What to avoid with your mobile app marketing

Mobile app marketing is no walk in the park. It takes a strong understanding of user interfaces, visual design, analytics and more. So it’s no surprise that a task this demanding could come with a few bumps in the road.

While mistakes are bound to happen, knowing when the common ones appear can give you guidance on how to avoid them. Matteo Gasparello, Director of Marketing with Blue Label Labs, an award-winning mobile app development company, gave us two main mobile app marketing mistakes he sees brands make. 

1. Failure to do adequate preliminary research

A mobile app doesn’t flourish overnight; you have to gather relevant information to set yourself up for success. 

“You might have been the person that could snooze through classes and pull off great grades, but a successful app takes much more than just natural intellect to get by,” Gasparello said. “Both competitive research and gathering feedback about your idea needs to be thorough — you need to be able to understand what kind of things work for your audience before moving forward.”

Important mobile app marketing steps, from a pre-launch perspective, include collecting data, analyzing your app’s performance, testing your initial UA hypotheses about the audience, segmentation and creative assets.

And research is your best friend. The data you collect will inform you of what adjustments need to be made and what users are wanting from an app. Research also shows a dedication to understanding audience needs — a skill that if mishandled, can result in a negative outcome for your brand.  

“People rarely nail their ideas and designs out the gate, and getting it right here is critical, or you risk your product going underused, which typically isn’t sustainable for most budgets, especially right after launching a Minimum Viable Product (MVP),” said Gasparello.

2. The absence of strong analytics

Incorporating quality features into your mobile app is a great way to connect with users, but it’s even more important for you to have measures that show you what does and doesn’t appeal to your audience.

“As you develop your product, app analytics need to be front and center. While you’ll get feedback from users in the app store, this is only part of a much bigger picture,” said Gasparello. “For example, behavioral analytics provides data that shows how a user moves through a product and interacts with different elements.” 

These products can reveal opportunities that you wouldn’t otherwise see, like: 

• How to rearrange the app layout (e.g., make a button bigger or smaller, move a menu item to a more visible location, etc.) 
• Which areas of the app aren’t working as they should (e.g., confusing copy on a screen causes a user to perform an unwanted action or exit the app, a necessary navigation button is missing or hidden, etc.)

You’ll also need to understand how marketing campaigns are performing as a whole, which means using analytic products that can integrate with marketing tools to analyze data on cohorts and specific prospects before they even reach the app.

Product owners with great ideas still need to do their homework, in addition to having great tools, to collect and interpret user actions. Mobile app marketing comes with its fair share of obstacles, but with the right preparation, any mistakes can be used as a source of knowledge.