Mobile Marketing Archives

How to do App Marketing

November 13, 2017/in Mobile Marketing/by Alina Dettmer

To attract the attention of potential users for your app or mobile game, you have to market it. In this article, we will introduce you to effective app marketing strategies and explain them thoroughly.

Ways to Market Your App or Mobile Game

To get started, we collected a few strategies – both free and paid – in this overview:

Free Options	Paid Options
App Store Optimization Social Media & Landing Pages App Review & Promotion Sites Blogs Media Kit & Press	Ad Networks Incent / Non-Incent Campaigns Various Combinations of Ad Formats & Bidding Types Influencer Marketing

Overview of effective free and paid app marketing strategies © ayeT-Studios

For more detailed insight on these methods, read our article about the basics of effective app promotion.

Special Options to Market an Android or iOS App

Besides the general strategies, we want to introduce you to some strategies that specifically apply to both Android and iOS apps.

Android App Marketing

Connect your marketing campaign with Google Adwords! This online advertising tool by Google lets you promote products via various ad formats, displayed on different channels. You can promote Android apps with it, too.

There are two campaign types you can choose from:

Universal App Campaign

This option enables you to promote Android apps via different ad formats and on several networks available by Google. Text and visual elements are taken from your app’s app store page (one more reason for ASO).

This campaign type is based on a CPI bidding system, meaning you can choose how much you are willing to pay for users installing or opening your Android app. This way, you can promote your Android app and increase your marketing budget if the results are satisfying.

Mobile App Installs Campaign

With such campaigns you only target one network to generate app installs. Depending on the specific campaign model, you can choose between CPA, CPV, and CPI as your bidding option to promote your Android app.

There are three different campaign models, each of them targeting another network:

Display network app installs campaigns (text or image app install ads)
Search network app installs campaigns (text app installs ads on)
TrueView for app installs campaigns (video ads on YouTube)

According to your Android app promotion strategy and your target audience, you can select the campaign type that best fits your needs. With Google’s bidding system, you can adjust it to your current marketing budget. Click here for more information about mobile app installs campaigns with Google AdWords.

iOS App Marketing

Apple offers two options for your app marketing:

Search Ads

With Search Ads, iOS app developers are able to place their app on top of search results. Since more than half of app downloads are generated through search in the App Store, this is one great opportunity to promote your iOS app more effectively.

With its self-service dashboard, creating a Search Ad campaign is very easy. There is no minimum spend for it and costs only incur when users tap the ad. Apple has set a bidding system for this feature, which makes it possible to set a price according to your current budget.

In combination with ASO, you can take advantage of your app’s information (e.g. description) and graphics (e.g. screenshots) through “Search Match”. This feature takes metadata of the app from the App Store for your iOS app marketing. You can also either use keyword recommendations made by Apple or select keywords on your own, just like Google AdWords. It is not possible to change the ad creative, this data will only be taken from your metadata.

Furthermore, relevance is more important than bidding regarding apps being displayed via Search Ads. Here, Apple again shows that it prefers high-quality to monetization. Hence, when you’ve already done a great job with your ASO, you can draw on it.

Check out Apple’s website for more detailed information.

Apple’s Editorial Choice

This is no direct promotion tool for app developers but it may attract them to create the best app possible. Apple’s editors choose great iOS apps continually that are displayed in these special sections of the App Store – so Apple will promote your iOS app.

Next to its appearance, features and quality, your app can also get the chance to be placed by lowering its price for a limited time. So, consider offering a discount from time to time.

Rewarded vs. Non-Incent App Marketing

If you want use app Marketing to push the quantity of installs for an app, there are different ways to do so. You can buy installs and choose between incentivized and non-incentivized types, meaning:

Users will either receive a reward for installing your application (incentivized) or
they will download your app out of true interest and without being rewarded (non-incentivized).

Both types have different advantages and disadvantages.

Incentivized

In general, you can choose between two app promotion strategies when driving incentivized installs for your app. One of them is based on the amount of installs generated in a certain time whereas the other one considers the loyalty of your users.

Advantages and Disadvantages

As mentioned before, one advantage is the number of installs you can generate in a small period of time and the resulting boost of rank. Another important factor you should keep in mind is the cost for each kind of install:

The CPI (=cost per install) for incentivized installs is way cheaper than that of an app promotion strategy only based on non-incentivized ones. The downside of incentivized installs is that users might download and install your app only for the reward, resulting in less user engagement, lower lifetime value and smaller retention rates.

