourself Before Starting App Development

No one knows your company better than you do, well, at least that’s the way it should be. When a company first starts out it is significantly different than the same company 1, 3, or five years later. Employees come and go, strategies have radically shifted to stay relevant, past failures have spawned new opportunities, and success has inspired action. The company you have now may be nowhere close to who it was when it first started.

The first step to generating new mobile app ideas is to first explore who the company has grown to be. Even a simple app idea can be huge. For many companies, this is usually the time they begin to look at their strength and weaknesses. We invite you to look a little further to find out the details of what makes your company unique. Examine your company’s physical appearance, the “brain” otherwise known as the people working for the company, your company’s characteristics, and lastly your pain points.

Is your company’s physical appearance a traditional brick and mortar, a virtual company something in between? More importantly, how important is your company’s physical appearance in relation to how you do business?

Brick and mortar companies have the privilege of interacting face to face with their customers. They get to walk up to one and strike up a friendly conversation and answer any of their questions. Building up a personal relationship feels a bit more natural because the individual is present and you are able to pick up on cues you would have never known online. Such as their preferences, fashion, and lifestyle.

Brick and mortar companies build themselves systems which cater primarily to needs and desires of their local market. Since the majority of their customers are locals, their strategies are tailored towards long term customer acceptance and retention.Much of what they will do is establish relationships with the customers through deep involvement in their personal growth and the growth of the community.

Virtual companies have the privilege of being part of a globally accessed network. They are globally accessible to any customer from around the world through having their own online presence usually in the form of a website, app, blog, or video. Virtual companies are able to build up relationships from around the world and must prepare systems to gather individual customer information.

Virtual companies will usually try to build up a massive email list to stay in an active relationship with all their customers. Having someone’s email means you can share with them relevant content, special deals and ask for a moment of their time to fill out questionnaires or to interview them.

Virtual companies build themselves systems that share value to anyone in the world at any time. Their strategies are focused on growing large followings of targeted customers, encouraging customer-to-customer promotion, partnerships with influencers, and

In-between companies are companies that are on the go. These are companies that are able to mobilize themselves to continuously change their place of business. They enjoy the privilege of switching up where they do business in accordance with their own personal preference and greatest customer potential.

In-between companies build themselves systems to complement their mobility. Since their customers are constantly changing in accordance to their shift in location, they design strategies that will adapt to the changing demographics while still retaining long-term relationships with their clients. A strong online presence with an ever expanding knowledge of local cultures and willingness to adapt to their surroundings will aid this type of business.

After you have examined your company’s “appearance” it is time to look at the brains behind everything you do at your company, your people. The actions your employees take will inherently have their effect on the company’s goals, perception, and process.

Take the time to get to know your employees by getting to know who they are and what characteristics they carry. This will help you understand the company’s culture deeply which plays a major role in what your company will be producing for app development. You will find that each of your employees will see the app creation process from a different perspective and would include major differences in each aspect.

Your employees all play a special role in the company. By including them into the iOS and Android app creation process you open yourself up to a mountain of resources which you could have missed entirely. You will find what your app is missing by interacting with the people that make up every aspect of your business.

Every single one of your employees encounters their own unique challenges and are in one way or another part of the customer experience. Keep them involved and be willing to change according to their feedback. Having a piece of each of your employees will make the app feel like a company-wide ongoing project which not only brings the company together but it affirms that every perspective is being addressed through your app.

Looking into the character of who your company really is will help you determine which ideas match your overall company theme. The character of your company can mostly be defined by the values the company proclaims to stand behind and the actions it actually takes.

Start by taking a look at your mission statement. Truthfully analyze your content, business model, goals, and priorities to see if you really have been staying true to your values. Your customers analyze every single output you produce. Consistency and authenticity through every blog post, email, call, discount, and sale are mandatory. Breaking away from your word breaks the confidence your customers have and may lead to them taking their business elsewhere.

