App ad campaigns for the Christmas season

Have you begun to think about your promotional content for this upcoming holiday season? The time is now to start preparing for this holiday season, and here are some of the key points you need to look at: 

1. Promo content

2. Channels to reach out to your audience

3. Your activities schedule

Let’s take a more in-depth look at each of these points and see how they can help you with your marketing needs this holiday season. 

1) Promo Content

When you’re preparing your promotional content, your job is to find a way to introduce your app or remind users about your app during the holiday season. More specifically, when we’re talking about the holiday season we are talking about Christmas through the New Year. But there is more to the holidays than brightly colored lights and festive decorations. Having a relevant symbol in your promotional material is extremely important, but the real questions here is, how can I make my app relevant to the audience I want to reach? Each app has its own unique case and this should be applied during the holiday season. 

Here are just a few aspects to think about when developing your strategy content:

- Individuals are away from their desks and their work computers, but their smartphones are still in their pockets and this is a huge detail to remember.

- They have plenty of leisure time. 

- They don’t want to think about work. 

- They want to watch new movies, visit their friends and family, shop for a new cool gadget. In short, they are seeking a mix of experience and shopping. 

The best kind of content is the kind that invokes an emotion, think of the Budweiser holiday commercials. You should focus on the positive emotions your app could bring its users this holiday season. Having a video demo has become an essential component of a successful ad campaign. Here are some details to look at:  

- The duration,15 seconds maximum. This is normally the number of times people are willing to spend interacting with a video ad, plus this is the time limit for Facebook Mobile App Install Ads.

- Stay away from clichés! Do your best to get people’s attention, try to make them laugh and say, “Hey, let’s check this app out!”

2) Channels

At this point in time, Facebook Mobile App Install Ads have become a proven component to generate app installs and retain/re-engage app users after they’ve installed an app. An important point to keep in mind as you are planning your ad campaign this holiday season is Facebook’s 20% text rule: “Images in your ads can include text that meets our general Advertising Guidelines, but may not include more than 20% text in the image to ensure people only see high-quality content. This includes logos and slogans in images.”

Facebook has a useful grid tool that helps you check your creatives to ensure your ad won’t be rejected. Remember that targeting is essential. Facebook has made this easier with a powerful tool that lets you specify a set of interests for the audience you wish to target. This is just as important as your ad text and ad creatives. It’s also important to note the age, gender, device and iOS version you are trying to reach. 

The new iOS 8 brings interactivity and allows users to interact with notifications right from a locked screen or banner notification. Psychologically speaking, it’s much easier for users to interact with your message because it doesn’t break their experience with the app they are using. In particular, interactive notifications are a great tool for:

- Retail or any business that has a physical location that wants to remind its shoppers about a specific topic such as a discount or a simple “Merry Christmas from…”

- Game developers to re-engage with their user base and invite users to get back to a game because there is something special waiting for them.

Promoted Tweets for mobile apps are quickly becoming one of the most widely used tools to drive app installs via social media. There is a fundamental difference between Facebook and Twitter in terms of a user’s interaction with these networks, it comes down to timing. On Twitter, users expect to see the news that is relevant today, yesterday and the current week at the latest, while on Facebook, users are not expecting such current news and thus you need to understand the difference when approaching ad campaign duration for each platform. 

YouTube is the best channel to use when you decide to promote a video demo for your app this holiday season. If you plan on launching an ad campaign with Google AdWords for video solutions, you will need to define the same targeting criteria that you have for Facebook Mobile App Install Ads. Since YouTube doesn’t allow you to place a link to your app on the App Store or Google Play as an overlay on your video, make sure you’ll have the link in the first sentence of your app’s description to give people an easy way to check out your app in the store. 

Writing articles requires a lot of time, so a good strategy is to focus on creating a 400-500 word blog post that represents your app for a particular blog. This is a public relations technique, so you should also prepare a short 5-6 line pitch to approach bloggers who cover content that is associated with your app.

3) Activities Scheduling

It’s crucial to start your preparations for this holiday season’s app marketing campaign as soon as possible. Your set of promo materials should be ready by the end of November at the latest! Here is a suggestive timeline that you can follow:

- Facebook: December 1, this is a good starting point to take full advantage of Facebook Mobile App Install Ads and acquire a significant number of new users to your app. 

- Twitter: Since Christmas is on a Thursday, we assume that people will be getting into the holiday spirit around December 22. Depending on the specific app and its relevance to Christmas, it’s a good idea to launch a campaign around the 22-23 of December.

- Interactive Notifications: December 25 - 31, the week of Christmas.

- YouTube: Early December.

- Content Marketing: This task is the most time consuming since you must approach various bloggers. It is important to remember that these individuals have their own publication schedule and many of them may have other individuals contacting them for publication material. So the sooner you contact these bloggers, the more likely you are to have an article published.  

So, the clock is ticking, it’s time to work on this holiday season’s app ad campaign!