When user acquisition plateaus: How to turn TV and Out of Home into your app’s new sources of growth

When user acquisition plateaus: How to turn TV and Out of Home into your app’s new sources of growth

It’s official: consumer acquisition has by no means been harder. With the full variety of apps ever launched hitting over 21 million, ensuring your app stands out is not any small feat. As we speak, tried and true techniques like app retailer optimisation and paid UA campaigns can solely take you up to now – and lots of apps are fast to see their consumer acquisition efforts plateau. At this level, it’s time to show to different channels that may enable you discover untapped swimming pools of potential customers. These channels are a number of the oldest ones within the promoting trade: particularly TV and out of residence.

 

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Whereas apps’ current acquisition efforts have been centered virtually completely on digital advertising and marketing, we’re seeing rising curiosity in offline advertising and marketing from app publishers throughout verticals. Out of residence within the type of promoting placements in subway stations and on roadside billboards has been a cornerstone channel for on-demand grocery supply startups like Flink and Gorillas, and linear TV has proved to be an enormous supply of development for gaming apps. Wooga, Nordeus, and Bandai Namco and Zynga’s Pure Movement are simply a number of the newest gaming studios to show to TV. The purpose of those campaigns shouldn’t be purely attain, but in addition to construct as many related touchpoints alongside the client’s journey as attainable: the extra repetition, the higher the salience.

This is sensible: because the cell trade matures, many apps with monetary leverage are investing extra of their branding efforts, moderately than persevering with to chase short-term efficiency metrics. iOS 14 can be a significant driver, given its influence on many apps’ potential to make data-driven acquisition choices. However the place precisely ought to app entrepreneurs begin when kicking off their TV and OOH efforts?

Scale with TV

TV has lengthy been seen as inaccessible and unaffordable for a lot of manufacturers. But there’s no denying its attain: TV continues to be essentially the most environment friendly advertising and marketing channel to succeed in an enormous viewers in a brief period of time, just because it’s the some of the closely consumed media platforms amongst adults of all ages.

The pandemic additionally opened up new alternatives for rising manufacturers to check the waters with smaller danger, as the supply of loads of low-cost stock helped make TV promoting extra accessible to smaller corporations. Total consumption of daytime TV additionally elevated, with extra individuals caught at residence all through the lockdowns – rebranding daytime as the brand new, cost-efficient “prime time”.

Getting began with TV promoting follows an analogous sample to different channels. Firstly, you’ll have to determine your related goal group, as it will form the techniques, positioning and messaging to your inventive (i.e. the TV advert itself). Any variety of issues could make a distinction in how charming and activating your spot is: from size (this may be something between 10 to 60 seconds), to readability of messaging, to how properly the inventive idea resonates along with your goal group, all the way down to particulars like the selection of voiceover actor. Be sure you additionally finish the inventive with a transparent name to motion, akin to downloading the app, so to higher measure the influence your advert is having in your outcomes.

Working with a full-service company may help you at each stage of the method – from creation and manufacturing, to the precise reserving of your TV slot, all the best way to short-term efficiency monitoring. Particularly should you’re planning a higher-budget manufacturing, it’s additionally sensible to spend money on market analysis first to check totally different approaches with a panel within the pre-production section. It will enable you keep away from burning costly media finances later for an advert that doesn’t carry out in addition to you’d anticipated.

There’s no place like out of residence

Out of residence (OOH) is one other channel that permits apps to succeed in completely new and untapped audiences. Campaigns are additionally extremely customizable throughout placements and budgets: from the smallest of advertisements on public transport, to very large productions like Balenciaga’s well-known 3D Fortnite billboard in Instances Sq. late final yr.

One of many predominant advantages of OOH campaigns is that attain, frequency and variety of contacts are typically quick to generate, particularly at highly-frequented places. Campaigns are additionally cheaper to provide in comparison with TV promoting – and OOH has the clear benefit that it could actually’t be ignored or overheard, a lot much less turned off. However, simply as with TV, the standard of the inventive is essential for constructing consciousness and visibility.

For manufacturers seeking to begin out with out of residence, we suggest specializing in native alternatives. For a current consumer with a web-based market app, for instance, we created a hyper-local marketing campaign that aimed to drive installs in particular districts of the German capital, Berlin. This meant working contextually-relevant campaigns inside every district, adapting the messaging throughout the inventive to play with every district’s stereotypes.

Measuring offline channels

Digital corporations centered on efficiency need campaigns which might be ROI-efficient and actually scale their enterprise. That is no totally different for offline promoting. Many advertisers are understandably involved about correctly attributing TV or OOH campaigns, however the trade has made enormous strides in relation to measuring each. Now that it’s attainable to measure this channel due to monitoring and attribution applied sciences, apps can higher consider their offline campaigns and optimise them on CPV/CPI, in an analogous technique to on-line advertising and marketing.

Utilizing Bayesian fashions is without doubt one of the finest methods you can begin monitoring the (seemingly) untrackable: the mannequin tries to foretell how a KPI (like web site site visitors or an set up) would look with out a marketing campaign working, after which compares it to precise site visitors information. The mannequin will also be constructed together with info like seasonality (e.g weekday vs. weekend), underlying long-term traits (e.g. natural consumer development) and the consequences of different advertising and marketing campaigns.

Past attributing site visitors, it’s additionally necessary to take a look at the affect of TV and out of residence campaigns on branding metrics akin to model consciousness, notion and loyalty. The influence of investing in these model constructing channels could be enormous, and customers usually tend to obtain and maintain coming again to the apps with which they’ve a constructive model expertise. In an trade the place retention is the whole lot, it seems that specializing in model constructing could be key to longevity.