Non-Incentivized

The advantage on one side is the disadvantage on the other: Since users won’t receive a reward for installing your app, you have higher costs in order to generate the same amount of installs of an an incentivized campaign. If you’ve just started your app business, this could take a big chunk of your marketing budget.

Conclusion

Now, the most important question needs to be asked: Which type of install is suitable for your app promotion strategy?
Can you choose a method where you only deal with the benefits and leave the drawbacks behind?

Take advantage of both of them. The mixture of rewarded and non-incent installs helps your app marketing strategy gather pace up and your app will climb up the charts.

App Marketing Campaigns

The main goal of app marketing is to acquire new users but there are various ways to advertise an app. These not only differ due according to the ad format, but also according to who is carrying the risk – the publisher or the advertiser?

Install Campaigns

With this app marketing campaign type the advertiser pays the publisher for every generated install (CPI). The install can be rewarded for the user or be of non-incentivized nature. If the advertiser wants the campaign to be incentivized, he/she can expect the download rates to be very high. Users install the app in order to get the reward.

For the publisher, incentivized installs are quite interesting, because they only want to deliver installs and do not care about what happens after the installation. For marketers, non-incentivized installs are more promising because a targeted group of users downloaded the app of their own interest. This results in higher retention rates and consequently a higher revenue for the developer of the app.

So, the difference between rewarded and non-rewarded installs also underlines the shifting of the carried risk between marketer and publisher. Rewarded installs pose a low risk for publishers but a high risk for the advertiser. Non-incent installs imply a high risk for the publisher, (as it is not clear what percentage of his/her audience will install the advertised app) and low risk for the publisher.

Action Campaigns

Action campaigns offer a reward to the user, as there is always an objective the user has to fulfill. This mobile campaign type allows the advertisers to spend budget only if the user has fulfilled a specific action in their app. Like that, he/she gets to know the product a bit better and might continue to use it. Although the risk for the advertiser is the same as with incentivized install campaigns, the audience of the publisher might only take the action to get the reward.

Mobile Video Campaigns

From a marketing point of view, videos as advertisements are very unique because it is so versatile to monetize and to calculate the bid. What advertisers should know first: a study showed, that 71% of mobile game players think that video ads are the preferred way to “pay” for an app.

When using video ads, marketers can also choose to reward users or to leave it non-incentivized. The possibility to choose the right bid-type is what makes it special.

The three main bid-types are Cost Per Install (CPI), Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per View (CPV).

Here, the model cost per install is used in the same way as in the install campaign. CPI video ads can be both rewarded and non-incentivized: the advertiser pays the publisher for delivered installs. The CPC bid-type only pays the user when he/she interacts with the ad and gets directed to a landing of a mobile browser or the page of an app store. As the action of clicking implies less work for the user than installing an app, the reward is a bit smaller. This can also mean that the user interacting with the video is generally interested in the product. The same applies to non-rewarded video ads. With this mobile campaign type, the publisher carries the risk and the advertiser only pays when a user interacts with the ad.

Non-Incent Video Ads

In terms of incent video ads, you have various options of implementing them in your app marketing strategy. You can either:

place them in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google or some video-focused ad networks,
place them before, within or after a video on YouTube,
include them on your app’s website or landing page or
create videos for your app store page.

With all these methods, you are able to give more detailed insight into the functions and benefits of your app. If you create a professional and compelling video, it might just convince users of downloading your app!

Rewarded Video Ads

A rewarded video is short video clip, on average 15 to 30 seconds long, that is non-skippable and designed for in-app environments. It offers users a reward in return for watching the video, though the download itself is the user’s choice. Thereby, it represents a mixture of incent and non-incent advertising.

That is not the only feature of rewarded videos: they also provide huge advantages for both the user and the advertiser and benefit them alike! On the user’s side, they interact with this ad format by choice since rewarded videos are fully opt-in. Users only have to watch the video if they want to receive the reward. Hence, this format doesn’t disrupt the user experience but increases user engagement with the advertisement. On the developer’s side, this last point is very important: higher engagement rates also mean increasing revenue and higher viewability rates for advertisers. This interplay of both sides allows advertisers to monetize their app through advertisements without disturbing the experience for the user.