Lastly, examining your own pain points will clear up exactly what areas your app should be hitting. For example, Having a digital presence is critical for businesses of any size, but sometimes a website is too costly and cumbersome for a small business to maintain. Yet, at the same time, if a company decides to leave the website altogether and only focus on social media, such as a Facebook page, then they realize that their options are far too little. might offer too little. LushEnds Salon found a way to reach a middle ground through the use of a simple, but very effective, mobile app. The app communicates their location and services, and allows customers to even ask for professional advice.

Some areas you may consider investigating are logistics, deliveries, and customer support. Certain aspects of customer support can easily be covered through instructional videos, and step-by-step knowledge-base documents for common queries, both accessible via your own app. The social media aspect is important here as well.

Questions to ask yourself to generate app ideas:

• Does my company offer solutions specific to being a brick-and-mortar company, virtual company, or on-the-go company?
• What system in my business are customers interacting the most to?
• What type of characteristics do my own employees have?
• Does the culture of the company promote collaboration or is everyone on their own?
• Am I involving my employees in the app creation process?
• Have I asked my employees for their feedback on what they feel should be included in the app?
• What values does the company strive to uphold?
• Is the company living up to its values?
• Will my app align with my mission statement?
• What are the company’s biggest pain points?
• What steps have we taken to solve the pain points?

Take a Closer Look at Your Customers

An important step to generating app ideas is to keep an intimate relationship with those you want to serve. As their giver, you want to be aligned to their every need, want, and complaint. You can learn a lot about your customers by watching them (focusing on behavior) and by listening to them. Do your customers want an iPhone app? Do they want an Android app?

Watch how your customers interact with your product and company. Pay careful to attention to where they spend their time. Map out the path they follow in using your product and through the exploration of your website. Your customers value their time and if they choose to give it to you, you are obviously providing some type of value.

After you find out where your customers spend their time and how they navigate through your content, begin to talk to them. Do all you can to have conversations with them so you can know exactly how they feel about your product and business. Send them questioners, try to schedule calls, and create systems within your website and your app to always allow your customers to send you suggestions so you know exactly what to pursue next.

Another way to go about it is to start a database with each of your customers having their own file. If you’re not in the habit of keeping a written record of customer queries and complaints, start doing so now – this will help you easily identify what the most common pain points are, and find ways of solving them.

My bank offers both online banking and a banking app, and the features and services available on both are identical. Why this duplication? Customer convenience: if I’m on the move and only have access to my mobile device, logging into the banking app is faster and simpler than logging onto the banking website.

Convenience itself doesn’t necessarily address a serious pain point, but having the information accessible via an app does put you closer to your customers. Spice Bistro & Bar, like most restaurants, have certain menu items that change on a daily basis. This information is now available through their app, but more importantly, customers can select to have this sent through daily via a push notification; meaning they are able to reach their customers even if they don’t open the app daily.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What systems do I have in place to foster a relationship with my customer?
• How are customers interacting with my products?
• Where are customers spending most of their time in my business? Doing what?
• What do I know about my customer?
• What do your customers love/hate about your business?
• What information am I pushing out to my customers?
• How often do customers have to contact me, and what for?
• Have I created a customer database?
• Does each of my paid customers have their own profile?

Take a Closer Look at Your Business Plan

Your business plan is the roadmap of your business. It stands as the foundation on which you build every intricate piece that ultimately makes up your business. Within your plan, focus on revisiting your initial short term and long term goals, strategies for future growth, and mission/vision statements. Work through these in conjunction with some of the points raised above to identify any goals that could be achieved, or aided, through the use of apps.

As you look over your past goals you will have noticed that you have modern solutions to many of your past problems. Use your current knowledge of the world to find new solutions to achieving your short term and long term plans for app ideas. Look for ways to incorporate many of these solutions with the creation of a mobile app. What types of features, design, and support would your new app need to help you achieve your organizational goals?

Questions to ask:

• What are my short term and long term goals?
• Have I accomplished any goals since the start of my business?
• Are there goals I can accomplish now with modern technology/ best practices?
• Which function of my business will my app amplify?
• Will the app allow customers to submit any of their questions/ concerns?

