Most marketers mistakenly understand app marketing

Absrtact: The explosive growth of mobile applications has brought digital marketing to an all-time high, with an app that has become an effective way to reach and woo consumers in the mobile internet age. A Nielsen report shows that app has already taken over the smartphone user

The explosive growth of mobile apps has brought digital marketing to an all-time high, with an app that has become an effective way to reach and woo consumers in the mobile internet age. A Nielsen report shows that apps already occupy 86% of the time that smartphone users use their mobile phones, a huge opportunity that marketers will naturally not miss. At present, 47% of marketing agencies and companies have their own app,65% marketers are planning to develop App,app marketing is being favored by more and more people. Unfortunately, most marketers mistakenly understand app marketing.

Myth: App Marketing core competition is content!

According to a study by Forbes and Adobe, 60% of marketers believe that the key to app marketing is to provide exclusive coverage, exclusive news or exclusive articles that drive customers to download apps. In other words, the exclusive content is distributed through the app channel, and users will have to download the app instead of the traditional online way to continue browsing the content. The exclusive content does attract a lot of people to download apps, and the thrill of the surge in app downloads in a short time is exciting. But this result is based on a false logic, because the key to app marketing is not the so-called "exclusive content."

I believe many people are concerned about the success of Flipboard: In a short period of time, the development of 56 million users, the number of millions of users per week growth. Obviously, unlike the traditional electronic content, Flipboard is a kind of real-time "publishing", automatic generation of content, personalized social media, you can also share the content of aggregated reading with friends.

Flipboard's popularity is bad news for marketers who take the "content app" route, so why do I have to put all kinds of software on my phone, bombarded by advertisements and tweets, if I have such a great aggregation reading tool? So trying to launch app marketing in an exclusive way has proven to be a failure, even for giant companies, where corporate sites are up to 20 million a month, but the company's app is just 100,000 users. You might say it takes time to change and guide users, but the reality is that mobile user habits have been formed and you can't go against the trend.

Here are some of Nielsen's survey data.

Look at the table, where is the exclusive content app closer to which category? Obviously, it belongs to the news information class. Smartphone users typically spend only 2% of their time in news-information applications, a far cry from 11% of practical functional applications.

At the same time, Flurry's research report shows that news-information-type app users are growing at the slowest rate.

You might say that news apps have a higher degree of user loyalty. Yes, that's true, as you can see from the table below, the user-resident half-life of the news-type app is the longest.

If you're looking for user loyalty, it looks like content-class apps are the best choice, even if it's a small number of users and a slow growth rate. But traditional emails are more consumer-accessible in content marketing, as MailChimp's click Statistics (by Industry) show that, for media and publishing companies, even sending 50 emails to the same user has dropped from 6.7% to 6.3%. By analogy, if you insist on sending the same message to the same user every day, and the hit rate continues to drop at the same speed, then your user half-life is still 14 months, much longer than the news-type app, and there is no need to develop a content app.

What's the way out?

Since content apps are not seen by users, slow growth, and user loyalty is lower than traditional email, what kind of app is appropriate? The answer is in Nielsen's report, "Smartphone users spend 86% of their time on apps, not on content." "So we need a functional app, not a reading software."

From the user's growth rate, flurry's data suggests that social-networking users are growing at the fastest rate, but considering that your users are likely to switch to other apps (unless you are Facebook) in three months, this is not a cost-effective investment. Unless you now have a large group of vibrant, active, willing to communicate, share the user base.

Looking at utility apps, this is the best choice. First, their users are growing at a higher rate (ranked second) and, more importantly, utility apps have a high degree of user loyalty. The number of business/Exchange users has a half-life of 6 months, tool class has 5.5 months, and news information Class 7 months difference is not very obvious, user growth rate can make up short board.

The Halifax bank, Britain's largest mortgage lender and Savings Bank, has been a good example of utility apps. To broaden their reach and keep in touch with customers, it has developed an app called the Halifax Home Finder, which uses real-world enhancements to recommend the homes that best suit their buyers and offer loans and mortgages. It also comes with a mortgage calculator, which allows users to calculate the amount of credit they need and the monthly repayment. It could even provide loan data for the houses sold in the same area and help consumers analyze decisions by linking the Halifax Bank's loan-mortgage consultancy center. Recent data indicate that it has downloaded more than 1 million times, and that some 200,000 people know about the app through some media reports, and that the effect is good for branding (even if the app isn't downloaded).

Starbucks has also done well in app marketing, and it is committed to promoting mobile payment tools. The app was online in 2011 and had little effect in the early days, but by 2013 years, with the formation of user habits, the number of app users in the first quarter increased by 1.4 million, less than three months, and 3 million people used the Starbucks payment app to pay for it, At present, 7 million users have been accumulated. The app, which is part of Starbucks ' customer loyalty Enhancement Program, has proven to be a success, creating a new brand communication channel while providing faster, more convenient and more efficient service to customers.

In the development of difficulty and input, utility-type app development is really more difficult than the news information class, but compared to those games, entertainment, social class app is much simpler. You don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about some of the most prominent, creative marketing gimmicks you can find from a customer perspective. Most companies can outsource app development to third-party companies, and then manage operations through tools such as Workzone without much effort. Here are some examples

The Columbia Sportswear Company's "What Knot to did in the outdoors" APP: Tips and suggestions for tying your shoelaces

The "Sit or squat" APP of the toilet paper brand Charmin: A map application that is designed to mark the cleanliness of public toilets.

Car cushion assistant for Phoenix Children's Hospital app: the size of a child's seat according to the size of the children's car

The Joy's Home Helper app: teach you how to deal with the mess at home, and the skills of tidying up and cleaning. These apps, which are all part of utility apps, are worth investing (though free app). With the actual use, users will go to download, will be keen to use these apps, your brand can get more people's favor and recognition.

Translator comments: Micro-bo, micro-letter, QQ space (in particular), a variety of content filled with people's world, sometimes users even at the very near of the micro-letter pushed articles are lazy to read, how can you expect to download a so-called "provide specialized content" of the app? Unless you are a great writer like Han. Therefore, app marketing should return to the essence of marketing-helping people solve problems and build good relationships with users to get paid. No one really cares about your product, people only care about what your products can solve, and for most businesses, utility apps are the best magic weapon in app marketing.