There are many more campaign types you can use to market your app, click here for more information.

App Marketing Costs and Budget

Knowing how to calculate your budget is crucial when wanting to conduct successful app marketing. First, you should select your key performance indicators (KPI) upon what you would like to achieve with your app. Following, we are going to present to you some of the most common calculations that you can use to calculate your budget for your user acquisition strategy.

Cost Per Install

The cost per install (CPI) measures the app marketing costs for ads that trigger an installation of your app. CPI varies a lot according to the ad formats you use. If you are using non-incent banner ads, you will most likely pay more for each install than when buying downloads via an incentivized offerwall. If you use an incentivized offerwall you can calculate very precisely how many installs you will get for a certain amount of money.

Cost Per Acquisition

This simple yet interesting formula helps you calculate app marketing costs because you can measure very clearly how effective your marketing efforts are. It is not limited to a specific model like CPI or CPAU.

For the mobile advertising industry, this pricing type is more commonly used for setting actions like completing a tutorial, reaching a certain level, registering an account or subscribing a newsletter.

Cost Per Active User

The cost per active user measures the app marketing costs for reaching users that will use your app actively. Every company needs to define for themselves what ‘active’ means. In this case, you might also hear the term ‘retention rate’.

Average Revenue Per User

The average revenue per user is the amount of revenue each of your active customers (on average) contributes in a specific period of time.

There are many more KPIs to optimize your app marketing strategy. Click here to get the full overview.

App Marketing Solutions

In this section of the article, we want to introduce and explain app marketing solutions that we developed for our customers.

Programmatic Buying

With Real Time Bidding (RTB), you can buy ad spaces like mobile banners, interstitials, and mobile video in real time via OpenRTB protocol.

The OpenRTB compliant ayeT-Studios DSP is the most versatile programmatic and managed supply source for precise and targeted buying of inventory. Our demand side platform comes with integrated programmatic and managed supply sources from thousands of publishers.

IAB Ad Unit Standards

Since our services fully support the IAB standards, ayeT-Studios can guarantee access to premium, brand-safe inventory across all supply sources. Since we are compatible with HTML5, Vast and VPAID 2.0, you can take full control of your media buying and maximize flexibility of where your ads can be served.

Data Driven Optimization

Rely on our data-driven approach and proprietary optimization algorithms to improve your advertising outcomes. Our algorithms will optimize your campaigns based on massive amounts of historic data, new data processed on a daily basis and a combination of multiple data points in order to make informed predictions, on which users will most likely show the highest interest for your ad and consequently result in a conversion.

In particular, all technical data points, such as the device model, operating system, location, and time, will be intelligently weighted, thereby enabling precise addressing of target audiences and informed decisions to buy inventory on a real time basis.

Fraud Prevention

We prevent your ad spend from possible fraud with the help of proprietary technology, strong partners, and a dedicated team.

We combine automated real-time data analysis and hands-on examination of accumulated historical data by our experts to identify abnormalities and fight publisher fraud. That way, we provide the highest level of security for your media buying. Additionally, you can monitor your performance and data in real-time with our dashboard.

In detail, we fight fraud by:

Measuring performance discrepancies
Using third party ad tracking
Detecting non-human traffic (NHT)
Monitoring statistical indicators
Built-in proprietary technology to:
- Analyse abnormal user behavior
- Measure unexpected CTR/CR ratios
- Detect abnormalities in traffic quality in real-time
- Examine suspicious performance distribution

ayeT-Studios Dashboard

With our self-serving dashboard, we can provide our customers with full control over their media buying and marketing outcomes. You just have to setup a campaign by choosing a campaign type like install campaigns, engagement campaigns, banner ads or mobile video. If you want to target a specific audience, you can set granular data like targeting location, language, device, OS type and more. To guarantee a fully transparent campaign performance, we cooperate with third party tracking providers Appsflyer, Tune, Adjust or Kochava. Furthermore, with our dashboard, you can react to real-time reports fast and optimize across all supply channels.

