Resources to Help You Make Mid Year App Marketing Adjustments

Can you believe it, we’re almost at the halfway point of 2015! And for me, that means taking a quick peak at business operations to see if there are any tweaks/adjustments we need to make in response to the overall business environment we operate in.

One of the things that I noticed from an editorial standpoint is that since the beginning of the year, we’ve tended to gradually focus coverage on several specific areas while other areas have seen less coverage. It wasn’t an intentional move, much of it was based on emerging trends and activity – such as with IoT development, which continues to dominate as a news category. So, now that I know this is happening, we’ll dig a little deeper and refocus our efforts on some of the topics we haven’t stayed on top of well as we should have.

For app publishers, I believe one of the must-do mid year evaluations is to take a look at app marketing. You should ask yourself questions such as: 

- Are you staying on course with you current app marketing plan? 

- Has anything changed externally within the market that indicates you need to make adjustments? 

- What is your competition doing concerning marketing?

For example, if you have an iOS app, are you using all of the resources at your disposal?  Such as updating your app’s preview video or using app bundles (which let you sell up to 10 paid apps together at a reduced price).  

Or, if you have a Windows app, you may not be aware that a whole bunch of new stuff is happening right now, including the launch of a new developer dashboard in June with additional marketing functionality. Or, perhaps the opportunity is now ripe for your app to be localized for markets you don’t currently serve.

To help get you in the right mindset for midyear analysis, I thought I would point to a number of resources Localytics has made available to help you evaluate your app marketing - including topics such as ASO, analytics and more. Offered on their site is an extensive collection of e-books, online quizzes, how-to guides, cheat sheets, and more. 

All are free for you to peruse at your leisure and you can pick and choose what resources you’d like to access. The vast majority are designed to be read and digested in under 10 minutes, no 300 page academic treatises here, just quick hitting insight you can incorporate into your marketing operations right now. Here is a partial list of the resources available (the full collection is available here):

To help understand what trends are affecting this year’s mobile marketing landscape, Localytics has published the latest version of its Integrated App Marketing Guide, which offers a comprehensive overview of the major app acquisition, app retention and app engagement trends.

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but App marketing automation is not automated marketing for your app. Instead, it is a process that helps you to scale your efforts providing the ability to run customized campaigns to your users. To help app publishers utilize marketing automation to its fullest, Localytics has published “The App Marketing Automation Kit,” which provides three free publications: (1) free mini-guide; (2) list of use cases; and (3) RFP for choosing an automation tool. These resources were created to help publishers find the correct platform for their purposes, learn the ins and outs on how to start running campaigns, and gain the knowledge to tackle marketing automation.

To help showcase real world app marketing success, Localytics has published an ebook focusing on 16 companies, examining in detail each specific strategy that these companies used to market their apps. As the guide dives into each company, it provides specific actionable takeaways and tips you can use to market your app. Each approach is different, yet they all have one thing in common – success.

To help you test your acumen to see if you can identify the mobile equivalents of web metrics, Localytics is hosting a quiz on their website which, in their words, will help you: “Find out if you’ve got the data analysis, dissection and demystification chops to accurately access your app – in new mobile terms, not old web ones.”

To help go beyond the mobile analytics basics, Localytics has created an advanced, comprehensive guide on how you can leverage your app analytics and apply the available insights in your app marketing efforts. The e-book is titled “The Advanced Guide to App Analytics & Marketing” and it provides the answers to the questions you should be asking about your data.

Are you really doing all you can for App Store Optimization? Access this cheat sheet to get: 

- The do's and don'ts of optimizing your listing

- Quick tips to make sure you're following best practices

- A cheat sheet you can print and refer to whenever you'd like

This is another free resource from Localytics that you can use to grade your App Store Optimization. Enter the name of your app, click the button and you can access your app's overall rating broken down into eight key categories including name, reviews, reach, and more. There are no limit to the number of apps you can test.

In addition to these resources, each week the Localytics’ blog offers a number of insights for best practices, tips and more.