The phrase “shop around the corner” has been replaced with “there’s an app for that”! A lot of startups have entered the industry, either as an answer to the gaps in the existing markets, or as disruptive ideas that promise to change the way things have been done in the past. Many have taken the app route to reach the potential customers.
It isn’t just big businesses who need a mobile app for their company. As more and more consumers are interacting with businesses on-the-go, small businesses, including those starting up, are following the trend and understanding how important it is to have a well-thought out mobile strategy that is more than just a presence on mobile website.
While developing a great app is, of course, the first step for startups looking to have success through apps, it is equally important to employ app marketing techniques that help reach a wider user base, leading to greater conversions and ROI.
Thanks to the advancements in technology, app-based businesses can now have access to understanding their consumer base, their users’ behavior and whether they are, in fact, hitting the right audience at all. How can app-based startups leverage technology in mobile app marketing to drive their businesses and revenue?
Leverage Data to Bring Value to Marketing Efforts
You’ve heard it before: Data is the new oil. For app-based startups, accurate data insights into who the target audience is and what their preferences are is the heart of real-time marketing efforts. Know which difference in various kinds of data and what value add it can bring to your efforts to reach to the relevant users. First-party data, for instance, can help tweak advertising campaigns so it more accurately reflects the customer’s needs and wants. On the other hand, survey responses (a type of third-party data) can help to review what people think of the app and its offerings and can be used for improvements.
Getting an insight into the audience data and analysing it can help track and measure where you need to focus on with the marketing efforts rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, which in turn gives higher returns.
Target Returning Users and Bring Back Dormant Users
For app-based startups, installs is just the first step of the consumer funnel. It is equally critical to engage those acquired users, bring back the dormant users and drive conversions for them to see their businesses grow. This is particularly true for eCommerce startups that have a presence on mobile. By creating calls-to-action based on things people have bought in the past, you can deliver a highly customized shopping experience that suggests what they’re most likely to buy.
Most businesses, for example, use push notifications for mobile marketing but suffer from low engagements if audiences view it as spammy or irrelevant. It’s now easier than ever to have access to user behavior within the ap, which can be used for re-engagement and retargeting campaigns that more accurately reflect the customer’s needs and has higher conversion rates. Other solutions can be audience segmentation, dynamic creatives and deep-linking to reach the audiences, increase conversions and grow the LTV.
Optimization in Real-time
Startups and small businesses, particularly those in the early stages, can better manage campaigns by keeping the costs low, but maximizing their reach at the same time by making use of intelligent technology. For instance, programmatic media buying lets advertisers track the campaign performance in real-time, and also allows them to tweak the campaigns for best results. Programmatic advertising has emerged as an attractive option for such businesses that want to focus on performance and scale, equipping them with tools to understand the past as well as predict the future of their consumers that can dramatically increase the ROI. Whether it is choosing the inventory type by creating white and black lists or capping the frequency of their campaigns to prevent audience fatigue, such technological tools can be employed for improved engagement and campaign performance to reach the right users.
Be Where the Users Are
Location-based marketing has been a holy-grail for businesses, particularly those who have a presence on the mobile, most notably those in eCommerce and dating services. Location-based marketing is likely to boost how a consumer interacts with the messages, leading to improvements in CTR. Geo-targeting and geo-fencing have been buzzwords in the mobile app marketing circles for long, and the latest has been the use of Beacon technology. These have allowed app-based businesses to reach out to the most relevant users geographically to tune the messaging to a more personal form and service offerings (and earn more money!). Dating services, for instance, can use this to let members see other singles in their neighborhood, thus upping the probability of more people finding the app relevant to suit their preferences.
Up the Personalization
The rise of AI is already altering our sense of social reality but is now evolving such that companies can leverage it to increase revenues and productivity. Already businesses are integrating chatbots to take customer orders and digital assistants that can make hotel reservations or online payments.
AI and predictive analysis is expected to take personalization to another level. With AI and Machine Learning, app-based businesses can do sentiment analysis, which is the process of determining the emotional tone conveyed by sentences of natural English. It can be used to gain an understanding of the attitudes, opinions (positive, negative or neutral) and emotions expressed by customers. This understanding of the customer will allow advertisers to recommend and suggest items or content that is relevant to each user. It will also allow them to learn a user’s behavior patterns in order to make the future sessions personalized and seamless.