To sum up all the advantages of our dashboard:

Self-serve capabilities
Real-time reporting
Buy from ad exchanges and premium publishers
Manage and optimize all your ad campaigns with ease
Optimize across all supply sources
Precise targeting
Integrated third party tracking
Multiple bid types available

App Marketing Costs and How to Calculate Your Budget

April 21, 2017/in Mobile Marketing/by Pascal Ludynia

Fulfilling your dream of being a successful app developer is not sorcery: It takes hard work, dedication and making the right decisions. After writing the code for and designing your app, you also have to consider your app marketing costs and how to spend your budget most effectively.

We have mentioned the different ways to calculate your budget many times on this blog. However, in order to give you a complete overview of this topic, we have listed the most important calculations in this article and seperated them in two categories:

Calculations involving capital, whether spent on or received by your customers.
Calculations on how frequently a user interacts with your app.

Firstly, select your key performance indicators (KPI), which enable you to make smart business decisions about the direction of all current app related projects. Which KPI’s are important totally depends on you and your company.

Following this, we are going to present some of the most common budget calculations with regards to your user acquisition strategy.

Calculations Including App Marketing Costs and Revenue of Your User Acquisition

These kinds of calculations only work retrospectively, meaning that you need data from previous user acquisition campaigns or you need to analyze your running campaigns. This is a very interesting aspect because you get numbers to calculate the app marketing costs and a relation to other parts of the development process.

Let’s assume this: You can spend $10,000 for your marketing campaign. What will the outcome be?

Cost Per Install

The Cost per Install (CPI) measures the app marketing cost that you carry for ads that trigger an installation of your app.

CPI varies much according to the ad formats you use. If you are using non-incent banner ads, you will most likely pay much more for each install than when buying downloads via an incentivized offerwall. If you use an incentivized offerwall, you can calculate exactly how many installs you will get for a certain amount of money.

So, if you use a professional advertiser and agree on a price i.e. of $0.20 per install, you can generate 50.000 installs with your marketing budget of $10,000 – a very clear result when calculating the app marketing costs.

Cost Per Acquisition

It is often called Cost Per Action, too. This simple but very interesting formular helps in calculating app marketing costs because you can measure very clearly how effective your marketing efforts are. It is not limited to a specific model like CPI or CPAU.

The defined action can be as specific as needed.

Cost Per Active User

The Cost per Active User measures the app marketing costs that you need to spend in order to reach users that will use your app actively.

Every company needs to define for themselves what ‘active’ means. In this case, you might also hear the term ‘retention rate’. (Click here for more information regading retention rates.)

CPAU is always higher than CPI, since it is not realistic for all bought installs to convert into an active user. If you spent $10,000 for your marketing and generated i.e. 50,000 installs and 10% of these users turn into active users, you spent 2$ per active user – if this is the KPI you are looking for.

Active users are more likely to generate revenue for your busines, making your user acquisition efforts very valuable.

Average Revenue Per User

The Average Revenue per User is the amount of revenue each of your active customers (on average) contributes in a specific period of time.

This is a very good indicator in two ways:

You can see how much money you get from a special group of your users that are very engaged with your app.
When calculating ARPU and including normal users, you get insight about at which point normal users are converted to active users – a good side effect when calculating app marketing costs.

Customer Lifetime Value

The Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) makes you predict how long your customer uses and generates revenue within your app and therefore, how much the user is worth for you.

It should always be your goal to improve app features that are the most likely increase the Customer Lifetime Value of your users. Most of the time this translates into improving retention rate, session duration and total usage time per user for your app.

The opposite might be the case, however, if you operate a shopping. For example, the session duration will be reduced by optimizing the check out process after a user has added an item to his/her basket.

This faster check out process might result in shorter session durations but higher CLTV in the long run. Thus, be aware of what KPI’s you have to measure and improve exactly.

With the CLTV in mind, you are now able to calculate how much you can spend for every user in order to still make profit – this is what the calculation of your app marketing cost is about.

The CLTV depends on three factors:

Monetization (how much customers contribute to your mobile revenue),
Retention (level of engagement a customer has with your app) and
Virality (sum value of additional users a customer will refer to your app)

What Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) depends on © ayeT-Studios

If you want to calculate the CLTV, use the following formula:

Following this link, you can read an article on how to find the right mobile ad format for your product.

Return on Investment

Return on Investment signifies the profit you make with your app in comparison to your investment. You take a look at this at the end of your user acquisition campaign because it summarizes your efforts in making money by acquiring new users for your app.