Take a Closer Look at Your Marketing

Marketing is the only function within a business that will continue to foster growth and create new sources of revenue. Everything from your sales team, promotions, advertisements, profit models, and partnerships are affected by the decisions you make in your marketing division. Generating a mobile app idea requires a careful look at your current marketing processes and examining whether there are sections which can be transformed into an app or if the app needs to have certain sections to fill in any holes or complement the customer experience.

Marketing is always one of the most challenging processes of a business; there are a myriad of variables to consider, and very few constants. Which is why it is also the ideal process to develop an app around.

Look at where you spend the largest amount of your marketing budget, and investigate how this could be reduced by shifting some of the activity to an app. These may include:

• Seasonal catalogues. Promote a digital catalogue in the printed catalogue, but also reduce the number of copies you print.
• Loyalty programs/cards. Gradually moving your loyalty program to an app can almost eliminate the need for any printed marketing material relating to the program.

An added benefit to shifting some of your marketing to an app is that you could end up reaching a far wider audience than you currently do. Remember you are not simply looking to reduce your marketing spend, you are looking to spend it more effectively. Even if you spend less, your return on investment (ROI) should be the same, or better.

Questions to ask:

• Is there a clear line for any division to give ideas to the marketing team?
• What aspect of my business can I shift over to the mobile app?
• Will the mobile app be helping me generate new sources of revenue?
• Will the mobile app help fulfill the company’s goals?

Take a Closer Look at Your Industry for Creative App Ideas

The industry you are in is constantly evolving to fit the needs and wants of its target market. The strategies you are using now will not be as effective in a few months or even in a year. Generating ideas are as continuous as the pursuit of staying up to date with the trends. Trending app ideas should reflect the current belief and expectations of your target market.

Nowadays, finding out the latest trends is as simple as opening up your browser and reading from a dozen analytics tools, blog post, and expert predictions. Information is abundant, the only limit is our willingness to implement the strategies we find.

There is such an overload of information that choosing which trend or strategy to follow can be overwhelming and even paralyzing. After all, not every trend or strategy is going to apply directly to your target market. While some choose to take a blind guess and just change with high hopes of success. We have found a few tools that will aid you in making a close and calculated decision.

Websites such as Springwise, Trendwatching, Inc. and even Entrepreneur are great for discovering ideas and trends, but because they often cover global trends, it can be difficult to judge what impact they will have on your own business or market. Instead of blindly following every trend that seems remotely applicable, set up a Google Alert for any that might affect you – this will allow you to see how frequently the trend is mentioned (especially by other industry leaders), and possibly highlight how other businesses are adapting to the trend.

Websites to explore:

• Springwise
• Trendwatching
• Inc
• Entrepreneur
• Google Trends
• Alltop
• Youtube Trends

Take a Closer Look at Your Competitors For Simple App Ideas

Without a doubt, your competitors are doing all they can to outshine you. This, as it turns out, is a beautiful thing. Your competitors will do all they can to stay up with the latest trends, discover new and innovate methods to stand out, and attempt to copy any of your ideas. So why is this such a great thing?

First off your competitors all have a team of talented individuals who are doing all they can to succeed. Once they implement their strategies, you will be able to refine them and add your own twist to it. This is what is known as a reactive approach to growth. You wait for your competitors to act and then take their idea and morph to be your own. If you are doing this type of strategy you will, for the most part, always be able to catch up to your competitors by replicating their work

By diving deep into the strategies your competitors are using, you can begin to break them down into components and reverse engineer your own masterpiece. Remember that the end goal here is not to copy all your competitors are doing, we are instead suggesting you use their strategies as a platform to build your own creations. Generating mobile app ideas is not always coming up with new concepts or mechanics, many times it is simply bridging the gap others have been unable to close.

Questions

• What strategies are your competitors using?
• Which such apps are bringing them the most success?
• Which strategies have not worked for them?
• What components and people did your competitors need to bring their strategies to life?
• What gaps and faults do you see in your competition’s strategies?
• Can you create your own mobile app idea using the experience you have learned from your competition?

