Starting a new app from scratch is no easy feat. You’ve spent money, given your time, studied the market and competition, tested it, and then comes a time to launch it. Then you ask yourself, How do I promote my mobile app?
There’s no formula for that, but with creativity and planning, there are many steps you can take to get your app to perform and bring in users.
In our previous blog post, we’ve covered the different ways you can promote your app organically. Now, I want to show you a few examples of various kinds of ads you can use across your campaigns.
What is mobile app promotion?
Before we jump into the examples, I’ll briefly explain what mobile app promotion is.
In a nutshell, it is a collection of actions you take to display your app to your audience. This promotion can include many steps.
You need to do App Store Optimization (ASO), which means making sure all the settings, images, and messaging are correct on the app store. This helps people find your app in the store search and understand what your app is about.
You can do press releases to get articles published about your app on related websites and portals.
You can use content marketing with blog posts, podcasts, or videos to get your website ranking well for the keywords related to your app, and people find you organically when using a search engine.
There’s always social media creating relevant content on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X. It’s a great way to get people pumped up and engaged with your app.
As said, the list is long, and you can find all these tactics in our blog post: Mobile App Promotion Guide: Launch Your App Successfully.
In this article, we’ll focus on using ads to promote mobile apps, so let’s begin with the examples.
Key ingredients of a mobile app campaign: tips and examples
Liven—Test, test, test.
Liven used variations of the same ad for this campaign, with the video sequence changing slightly but featuring the same voice-over. These variations help the ads not fatigue and serve as creative testing to see which of them the audience relates to more.
Keiki—Audience targeting
Understand your audience's pain points and use precise targeting.
Sometimes, you don’t need to promote your app directly and can use creativity to create an ad like the one Keiki did.
They are an app that helps educate children through fun mini-games, but their audience is not the kids, but the parents. They did a series of different ads that promoted downloadable cheat sheets to help parents when they installed the app and used precise targeting to reach that audience.
Check out how Keiki reduced their CPC by 26% and their CPA by 17% using Bïrch automations: Keiki case study.
🤯 You can also learn everything about targeting with our How to master Facebook ad targeting blog post!
Promova—Keep it simple
Simplicity is sometimes best.
Promova created a series of very simple static image ads promoting their language (English) courses with a clear call to action. The ads accumulated over 3 million likes on Instagram and Facebook.
PlantIn—Show your benefits.
One simple way to get the audience to install your app is to be straightforward and show them the benefits and functionalities of your mobile app.
In this campaign, even if you mute the sound, you understand perfectly what the app is about.
Relatio—People relate to people.
Relatio constantly uses real user-generated content for their ads. The audience can relate to the testimonials given. Asking your users for feedback and using it on your ads can be a very good strategy.
Lift—Show, don’t tell.
Instead of relying on text alone, show the functionalities and provide tutorials on how to use your product. The solutions you present can be exactly what your potential user is looking for in an app.
EveryDoggy—Apps can be global!
Don’t limit your app and your campaigns to English or any other single language. Create variations of the same ads in different languages and target the ad to audiences in different countries. If you make your app global, you’ll increase its reach exponentially.
Onestate—Show your real app in action
People get very disappointed if you overpromise something you can’t deliver. Lately, there has been a flood of game ads that show one type of gameplay, but once you download, the game is completely different. Check these reviews from one of these:
Now check how Onestate does it with an exact footage from in-game gameplay as the ad.
Wrap-up
As mentioned, there’s no actual formula for designing your ads, and the list doesn’t stop here; you should always use your creativity to create incredible ads to promote your app. Hopefully, this was an inspiration for you.
To summarize this list, the main takeaways to create mobile app campaigns are:
- Always test everything
- Use precise audience targeting
- Don’t overcomplicate things. Keep it simple.
- Show your apps main benefits
- People relate to people. Use real people and use cases on your ads.
- Show, don’t tell. Provide in use cases of the app.
- Apps can be global! Translate your app and reach a broader audience.
- Use real screenshots and videos from your apps.
Wrapped up by the sound of Radiohead—Karma Police