In our case, we assumed $10,000 for app marketing costs. Let’s say the total revenue was $12,000, so your ROI for user acquisition was $2000. A high ROI means that your profit is way higher than your investment.

As long as your ROI is a positive value, you are not making losses. Be aware that you might want to measure additional spendings to CLTV and Ad Spending like all other costs of the business you operate (rent, HR, infrastructure and so on).

Conversion Rate

There are many different ways to calculate your conversion rate; it all depends on your goals and what is important for you.

You might want to measure more than just one conversion within your conversion funnel from user acquisition to revenue generated to calculate the app marketing cost. That way, you would be able to improve your app on a more sophisticated basis.

There are at least two conversions we find worth measuring for almost any app type:

Installs / Active Users: You can calculate the number of users that installed your app based on your user acquisition campaign and then decided to take specified actions to convert into an active user.
Active Users / User Generated Revenue: You can calculate the number of users that are using the app and then decide to take action and to generate revenue, for example by doing in-app purchases.

Calculations not Inlcuding App Marketing Costs

You can get very useful information to calculate your app marketing costs the right way without looking at financial aspects.

Important factors for your budget calculation are, for example

how often users interact with your app.
at which point you lose their attention.

Churn Rate

With the churn rate you can calculate the number of users that delete your app in a specific period of time. It is a valuable indication of your users’ satisfaction.

Monthly Active User (MAU) / Daily Active User (DAU)

These are your key users. Try to get as much information about this group as possible because it will help you improve your app.

Retention Rate

This element indicates the percentage of customers you are retaining. The retention rate is not a defined term, you can measure different factors according to what you want to learn.

Daily Sessions Per DAU

Daily sessions per DAU helps you to determine whether or not your customers are returning to your app as often as you want them to.

Stickiness

This is an indicator for how many users engage with your app and a good measuring tool for you if you provide bigger updates for your app.

Session Length

If you measure session lengths, you can quantify the depth of a user’s relationship with your app.

App Launch / Load Time

Users want a fluent experience with your app, so keeping this number as low as possible is necessary.
As result, the KPI’s including money for calculations are not the only way to succeed. You need to know the behavior of your users; why and when they use your app.

Click here if you want to know more about the right way to promote your app.

Conclusion

In summary, we can state that calculating your app marketing costs (or the use of them) is not only limited to the factor of profit or revenue.

Retention rate, daily sessions per active users or session length are significant factors for the success of your app – and for the success of your business.

Try to aim for the KPI, which is most useful to your app marketing campaign and in this light, plan how to use your budget.

We at ayeT-Studios are an experienced team and can help you calculate the costs of your app marketing and lever your user acquisition.

Beneath, you can find information about our pricing:

Rewarded Advertising	Android (starting at)	iOS (starting at)
CPI	0,07$	0,15$
CPE	0,30$	0,30$
CPA (Signup, Registrations)	On request	On request
Rewarded Video (CPV)	0,020$	0,020$
Rewarded Video (CPM)	0,50$	0,50$

Non-Rewarded Advertising	Android/iOS/Website (starting at)
CPC	0,02$
CPM	2,00$
CPV	0,02$

Devices for mobile marketing © FirmBee/ pixabay.com

Mobile Marketing – Leverage Your Marketing Campaign

April 19, 2017/in Mobile Marketing/by Pascal Ludynia

We live in a mobile world! In our daily routine, we constantly use our mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). This trend gives marketers many new and exciting possibilities to advertise their products. Today, they can run a mobile marketing campaign in an attempt to capture the great potential of the mobile world.

The number of mobile users exceeded the number of desktop users in 2014 © ayeT-Studios

Mobile devices are not only used to play games, watch videos or chat with friends but mobile commerce is growing more and more every year. So, users get used to spending money on their mobile device.

Mobile Retail Commerce is growing rapidly © ayeT-Studios

In the following article, we want to give you an idea of which mobile marketing options you have, and how to use them to leverage the success of your product.

What is Mobile Marketing

The meaning of mobile marketing is already contained in its name: It is a non-static, non-local way to promote your product. It is a broader term for a digital marketing strategy aimed at reaching a target audience on their smartphones, tablets, and/or other mobile devices, via websites, email, SMS, social media and apps. In short: It aims to reach potential customers on their personal mobile devices.

What Does Mobile Marketing Aim to Do?

