ITP 140
Mobile Technologies
Outbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing
• Inbound marketing
– Advertising through blogs, podcasts, video,
eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, and other forms of content
marketing
– Earns the attention of customers, makes the
company easy to be found and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content – David Meerman Scott recommends that
marketers "earn their way in"
Inbound Marketing Strategies
• Inbound marketing on the web has matured and grown a lot over the past several years • We can learn a lot from our past and apply it
to our future (i.e. we can take what we know and apply it to mobile marketing)
• Three simple inbound marketing strategies
1. Be social
2. Tell your own story
Be Social
• When it comes to mobile, social is just what we do as humans
• This means that social is a perfect venue for
conversations about your mobile app's offerings • Twitter example – Nike mobile app
– Proactively shared their content and the app with likely consumers who were sharing their athletic activities on Twitter
– They received as many downloads from their social “experiment” as they did through their largest paid channel
Tell Your Own Story
• Getting discovered by a large audience of interested customers can be as simple as:
– Selecting the right name
– Investing in a compelling and memorable icon – Experimenting with categories and keywords,
and
– Testing and optimizing your app’s description (social proof in the description itself works
Court Your Audience of Fans
• Have your customers tell great stories about you
• Consumer studies continue to show that
recommendations from the people we know are trusted the most for the average
consumer
Truthful Advertising
• Tell the truth about what your app can do
• Once you start distributing your app, you become an advertiser
– Under the law, an ad is pretty much anything a company tells a
prospective buyer or user – expressly or by implication – about what a product can do
– False or misleading claims, as well as the omission of certain important information, can tick off users and land you in legal hot water
• Look at your product and your advertising from the perspective of average users, not just software engineers or app experts
– If you make objective claims about your app, you need solid proof to back them up before you start selling.
– The law calls that “competent and reliable evidence.”
Marketing Plan
• If you have a website, have a clear call-to-action to download the app
• Use your existing assets like your Twitter account, email list, or Facebook page
• App stores are the primary method of app discovery
– Have a great app title, use appropriate keywords and descriptions, and have screenshots
– Tools for improving your App Store Optimization (ASO)
• MobileDevHQ – http://www.mobiledevhq.com • SearchMan – https://searchman.com
• Appnique – https://www.appnique.com
Marketing Design Services
• Graphic designs for your various mobile marketing needs
– QR Codes
– Homepage banner, Splash page – App flyers,
Mobile Marketing
• Best practices for mobile app marketing
– Relevant channels to use: social media, website, offline, print
– Developing your value proposition – Effective messaging tactics
Get Users to Return to Your App
• Remember that 90% of the people who download your app are gone within 6 months
• Design around a consistent and recurring use case
– This requires that you truly understand what customers want from your mobile app, why they use it, how they use it, and when they use it
– If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you need to invest in research with your customer base, either through
focus groups or within the app using real-time in-app surveys
• Create engagement mechanisms and remind them of your app's presence on their device
– Use exclusive content or benefits for your customers
(discounts, rewards, content packs, etc.) available only through the mobile app
Privacy
• Build privacy considerations in from the start • Be transparent about your data practices
• Offer choices that are easy to find and easy to use
• Honor your privacy promises • Protect kids' privacy
• Collect sensitive information only with consent
Privacy Policies
• Privacy Policies are not all alike
• Recently social app Path was fined $800K from two lethal mistakes made by the app:
– Storing third-party names and numbers from their users’ address books, without proper disclosure – Failing to comply with the provisions of COPPA, a
law that applies to every app that knowingly collects information from children
• FTC Mobile Privacy Disclosures document
– http://www.ftc.gov/os/
