Goal Setting Plan for Application Pre-launch Checklist

Mobile apps have taken the world by storm. It follows that there are some pointers that a business launching a mobile app needs to follow. According to Business Insider, mobile is growing faster than all other digital advertising platforms, and advertisers have begun allocating their marketing budgets for mobile users. Specifically, U.S. mobile ad spend will surpass $80 billion in 2018, which is a marked increase from 2013.

 

The important thing to understand about mobile users is that they behave differently than desktop users. The average session duration on mobile is 72 seconds, whereas desktop it’s more than double at 150 seconds. So it’s imperative that your page not be too long because mobile users are less likely to engage long enough and get value from an unnecessarily long page.

 

Therefore, your mobile landing pages shouldn’t be copy-heavy, just include enough copy to explain your offer’s value, and refrain from filler paragraphs that don’t add any value to the page and simply look pretty. Let us look at each of these pointers from checklist that business need to keep in mind.

 

Assets

 

Landing page with app features: When choosing your landing page, make sure these criteria are met:

 

1. The page or content has performed well historically in submissions or conversions. It’s especially good to use content that converts well but maybe hasn’t had a lot of exposure.
2. It tells your story in a real and meaningful way that shows the user how you are set apart from your competition.
3. It implements bullet points and white space to communicate both clearly and concisely, with an enticing call to action (CTA) that sits above the fold.

 

App explainer video: is an engaging video and a successful approach that helps showcase the unique features and benefits of an application. An app explainer video aims at educating viewers on how to use the application. It’s estimated that explainer videos increase rates of purchasing a product by up to 85%. App explainer videos connect with your audience on an emotional level, combining attractive visuals, animations & informative audio, to boost your brand image and engagements.

 

Extreme Couponing: to Incentivize purchases and increase visits. Extreme couponing can save you a lot of money, but it can also take a lot of energy. People with kids or full-time jobs typically don’t have the time to scour the Internet and print out, organize, and use anything more than the occasional coupon. That’s where couponing apps can come to the rescue. The ability to upload - “clip” and scan coupons directly on your smartphone can make the process a lot more efficient. If you type “coupon” into your smartphone’s app store, you’re sure to get hundreds of returns.

 

ASO

 

App store optimization is the process of optimizing mobile apps to rank higher in an app store’s search results. The higher your app ranks in an app store’s search results, the more visible it is to potential customers. That increased visibility tends to translate into more traffic to your app’s page in the app store.

 

ASO works by optimizing a target app's keyword metadata in order to earn higher ranks for relevant keywords in the search engine results page (SERP), as well as increasing the rate at which users decide to download that target app.

 

The app store is where people make the decision to become your users or not. If they aren’t impressed by your app store page, everything will be lost. Give careful consideration to your app store marketing strategy.

 

Goals & Methods

 

Keyword Optimization: one of the main jobs of an ASO marketer is to optimize the keywords in an app's metadata, so that the app store keyword ranking algorithms rank that app higher in the search engine results page for relevant keywords. This is accomplished by ensuring that relevant and important keywords are found in an app's metadata, as well as adjusting the mix of keywords across an app's metadata elements in order to increase the ranking strength of target keywords.

 

Conversion Rate Optimization: in order to increase the downloads of an app, an app's assets (e.g. the icon, preview video, screenshots, etc.) must also be optimized. It is recommended to measure the effect of these optimizations by creating different variations of each asset, showing each variation to users, and then comparing the conversion rate of each variant, in a process referred to as A/B testing.

 

Paid, Owned & Earned Media

 

Before devising your strategy, it’s important to carefully consider which media channels are most applicable to your hotel’s audience. It goes without saying that some channels are better suited to app promotion than others.

 

In the social web one differentiates between the media types Paid, Owned and Earned Media. The three areas are communication channels in the online environment, with which advertisers can reach their target groups.