When reaching out to the personal device of a customer, you should have in mind where your advertisement will redirect your user to. Basically, you have two options for redirecting your users when they interact with your mobile ad: A website – if you are advertising goods and services or running your business with the help of a mobile website; or a page of a corresponding app store – if you are advertising an app. Some marketers, like Amazon, operate a mobile website and an app in order to sell goods to customers. They are likely to set up campaigns to trigger traffic for their mobile website as well as campaigns to trigger user acquisition for their app. Keep in mind that those two campaign types are much different in nature regarding set up, target, user flow and tracking.

In order to allow the customers the most appealing experience, not only the used advertising assets should comply with the conditions of mobile devices, also the website or app store page should be optimized.

Mobile Friendly Website

Mobile friendliness means various things:
The content on your website should not be too big. This way, the page can load quickly and the user does not have to wait. Obviously, the page should not contain any mobile specific errors, like links to other pages, which are not mobile friendly or faulty HTML-code. You should also make sure that your page can be viewed horizontally and vertically. Furthermore, avoid arranging your website in a way that users need to scroll horizontally.

To check whether or not your site is mobile-friendly, you can use a tool provided by Google and see in what way your website can be optimized.

Another crucial factor why you should consider to make your website mobile-friendly is the importance of the user experience. For the best user experience, engaging with your website should be flawless. If there are issues, the chance that the user will engage with your product or buy it, decreases significantly.

Since Google made mobile-friendliness a factor for the ranking of a website, you really should make the effort to get a good position in the search results.

Appealing App Store Page

App store pages itself are made to fit on any screen of a mobile device. Nonetheless, there are various options to make the store page special and let visitors download your app.

Name of the App

The name of the app is one of the first things a user recognizes when he or she is coming to your app store page. It should be catchy and unique and furthermore include one main keyword. The name should also indicate the purpose of the app and represent its main message.

Icon

The icon is also one of the first things a user will see, so you should create an extraordinary and distinct one thats every user can understand and recognize easily. It should invite the user to visit your page in the app store and finally download your app.

Description

If you managed to get users to your app store page, you can now show them what your app is capable of in detail. The description should be well-structured and show clearly what the app is about. Try to keep it simple and inviting and list the main features and functionalities of your app.

Feature Graphics, Screenshots and Videos

A picture is worth a thousand words! At least if you add screenshots that make it easier for users to understand what your app is about. Great screenshots emphasize the app’s sales arguments and its unique selling point.

Which Channels Can Be Used to Do Mobile Marketing

At this point, you know what to look out for when designing your your mobile website or app store page. Now, we want to show you different channels you can use to advertise your product with the help of mobile devices. Additionally, we will explain what you have to keep in mind when creating a mobile marketing campaign.

E-Mail Marketing

Email campaigns are one the most effective ways to use mobile marketing. About 54% of all emails are opened and read on mobile devices. And 69% of these are instantly being deleted if they are not optimized for mobile devices.

On this chart, you see how the opening rate of mails on mobile devices exceeds the opening rate on desktop pcs © lizmus.com / ayeT-Studios.com

If you plan to use an email campaign, there are certain things to keep in mind:

The “from“ field should be optimized to have a maximum of 23 characters displayed correctly. The subject line should consist of a maximum of 38 characters.
If you want to include a CTA (call-to-action), position it early in the message and make buttons at least 44×44 pixels wide, so that they are easy to “tap”.
Try to integrate coupons or benefit programs. Users in the digital era are very likely to use them or refer them to their friends.

The user is very likely to leave a page if it doesn’t fit on his screen, or takes too long to load. Therefore your CTA should always lead to a landing page, which is also optimized for mobile devices. Make sure to include metrics to measure the success of your campaign. Keep the design simple and include clear image buttons – the fewer fields you have, the better! Always keep the images re-sizeable for different devices. The page should also look well horizontally and vertically. Email marketing works great to get users to your mobile website and to your app store page.

SMS Marketing

Using SMS in your marketing campaign is a good idea because you reach the customer on his/her device directly. There are some facts that make SMS marketing interesting:

The open rate of 98% is significantly higher than email (22%).
Close to 50% of users in the U.S. make a direct purchase after engaging with an SMS-branded text.
It is conjectured that SMS are up to 8x more effective at engaging customers than other types of media.

