The following is a guest contributed post from Dave Bell, CEO of Gummicube.

When you’re searching for the right app in the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, what are your eyes immediately drawn to? While everyone is different, most can’t help but divert their attention to what instantly catches their eye. In the app stores, this typically requires having unique and attractive creatives.

Why Creatives are Important

Creatives such as an app’s screenshots and icon are a few of the most important on-screen pieces of real estate to convince and entice users. At a quick glance, an app’s creatives is the main space that sets them apart from the sea of apps and their competitors in search results.

It’s important to keep in mind that a user only spends 3-5 seconds considering an app in the app stores. On the topic of seasonality, a sure-fire way of distinguishing an app from their competition is by implementing seasonality into their creatives by following App Store Optimization (ASO) best practices. Users definitely do notice and appreciate when apps put the extra effort in making graphics relatable to the upcoming season or holiday.

Keep Up with the Times

Targeting seasonal keywords just isn’t enough to attract users when they are quickly skimming through the app stores. Similar to commercial businesses like Target and Starbucks that alter their marketing strategies for different seasons, apps should also make key changes to their app listing. Incorporating seasonality into creatives could be the secret weapon your app needs to increase conversion rates.

Take advantage of what app consumers will be looking for during the different seasons and holidays, and if applicable, cater your app to those interests and aesthetics. Consider seasons like winter and summer – developers can make changes to incorporate various elements that highlight the current season and attract users.

Winter

When the weather starts to take a chilly turn and snowflakes fall as an introduction to the winter months, the world in your gaming or shopping app can mirror that. For example, for a gaming app, consider changing your app’s creatives to incorporate snow or a colder terrain. For a shopping app, think of what a consumer looks for and can relate to: warm clothing in the forefront, colors evocative of the holiday, holiday ornaments in the background, etc.

The holidays are also a favorable time for targeting more users. For instance, some popular retail apps changed their icon promote Black Friday sales while others incorporated holiday themed elements to target the holiday season.

Take for example, how Hustle Castle features the main character in their icon with a Santa hat. By incorporating this simple, yet relevant, element to their icon, they will attract users who already feel festive.

At the start of the new year, consumers are looking to better themselves. Productivity apps or fitness apps can cater their creatives with catchy new Call to Actions to those looking to meet goals for the new year.

In February, love is in the air. Valentine’s Day is a great time to take advantage of those looking to find love or create memories with their significant other. Dating apps and photo apps can target new users during this time by displaying creatives that emphasize love and dating.

The photo app below features romantic pictures of couples to cater to those who want to create lasting memories with their loved ones during Valentine’s Day. Not only does the developer include relevant themes and colors in all of the creatives, but they portray elements of love and happiness to appeal to the user’s emotions.

Summer

Even though holidays are few and far between during the summer, people still get excited about everything it represents – warm weather, barbecues, vacations and so much more. While retail apps can utilize their creatives to promote swimsuit season or Memorial Day sales, travel apps can target the high volume of users who are going on summer vacation.

Even gaming apps can incorporate symbols of summer in their creatives and gameplay. The game featured below employs warm colors and flip flops in their screenshots to emulate the hot weather associated with summer. 

Relevance is Key

Staying relevant to users is key to improving conversion rates year around. Consumers’ expectations are constantly changing and evolving, meaning an app’s creative assets should reflect user trends and behavior and the current season.

Users will spend just a matter of seconds looking at an app. As the seasons change, developers need to utilize ASO best practices to ensure that both their icon and screenshots are relevant, eye-catching, and unique to differentiate themselves from competitors.

The post The Power of Incorporating Seasonality for Creatives appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Dave Bell, the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gummicube.

Budding app developers who recently released their first app have quickly recognized the challenges of getting their app discovered. The App Ecosystem is teeming with competition, meaning it is more important than ever to properly position your app.

The competitive nature of the mobile market forces developers to think outside the box when it comes to marketing. App Store Optimization (ASO) is an essential marketing tool that can be utilized by developers to help maximize their app’s visibility and target their audience quickly.

Various Marketing Strategies

Defining a clear and effective marketing strategy will improve an app’s chances of converting users within the app stores. Once a marketing strategy has been created, it’s crucial that developers continue their efforts to keep up with current user trends and behavior to reach their maximum audience.

To ensure an app is relevant to its audience, developers can utilize marketing strategies such as ASO, Paid Search, Reputation Management, A/B Testing and Social Marketing. Since there are many ways to market an app, developers need to test each method before settling on a combination of marketing strategies that works for them.

1. ASO

ASO is the standard marketing tool for app developers to build visibility in the app stores. The key component of ASO is optimizing an app’s metadata, otherwise known as its app name, keywords, description and creatives.

Developers need to optimize their metadata so their app is relevant to user searches and appears before competitor apps.

Once developers set up their ASO strategy, they need to continue monitoring user trends and behavior to ensure they are properly targeting their audience. Since trends are changing all the time, developers need to pay close attention to their users’ interests and needs and update their metadata accordingly.

2. Paid Search

Paid Search is a marketing strategy that has recently gained more traction. Since Google’s introduction of Adwords in 2015, and Apple’s introduction of Search Ads in 2016, Paid Search has continued to serve as a viable marketing strategy for many apps.

