The Mobile Marketing Errors Your Rivals Make That You Should Avoid

Time flies so fast. Trends come and go and new technologies come. Doubtless, some become a norm, while some finally become obsolete. However, mobile app development is still around. Not to mention, it’s there with all its power and grace. With time, it has become all the more distinguished.

We’re in 2020 and as usual, the same as every year, we would be seeing some trends going up in the field and leaving considerable footmarks successfully in the tech industry. In the ferocious competitive mobile marketing landscape today, the smallest slip could cost money, time, and ranking. It’s not a question of who has better assets anymore or who purchases more media but, who would make the first error and who would profit from it.

This article takes you through some of the perils that other marketers are inclined to fall into, giving you a chance to forge ahead of the competition.

Avoid Mobile Marketing Errors Your Competitors are making

1. All Asset Optimization without Paid Traffic: Media asset optimization or ASO is vital, but gets you so far only without paid traffic. Simply, in order to drive organic traffic, you have to make an investment in app asset optimization. As soon as you have wonderful graphics and converting and get texts optimized, organic traffic would begin to flow and naturally, the ranking would soar. However, your competitors are exactly doing just that.

In the ranking, the two differentiating factors are traffic and downloads. An app that runs a paid media campaign could purchase traffic and boost downloads. However, the app that is stuck to ASO alone could easily fall behind. It’s obvious that while targeting the right visitors, converting them into downloads is vital, but downloads are equally important to stay on the competitive edge.

To make the most of your ASO strategy and rank high, the best thing is to ascertain that your optimized assets are backed by paid traffic and the other way around.

2. Failing to do an experiment of App Assets: Owners of apps are enabled by Google to experiment with their store listing pages since 2015. Meaning, you could run several app listing versions, such as texts and graphics simultaneously to test which performs best in a live scenario. The valuable insights and data alone are enough reason to do these experiments regularly.

It’s believed that experiments are indexed, including short descriptions, app names, and practically just about every GP asset, graphic, and text. With everything to gain and nothing to lose when it comes to insight, data, and traffic, failure to regularly do these experiments is simply leaving money on the table.

3. Targeting Immaterial OS and Devices: One of the more costly errors in mobile app development, for instance, is to push an Android app down the throat of iPhone users and vice versa. Failing to eliminate OS and devices not compatible with the application you try to promote is a common pitfall, which even professionals fall into. 

You get to save valuable campaign money while the competition is sending traffic to insignificant users, which is a waste. Avoid the peril by getting rid of certain devices from your app campaign. Moreover, it’s a well-known fact that users of iOS and Android vary a great deal in spending power and consumer behavior as well. It’s simply a waste of traffic, targeting both devices with the same assets.

4. Deficient media purchase: A lot of mobile advertisers would say with certainty that the more targeted the campaign, the higher the conversion rate, and the faster you’d be hitting KPIs. There is a common misconception about this statement that it’s best to launch a deficient or narrow campaign and, when you get your target audience down, you scale-up. Actually, it’s the opposite.

It would be much better to start wide and then narrow down as campaign platforms like Facebook or Google have capabilities for Machine Learning. Meaning, they study the audience and optimize campaigns automatically for conversions that max. Our friends at Rocketium Creative Automation told us that Google adwords is the most used and reliable media buying platform where we can get potential audience and they’re using machine learning in their algorithm.  By limiting the audience to particular interest groups or demographics you think would perform best but in fact are impeding the ability of the algorithm to learn, not to mention that you would probably miss audiences you have not considered.

5. A/B Testing, Getting it Right: You probably are using GPE if doing an A/B testing, which is okay, or much better, third-party A/B testing tools such as StoreMaven or SplitMetrics. However way you go about it, some of the common mistakes to avoid are:

A. Skimping on iOS A/B testing. Since iOS doesn't have a built-in A/B testing system such as Google Play Experiments, it doesn’t mean you should not be doing it. Mobile app A/B testing is a critical step to understand the assets that best capture the audience.

B. Premature stopping of Variations. Understandably, there is an urge to get rid of losing A/B tests variants as quickly as possible, particularly when it’s costing money. However, before you rush to conclusions after you see a line graph go up, think whether when you validate your finding that you have ample data. Without adequate evidence, you couldn’t reach the statistical significance desired that every A/B test should produce.

C. Neglecting to test icons. Maybe because it’s the most visible asset, a lot of app owners consider icons as their Holy Grail, the sole asset that must not be altered. The fact that it is so easy to tweak and the high visibility makes icon one of the best A/B testing candidates. The smallest adjustment, playing around with color combinations or switching from sharp edges could lead to a considerable CVR enhancement.

D. Results implementation without follow up. Doing A/B testing is one thing and coming up with a winning version for the audience. It’s another to see similar results in the live store. After you have implemented the winning version, make sure to go back and re-check the live results against the A/B test. You either find the app will perform as expected, or find the winning version is a true world loser, in which you have to do the A/B test again.

Conclusion

Mobile marketers should be on their toes to stay ahead of the competition. The thing to do is to test various strategies often and check results against outcomes in real-time. Moreover, it won’t hurt to keep your ear on the ground. The number of insider tips you could pick by following the right source may surprise you.