 

The distribution of budget amongst these three channels will depend on how much cash you have to spend marketing your hotel, what activities you plan to base your marketing around and what your overall marketing strategy is. Most great strategies will include some element of all three channels.

 

Owned Media

 

Owned media is content you’re in full control of. Think of content for your company website, your blog, and your social media accounts. Total control also gives you the ability to optimize for readability and conversions. Your content can be best positioned to achieve its intended outcome and serve your goals - no one else’s.

 

But just having a website and social pages isn’t enough, even with paid and earned media in the mix. You need quality content about your products and services and their benefits on these owned channels to not only improve search engine optimization (SEO), but to also build your brand and convert your customers.

 

So, what are the techniques for ensuring success across an owned media strategy? Think content, posting & sharing, and email marketing.

 

Content:  The foundations of an owned media strategy are your content channels - the vehicles through which you deliver content to audiences directly, unmediated by a third party. The key to a successful content channel is that you have engaging content that is relevant and valuable, and that you are using all available data to personalize the experience for the user.

 

Posting & Sharing: Social media is a great way to engage with customers and potential customers. By sharing information on social networks, you can build a following and keep in front of potential customers. Social media can also help you distribute your content and direct traffic to your website.

 

Email Marketing: Send sales or marketing messages to a targeted audience via an email. This is a great way to nurture existing contacts and ultimately get them to convert. Additionally, email can help keep your business top-of-mind with customers.

 

This kind of marketing strategy will usually be preferred to reach your followers, loyal customers, and fans, unless you choose to also implement some paid media or earned media strategies.

 

Earned Media

 

In today’s marketing world, consumers are heavily influenced by reading reviews online to make purchasing decisions. Additionally, contributing your own content to bloggers, journalists, or publications industries help facilitate earned media. The media is earned by receiving press mentions, reviews, awards, article shares, tweets, etc.

 

Not only is it free, but the true value of earned media is that it creates a sense of trust in your brand. When a third-party creates content about your product or company, you receive engagement and exposure from an entirely new audience.

 

But earned media is only successful if your company is posting creative content, interacting with social media, and making customers happy.

 

There are three key ways you can do this:

 

Tap into the power of brand ambassadors: Start by identifying existing brand ambassadors and listen to what they're saying about your brand. Keep a list of them on Twitter and other social media, and check-in regularly to see what they're posting about your brand. If you don't have as many brand ambassadors as you'd like, or you'd like to "recruit" more, you can start sharing and interacting with people who regularly create earned media for your brand.

 

Influencer campaigns: Similarly to identifying key content creators in your customer base, you can also identify key players in your industry. Influencer campaigns let you tap into the audiences of influential, relevant people and reach a wider base of tuned in consumers.

 

Loyalty Campaigns: People like to be rewarded for their actions. Fact. If you're struggling to get consumers engaged, a long-term loyalty program might be the answer.

 

Epistrofi App, for example – is the innovative application of Epistrofi Loyalty Program, designed and developed exclusively by Warply. Create your loyalty strategy with just few clicks and increase customer value.

 

How to earn and increase customer value?

 

While this form of marketing content is dependent on audience actions, ecommerce businesses have to take five steps to promote earned content - this is where the "earned" part of the term comes from.

 

1. Build Credibility: The most trusted source of information about your business comes not from the information you disseminate to the public, but from third party sources such as the media or highly satisfied customers. People are much more likely to trust messages about your brand when they read or hear about it in the media, than through a hard sales message. Your loyal customers – otherwise known as brand advocates – also have a key role to play in building the credibility of your brand.

 

2. Use SEO: Practically speaking, earned media is an effective SEO-builder. It allows you to garner valuable backlinks that further elevate your web pages and brand name in the search engines. Again, this is something you can’t directly pay for. Instead of focusing all your time and money on trying to develop shortcuts to SEO success, just invest that time into developing earned media relationships. It’ll be much more meaningful in the long run.

