Mobile App Marketing Explained: How to Engage, Retain, and Grow Your Customers in 2023

• According to App Annie, “at-home” categories such as education, streaming, and shopping will increase, leading to 1.3 trillion hours of consumption on Android apps in 2021.
• Apps offering video streaming and live events will dominate the app market as COVID-19 reinforces stricter social distancing norms.
• Audio marketing and podcasts will witness skyrocketing growth.
• Mobile UI/UX will become a priority for marketers looking to engage better with customers and drive customer loyalty.

Driving an app-first lifestyle will be on the cards for multiple businesses looking to leverage the already exploding smartphone customer base.

Look at the top strategies that can take your app marketing to the next level. Let’s start at the very beginning by answering the elephant in the room:

What are the three stages of mobile app marketing?

Much like your traditional marketing funnel, mobile app marketing, too, comprises the following three stages:

Stage 1: Awareness

The primary goal is to attract new customers to your app and create awareness about it in the right segments. Here are some ways in which you can expand your reach and build awareness:

• App store
• App review websites
• Paid advertising
• QR codes
• Social media

Before you build a marketing campaign targeting customers, you must zero in on your brand messaging and positioning. After all, customers connect with brands on the latter’s values and purpose, not solely through product features. So, defining your brand positioning should take priority so you can engage with customers on a deeper level. Additionally, you should identify the right channels where your customers are.

If you are unsure about how to prioritize the channels, you can refer to the bullseye framework, which includes the following four steps:

• Brainstorm: The idea is to brainstorm at least one strategy per channel to boost growth.
• Rank and Prioritize: The next step involves ranking and prioritizing strategies brainstormed in the previous step.
• Test: Once your list is ready, you can start testing your target market to see which strategies are sticking (and which are not).
• Focus: In the final step, once you’ve identified channels fueling growth, you need to keep focusing on them until you reach your end goal.

If you are wondering what would motivate customers to download your app from thousands of apps in the same vein, here are some tactics for you to try:

Top Strategies to Take Your Awareness Stage to the Next Level

1. Plan your app release date and work on your mobile app marketing strategy in advance, considering any delays or setbacks that may come your way. You should plan to:

• Understand who your ideal customers are.
• Why they should download your app.
• How you can encourage them to download your app.

2. Make sure to conduct in-depth market research before developing your app. This includes looking at influential blogs, online forums, websites, and social media to understand your customers and their pain points.

3. Build an accurate customer persona that helps you understand your ideal audience, what they think about your app, and their customer journey with your app. Make sure to include demographics, mobile preferences, interests, operating system preferences, and challenges that shape your audience. Here’s an example of a mobile app persona that aims at selling a ‘social tool’ to a buyer who wants a modern app that can assist him in this mission for change:

4. Engage in in-depth competitor analysis that includes comparing your top-5 competitors. You could look at their current pricing model, app store ranking, user experience (UX), app reviews, etc., to understand how your app compares.

5. Before launch, ensure that your website, a video promo with the app’s key features, and a helpful press release or blog post are ready.

6. Build a clean, attractive, and user-friendly pre-launch mobile website or a landing page, including teaser video/app screenshots that can be used across app stores, social platforms, and paid ads. Also, focus on building an email list of your customers so that you can keep them updated on new updates, features, and positive reviews to drive engagement. Here’s an example of an app landing page by Soundcloud, which ingeniously uses animated GIFs, short and crisp text, and a clear call-to-action to engage the reader.

7. Laser-focus on collaborating with authentic influencers, credible publications, and established bloggers to secure backlinks and dole out honest reviews. The better your reviews, the more consumers will be encouraged to hit the download button. An excellent example of this would be BuzzStream which partners with influencers to get feedback on features and include them in the launch. You can ask them to have a link to your landing page/press kit.

8. Go all out with promoting your app on social media platforms relevant to your audience. You can create a specific hashtag and social media posts to inspire excitement about your app.

9. Brainstorm what your content marketing strategy will look like. You can write blogs on what your app development experience has been like. Make sure to promote your blog content through personalized email marketing and focus on building trust with customers through honest and valuable content.

10. Focus on building a stellar presence on diversified platforms such as YouTube by demonstrating how customers can use your app. You can also create online tutorials and blogs to keep the momentum going and proactively address customer queries.

All these efforts will collectively help you customize your app, branding, in-app content, features, etc., to your customer’s needs and wants, making it an instant hit. Additionally, it allows you to:

• Present your product in a logical step-by-step sequence
• Monitor your app’s optimization in the app store
• Segment your customers

Stage 2: Conversion/Acquisition

In this stage, your goal is to encourage the customer to take the necessary action that contributes monetarily to your business. The various ‘actions’ that your customer can take include:

• Downloading your app
• Setting up an account
• Making an in-app purchase
• Using app constantly

Top Strategies To Ace The “Conversion/Acquisition” Stage 

1. Focus on enhancing your onboarding experience by creating step-by-step, instruction-led content. You can also include free demos to help customers get familiar with the app instantly and effectively. Here’s an excellent onboarding example by Strava that boasts of a simple UI and presents customers with relevant tasks:

2. Understand where downloads originate from. In other words, get to know the ‘source’ of your downloads.

3. Create a seamless and effortless customer experience.

4. Boost customer engagement through mobile push notifications. Here’s an example of location-based push advertising:

5. Post the app launch, and engage in paid advertising on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc. You can also go for Google Search ads.

6. Engage in app store optimization by focusing on the title of your app and by using structured and well-researched keywords. Also, include a brief description of the features and benefits customers can gain from using the app and screenshots and videos. Here’s an example of Starbucks’ mobile app store listing:

7. Create a convincing pitch for Apple’s editorial team so your app can be featured in the app store.

Stage 3: Retention

In this stage, you will want to keep your customer base happy, engaged, and loyal. Granted that downloads peak after the first few weeks of the launch, the trick lies in keeping customers engaged once the excitement dies.

To improve mobile app engagement and customer retention, focus on the following elements of your mobile app marketing:

Top Strategies for Retention Stage

1. Segment your audience and then roll out relevant in-app messaging about upcoming offers, new launches, warnings about app issues, payment failures, version upgrades, etc. Here’s an example of in-app messaging that encourages to sign up for the VIP program:

2. Roll out customer surveys and reward customers for participating in the survey.

3. Drive push notifications to encourage engagement. You can send specialized content, coupons, special promotions, etc., to reel your customers in.

4. Offers customers a reward/bonus/benefit in exchange for them promoting your app online as Robinhood does:

5. Ask for customer feedback by placing pop-ups strategically. Make sure to include your contact information wherever possible so customers can easily reach out to you. You can also ask your customers to give unfiltered opinions via forums on relevant sites and social media.

6. Work on the negative reviews and focus on continuously improving your app:

You want to drive as many organic app installs as possible. This is why creating a strategic and in-depth mobile app marketing plan should take center stage. Here’s a detailed framework for driving app adoption and growth: