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Top mobile app marketing tools to streamline your campaign

Digital marketing and analytics both involve intensive use of tools. Any serious digital marketer would have at least heard of popular tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Buffer, Buzzsumo, and so on. All these tools help marketers traverse the varying terrains of online marketing.

The rise of mobile apps is slowly turning the spotlight on app marketing. There are a number of different practices, strategies, and tactics that marketers follow in mobile app marketing. Each contributes in some way to promote an app and raise awareness in the right channels.

Powerful app marketing tools can help streamline the vagaries of a typical marketing campaign. Every tool contributes its own set of features which help enhance the dimensionality of a marketing push.

Mobile app builders effectively simplify app creation. Tools like AppMySite even enable users to create WooCommerce app for Android and iOS. The next frontier is app marketing and tools are a big part of the puzzle.

The following sections will discuss some of the best mobile app marketing tools you can use to improve the general working of your campaign.

In this blog

  1. Buffer
  2. Apptentive
  3. Branch.io
  4. Google Firebase
  5. App Annie
  6. Canva
  7. Localytics
  8. Optimizely
  9. Airship
  10. Apptopia
  11. TheTool.io
  12. Frequently asked questions

#1 – Buffer

Buffer is most popular for its role in helping businesses and users in general schedule their social media posts. It is no longer possible for companies to only maintain their presence on a single platform alone. Most businesses these days have official accounts on all major social platforms.

How does Buffer help?

Managing social media posting across multiple platforms can be tedious. Buffer simply streamlines the process by enabling single dashboard post publication on multiple platforms.

Presence of social analytics and post scheduling features are also some of the key tenets of the Buffer platform. Social media is an indispensable part of any mobile app marketing campaign. This makes Buffer a crucial marketing tool needed for the functioning of any given social media campaign to promote an app.

Here are some of the features Buffer offers –

  • Post scheduling – Schedule social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
  • Social analytics – Study engagement data from each social media post with straightforward metrics
  • Buffer Business – Separate tools for businesses looking to gain actionable insights from their social media efforts.

#2 – Apptentive

Customer relations are an important part of mobile app marketing. A lot of customer acquisition and retention strategies boil down to a better understanding of the target audience and user.

The main problem with most engagement strategies is a lack of accuracy. Campaigns are either too distant or too pushy during a campaign. This existence on the two extremes of user and audience engagement is not ideal.

Apptentive is essentially a customer feedback engagement platform. It enables users to react to user behaviour and feedback by providing excellent and accurate insights. Such a tool naturally helps a lot during marketing campaigns when professionals seek to specifically tailor CTAs and creatives according to the target audience.

Some of its features include –

  • Sentiment analysis – Track changes in user sentiment over a period of time to predict app churn. Engage users close to abandonment back to regulate app churn.
  • Customer acquisition – Identify key market segments where new and high value users can be acquired at a higher conversion rate
  • Reputation management – Make happy app users leave positive ratings and reviews. Study the factors leading to good or bad NPS scores.

Every mobile app marketing campaign needs a certain level of intelligent data to enhance overall effectiveness. Apptentive helps greatly in this regard.

#3 – Branch.io

Branch.io is most popular for helping users create deep links within their apps. These links can then be used to directly market specific app content to users and even attract new ones.

Deep links simply refer to URLs which direct to a specific section of a mobile app. Let’s assume your app company is about to develop a pharmacy app in the market. You’re about to launch a new sales campaign and want your regular engagers to participate in the sales campaign.

To find the products on sale, your app users will have to open the app and find the specific area of the app where the products for sale are.

Branch.io essentially helps you create app URLs which will direct users directly to a specific app screen. Deep links can also work for non-app users. When new users who don’t have the app click on a deep link, they’re directed to the app store listing page.

After downloading the app and completing user onboarding, they’re directed to the screen the original deep link was pointing too. Deep links thus are a great way of shoring up both user retention and acquisition. Branch.io thus uses deep linking to improve the all-round performance of any given mobile app marketing campaign.

Some of the features Branch.io provides are –

  • Attribution – Identify which channel delivers most app users and engagement with top notch attribution models.
  • Deep linking – Create powerful deep links and direct users and prospective audiences on every marketing channel to app content.
  • Cross-platform experiences – Customize app onboarding across different channels and devices with ease and provide the ultimate user experience.

Practices like deep linking are very important for your future mobile app marketing campaigns. Start with Branch.io and instantly enhance your overall app promotions.

#4 – Google Firebase

Firebase is amongst the most popular mobile app analytics tools around. It is generally not seen as a marketing platform per se. It nevertheless helps marketers get real insights on the performance of their Android app on the Google Play Store.

Besides Android apps, Firebase also supports iOS apps. Users can thus even add a seperate iOS project to their Firebase account.

The direct benefit of using Firebase for marketing is getting basic data like app downloads, session duration, user retention, app churn, and so on. There is no better place to get accurate information for these metrics than Firebase.

Some of the main features of Firebase include –

  • User segmentation – Analyze users based on their respective cohorts to look at user behaviour in the right context.
  • A/B testing tools – Study which changes in a mobile app work well with the end users. You can extrapolate these changes to the marketing campaigns as well.
  • User funnels – Create user funnels to direct incoming users towards a specific action. You can measure the impact of a marketing measure with these funnels.

#5 – App Annie

App Annie is one of the best known mobile app analytic tools around. It provides a whole host of app insights that massively help during a typical app marketing campaign.

Major platforms like Pinterest and LinkedIn for studying metrics like user engagement. The former even banks on App Annie to grow overall brand awareness. The main advantage of using App Annie is the value of its insights and the irrefutable place they’re coming from.

App Annie uses data from over eight million mobile apps to deliver strategic insights on user acquisition, retention, customer journey, new market segments and so on. Some of its main features include-

  • Single-window tracking – Track important data such as downloads, session duration, retention, churn, and more on one single dashboard.
  • Advertising insights – Learn market segments best placed for conversions with app install ad campaigns.
  • Competitor research – Make note of your immediate competitors and their market share.

#6 – Canva

Canva is not seen widely as a mobile app marketing tool. However, its sheer ubiquity in helping professionals create quick designs make it indispensable for app marketing as well.

A typical app marketing campaign is run across various channels such as app stores, social media, email, and so on. Each of these mediums requires creatives from time to time.

Canva is a great tool in this regard. Users can create graphics in quick time and leverage the vast library of free images and graphics on the platform. It furthermore provides a number of premade templates for common graphics such as Facebook and Instagram posts, email templates, infographics, and so on.

Some of the features available on Canva are-

  • Premade templates – Select from a wide variety of premade templates and create high-quality creatives for your marketing campaigns.
  • Vast image library – Access quality images and designs to create powerful creatives for your app marketing campaign.
  • Invite users – Invite team members and collaborate on various creatives.

Canva doesn’t really involve a steep learning curve. Even novices in design can use Canva to create premium marketing creatives.

#7 – Localytics

The main reason to count Localytics amongst the best mobile app marketing tools is its ability to create and send push notifications.

Push notifications are very important from a marketing perspective. It is a direct channel to target existing app users and maintain a healthy level of user retention. Localytics is thus an important tool and comes in handy during an app marketing push.

Localytics is not known as a great tool for product developers. It is however extremely useful for app marketers and analysts looking to generate more engagement for their marketing campaign.

Here are some of the important features Localytics offers –

  • Push notifications – Create and send push notifications to engage app users and maintain user retention.
  • User segmentation – Segment app users based on their reaction to notifications.
  • Event tracking – Track major in-app events to map user journey with greater accuracy and achieve better user segmentation.

#8 – Optimizely

Optimizely is basically an experimentation platform. Any time marketers set up a campaign, they create a bunch of captions, CTAs, and creatives to attract the target audience.

Predicting the ability of any set of creatives and CTAs to perform in a marketing campaign is difficult. This is where Optimizely helps.

Optimizely helps marketers gauge the power of their marketing content and app features with testing features such as multivariate analysis, A/B testing, feature activation toggles, and more. It is the go-to tool for any marketing team about to deploy a marketing blitz.

Insights from Optimizely can help shed light on the marketing content created. Running an efficient campaign is a challenge and Optimizely is a great solution. It helps users verify the inherent quality of every part of a campaign through intense experimentation.

Some of the important benefits of using Optimizely are –

  • Test copy strength – Test the quality of varying marketing copies and make sure you use the right one in a campaign.
  • Optimize ROI – Better copy directly translates to higher conversion rates and an overall increase in ROI.
  • Get real marketing insight – Access state-of-the-art experimentation features and get real marketing insights.