 

3. Ratings and Reviews: Ratings and reviews, are known to provide benefits in the following ways:

a) Higher rank on the search engine results pages (SERP). The fact that UGC is frequently updated, indexable and engaging to users, provides positive signals to search engines in terms of ranking factors, potentially increasing position on the SERP.

b) Increased click-through rates (CTR). The implementation of micro-formatting, or rich snippets, is perhaps the most visible benefit that reviews have to search engine optimization (SEO).

c) Increased conversions rates. From a conversion standpoint, reviews can help with search engine rankings, but ultimately increase users’ trust in the site, and can help answer questions and remove doubts about products.

 

4. Connect to Journalists: Interviews in magazines, whether in print or on the web, or press stories about your company count as earned media. But journalists are picky about who they write stories about, so it’s important to develop a rapport. That means more than just sending out press releases. It also means writing friendly emails and messages and going above and beyond to get a writer’s attention.

 

5. Reach out to influencers: Influencer marketing, on its own, is paid media. But, one of the goals of it should be to have people share the content created by influencers, transforming it into earned media, as Forbes.com points out. Partner with influencers who have high engagement. Find ones who fit with your brand. And share some incentive (exclusive content, VIP treatment, free virtual goods to redeem) and ask for a detailed feature in their digital media property or social channel.

 

Pro tip: Try to reach out to app store/play content managers and ask to be featured.

 

Paid Media

 

At a more advanced level, there is significant potential for growing your audience or establishing a position of authority in your industry, but the primary goal is usually to drive traffic, leads and conversions for your business.

 

There are dozens of social channels that marketers can use for advertising, and most of them go one step beyond to provide multiple ad product options. When creating click-to-call ad campaigns on Facebook, there are a few best practices you should keep in mind:

 

Target the right prospects: Take advantage of Facebook’s detailed targeting capabilities to display ads to your ideal customers. Also, make sure to utilize location targeting to get your ads in front of people who are near the business you’re promoting.

 

Schedule ads to run at prime times: To do this, you’ll need to establish an ad lifetime budget rather than a daily budget. However, being able to narrow the window when your ads display, such as displaying a restaurant ad a couple of hours before dinner, will help you reach people in the moment that they’re seeking your services.

 

Test multiple versions of ads: The only way to find out which versions of your ads generate the most impressions, clicks and calls is to test multiple versions and discover the top performers.

 

Advertising on social media is one of the easiest and most effective ways to ensure your message reaches your target audience—and social media users are in agreement. In fact, 57% of Millennials surveyed agreed that the ads they’ve seen on social media are more relevant to them than ever before.

 

Whichever way it is that you choose to remarket to your potential customers on Facebook, you’ll need to start somewhere. First of all is important to understanding Facebook retargeting campaigns that will get you on your way to creating stellar remarketing campaigns that will help your sales take off.

 

Ad Retargeting: Retargeting works using a cookies-based technology that follows your audience (historical website visitors and email addresses) around the internet. This strategy works best when paired with a larger digital strategy that is driving users to you. There are two goals that a marketer might have for including retargeting in a marketing mix:

 

a) Awareness: Retargeting is a great way to re-engage users who may have forgotten you, especially when you’re running a great special or you have a new product offering that might entice them back.

b) Conversion: A lot of people believe that when retargeting is done well, it’s the best paid channel for nurturing users to turn them into customers.

 

 

 

Being creative is not a hobby it is a way of life

 

Marketing banners and wording should be simple and to the point. Explain what the app does, how it saves you money or time or makes your life easier (modern life incentives). Try to avoid vague branding, especially in the case you are a known/love brand. If you are smart enough to run an incentive be sure to market it accordingly, some examples follow:

- download and get your first parking for free

- download and get your first taxi ride for free

 

Mobile App KPIS to take your app to the next level

 

Figuring out your mobile app’s value and assessing its performance should not be based on your personal emotions. We all know that you love your product like your own child. But that kind of love might sometimes ruin a business in the end.

