Picking up new app installs can be difficult, so it’s safe to say that sometimes it can be even harder to first target the right audience and pick up valuable installs from that. Truthfully though, if you aren’t attempting to target the right audience then you’ll struggle to break even with your app marketing campaign. It is very important that you find value in your app users and the first step to reaching that is by the tricks of the trade when it comes to targeting your audience.
We’ll be helping you to brainstorm your targeting campaign, so grab a large piece of paper or hop on the computer and get prepared to create your own plans for targeting your own app audience.
Step One – Understanding Your Audience
Before you can start to target your audience, you must understand everything you can about it. There are a number of questions you can ask yourself to help find the right answers for this, and as you’d expect, your audience will have a wide range of different behaviors to the audience of another application. Here are a few questions that you could ask yourself.
- What category does your app fall under?
- What service, feature or functionality does your application provide?
- Why should users use your application?
- When do users use your application?
Hopefully, if you understand your application well enough, which you should do if you’re creating it, then you’ll be able to answer the questions above. Once you’ve pinpointed exactly who your audience is and what they could be looking for you should fill the center of your page or paper with these traits. Include the things you know about your audience use the answers to the questions above as inspiration.
Step Two – Choosing The Right Location
So now that you’ve got a decent idea about what your audience is all about, you can start branching off and looking at different locations to target audiences. Each time you think of a new location to target your marketing you can draw a line branching out from the center of your page/paper.
We’re going to be suggesting a few areas where you can start marketing but remember that you can find your own areas too, just ensure that they fit in line with your audience’s traits.
The first two biggest places to begin a targeting campaign are Facebook and Twitter. If you’re asking why you should take a step to realize exactly why both of these platforms are so powerful.
- Huge global scale with millions of users
- Great ad tools with site-wide analytics
- Targeting is easy; users share their usage patterns, interests and social activity on these platforms
- App-install ads available
Both Twitter and Facebook are great places to start – you can create campaigns that target very specific users, especially in the case of Facebook, and adverts will be shown to your targeted audiences. You’re given a lot of control over what you show and when and also how much you’d like to spend. One of the best options is to use app-install ads – with these you’ll only be paying out for every confirmed app install.
You should dedicate a branch of your brainstorm sheet to Twitter and one branch to Facebook. Take a delve into the marketing tools on both of these websites to get a better understanding of how they work. Once you have you can start to plan out different campaigns for these platforms.
Remember that whilst Facebook and Twitter are gold mines for app marketing, there are other platforms as well. Plenty of mobile ad platforms have potential. Take InMobi’s Appographic Targeting platform for example – with this you can target users based upon their own app interests. Data on InMobi’s new platform is based upon a user’s app download history, so you’ll be able to target app users that are likely to download apps similar to yours.
Step Three – Choosing The Right Time
Once you’ve considered the different platforms you can use to target the right audience, you should now consider when to push the big red button. It is incredibly important that you don’t start your campaign as soon as you have it prepared because there’s still one large step that needs to be worked on.
The final step is finding out exactly when to launch your targeting campaigns. Different platforms will give you varying degrees of control over when your content can be shown, whether it’s by a certain day or even by the hour. You should revert back to the first step to figuring out exactly when your audience may be active. Are they going to be downloading apps on the weekend? How about during the workweek? Perhaps your audience is based upon seasonal occurrences – if it is, what time of the year would be best to launch your campaigns?
Once you have worked out exactly the best times to launch your campaigns, you are ready to get started. Always refer to your original brainstorming when you consider launching a new targeting campaign and update it with any more information as you learn more about the specific market or niche you’re working in.