Take a Closer Look at Businesses Outside Your Industry

Too many companies make the mistake of staying trapped within their own industry bubble. They pay too much attention to “best practices” that only cater to their specific industry. In the long run, many of these companies all end up melting together to create a very similar experience. Generating new mobile app ideas does not come by simply taking the same idea and adding a fresh coating over it, it comes through bridging gaps, often times between two very unrelated concepts.

Enhance your business, your app ideas, and your app by introducing concepts from a variety of unrelated industries. Below are a few suggestions of what to learn from a few industries.

• Learn the immersive and engaging practices of the Gaming industry
• Learn the to create beautiful and stunning designs from the Graphic designers industry
• Learn to create buzz and action from the fashion industry
• Learn to craft immersive and captivating stories from the Writing industry
• Learn the teaching methods of the Education industry
• Learn the precision and balance from the Accounting industry

Every single industry has its own specialties which can be formatted to aid your own business goals. Your job is to simply immerse yourself in their world and break down their magic into components, then take those components and mold them into your own work.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Am I breaking out of my own industry and exploring outside influences?
• Can I add bring concepts from multiple industries to create a singular masterpiece?

Mobile App Development Ideas (40 Best Mobile App Ideas)

If you’re struggling to think of a mobile app on your own, here are 21 different mobile app development ideas you can steal. Take these simple app ideas to a development company to create an iOS an Android app.

1) Fitness Buddy – Fitness App

Fitness apps are trending upward, and Fitness Buddy is here to encourage your personal growth so you can achieve your desired levels of fitness. The app starts by first analyzing how fit/active its user is. It then ask its user what “What is your ideal fitness level?”. Fitness Buddy will also ask its user to list any injuries or limitations. After which, Fitness Buddy will ask its users to list how many times a week and for how long during the day they would like to exercise. Once all this information is gathered, Fitness Buddy gives users a recommended list of exercises. Including recommended repetitions to do, for how many hours a day, and for how many days a week. Fitness Buddy will also take into account menstrual cycles for women users and adjust exercises to fit the limited capabilities of their bodies during these cycles. Fitness Buddy has a unique feature allowing it to recommend the amount of daily water and protein. Fitness Buddy is here to protect and promote the user’s well-being. Sources of revenue can be implemented through a “pro service” which gives users access to exercise plans and diet plans.

2) Your Voice Translation App Idea

Language will no longer be a barrier. By using the “Your Voice Translation” app idea, users are able to speak into their phone and immediately have their words translated to their desired language. The app would work by first having two people sitting across from one another with a phone in between them. The users then choose their native language. After which two bubble buttons would appear. One in blue with user A’s language and the other in red with user B’s language. Users then take turns speaking into the app by first pushing their colored button. When they push their colored button, the screen will also change according to that color and say the name of the language being spoken. Users take turns being speaker and listener. Once the speaker is finished and the listener wishes to respond, all the listener has to do is double tap the screen which will instantly switch to the listener’s language. Allowing the listener to now speak. Future updates could include a “subtitle” mode that not only speaks out the language but also creates a live script for people to follow along and look back on. This app would make a great travel tool for any tourist and can easily be leveraged to public speakers, classrooms, politics, meetings, and anyone learning a new language.

3) Order Delivery Aggregator App Idea

Tracking your package is never an easy task, especially when you buy from multiple vendors that ship through multiple distributors. If you buy from Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Victoria’s Secret then you will have to separately log onto each account to check the status of your orders. This app aims to give you a space to collectively view all your orders. By giving this app access to your order history, it will automatically update itself on the status of your order. Saving you the time and the stress of having to log onto multiple websites to see where each of your packages are. You can also keep track of packages sent by you and your loved ones by manually inputting the tracking number and the carrier’s name.

4) Recipe Aggregator App Idea

Sometimes all you have are a few ingredients and one recipe that you have used way too many times. So if your meals have all been starting to taste oddly familiar then it’s time to spice things up. This app allows you to input a list of all the ingredients you would like to cook with. Then the app will take your ingredients and search online for hundreds of recipes with only these ingredients. Recipes can be filtered based on their ratings and time to cook. When you find the recipe you like, you are then able to follow the step-by-step instructions to help you create your masterpiece. Or if you are too busy to cook, you can click a “find near me” button which will search for restaurants closest to you with this dish.

