Building a Full-funnel App Marketing Plan with Programmatic Ads

Almost every business is looking forward to building their own app. Then to drive revenue from it, they need an app marketing plan. Among the endless options (such as offline ads, incentivizing, word of mouth, etc) available for marketing, programmatic ads have stood out for many reasons. First and foremost is the track of efficiency or value for money that it offers. 

Another reason that makes programmatic an indispensable choice for app marketing is its application at every stage of the purchase funnel - whether it is awareness, user acquisition, or retention. When a business launches a new app, it is most likely to focus on the number of installs. It curbs the ability of businesses to foresee the strategy of driving revenue as they ignore the quality of installs. A large chunk of installers may not opt for the paid services. Utility apps are prime examples of this challenge. So, to gain the profit from your app, maintain a consistent focus at quality as well as quantity of conversions at every stage. 

This blog is discussing the right practices to follow at different stages to build an app marketing plan for the entire funnel. A cohesive plan that takes into account every stage is more likely to deliver a smoother conversion and faster results for the business.

At the awareness stage, you should be interested in building a better brand image for your app while suggesting the solutions that it is capable of offering. Programmatic ads go beyond traditional marketing to boost your brand awareness if you are adopting the relevant strategy, which requires the use of apt ad formats - rich media and video.

Rich media is basically the usage of interactive elements in the ads that are capable of multiple clicks and make the ad playable for the user, which is likely to raise the ad engagement and contribute to brand awareness. Similarly, videos are known for being an easier medium of delivering the message. Programmatic ads are capable of leveraging various ad formats, including rich media, video, native, banner, and more. By displaying such ads to the targeted audience, your app gains better visibility and higher branding.

The user acquisition stage in the app marketing is the point at which the user installs the app on their smartphone. While looking at ways of increasing the number of installs, it is of critical importance that you are getting high-value users to your app, which will engage and take desired actions in the app. Programmatic ads can address this concern by targeting users based on a neuro model that takes into account the affluence parameter. Correlating them with other audience insights and demographics, such as - age, product preferences, etc. of the target audience, your ads reach the right audience and you drive more relevant installs.

The audience points out that deliver quality installs can be used to build a lookalike audience so that you can target similar users. It escalates the number of installs - which means while the quality is optimum, the quantity is not compromised.

Conversion

Converting a user into the paying customer is one of the most daunting tasks. However, the life of marketers gets easier with programmatic ads at their help. You can utilize them to run retargeting ads as per the offerings of your app and the requirements of users.

Offerings of an ecommerce app will not match with the offerings of a gaming app even if they are targeting the same user. Now a lot of small corrections, such as the timing of the ads, ad format, and where the ad is placed can drive conversion for both of them. Programmatic ads driven by audience intelligence can tick all the boxes and accordingly pitch the right messaging.

Acquiring a new user is always more expensive than upselling to the existing one. With your retention strategy, you can bring down a number of expenses in advertising, such as cost of user acquisition, cost of customer acquisition, and even return on ad spend. Programmatic ads at the retention stage can be more precise and effective because there are more user data points available for an existing user.

Their preferences with products, ad engagement timings, etc. can be better leveraged to deliver more appropriate results. Building a lookalike audience from this stage to target for user acquisition is another added advantage. Since you have already gathered a number of user preferences and journey metrics, your programmatic algorithms can build similar that can boost conversions faster.