When thinking about the benefit of reaching out to a personal device of a customer, you should also choose a specific style of words:

It’s better not to use slang and abbreviations.
Be very clear who is sending the message.
Keep the text under 160 characters to only send one message.
Offer the recipient something that has a real value.
Insert a clear call-to-action.

Like Email-Marketing, SMS-Marketing works very well in getting customers to your mobile website or app store page on mobile devices.

App Based Marketing

Mobile devices are mostly used with applications. Many of these apps are free but still have to generate revenue for the developer. So, many developers decided to monetize their app with the help of showing advertisements while the user interacts with it. In the next paragraph, we will describe which in-app advertising methods are available on the market.

Banner

Banners are the founding stone of mobile advertising and improved a lot in the past years. They are displayed at some part of the screen, with a standard size of 350×50 pixel. In contrast to the beginning when users thought of banners as disruptive, nowadays, they can be implemented much more effectively in the context. The prototype of web banners was developed really early on. Today, banners don’t have to be static, they can be animated, have a sound-layer or even get the information of a live-stream!

Interstitial

You could also call an interstitial a full-screen banner because it is displayed on the whole screen. By this, more information can be provided and users receive an immediate impression of the product.

Video

In the last years, mobile videos have had a real boost. According to eMarketer, the numbers of mobile video ad budget spend in 2014 doubled in comparison to 2013 – from $720 Million to $1.5 Billion. This progress shows the huge potential mobile videos have as app promotion service. Due to the duration of the video, more context can be shown to your audience.

Rewarded Video

An option for using mobile video ads in an incentivized way are so-called rewarded videos, where users receive a reward for watching the whole video.

Native

This is the modern type of banner, where ad components are displayed. When choosing the right place and structure of the ad, it can be very effective: Users won’t be disrupted when being online and will see the ad as part of the app.

Rich Media

Rich media is a digital advertising term for an ad that includes advanced features like video, audio, or other elements that encourage viewers to interact and engage with the content. While text ads sell with words and display ads sell with pictures, rich media ads offer more ways to involve an audience with an ad. The ad can expand, float, etc. You can access aggregated metrics on your audience’s behavior, including number of expansions, multiple exits, and video completions to get granular data on the success of your campaign.

Offerwall

This ad format describes a page in an app where different offers are shown to the users. They can choose and complete an offer and receive a reward in exchange. Offer types may vary, from downloading and using a mobile app to watching a short advertisement about a certain product to completing a quick survey. It is always a good idea to scale the size of the reward according to the amount of work a user has to do to fulfill the task.

Push-Notifications

These are alerts and messages delivered by apps to the user. The messages appear on the home screen of a user device even if he/she didn’t open or isn’t engaged with a specific app. The user needs to have downloaded an app and agreed to allow push notifications, which 70% of the users do.

Some examples of push notifications:

Personalized messages based on the user’s profile
Reminders
Promotional messages
CTA for a specific goal or event

QR-Codes

QR codes allow customers to scan a 2D image with their phone, which leads them to a webpage without entering a URL. This kind of marketing is a good mixture of classical offline and mobile marketing, because you can lead users from i.e. billboard or print magazines to your mobile appearence.

Most of the previous ad formats can also be used on mobile websites itself to advertise your product or app. We will show you which formats fit for which products in a table below.

The Costs of Mobile Marketing and How to Calculate the Budget

To calculate the costs of your marketing efforts, you have to determine the most important KPIs (key performance indicators) for your business. You should just ask yourself what you’re aiming to achieve with your mobile marketing campaign.

This can be, for example:

Do you want to increase mobile traffic of your mobile website?
Do you want to increase the conversions of email messages?
Does your brand need to improve its general awareness?
Do you want to increase the sales on mobile devices?

Below, you will find some of the most established indicators on how to calculate your budget.

Return on Investment

Return on investment signifies the amount of additional profit you make with your mobile marketing campaign. So, look at this at the end of your mobile marketing efforts since it summarizes how much money you’re making through advertising.

You can use this formula to calculate the revenue you generate by advertising either a product, service or an app.

Conversion Rate

This KPI is very important because converting a visitor into a customer is the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign – and with this formula you can calculate it very easily. However, a completed purchase is not always the only conversion you want to achieve. A newsletter subscription, the setup of an account or even a (potential) customer clicking on your ad, can also be a conversion you want to trigger.