5) You Are What You Eat App Idea

The way it works is that you let your emotions guide your taste buds. The point of this app is to capture your daily emotions and then match you with foods that mirror these emotions. It can easily be done through a simple questionnaire that will give you, as the user, a food recommendation. Followed with the location of a local restaurant with that dish. Human emotions are extremely complex but having the ability to complement people’s current mood with a delicious meal is an avenue worth exploring. This idea can even be paired with a restaurant reservation feature. 

6) You Always Know What To Say App Idea

Communication is an integral part of our lives. We interact daily with strangers, acquaintances, friends, and others that we love. For some people, it’s hard enough to make initial contact. The question then becomes “Well, what do I say?”. Thanks to this app, starting a conversation will no longer be an issue. The app begins by asking you an initial question such as “What is your relationship with this person?”. You can choose from the four groups of “stranger, acquaintance, lover, and friend”. The app then ask you “what kind of conversation do you want to have?” You can choose from “casual, flirtatious, friendly, philosophical, supportive, and aggressive/confrontational”. The point of this app is to give people everything they need to start the conversation right by knowing who they are talking to and what type of conversation they hope to have. Not every conversation is conclusive but it can start with a memorable opening.

7) Name That Flower

The world is too beautiful and diverse to not be explored by someone. We daily come across plant life that captures our full attention. Yet the problem then comes when you try to describe that plant without knowing its name. Typing in “plant with red flowers and green leaves” will only get you so far. This app is meant to eliminate that frustration. Ideally customers will be able to take a picture of any plant life which will then match to a picture on your plant life database. The system will then send that person information on the plant such as: its name, origin, edibility, small description, a link to more information, and a link to buy the plant life through a local or online vendor. The app database can either be filled by its users or can be filled through partnering with local and online flower shops. This gives the app creator leverage in choosing who to partner with. This app can be monetized by taking a commission from every plant sold through the app or for first mention in the “buy here” section

8) Your Perfect Garden App Idea

A garden can be a safe haven for some, a wise teacher for others, and a source of beauty for many. Gardens express the creative soul of its creator. They each tell their own story and carry in them fragile life. This app gives anyone the tools they need to tell their own story. The app itself starts by giving users a plot of land or flowerpot. Then they are given a diverse list of plant life which they are able to drag and drop into their garden. Giving users a visual representation of their soon to be garden. Users are able to find plants through a search bar or through the various categories in the app. After the user creates their garden, they are able to receive a quote from a local flower shop on the price of their garden. Along with a quote for the price of a local gardener to plant them for you.

9) Up The Ladder

Have you ever looked at someone and thought “Wow, how did they get to be so successful”? This app does just that. It aims to solve that issue by giving users a place to document and share their journey. Users are able to list their education, job experiences, references, skills required, and advice. The tracking app also allows you to search for professionals by their industry and education. This app should be a one stop resources for questions such as “What can I do with this major?”, “What skills will I need for this job?”, “What training, certification, experience will I need to be successful?”.This app can easily be leveraged by school systems as a resource for its students or by companies to develop their employees. Users are also able to promote themselves and charge a fee for training.

10) Similar Book Search App Idea

You just read the final words and have concluded the trilogy you had been reading for the past month. Feelings of joy and satisfaction fill you with a certain indescribable peace as you stare off into the distance. You then come to realize that there is no new frontier. This last book was the end to the series you had invested so much of yourself into.This app aims to fill that void by bridging you to your next adventure. You start by typing in a list of your favorite or recently read stories. The app will then offer customized recommendations as to what you should read next. Each recommendation includes a short description along with a rating system, customer reviews, similar stories, and the offer to buy an electronic or paperback version of the book. Users are also able to search for books based on author, genre, language, and setting. By the end of the process, your users should be joyfully satisfied as they immerse themselves into a new world.

