Marketing experts specializing in business-to-business commerce have been tracking the gradual digital evolution of leaders and B2B buyers for close to a decade. The trend became a hot topic when a study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) revealed that 80% of B2B buyers were using mobile devices to make purchases. [1] Since that report, the demand for business-focused mobile apps has grown and globally is anticipated to reach a value of $8.7 trillion by 2026. [2]
As with any new product or service, building a mobile app to support your B2B business is a complex, multifaceted process, and you’re not guaranteed to succeed—only 13% of B2B mobile apps are successful after launch. [3] However, you can improve the chances of success by ensuring your new mobile app is supported by a comprehensive marketing plan.
To help your team understand what it takes to fully support your new mobile app from a marketing standpoint, UpCity has taken the time to break down mobile app marketing for you, including how to market an app, how to build a marketing plan and the stages involved, why you need an app marketing plan, and how to measure app success.
What is app marketing?
A B2B mobile app marketing strategy ensures that your team has optimized your marketing efforts to reach the ideal target audience who will benefit from your mobile app the most. In the B2B space, the ideal audience will often be buyers who are looking for digital experiences that provide convenient access to services. Successful mobile app marketing plans will position and promote your app for maximum visibility with a focus on driving user installations and increasing engagement and retention over time.
Why do you need an app marketing strategy?
Data reported in 2023 by Zippia revealed that 42% of small businesses have already deployed a mobile app to support their business or planned to. [4] Mobile apps have become a product and service, and like any other offering from your company, needs to be supported in your annual marketing plan. However, the traditional marketing gaps between B2B and B2C are closing, as buyers in the B2B space are increasingly shifting their consumer behavior into the workplace.
With B2B buyers behaving like traditional consumers, your brand will benefit greatly from having a well-crafted app marketing strategy that focuses on growing the user base by highlighting the elements consumers will be most drawn to.
Marketing efforts focused on increasing downloads grows your target audience
One of the primary goals of your app marketing strategy will be to increase the number of downloads of your product. Because of the research your team has performed in crafting your marketing strategy, you’ll be targeting users most likely to download and use your app, ensuring you’re growing a healthy and responsive customer base.
The Starbucks loyalty program is a perfect example of how an effective marketing campaign can drive growth in the customer base. Since launching the app, membership through the digital platform has seen 15% growth year-on-year, with recent figures showing 31 million active users generating nearly 41% of the company’s sales in the United States. [5]
Marketing strategies built to increase mobile app engagement reduce costs in more expensive marketing channels
While it might be a costly undertaking to build and design a mobile app for your business, your development costs can quickly be recouped in the savings you’ll realize in leveraging push notifications and in-app messaging to directly reach users. Because users have already opted in to receiving marketing messaging through the app and are more likely to make a purchase as users, marketing teams can shift attention and budget to focus on paid and organic marketing efforts structured to grow the base audience.
Marketing your mobile app’s ability to provide a high quality experience drives customer loyalty
With more than half of consumers pointing to the service experience specifically as a loyalty driver, businesses have started highlighting their use of AI-driven chatbots and other automation tools in the mobile app infrastructure to enhance their product’s ability to meet the personalized service needs of their users. [6] Combining the ability to provide a high quality service experience with boosted personalized engagement allows mobile apps to increase loyalty.
Improving customer loyalty encourages repeat business and boosts your bottom line
Updated in 2023, a Yotpo survey revealed that 37% of customers don’t consider themselves loyal to a brand until they’ve made their fifth purchase. [7] Mobile apps provide a direct marketing channel to be able to reach your customer base, improving the chances over time that they’ll continue to make purchases with your brand.
This is perhaps best illustrated by the success of Amazon’s mobile app. Marketed as providing highly personalized recommendations, the app is touted as being the source of a 30% increase in Amazon’s sales following its launch. [8]
What are the main stages of mobile app marketing?
A comprehensive mobile app marketing strategy will support the adoption and growth in the user base of your app from pre-launch through post-launch, and engage customers at every level of the inbound funnel.
Pre-launch: Building product awareness
Strategic marketing planning and the product scope and project planning process overlap in the stages prior to the app’s launch. During this period, your team is identifying the ideal customer for the product, what problem it will solve, and how solving that problem will in turn support your brand.
Market research should not be rushed, as it takes time to identify the ideal customer and build a well-defined product to meet their needs. Once you’ve defined your audience and determined how to best meet their needs, your team can move on to establishing the digital real estate that will act as the foundation for your team to deploy your app-focused marketing campaigns.
Acquisition stage: Building your customer base
Once your mobile app is ready to launch, your goal should be to focus all of your marketing efforts on attracting users who match your ideal personas and maximize app downloads. You should establish systems for tracking the channels by which customers have discovered your mobile app, so that you can take an iterative approach in making improvements to your marketing efforts.
Post-launch: Retention stage
Your app won’t survive if you’re not focused on retaining the customers you spent valuable time acquiring. You also don’t want your customer base to remain static. In the post-launch phase, your marketing efforts should be focused on both growing your customer base and keeping your existing customer base engaged and active on your app.
How do you build a marketing plan for your mobile app?
Across these three stages of marketing your mobile app, there are a series of actionable marketing steps your team should be prioritizing in order to ensure your mobile apps success.
Define your audience and build stronger relationships
Defining user personas in the early stages of product development will help set the foundation for the life of your product. Because you’re dealing with a digital product, you want to ensure not only are you researching potential customer’s pain points, but you’re also researching which brands of technology they use, on which social platforms they are active, and what advertising channels they tend to engage with most.
Ensuring your product is aligned with consumer expectations in the early stages allows your marketing team to remain on-brand when crafting marketing campaigns intended to convey the value your app will provide. By remaining focussed on the value and relevancy of your app pre-launch, your team can develop more grounded and meaningful relationships with customers who will become early adopters.
Know your competition and highlight your value proposition in your marketing
You can’t effectively market your digital product if you don’t know what other apps and businesses are operating in the same niche. It’s important to understand what products are your direct competition, what strategies they’re adhering to for marketing, and any visible customer insight that might give your team an idea of what your competitors are doing well and what flaws in their product your team might be able to capitalize on in your own design. This will help your team communicate the value proposition of your app in your marketing efforts.
Create a web presence and claim your digital real estate across social media platforms
While it serves as a powerful sales and engagement tool, your mobile app is only one of the many channels your customer base should be using to engage with your brand. As with any brand operating in the modern economy, your app should be supported by a webpage if it’s the only product or service you offer, or a landing page on your company website if you have multiple products and services in play.
Similarly, you can’t afford not to be active across social media channels. Social platforms can be leveraged to engage your target audience more effectively and provide a way for new customers to discover your mobile app.
Incorporate your mobile app marketing into overall content marketing strategy
In order to build and maintain awareness of your app over time and spread a wide enough net to capture users that match your defined ideal user, you’ll need to create content across multiple channels in a variety of formats. Take the opportunity to lean into video so you can highlight app functionality, but the type of content you deploy will largely be determined by where your customers are most active.
Fold in paid marketing to support your organic efforts
Once your mobile app has been launched, you’ll want to support it with paid marketing ads across digital channels and social platforms, ideally focused on the channels used by your audience most often.
Be intentional with your app store optimization efforts
An ongoing, iterative process, app store optimization requires your app development team to track downloads of your app from the app stores and the various factors that might impact its popularity. Similar to focusing on search engine optimization in a website, your app store listings should be optimized with the appropriate keywords to appear in the proper category and visually presented with screenshots and icons that will catch the eye of your target audience.
Leverage user-generated data to improve the app over time
In the post-launch phase, the user experience becomes paramount. At this stage, it’s important to use in-app messaging and push notifications to communicate with your user base and provide them with timely, valuable information about your products and services. The data gathered from their interactions with these communications can inform your development team on how best to improve and optimize the user interface for maximum ease of use.
