Have you come up with the most innovative app but you lack the right app marketing tips to promote it? You have no idea of how to rank your product on the app store, but you would like to make it visible to as many users as possible, wouldn’t you?
If you need the answers to all these questions, don’t waste any other time, and let’s read our article to discover the app marketing tips to scale your 2023 user acquisition campaign. Here are the main points we are going to talk about:
- User Acquisition: the difference between paid and organic campaigns.
- How to use MMPs to increase your user base.
- Marketing Channels: Ad Network and DSPs.
1. Combine Organic Installs with Paid User Acquisition
What does user acquisition consist of, and why do you need app marketing tips for a user acquisition strategy?
To understand the importance of user acquisition and why you should be knowledgeable about the best app marketing tips, let’s first say that your app ranking on the app store and the number of app installs and in-app actions is bound to the user acquisition strategy you are going to adopt.
User acquisition is the process through which you can drive new users to interact with your app, download it, and hopefully perform any actions or events that can generate revenues.
In user acquisition, advertisers rely on marketing activities and advertising campaigns to catch and then persuade potential loyal users to engage with their app. Among the marketing actions on which app publishers can rely, there are non-paid or organic activities and paid campaigns.
Organic activities are responsible for organic installs, or, in other words, those installs of an app that cannot be attributed to a specific source or tracked by the performance marketing. We talk about organic installs every time users spontaneously engage with your app without being prompted and without responding to an advertising campaign.
While organic user acquisition is of core importance as an indicator of users’ loyalty and value, it is still not enough if you wish to scale up your campaign and increase your app ranking in the App Store or Google Play. If you are willing to increase the number of users and optimize your performance, you must combine organic activities with paid campaigns within paid user acquisition framework.
What is paid user acquisition?
In paid user acquisition, advertisers influence new users to download your mobile app by leveraging marketing activities and paid advertising campaigns.
With paid user acquisition, advertisers can take advantage of several benefits by relying on the right app marketing tips and a good strategy. For instance, in paid user acquisition, A.I. and machine learning algorithms guarantee high targeting abilities to spot and focus on potential high-quality users. Moreover, paid user acquisition consists of data-gathering and data-analysis operations with which you can keep track of your campaign results and make wiser investments in your app install campaign and marketing sources.
There are several channels and media sources on which paid user acquisition operates. Social media, for example, is often conceived as a medium for advertising. Nearly 90% of marketers rely on influencers and social media to grasp the target audience, improve their brand awareness and increase the number of their users.
2. Increase your User Base with MMPs
As we stated above, in paid user acquisition, measuring your campaign performance is not just something you can do but that you should. Therefore, the second suggestion about which you should be knowledgeable of all the app marketing tips is to rely on a Mobile measurement partner or MMP.
An MMP is a company providing you with tools to measure your campaign performance across marketing channels and media sources. A mobile measurement partner counts on a platform that collects and attributes your app data to assess the overall performance of your campaign metrics.
Moreover, MMPs allow marketers to analyse their campaign performance by reaching a high level of data granularity. For instance, they can measure installs, in-app events, ad spending, and generated revenues other than LTV, ARPU, retention rate, and ROI.
Why Do You Need to Complete the Assessment of Your Campaign?
In basic terms, an MMP partner is of core importance for you to understand which channels and media sources provide the highest figures of installs and conversions. Having insights on which sources deserve more credit allows you to invest more efficiently in your budget and make the most informed and self-conscious decisions.
Among the metrics through which you can optimize your campaign by availing yourself of an MMP - Lifetime Value, or LTV, is a metric defining the average revenue that stems from a single app user or customers during their life spent using the app.
To calculate it, you need to consider first the average value of your app usage combined with the figures of in-app actions and revenues generated in an established timeframe. Once you have calculated this average value, you need to measure the average time the average user spends within the app and interacts with it.
Taking all this information together, you will know the expected profit generated by a single customer during their overall app experience and optimize your budget allocation depending on these assessments and expectations.
Retention Rate
User Acquisition is not enough if you want to increase users’ LTV and in-app revenues. How can you measure the percentage of users who continue to use your app after a specific and pre-set time frame instead?
Therefore, among the app marketing tips we strongly recommend following there is to consider the Retention rate, another core metric that measures the ability of your app to hold the users’ interest in your product by dividing the sum of active users on a specific day after the installation by the sum of users who have installed the app in the time frame considered.
3. Rely on the Right Marketing Channels
Finally, we will focus on the last but not least set of important app marketing tips regarding performance-based marketing channels such as ad networks and DSPs.
How can you find the perfect match between your campaign’s needs and the right marketing channel? Let’s quickly check on the main differences between the two.
Ad networks work as an umpire between the publisher and the advertisers: the former provides ad networks with a set of available ads – the ad inventory – among which the advertisers, by the mediation of the ad network, can choose to promote their app. On the other hand, a DSP is a tech platform aimed to lead paid user acquisition campaigns and – more specifically – machine learning-based CPI / CPA campaigns.
It is not only a matter of quantity when it comes to campaign optimization and user acquisition. Conversely, you may need to reach out to those users that appear more likely to perform several in-app events on a long-term perspective. For this reason, programmatic advertising within paid user acquisition is essential to catch on to them.
Programmatic Advertising
It is down to programmatic advertising that marketers can rely on DSPs to automate the media buying process. Indeed, programmatic advertising is precisely that digital and automated technology that speeds up and automates the manual negotiation of ad space between the advertiser and the publisher. And for this reason, a list of the best app marketing tips for your campaign cannot do without it. Based on data and statistics, programmatic advertising can assign the ads to the best recipients to catch the right audience.
While ad networks still rely on manual work and longer times, DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) can afford a completely automated process enabling advertisers to purchase ad space on the publisher’s platform in real-time. Alongside real-time ad purchases, DSPs allow advertisers to define and plan all their campaign requirements as the target audience and budget, and they can also guarantee overall campaign optimization.
Self-serve and Managed DSPs
One last difference within the world of DSPs we may want to consider to complete the list of the app marketing tips for your campaign optimization regards the distinction between self-serve DSPs and managed platforms.
A self-serve demand-side platform allows advertisers to autonomously manage their ad exchanges and ad-buying process through a single interface by selecting the ads from the ad inventory depending on their targeting criteria and campaign organization.
On the other hand, managed DSPs – such as Mapendo’s – are autonomous companies that own the digital and automated technology to take care of all the management and optimization campaign processes. Once advertisers have set their budget, targeting criteria, creatives, and KPIs, managed DSPs can immediately determine the value of ad impressions and ensure advertisers the most appropriate ad spaces.
All the app marketing tips that we have mentioned in this article represent fundamental steps for you to follow to scale up your campaign and your app ranking on the app store, optimize your results and improve your brand visibility. If you are ready to combine these app marketing tips with a great understanding of your users, your campaign cannot but succeed.