11) Battery Optimizer App Idea

It’s 6pm, you’re leaving work and you look at your phone only to see it’s out of battery already. The day is only part done and you have to worry about getting your phone charged for the rest of the evening. A very real problem for millions of people around the world. With the shift to more feature rich smart phones, the one thing that has unfortunately stayed the same is the size of the smartphone battery. The Battery Optimizer app would aim to track battery usage across a variety of measures: by application, by services running on the phone and by actions taken. Then the app would be able to make recommendations like shutting off Bluetooth from 9:30am till 4:30pm as it is often left on, but unused. A way to give “smart” suggestions to optimize battery usage, or just allow the app to handle the optimization automatically for the best battery life possible. You can use this as an Android app or iOS app.

12) Gifts For Friends (Based on Data) App Idea

Finding the perfect gift for anyone is hard. You’ll often spend hours looking for the perfect gift, buy something and still have disappointment. We put out so much data on the internet about our lives, likes, dislikes and more. This app would make use of the data your friends put on Facebook and the internet to build a profile of who they are, what they like, and what their perfect gift would be. If there is mass adoption, tying in Google’s profiling data would make it even more accurate. The end result is a 3-tap experience from opening the app, to picking a friend and getting recommendations on what to buy for them based on the occasion.

13) Tinder For Recipes Mobile Application

People are often spoilt for choice and without a finite amount of choices, it’s hard for them to make decisions. This app would aim to give each user 5 to 10 recipe recommendations to choose from each day or for each meal, based on their preferences. The premise is that the user would continue to see recommendations until they swipe “yes” on a recommendation. That way it’s a simple choice. An extension of this can be to focus on specific objectives or dietary goals (ie. eating healthier or eating a paleo diet). A more advanced version of this app could leverage machine learning to gain a deeper insight of the user’s food preferences.

14) Smart Video & Content Recommendations App Idea

There’s a lot of companies out there aggregating data about each and every one of us. Some have that data openly accessible to understand how they categorize us. The aim of this app would be to capitalize on those profiles, along with further profiling through a series of like/dislike questions, to determine the best content to deliver to that person. Think of it as a simple best of _____ delivery: top 3 videos from the web today, top 3 news articles and so on.

15) Chatroulette For Studying Students App Idea

Exam time is rolling around and students are scrambling to form study groups and gain the benefit of shared knowledge. Often times there is a disconnect on this end that results in many students not being able to connect with others to study. The aim of this app is to bridge the gap and make study group creation easy and potentially virtual. A student can open the app, enter in their info of what class and subject they want help with. From there they’re matched with others on the same campus or in different schools who have the same need. They can choose set times to meet online and leverage a framework given by the app to help them study in the most efficient way.

16) Home Cooked Meal Delivery App

With the rise in easily accessible food, there’s a large chunk of the population that doesn’t know how to cook, let alone cook healthy food. The concept of a “home cooked meal” is extremely foreign to a large majority of the population. The premise of this idea is to make home made food available on demand with a delivery app. You’d be able to open the delivery app, find people who are ready to make you a home cooked meal in your area, and order through the app with a set time delivery. A simple marketplace styled app. In addition to a food delivery app, you can potentially add a feature for a food donation app. Restaurants and people can donate unused food to those in need.

17) All In One Dashboard

The average business owner has to check at least half a dozen dashboards on a daily basis to see the status of his or her business. This results in dozens of wasted hours every month checking information that could be more readily available. Most business owners are on the go a lot, even within their own office. The aim of this app is to provide them with an easy solution that connects to where their data is currently, to aggregate that data into one easy to access place on their smartphone or tablet. The end result saves them more than half of the time spent every month by just making their data easier to access. An expansion could include inferences, suggestions or recommendations based on that data to save them even more time in their business. App developers can easily create this functionality.