Optimizely is a must for any company about to launch a major marketing campaign. It can help ensure the campaign budget is spent wisely on validated marketing content.

#9 – Airship

Airship is ideal for companies without a large marketing department and looking for a one-stop app marketing solution.

A lot of large companies don’t have a big marketing team. It is difficult for them to theorize app marketing strategies and maintain a grip over various analytics platforms. Airship brings all the necessary marketing gear together on one platform.

Some of the essential features of Airship include –

  • Multiple tools – Get a whole host of app marketing tools. This eliminates the need for companies to buy up subscription plans for multiple tools and platforms.
  • Ready-made strategies – Refer various actionable strategies that provide solutions to app marketing tenets like acquisition, retention, and churn.
  • Intelligence tool – Track the most potent cohorts most likely to be converted in a marketing push.

#10 – Apptopia

Apptopia is similar to a number of analytics tools covered previously in this list. It helps users get a better sense of the mobile app market and identify untapped growth opportunities. These fundamentals make it a useful addition to any given marketing campaign.

Some of interesting features Apptopia offers are-

  • Real time alerts – Act upon real time trend alerts and make sure your app remains up to date with the app market.
  • Category analysis – Study the overall movement in every app category and analyze your competitors at a deeper level.
  • Basic essentials – Get essential app downloads and other key metrics on Apptopia and compare your numbers with other competitors.

Apptopia is a great place if you’re using an app analytic tool for the first time. It is a simple and effective platform to familiarize yourself with app analytics and its role in shaping a marketing campaign.

#11 – TheTool.io

The Tool is a popular app store optimization (ASO) tool. It enables mobile apps to enhance their organic visibility on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

Getting app downloads is a perilous task. Making the most convertible prospect go through an entire user journey to download the app is very tedious. Even making an app is easy now with the use of a mobile app creator online. This makes app marketing the main challenge and underlines the need of organic app downloads from the app stores.

TheTool is a great tool to empower your ASO push. Here are some of its important features-

  • Keyword analysis – Identify the best possible keywords you can start ranking for quickly and get a real app downloads push.
  • Sentiment analysis – Use sentiment analysis tools to check the real feedback you get on your app store listing.
  • Worldwide tracking – Track your app store rankings in different locations to effectively target international audiences.

In conclusion

Tools are meant to make a difficult task easy. While some tools we covered here do simplify app marketing, others are designed to make it more powerful and productive.

A marketing tool is not alone enough to make an entire campaign a success. However, when used with the right resources, an app marketing tool can pave the way for unfettered growth and increase efficiency.

Greater efficiency comes from a simplification of complex tasks. The main function of any tool is to simplify an existing laborious task.

This piece covers some of the most prominent mobile app marketing tools around. App builders like AppMySite have made app creation a small matter of minutes. Anyone can get a WordPress app for Android and iOS ready to submit to the prominent app stores.

The next great challenge is app marketing. Readers should begin by trying their hand at the tools mentioned here and improving their overall marketing push.

Frequently asked questions

Have questions about choosing the right marketing tools for your mobile app? Here are some commonly asked questions about mobile app marketing tools. 

What are mobile marketing tools and platforms?

Mobile app marketing tools enable you to improve how you run your promotion campaigns. These tools vary in terms of functionality and scope. For e.g., some marketing tools provide insights on ASO, while others are analytical. By definition, these tools help run and manage app marketing campaigns. Even Canva, for example, is an app marketing tool as it enables you to create creatives to promote your app.

Which platform is best for app promotion?

There are many platforms where you can promote your mobile app. From social media to YouTube, you can promote your app on any platform where your audience is most likely to find you. There’s no way to suggest which platform is the best, as each app has its own unique audience. Every app marketing team has to research different platforms and find the one that suits their audience best. 

For example, Facebook ads is typically ideal for B2C apps trying to sell products directly to consumers. However, B2B apps may choose LinkedIn ads as a way to enhance their visibility.

What is the best way to promote a mobile app?

It’s not possible to define a ‘best’ way to promote a mobile app. Successful apps use various techniques for marketing. Some techniques that work for promoting one app might not work for another. The best way to promote a mobile app is to find the right technique and platform to market your app. Once you understand your audience and how to reach them, you will find the best way to promote your app and get downloads.

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