A general business plan of your app is a key to success of your product but you can’t forget about a marketing plan as well. It focuses on presenting your app to its audience and has a vital role in winning and keeping the users. As with a business plan, marketing plan should be prepared thoroughly in advance. Check out the 7 steps you should take before starting your app marketing campaign.
1. DO AN IN-DEPTH SITUATION ANALYSIS OF YOUR APP
Every plan should be based on existing data and so should an app marketing plan. That’s why you should analyze your company’s current situation and define what your product really is. The best way to do it orderly is to use the SWOT method – list the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your app. It is always a good idea to do a competitors analysis. Find out whether similar apps exists or whether there are other products that serve the same needs as your product. Look for good benchmark too and follow its example.
2. DESCRIBE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE AND ITS NEEDS
The next and extremely important step is to create a profile of your target user. Begin with conducting a marketing segmentation process – divide your potential market into different categories. There are four main aspects of segmentation you can use: demography (age, sex etc.), geography (where your users live), behavior (attitude and use of product) and psychography (lifestyle, interests and so on). A free and useful tools that can help you in the segmentation process are for example Business Dynamics Statistics and American Fact Finder. Having done your marketing segmentation, choose the target groups which suits your product and aim the most.
3. LIST YOUR MARKETING GOALS. PRECISELY
Marketing goals should be closely connected with the general goals you have set in your business plan. They need to have more sales and communication bias though. Do you want your app to be downloaded by 1000 new users every month? Or get a revenue of a certain amount within a year after the launch? Make a list of such goals and remember that a good aim should be defined precisely. ‘Make some profit’ is just not enough. You should focus on Sales Revenue, Number of Leads and Cost per Acquisition. It is also a good idea to monitor KPIs such as Customer Value, Traffic-to-Lead Ratio, Landing Page Conversion Rates or Organic Traffic.
4. CREATE A DEDICATED LANDING PAGE
Remember to never start a marketing campaign without a dedicated landing page. It means a standalone page that a user lands on after clicking on the add or Call-To-Action. A well-designed landing page should include your Unique Selling Proposition (what you sell), the hero shoot (context of use of your app), benefits from the app, proof (e.g. social proof or data) and Call-To-Action (conversion goal). A good example of a well-prepared landing page can be this of the GameDay Sky, an app developed by Ready4S.
5. DECIDE ON STRATEGIES AND MARKETING CHANNELS YOU WILL USE
Having prepared the analysis and the target of the consumer journey (landing page), you finally come to planning how to make your potential users reach your product. To accomplish this goal, it is best to use media, language and communication used and understood by your target group. Mobile apps are mostly advertised online. You can use banners, social media and blogs but also PR tools such as article in the recognized online media, which write about your target topic or just about mobile apps in general.
6. SET THE MARKETING BUDGET
When you are a startup or a small/medium company, you will probably want to save as much as you can on every part of your business plan, including marketing. It is not a good idea though. Marketing is absolutely essential to success of your app so its budget should be thoroughly prepared. Adjust your budget to your company’s abilities, use free online marketing tools such as social media but never stop marketing for good.
7. REVIEW YOUR STRATEGY AND PREPARE THE LAUNCH OF THE CAMPAIGN
The final step of the mobile app marketing process is reviewing your whole strategy and checking whether it is coherent, especially if the budget meets your goals. All the promotional materials in the campaign should be prepared in advance and their launch scheduled. If you need some paid media to display your ads or information about your product, it has also be planned in advance as the media has very strict deadlines. After launching your app you should also monitor the statistics of your marketing tools and adjust the methods according to the results.
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