Developers that are interested in using Apple Search Ads need to keep in mind that they are created using their app’s metadata and creatives. Even though this means developers do not need to create any new content, it’s imperative they first utilize ASO best practices to ensure that their metadata is optimized to target their audience. If their metadata and creatives incorporate high-volume keywords, they are more likely to be relevant for those keywords.

3. Reputation Management

On top of using ASO and Paid Search, developers can create a Reputation Management campaign to monitor user reviews. Monitoring reviews is a great way for developers to engage with their users and understand the current user experience.

Besides engaging with users and understanding what users are currently experiencing, developers can quickly identify and troubleshoot any issues or bugs their users have mentioned. This shows users the developer is interested in providing the best experience possible, and that they are listening to their needs.

4. A/B Testing

Developers looking to improve their app’s conversion rate may want to consider conducting A/B Tests, the process that compares two or more options of metadata to determine which is preferred by end users.

This form of testing is incredibly effective because it quickly determines which piece of metadata or creatives engages with users best. Having this knowledge allows developers to understand what app name, short description, icon, or screenshots to use without spending a lot of time or money.

5. Social Marketing

It’s important that developers don’t pigeonhole themselves to just one type of marketing campaign. A great way to get noticed fast outside of the app stores is by taking advantage of social media.

Developers can connect with social media influencers to provide marketing offers that display the app outside of the App Store and Google Play Store. This also allows for the brand or company to gain awareness, which will in turn improve an app’s conversion rate.

Key Takeaways

Marketing an app is imperative to ensuring that it does well on the App Store and Google Play Store. Developers need to test every marketing strategy available to see which engages with their users best.

While ASO is the key marketing tool available to app developers, they need to incorporate all marketing strategies to improve their app’s visibility and help it become more discoverable to its target audience.

The post Top 5 Strategies for Marketing Your Mobile App appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is an exclusive guest contributed post to MMW from Dave Bell, CEO of Gummicube

Late in the 1990’s we were in the very early days of mobile. At this point in time wireless handsets started to become more than simple phones and there was a constant phrase that was used to describe the future of content. That phrase was “made for medium”. It represented awareness that to succeed with software for mobile devices, one had to create something that was specific and special for the platform. Bringing an app that was originally intended for the PC or web wouldn’t work because it didn’t cater to the unique ways people used their mobile device.

Since that time mobile devices have become more powerful and they themselves are a type of computer that is essential to everyday life. While this evolution has changed what can be done with a mobile device, what hasn’t changed is the fact that people still interact differently in a mobile environment than they do on the traditional web. The ways that mobile devices are used, the kinds of features that are popular, what people search for, and even the way that they search inside app stores are very unique to mobile. Understanding these differences are key for mobile marketers to succeed.

First, let’s look at a couple of key features of mobile devices vs. PC counterparts and how these features translate into real world use cases.

Camera

In the mobile world, people are taking pictures directly with their device. After a picture is taken, users modify pictures with “lite” editing apps before sharing socially. Some key mobile search terms in this category include: “camera apps”, “photo collage”, “photo effects”, “instagram” and “selfie apps”. If you look at each of these terms, very few logically have as much relevance for traditional web search. In fact, searching for camera using Google Web search reveals that most people are looking to buy cameras, compare prices or find their local cinema.

Messaging

This category not only has people looking for functionality unique to mobile, but the top competitors are also very different than in the web world. In mobile, people want to ensure their messages are secure (searching for terms such as “message lock”) and that apps are customizable and offer personalization such as alternative background images. The top players are Tango, WeChat, Line and other companies that are not known for their efforts on the PC platform or in web. Performing the same kind of search using Google Web search reveals that users still search for the term “instant messaging” (an artifact from early web messaging – in mobile people tend to use the term SMS) and look for topics as diverse as “brand messaging” (tied to traditional marketing activity).

Storage

The intent of the word storage is very different on a mobile device than on PC/web. In mobile, people have the very real problem of wanting to carry around more media than can be stored on an inexpensive mobile device with 16GB of storage. Users don’t want to decide which photos, videos or apps to keep or delete, so on demand cloud storage is a sought after service. This is especially true as it overlaps with the photo and video category as a use case. In the context of PC/web use of this term, people could be searching for a range of topics from “storage containers” to “computer memory” to web apps like Google Drive that allow you to store and share documents in the cloud.

These are extremely good examples of how context, search terminology and intent can be very different across web and mobile platforms.

Taking this discussion to a higher level, where users are searching is very different in mobile from the web. In the world of the web, Google Search dominates how people find content on the web – and with so many websites in existence; users need to use very specific search terms to find what they are looking for. In the world of mobile devices, people search within the App Store and Google Play for anything that they want to download or “add on” to their device – with web search falling back to a more supportive or informational role. This means longer more detailed search queries for the web, and shorter (2-3 word) search queries on mobile that tend to be feature focused.

This behavior stems from the fact that most users can’t (or prefer not to) download files and applications from the web to their device. Indeed, Apple devices don’t allow you to download anything from the web and Android users are faced with serious security concerns downloading from third party sources. As a result, users are conditioned to taking their actionable & transactional searches to the App Stores and then using native apps to perform basic tasks like checking movie times, which would otherwise be a search on the web.

Looking at the examples provided above, it is easy to see how the differences between web and mobile filter down into every category and sub-category of any number of products and services. The importance of mobile apps and services being “made for the medium” clearly also extends to marketing, which needs to be tailored to the uniqueness of the platform and how users interact with it.

The post Opinion: Marketing Made for the Mobile Medium appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.