18) Proximity Based File Sharing Mobile Application

You’re out with friends, taking pictures from your evening together and now each of you has a dozen pictures to share with the other. Your only option is to waste hundreds of megabytes of data (this could be $10+ in data depending on where you live) to transfer the pictures while you’re all still together, or hope everyone remembers and sends around the pictures when they get home later (this rarely happens). This app aims to eliminate the need for data wastage or the possibility of people forgetting by leveraging the multiple data transfer channels available within smartphones. It would allows groups of people to send data through multiple channels (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc) in the same way AirDrop allows proximity based sharing over WiFi. That way data can be sent locally, without the need for costly data transfer. The main element here would be an easier way to have this data transfer occur.

19) Real Time Voice Translation Application Idea

You go on vacation, things are going smoothly and you decide to hop into a local restaurant to get some food, try things “off the beaten path”. You’re faced with a a giant wall, the language barrier. You are able to get by with Google Translate and the limited text translation it provides, but even then it’s not a smooth interaction. With the shift to a more connected global community, there is also a big uptick in travel. Travel to countries where many expect to “get by” with their common language. While it has become easier with a large chunk of the population speaking some level of English, there is still a big gap in translation tools. Google Translate is one of the most advanced out there, but even Google Translate struggled with languages in the Eastern world and it has yet to move into real time or semi-real time translation. The aim of this artificial intelligence mobile app would be to provide semi-real time or even real time language translation in the major business countries of the world. A thorough need for the enterprise sector. Such an app that gives you the ability to translate English into Mandarin and Mandarin back into English is often done through translators in the enterprise world, and that poses a high cost to businesses that want to enter the Asian markets without a lot of resources.

20) Augmented Reality Mobile Apps for Mobile Phones

AR (augmented reality) is the shaping the future. There are apps out there right now that are already leveraging AR technology. Furniture companies like Ikea use augmented reality mobile apps to give their customers a better understanding of how products will look within their home before they purchase something. This can help users with color, size, and general aesthetics prior to buying. App developers and development companies are always brainstorming new ways to leverage augmented reality.

21) Parking Spot Mobile Apps

Anyone who lives in a crowded city or population-dense area knows how challenging it can be to find parking. There are lots of ways that this problem can be solved with mobile apps. People who have prime parking spaces can rent out there parking spots on-demand or even long-term. You could even create a tool with tracking app functionalities to monitor when new parking spaces become available in real-time. This would be a great feature to implement into a travel app as well, so people from out of town can find parking. You can even pair this with a social networking app.

Other Cool App Ideas (19 Bonus App Ideas)

Feel free to take an innovative mobile app idea from the list and use it for your next app.

• Interior design app
• Deal alert app
• Restaurant management app
• Grocery Delivery app
• Security app
• Finder app
• Motivation app
• Karaoke app
• Shop app
• Video hosting app
• Telemedicine apps
• Messaging app or random chat app
• Virtual exam study app
• Brand identifier app
• Criminal alert app
• Influencer marketing app
• Free parking space app
• Language learning app
• Virtual time capsule app

You’d be surprised how far a useful mobile app idea can take your brand. The best such app ideas can even transform the mobile app development industry.

Conclusion

Simple app ideas are highly effective. This is the first step to consider prior to hiring a development company or starting a mobile app development project. Whether you’re a mobile app development company looking for inspiration or you’re an entrepreneur seeking app ideas for startups, this guide should give you plenty of inspiration.

We built relationships with our customers to know the exact needs of the people we are aiming to serve. We looked back at our business plan to see if we could solve our past goals and if we stayed true to our values. We opened up channels between our marketing team to allow a smooth transition of app ideas refined our marketing process. We examined tools to help us stay up to date with the latest trends in our industry. We analyzed competitors and used their creations as a platform for our own ingenuity. And lastly, we jumped head first into other industries to learn their best practices and then morphed those concepts back into our own business.

We hope this article has given you a clearer grasp of the idea generating process. There is no singular way to create mobile app ideas, instead, there is a process that wonderfully comes together and which can be carefully explored in every aspect of your business.

If you’re like many online retailers who have dipped their toes into the mobile marketing waters, you’ve experienced your first taste of success. And if you aren’t in that camp, don’t worry. It’s not to late to join.