 

So, let’s not go to extremes and let’s see what are the most valuable mobile app KPIs you should track to measure your app’s performance.

 

Downloads: The true KPI to measure in the sense that cost per acquisition (CPA) is most of the time a multiple of cost per download (CPD). Remember not all people who download an app buy or perform a registration.

 

App open rate: This is also known as AOR. It shows the percentage of sessions generated by your app users. The more sessions they generate, the stickier to your app they can be considered. “Sticky” users are awesome!

 

Number of new users: This is one of the most interesting mobile app KPIs to use since it helps understand whether your user base is growing or not. For example, you could check whether you are having new users due to some particular events or maybe advertisement campaigns, or app improvements and bug fixes? There can be a whole lot of reasons behind this.

 

Daily active users (DAU): This is as simple as one-two-three. This KPI indicates the number of active users who use the app every single day.

 

Monthly active users (MAU): This KPI shows the number of active users on a monthly basis. Usually, unique visitors are being tracked. Each of them might engage with the app during multiple sessions. So, make sure you know the difference between monthly active users and monthly sessions.

 

Retention rate: This KPI shows how many of your users actually stay loyal to your app. If your retention rate is high then you are providing the users with value. You can be proud of this! If we put it really roughly, the higher the retention rate, the more earnings from your app you are likely to get.

 

Reviews: And last but not least, reviews are among the mobile app KPIs that matter. And thus they should never be overlooked. However, note that it takes less effort to rate an app than to write a review about it. Often neglected action which can make or break your app store bounce rate.

 

Automation makes things easier and better

 

When you incorporate social media tools you free up time. That time can be used to create better, more meaningful content and it gives you more time for engagement. Warply presents New eCommerce Robotic Process Automation Platform. A tailor-made robotic process automation platform designed to simplify day-to-day eCommerce workflows:

 

Loyalty Rules: Design and adjust your customer's loyalty segments, add rewards based on real time actions, optimize cross and up selling. Create your loyalty strategy with just few clicks and increase customer value.

 

Commercial Rules: Set up your commercial policies utilizing our basket analysis tool and automatically trigger discounts and offers! Calculate against master data SKUs for retail (SAP, Navision) or eTail (woocommerce, magento, shopify).

 

Behavioral: Take action on your 1st party marketing data through machine learning and provide real time content (messaging, campaigns). Explore customers descriptive and predictive analytics to set goals and strategies.

 

Why hassle only with marketing automation, when you can have all eCommerce operations automated? There are two options in digital marketing, either build your own marketing stack or work with Warply Engage. Warply Engage for eCommerce automates 80% of our day-to-day work, optimizing not only our customer retention programs but also our supplier product campaigning and listing fee calculation.

 

At work

 

At a price after saturation that can exceed 2 euros per install, paid media for app installs is a very expensive process. Therefore, we need to follow a specific sequence in order to maximize campaign return on investment (ROI), by mostly avoiding to pay for installs we would acquire organically or through an outbound campaign.

 

In that perspective the sequence is the following:

 

1. Launch an outbound campaign through owned media and lists

2. Send PR and run a follow up campaign to achieve the maximum of paid media.

3. Setup some mobile search ads with long tail and niche keyword combinations.

4. Begin running download campaigns in the facebook ecosystem, which because of the reach can deliver very low CPDs early in the process. Allocate a moderate high budget in order to increase download velocity and get featured in the top downloaded apps list. Thus getting more organic acquisitions.

5. At some point in time facebook ad manager will start delivering increased CPD costs, so it;s high time to open another acquisition channel. You can use Google or various third party mobile ad networks either premium or long tail. This is an intense trial and error process so do not be blinded by jargon such as AI, machine learning, audiences, personas etc. Just test and audit the quality of the traffic with post-acquisition customer value metrics and optimize accordingly.

 

Final Thoughts

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