Mobile app marketing is becoming more important, with a boost in app usage worldwide, making the need for app marketing companies and agencies more stronger than ever before. Find out about the top platforms that know how to promote your app best from our carefully selected list of only the best in the industry.
Top App Marketing Companies
The times when tech media pundits talked widely about businesses transitioning from a desktop to mobile or about top level businesses adopting a mobile-first approach are long gone.
Now, it is mobile right from the get-go, by default.
So, keeping this picture of a highly competitive mobile app market in mind, can you imagine what it takes for an app developer to compete and run a successful app marketing campaign?
They Won’t Be Able to Click INSTALL Fast Enough
There’s a massive segment of people who want your app. It’s our job to make sure they see it, fall in love with it, and then grow your brand like crazy.
Start Your FREE Growth AuditPromoting and marketing an app is as tough as developing it. One way of mastering this challenge is to hire a mobile app marketing agency that helps marketing apps via multiple channels, and has the expertise in reaching your target app users.
But this is barely scratching the surface of what an app marketing agency can do for you. So, in this guide, let us first talk about what app marketing is in the first place, and introduce you to the top app marketing companies.
What is mobile app marketing?
Mobile app marketing means to make efforts so that your customers engage with your product and services on mobile. And it also means boosting your app’s presence in the app store with clever marketing techniques.
While the app marketing funnel may include similar stages to the traditional digital marketing funnel, it consists of these three prime stages:
3 stages of app marketing
This concept is therefore all about interacting with your users through all three of these stages in order to drive profitable, long term action. So, the question now lies in how exactly do you interact with them to successfully promote your app.
Let’s take a closer look at the three phases.
Awareness
The awareness stage occurs before marketers launch their apps, where it is all about creating a presence and building brand awareness. This strategy includes a clear brand purpose, communication and positioning – basically answering the who, when, why, where and how of your product and services.
The main goal in this stage is to interact with potential customers, by using methods, such as influencer marketing, and direct their attention to your upcoming brand.
Acquisition
In the acquisition stage, your app has already launched and you are implementing new strategies to continue to acquire users and generate installs.
Acquisition is an ongoing process that needs constant tweaking and extensions of previous strategies and methods of marketing.
So, the main focus here is to keep optimizing for the app store and implementing creative strategies to attract new users and continue to build a loyal customer base.
Retention
When you acquire target users, it doesn’t end just there – you want to keep them engaged and invested in your app. In the retention stage, also an ongoing process, you want to come up with creative methods to turn users into loyal customers.
In this stage, make sure you keep up ongoing communication with users, maintaining an interactive and trustworthy bond.
In this case, push notifications will become your best friend. Keeping users in the loop and sending them alerts and updates about promotions, special rewards or upgrades is a great way to keep up engagement.
User experience is also an important component of the retention stage. First impressions are crucial – and you only get one chance at it. So make sure users can smoothly browse through your app, and use your services at ease from the start.
Mastering these three stages belong to a successful app marketing strategy. If you are able to build a presence for your upcoming app, acquire new users effectively and keep a loyal customer base, you are doing it all right.
But a lot of research and analysis goes into this, so it is easier said than done. This is why app marketing agencies and companies are here to make your life easier by lifting the extra weight off your shoulders.
You still want to understand how the company you hire works their magic though. So, let’s dive into the inner workings of ‘how’ you market your mobile app.
What does an app marketer do?
Understanding how app marketers and agencies work is important to having an overview of the best strategies being used for your mobile app. Knowing the ins and outs of the different methods will inform your decision in choosing the best app marketing company out there.
And it always begins with market research. In 2021 alone, 143.6 billion apps were downloaded, with 55 billion of those downloads being games and 88 billion apps. So, you want to find out what types of users are downloading apps that have similar services to your business.
And don’t forget about the high competition in the app market currently. In 2022, 2.5 thousand new apps were submitted to the Apple App Store, which shows how important competitor analysis is when app marketing agencies come up with their own strategies.
App marketers and app marketing agencies are committed to fulfilling their users’ needs, and therefore create user personas to help create a solid app marketing strategy. The personas typically represent a kind of target audience, containing the characteristics of that particular group.
Other unique identifiers, such as demographics and mobile preferences are also dissected in order to create accurate personas to work out the typical user journey of this group. This allows app marketers to tailor their app marketing strategy to drive profitable action.
Top Mobile App Marketing Companies:
Doing a competitor analysis, market research and creating user personas will help you answer the following key questions in the early stages of the process, enabling you to effectively and successfully market your app:
User persona questions
Mobile acquisition
The first step for users to interact with your app directly is to get them to download and install your app. Mobile acquisition is therefore a must and app marketing agencies work hard to master the art of it.
In order to attract and acquire new users, you want to nail the messaging part, which belongs to a good app marketing strategy.
Here are some messaging formats that are commonly used by app marketing agencies to get people to use your app:
Social
Posting on your social media channels to relevant followers to gain more traction and build brand awareness.
App Store Optimization (ASO)
Optimizing your profile on the app store, including title, keywords, ratings and other ranking factors, to acquire new users and increase app installs.
Paid advertising
Creating social media ads and PPC campaigns, using Google Adwords, native and interstitial ad formats can push your app to the forefront, gaining a wider audience.
Influencer marketing
Getting influencers to advertise your brand will allow you to gain your audience’s trust and therefore a loyal following that will increase your credibility and traffic instantly.
Email marketing
With global the email marketing market reaching 7.5 billion U.S. dollars of value in 2020, this method of mobile acquisition can massively drive customers to your app when promoting your app content, services and any offer discounts via email.
When it comes to app marketing, mobile acquisition is a key component of app marketing agencies’ strategies. You need to implement a good balance of acquisition techniques to secure the long term success and revenue of your app.
But mobile acquisition belongs to a sea full of app marketing strategies and techniques that app marketing companies will focus on.
What are the best app marketing strategies?
A marketing plan that an app marketing agency team will devise for your app, will usually consist of the following concepts:
App marketing concepts
The app marketing best practices also demand an agency to carefully measure KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of such app marketing campaigns. And there is one main app promotion method that stands out from the rest – growth hacking.
Essentially, growth hacking is about finding ways for a particular mobile app to grow its number of users and revenue by integrating non-standard app marketing techniques, preferably on a low budget. Growth hacking focuses on driving scalable growth, in a short period of time, to produce ‘quick wins’.
But growth hacking and the techniques mentioned above belong to the greater process of your app marketing plan, and is integrated in a larger mobile engagement ‘loop’. Like traditional marketing, app marketing takes users through the marketing funnel that consists of the stages of awareness, acquisition and retention.
We call it a loop because users can go back and forth between stages as illustrated in the graphic below:
Mobile acquisition cycle
In essence, app marketing is all about finding ways to reach, attract and retain your customers as well as analyzing and monitoring their behavior and the performance of your app to improve the experience.
Users look for services that fulfill their ‘needs’ and ‘questions’. So, you want your app to be the number one place they go to to get the answers they are looking for. Integrating these strategies and methods, and partnering with top app marketing agencies will help you reach your goals at a higher rate to start making revenue.
How much does marketing an app cost?
Now, your next pressing question must be how much it actually costs to market an app.
Because the main challenges of marketing an mobile app are both to reach and retain your users, there is a swarm of competition for users’ attention in the app store. Therefore, it is worth investing in the best app marketing company to successfully market your app and make it stand out from the crowd.
But you certainly don’t want to overspend your budget, and instead want to get the most value out of your marketing strategy at a reasonable price. Mobile app marketing costs usually consist of components that cover the entire lifecycle of an app:
Mobile application lifecycle
You will find within these stages that there are individual costs that will apply. Here is a brief estimation of the key data points that you can expect when working out your budget to market your app:
Key data points
| Element | Cost |
|---|---|
| App market research | $5k - $15k |
| App beta testing | up to $5k |
| ASO tools | $250 - $1,500 / month |
| App marketing agency | up to $25k / app |
| App PR outreach | $100 - $300 / hour |
| Influencer marketing | $10k - $18k / month |
| Average Cost Per Install (CPI) | $1.75 / install |
| Cost Per Action (CPA): Register | $3.5 / install |
| CPA: In-app purchase | $87 / install |
| CPA: Purchase | $75 / install |
| CPA: Subscribe | $37 / install |
For a more detailed overview of the costs you can expect, take a look at our App Marketing Costs guide for extensive data.
Which agency is best for digital app marketing?
So which agency is on the top of the list for digital app marketing?
In order to simplify the answer, let’s dive into the types of app marketing agencies that are out there.
There is a range of types of mobile app marketing companies that can help you with your marketing campaign:
- A specialist mobile agency can serve your app’s marketing needs via some particular marketing channel, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram ads, App Store Optimization, and PR.
- A general agency, with a mobile app marketing agency within it, with added mobile experience.
- A mobile advertising agency, focusing on mobile media buying: Media buyers negotiate and purchase audience-targeted time and advertising space to convey a marketing message.
- App marketing agencies that focus purely on App Store Optimization, and are capable of driving mobile app user acquisition via Apple’s App Store, Google Play or both.
- Agencies that focus on mobile campaign strategies, analytics of a mobile app user in-app behavior as well as traffic attribution.
Partner with the best mobile app marketing agencies and companies
Having now a picture of the mobile app marketing industry, we’ve gathered facts and created a guide that covers the best mobile marketing companies to consider.
Our list includes big international agencies, with broad creative marketing capabilities as well as boutique marketing companies, focussing solely on mobile apps. Each of the companies listed has something different and unique to offer.