Mobile marketing can absolutely transform a business’s sales from blah to baaazingo, and we’ve seen it too many times to even count. Don’t believe it? Did you know that consumers spend a whopping 89% of their mobile use time on apps (according to Nielsen statistics)?

Up until now, we’ve been discussing where we are with mobile marketing. It’s a rosy picture. But industry projections indicate that it’s about to get a whole lot rosier.

Of all the marketing “buzz words” you’ve been hearing in the past few years, “mobile” is one you shouldn’t ignore. In fact, a new Econsultancy poll indicates that 43% of digital marketers agree that mobile optimization is the most exciting digital opportunity of the year, beating out things like video, viral and content marketing.

A Local Issue
Remember you tried pulling up a nearby pizza shop’s website on your iPhone, only to find out it wasn’t mobile friendly? No menu to find out whether they have those garlic knots you were craving. Oh well, on to the next…

You know some version of this story has happened to you – because too many local businesses focus so much time on local advertising that they often neglect the “low hanging fruit,” the mobile-ready website.

But if you own a local business, this is good news for you. You may very well be ahead of the curve, and all of your competitors.

If you were thinking that mobile marketing is just for large corporations, you are contributing to the “I’m not worthy” mentality that is holding so many small businesses back from achieving the greatness they deserve.

You are worthy. Your business is worthy. Your customers are worthy. Don’t get discouraged by the costs.

If you’re not convinced, just reread the last three sentences aloud. Just because your business isn’t part of a major conglomerate doesn’t mean that you can’t compete with one. Today, small businesses have access to many tools that help level the playing field. There’s no excuse not to take advantage.

Mobile is the present and future of local marketing. But, okay. You don’t want to take our word for it. We understand. We’re all about the data too. So, here are some statistics that may help sway your marketing plan towards mobile. Read on. It’s for your own good.

• About 12 of 30 billion mobile searches are local (Search Engine Land)
• Local mobile searches (85.9 billion) are projected to exceed desktop searches (84 billion) for the fist time in 2015 (eMarketer)
• The number of local searches on mobile devices quadrupled in 2012 (Local Search Association)

What your competitors may already know about the future of mobile marketing
If your competition isn’t already on board with mobile marketing, they’re likely considering it. It’s akin to the conversations that were being had when the Internet was new and local businesses were deciding whether or not to purchase a domain.

But we don’t know exactly what is going on in your competitors’ heads; we can only tell you what the analysts (people smarter than us) are saying.

Personalized messages will increase – If a user searches for a pizza recipe, show them an ad for mozzarella cheese. The specifics will vary based on the industry, but you get the idea.

Businesses will take full advantage of geo-targeting – Where are your customers right now? Hey, maybe they are right outside your door, but neither of you realize it. Don’t just rely on sandwich boards to capture their attention. Savvy businesses will reach customers as they are in the geograpic area of their shop.

Businesses will “Snapchat” ads – Maybe they won’t actually use the Snapchat service, but ads are becoming shorter and much more succinct, and much like a Snapchat, they aren’t designed to stay on screen for a long time.

Multimedia messages will make things interesting – Standard text messages are so passe. These days, those on the cutting edge are experimenting with rich media messages that deliver text, photo and video to a users smartphone, and these messages are designed to work whether that phone is an iPhone or android.

Now to get started…
If you’re just dipping your toes in the mobile marketing waters, you may be tempted to play it safe; to start where everyone else did back in 2010; to mimic some old successful campaign. That strategy just might work for your business, and it’s definitely a good idea to review the competition and what they have done, but if you’re a little more imaginative, you may want to jump in with both feet and become an early adopter of one or all of the mobile marketing trends above.

Let us leave you with a few words of advice.

1. Pay attention – What are your competitors doing? How can you attack your mobile campaign in a way that is more engaging to customers (i.e. why should they use your app or service over the competition?).
2. Plan – Start thinking about your mobile strategy. What do you want to get out of it, and how would you like customers to interact with your brand?
3. Take action – Too many businesses get stuck in the planning phase and end up spinning their wheels. Remember that it’s better to get started and make adjustments along the way than to sit around talking about things while technology passes you by (and takes your customers along with it!).