Programmatic has experienced a non-stop growth over the past few years. It is predicted that in 2022, mobile will be the top-purchased advertising platform, surpassing direct mail. Consequently, the mobile programmatic market will become more cluttered, so it is important for app marketers to level up their mobile advertising campaigns by leveraging upcoming trends and best practices for the year ahead.
Optimize User Retention Strategies
With Apple’s recent privacy changes, more app marketers have been focusing their efforts on user acquisition campaigns. Although these campaigns are crucial to any app, it is also important to focus on user retention strategies. For that, a full-funnel approach is needed to maintain high quality and engaged users, which contribute to the success of your app. To learn more about high quality users, take a look at our article here.
Now is the time to level up your reactivation campaigns to entice lapsed and inactive users back to your app. Pairing reactivation campaigns with your overall mobile strategy will improve your retention of high quality users, drive engagement across the entire app usage lifecycle, and keep your app competitive in an ever-growing market.
Leverage the Continuous Rise of Gaming and In-App Purchases
In the first half of 2021, user in-app spending reached $64.9 billion globally for both the Apple and Play Stores. Mobile games make up a huge chunk of that revenue. The category grew dramatically over the past year as users gravitated to mobile gaming as a form of entertainment during lockdowns. The rise in mobile games is set to continue, and the market is expected to grow to 3.3 billion people by 2024, incorporating the largest segment of new audiences in the gaming industry overall.
This presents you the opportunity to add and test new strategies for your gaming app, such as deals, promotions, and discounts, to encourage users to engage with your app’s features and drive revenue. Your ads can also be personalized by analyzing the user’s app history, such as level achieved, in-app purchases, favorite game skins etc. to drive click-through-rate (CTR) and inspire action.
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Focus on AI Learning
More app marketers are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models for hyper-personalization and diversity of content. Programmatic enables you to proceed with data collection and analysis, all in real-time. With AI and ML, insights and predictions for user behaviors can be retrieved faster and more accurately, without needing to be explicitly programmed. This allows app marketers to adjust their ad spend and budgets to focus on successful campaigns, as well as gain insights and understanding into the publishers, exchanges, and ad formats to leverage.
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Increase Spending on Playables
With adtech constantly evolving, and the expanding footprint of 5G, there are always new approaches to explore with creative formats and strategies. One of the most effective ad formats is payables. These are interactive ads that users can play with before they download or buy the app, which also serves as a “free trial.” This ad format has seen great results, and especially strong retention rates, in 2021, and is expected to continue to do so in the years to come. But this format does not fit every campaign, so it is always important to test different ad formats to see which is the best for your campaign. You can discover more about the different ad formats to use for your next campaign here.
Refresh Your Ad Creatives
Continuous advertising is important to extend the longevity of your app’s life cycle. Although, serving the same ad creative can lead to ad fatigue, no matter how good your ad is. Ad fatigue decreases click-through rates (CTR) and return on investment (ROI), so it is important to know when to refresh your ad creative. Offering a new creative strategy to catch users’ attention allows a mobile app to maintain higher conversion rates and better marketing performance.
Below are some tips from our creative team on how to approach creative ad refreshes for your mobile app marketing campaigns:
1. Explore the app
There are many different reasons why users choose to download and use a particular app. In the case of a food and drink app, it may be for convenience, to receive discounts and other promos, or to access a specific cuisine. Whatever the reason, experiential learning is essential for your audience to understand the app’s features and services. Being familiar with the app’s features means your users can hit the ground running. Imagine yourself as a new user and explore questions such as:
- What makes the app different or unique?
- What feature of the app excites its users?
- What value does the app bring?
- What can be improved?
Answering these questions will allow you to highlight the most relevant aspects of your app and develop a compelling ad creative. It also allows you to find ways to constantly deliver to the ad viewers the ad’s message in different, exciting, and new ways.
2. Check the app users’ reviews
An in-depth analysis of your app’s social media accounts and app store reviews is a useful starting point. Comments, reviews, and feedback found in the app store can help you verify your users’ opinions. This also helps you understand what motivates users to download and use your app, as well as pinpoint areas that need improvement. Social media accounts can also reveal insights into ad copy and engagement strategies that resonate with your audience.
3. Understand what the campaign’s data is telling us
There’s always a message within your campaign’s data. It is critical for you to find the patterns, analyze and interpret them correctly, and understand what they are telling you. By doing this you can avoid repeating mistakes and you can find new ways to improve your campaign’s performance.
Understanding these trends and best practices will help guide you in the right direction when planning your 2022 mobile advertising campaigns. However, there is no “one size fits all” approach in mobile app marketing, and these are just some of the many strategies that can be effective. To determine what will work for a specific app, app marketers must know their audience, have clearly defined goals, and take the appropriate course of action.
To find out how Aarki can help scale your mobile marketing campaign for 2022, shoot us a message here.
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