With over 150,000 applications on the iTunes App Store and 30,000 apps in the Android Market, it is more important than ever for iPhone and other mobile app developers to approach the marketing of their apps professionally.

Do You Have a Mobile App Marketing Strategy?

Many developers don’t have an app marketing strategy, instead relying solely on the limited marketing provided by app store operators. The iPhone App store, the Android Market and the Windows Mobile Marketplace all promote apps through ‘featured’ and ‘top’ lists.

An app can, for example, be featured on the front page of the iTunes App Store, or in a ‘Top 20’ list in its category. These spots are viewed by millions of iTunes users, which makes them highly lucrative. Getting on one of these spots could spell phenomenal success. Stories of such quick success reverberate throughout the iPhone development community – from Ethan Nicholas’ iShoot, to Joel Comm’s iFart.

However, the competitive reality is that, while getting featured is almost guaranteed to make your app successful, there is no guarantee your app will ever get featured. Of the 150,000 apps in the iTunes App Store, Apple chooses to feature only about 100 on the front page of the store at any one time. At the same time the ‘Top 20’ lists are reserved exclusively to the most-downloaded apps, which in turn earns them more downloads and thus turns this method of promotion into a self-serving cycle that’s almost impossible to break into. Getting featured sells apps, but don’t depend on it.

Mobile App Marketing – Getting Bang for your Buck

This is why it is important to devise a marketing strategy. Step one in your marketing strategy is understanding who your potential customers are, and step two is figuring out how to get your app shown where these eyeballs hang out, while optimising for minimum cost. It sounds simple: advertise your gardening app in gardening-related channels, and your game on gaming-related channels, but what about optimising this process as best as you can? This is where you really need to get professional.

To get the most bang for your buck in advertising, it pays to optimise by cleverly targeting your ads not only to the appropriate demographic, but also at precisely the time they are most likely to purchase your app. Pitching your gardening app in a poster inside the pub, for example, probably won’t work – even if the pub is frequented by gardeners – because even if a patron was interested in your app, they would likely forget about it by the time they get a chance to browse the App Store.

Targeting Mobile App Users

Here are some tips for targeting your mobile app advertising campaigns:

Try in-app advertising

Adverts are shown while users are actively interacting with other iPhone apps – and thus aren’t distracted by socialising or drinking beer! This generally makes for the most cost-effective advertising.

Try targeted online advertising

Online advertising networks such as Google Adwords can target users by keywords and/or by website placement. – You can, for example, place your gardening app ad on a relevant gardening-related website.

Try offline – if you’ve got the budget

While some apps are lucky enough to get free coverage by offline media to great effect, most app developers would have to use commission payable advertising to ever appear in a publication. Paid offline advertising generally does not result in good returns on investment for mobile apps.

That’s because using offline advertising such as Billboards, TV, newspapers is expensive and reaches consumers too far from the App Store. It is akin to advertising beer to wine lovers: Sure if your campaign is exceptionally good you might convert a few – and have them rushing to search for your beer, but why not advertise your beer to beer lovers in the first place? That is, why not target your customers when they are looking at their computer or mobile screen?

Contact First Rate

If you are an iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile or any kind of mobile app developer, we can help with effective online marketing. Contact First Rate for a no-obligation chat.

Mobile Internet usage is ‘the next big thing’ in online, with the iPhone and platforms like Google Android really starting to take off.

Having the power to browse the web, look up maps and do pre-purchase research “on the go” from practically anywhere, is a powerful concept. (And don’t forget that your phone can be used to make phone calls, too!)

Obviously, big players in the online marketing space are looking to make the most of this. Here is an example of a Google AdWords Ad appearing on a Nexus One:

Google has allowed targeting of mobile device users for some time on the AdWords platform, but this month has stepped up the targeting options.

Mobile Device Targeting

Earlier in January Google announced that they would now be allowing advertisers to specify what phones and networks they would like to target. The new AdWords device targeting options are shown in the screenshot below:

Phone types are limited to either Android, iPhone or Palm’s WebOS devices (despite the fact that Symbian and Windows Mobile users still have some of the highest ad click through rates based on recent studies in the US).

Google has not bothered to separate out between Vodafone and Telecom here as yet. (Australia is showing different network targeting options, so we imagine it is just a matter of time before they provide New Zealand specific targeting functionality.)

Click-to-Call Mobile Marketing

Based on geo-targeting, if your business phone number is located in a similar area to the mobile users location at the time of the search, your mobile ads will give the user the option to call your business. This will cost you the same as a click would, but instead of sending users to your website it sends a lead right to your phone. We will be interested to see what click through rates these are able to generate.

Mobile Usage in New Zealand

So with these new options, is it worth trying out mobile advertising in New Zealand? First Rate has carried out some brief research on aggregated statistics which has produced some interesting results.

• New Zealand “Information” websites sites generally appear to attract the most traffic from mobile devices, between 1% and 2%.
• By comparison, New Zealand “Retail/Service” websites are struggling to attract even 1% traffic from mobile devices.
• Data from this aggregated pool of websites further showed that as little as 0.5% of total Adwords originate from mobile devices.

With percentage figures this tiny, mobile advertising is not exactly going to be focus of your next large scale campaign, is it?

But why not start trialling now for when the inevitable growth does arrive here in New Zealand? We certainly think mobile marketing is important and on this basis all First Rate consultants consider this channel when devising a client’s Adwords strategy.

In-App Mobile Advertising

Let’s not forget about other forms of mobile advertising. In-app advertising, for example, is becoming a popular way of generating an income for both the Apple and Android app markets.

We are starting to see more interesting ads appearing in this area overseas, with advertisers making the most of these devices.

A great example is the following iPhone music video ad, which enables the user to interact with a music video for the new Vampire Weekend album.

We can’t help but think that the reason the uptake levels are still so low is due to the cost of having one of these high end devices: Both the outright purchase cost, as well as the ongoing data charges. Both of these are very high in New Zealand, especially when compared to other countries.

Conclusion

Google are putting a lot of time and money into developing this market, and with good reason!

Search is still one of the most used functions on these phones, and in 2011 Google see mobile search volume surpassing that of desktop levels in 2007.

The purchase of AdMob, the new targeting options and even the release of “The Google Phone” (the Nexus One) and the Android operating system itself, these are all indicators that Google knows exactly just how important this market is going to be.

We would also be willing to bet Google are only just getting their head around how different the mobile user is to their desktop-bound relative, so we can’t wait to see what happens when they really start to get good at targeting this new breed of user. Google Analytics is, once again, your best friend!

Mobile Advertising is obviously an area where First Rate is going to be keeping a close eye on. We have already started trialling some campaigns in this space – If you are interested in targeting mobile users cost effectively, then make sure you contact us.