How do you measure app success and ROI?
The overall profitability of your mobile app is measured by the return on investment you garner from the sales it generates versus how much it initially cost to develop combined with the ongoing costs for upkeep. App ROI is one of the clearest indicators as to whether an app is an overall success. However, ROI isn’t the only indicator that you’ve built and launched a successful mobile application to support your brand.
What’s your cost per install?
Your marketing campaigns should be designed so that you can track when and how a customer finds your mobile app and downloads it. Dividing the costs of the marketing campaigns by the number of installations they generate allows your team to calculate your cost per installation (CPI), and indicates the efficiency and effectiveness of your campaigns.
What’s your customer acquisition cost?
Encompassing your CPI, you should also be tracking your customer acquisition cost (CAC), which in this case is the cost of the campaigns that result in in-app sales or subscriptions to your services. The CAC, in conjunction with several other KPIs such as the customer lifetime value (CLV), can provide leadership with an idea of whether or not your profitability is inline with the effort it takes to generate it.
Do your customers remain engaged and keep the app installed?
Figuring heavily into the app churn and uninstall rates, retention and engagement are considered the flip side of consumer behaviors that your marketing team should be concerned with.
- App churn is the rate at which customers abandon using your app over a given period of time.
- Uninstall rates reflect the number of users who delete the app from their devices during a given period of time.
- App engagement is a measurement of a combination of factors, such as session frequency or duration, actions taken in the app, conversions, and other behaviors performed within the app that might be tracked.
- Retention is the rate at which customers return to the app within a given period.
How valuable are your customers over time?
Your app is a success if it provides sufficient quality and functionality to support the user experience in such a way that they continue to remain active on the app and spending money. Referred to as the customer lifetime value (LTV), this value is one of the most important KPIs, as it shows the true profitability generated by active customers, rather than assuming a user will generate value simply by installing the app.
The LTV is the average value you can expect from a new user, and it can be calculated several different ways.
- One of the most popular is to multiply the average revenue in a specific period a customer will generate by the average churn rate for the same period. Some versions of this formula then add in an average of the additional revenue customers generate with referrals.
- Another version of the formula is to multiply the average monthly revenue per customer by the average customer lifetime in months.
- A more complex formula multiplies the average order value by the number of repeat sales then multiplies that number by the average retention time in months. This formula is focused on customers who have shown a degree of loyalty to the brand.
Get strategic about supporting your digital product with a comprehensive mobile app marketing plan
Chances are you’ve either already invested significant time and resources in building a mobile app to support the growth of your business, or you plan to build one in the near future. Wherever you are in your journey to create a powerful platform that allows you to reach your target audience more effectively, you’ll need to support your product with an extensive marketing campaign to ensure you get a return on your investment.
It can be a daunting task to craft and execute a marketing campaign for your mobile app, especially when to be successful you also need to ensure you’re tracking all of the relevant KPIs in order to make improvements to your digital product and your outreach efforts over time.
As a small business, you may not have the staffing or the expertise to give such a project the full attention it deserves. Partnering with a team of digital marketing experts can help elevate your mobile app marketing efforts to the next level and ensure you’re able to maximize the ROI on your new digital product.
Sources
- Mobile Marketing and the New B2B Buyer, Boston Consulting Group
- B2B Mobile Apps To Build In 2024, TheCodeWork
- What Goes Wrong to Make Mobile Apps Fail?, Frank Zinghini
- 40 Fascinating Mobile App Industry Statistics [2023]: The Success Of Mobile Apps In The U.S., Zippia
- Starbucks Customer Loyalty Statistics and Data (Latest), BusinessDIT
- 51 Incredible Customer Loyalty Statistics (2024), Exploding Topics
- The State of Customer Loyalty in 2018, Yotpo
- How Top Brands Have Increased Their Sales Through Mobile App Development?, Appentus