Cost Per Install

This KPI is used to calculate when you’re advertising an app. The Cost per Install, or CPI, measures your expected app marketing costs for ads that trigger an installation of your app. CPI varies a lot according to the ad formats you use. If you are using non-incent banner ads, you will most likely pay much more for each install than when buying downloads via an incentivized offerwall. If you use an incentivized offerwall, you can calculate exactly how many installs you get for a given amount of money. Nevertheless, buying an install doesn’t necessarily mean you are also buying a loyal user that spends money for your product. Therefore, other KPIs were established to measure user engagement more precisely.

If you want to get to know more about app marketing specialized KPI’s, read this article!

What to Think of When Creating a Mobile Marketing Strategy

When thinking of developing a mobile marketing strategy, you should keep in mind what kind of targeting options mobile devices offer you.

Here are 4 Steps you can follow:

Step 1 – Define Your Targeted Group of Users

Thinking of what your audience is should always be the first step when creating a mobile marketing campaign. Make a particular point to detail your target audience’s mobile habits. Are they going to complete a purchase on a smartphone? Is the main percentage of their web usage happening on mobile devices?

Some interesting points:

56% of B2B buyers use mobile devices often to get to the vendors content.
95% of grown-ups use their mobile device primarily to access content or information.
65% of all emails are first opened on a mobile device.
48% of all users begin their internet session on a search engine

It is always good to measure how users approach your website. You can monitor that with Google Analytics.

Step 2 – Set Goals

Before you can work on running a successful mobile marketing campaign, you have to be sure of what “successful” means for your efforts. Here are some examples of questions you can ask yourself to determine worthy goals:

Are you already doing something for the mobile market? This defines your starting point.
If you are already advertising on mobile devices, how are your campaigns performing?
How will a mobile marketing campaign fit in your overall marketing strategy? You should have a reason when you want go to mobile.
What group of users are you targeting?
How can mobile media channels get connected with your already existing channels?

Step 3 – Choose your KPI’s

Just like all other marketing efforts, mobile marketing campaigns also need to get optimized and tested. Think about what realistic and measurable KPIs are to define the success of your campaign. You can measure the Costs Per Install, Return on Investment, Conversion Rate and many more. In order to choose the right KPI you should ask yourself:

Do I want to increase the Conversion Rate?
Do I want to increase the traffic or the sales directly?
Does our brand need to improve the general awareness?

Step 4 – Monitor the Mobile Metrics

It is important to get as much information as possible on how the customer/user engages with your product. You can get help of various tools:

Metrics of Your Mobile Website

Google Analytics can help you measure mobile usage of your website:

The data about conversions can indicate whether or not the landing page should be optimized for mobile devices.
With Google’s given data, you can see how well your audience engages with the content.

When adding the Device Category field to the Site Content dashboard, you can quantify the traffic to each individual page on your site. You can also get information on which mobile page is most viewed, which device is most used and see how much web traffic you have compared to desktop PCs.

Metrics of Your App

If you published your app in the Google Play Store, you have great possibilities to get insights on how which user gets in touch with your app. You can get useful data with the help of Google Analytics or pull it from the developer console itself.

What is the conversion rate for play store page visit to app install for your app?
How many visitors do you get from AdWords-campaigns and how do they convert?
You can set every mobile marketing ad with a specific UTM-Tag and the Developer Console will show you in detail how many users visit which ad and convert into app users.
How many visitors come from Google Search?
How many visitors come from third-party referrers?

If you published your app in the App Store for iOS devices, you can implement code into your application, which gives you the possibility to get data on how (potential) users approach your app with the help of Google Analytics. Click here if you want to learn how to do this!

To Put it in a Nutshell

At the end of this article, we want to give you an overview on the mobile marketing ad formats available and which product they are most suitable for.

	Mobile Website	App
Email-Marketing	✔	✔
SMS-Marketing	✔	✔
Banner	✔	✔
Videos	✔	✔
Rewarded Videos	✔	✔
Interstitials	✔	✔
Native Marketing	✔	✔
Rich Media Advertising	✔	✔
Push Notifications	✔	✔
QR-Codes	✔	✔

This table shows which mobile marketing format fits which product.

As you see, most of all mobile marketing ad formats can be used to promote products, services and apps.