Social Media Marketing For Mobile Apps

Marketing your app on social media has become one of the most vital components of successful app marketing. According to Statista, approximately 4.26 billion people worldwide were active on social media in 2021, with that number expected to hit almost six billion by 2027.  

With the average user spending around 144 minutes (2 hours and 25 minutes) on various social media platforms every day, marketing your app on social media has become a viable means of building brand awareness, improving user acquisition and driving customer retention and loyalty. 

Social media has become a key component of an effective marketing strategy and if you aren’t leveraging it to market your app, you’re leaving revenue untouched.

Why is it vital to have a social media marketing strategy?

What makes social media such a lucrative platform for marketing is its ability to effortlessly reach consumers irrespective of their location. With multiple platforms, each with millions of daily active users, social media offers endless opportunities for app owners and founders to market their apps to a wider, more diverse audience compared to traditional marketing channels.

But social media doesn’t only offer a more extensive reach, it also possesses a unique key differentiator that increases its value as a marketing platform: it offers user influence. Unlike older marketing channels like print and tv, which are rigidly controlled by businesses and marketers, information on social media is primarily driven by consumers through engagement, communication and sharing. 

Research has shown that consumers, especially younger millennials and Gen Z consumers, place greater trust in other customers’ ratings and reviews when doing brand research and making purchase decisions.  As an app owner, you can harness user influence to build trust and authority in your app in ways you wouldn’t be able to on static channels. 

How to build an effective marketing strategy on social media

Before you can begin marketing your app across social media channels, it’s important to plan and develop your social media marketing strategy to ensure it generates the results you’re looking for.

Establish your goals

The first step in building an effective marketing strategy for social media is setting performance goals or KPIs. What are you looking to achieve? Do you want to build brand awareness, generate leads, expand your audience, build trust and loyalty or boost your download rate? Getting these goals down will help you determine where you should be marketing and how. You also need to decide what figures you’re looking to hit for each goal and how you’ll track and measure them. 

Define your audience

You need to know to whom you’re marketing, namely, you need to know who your target audience is. This will tie in directly with the goals you’ve set. 

Reinforcing trust and brand loyalty means you’ll be speaking to users who already use your mobile app and lead generation will require you to reach people who may have never heard of it before. 

If you’re not sure who your audience is, having established buyer personas can help you to identify who you need to target and what your purpose is for marketing to them. 

Decide what you want to share and where to share it

As a general rule, users on social media don’t respond well to heavy product or service pushes and blatant business marketing, choosing to engage with content that’s entertaining and adds value to them - not just your business.

This doesn’t mean you can’t market your app, but that you should be strategic in how you do it. You’ll need to build a content strategy that strikes a balance between sharing entertaining, useful and informative content with your audience. 

The type of content you share will also relate to what platforms you decide to market on, Facebook, for instance, will require a very tone and style of content to a more visual platform like Instagram or Tik Tok. 

With your KPIs, intended audience and content strategy in place, you can begin building your online presence across various social media channels.

Best practices for social media marketing

Be consistent when posting

Maintaining a presence on social media is more than publishing a page and occasionally updating it. Consistency is key when it comes to staying relevant, so you’ll need to regularly update and share new content with your audience. 

Having a calendar and content schedule in place can ensure your brand is regularly appearing in front of followers and users and it’s ideal to know when your followers are most active to time your posts, so they’ll get the highest number of views possible.

Combine organic and paid advertising

To get the most out of your marketing efforts, don’t rely on either organic or paid advertising. Instead, utilise both to maximise your app’s reach. You can do this by publishing relevant and shareable content powered by hashtags, and harnessing paid advertising to position your app in front of an entirely new audience for lead and conversion generation.

Leverage user-generated content

User reviews, pictures and posts can help to spread awareness, generate interest and build trust in your app. Reposting and resharing user content also allows you to directly engage with your users and shows that you’re actively following what they say on social media and that you’re taking their feedback into account. 

Let data inform your strategy

All the actions you take when it comes to social media marketing should be informed and guided by data. Continuously measure the performance of your posts and campaigns using social media analytics and reporting. 

Leverage A/B testing and other ways to identify what posts your audience wants to see more of and what they don’t - then tailor your content strategy accordingly. Remember that your audience will change over time, so keep your marketing efforts up-to-date and reflective of your current users. 

Ready to get started with social media marketing?

Marketing on social media channels requires ongoing time, effort, planning, review and insight. At Appic, we excel in creating effective, results-driven social media marketing strategies for high-potential apps that generate the growth you want to see. To find out more about how we can help you build an online presence on social media, contact us.