Christmas is just around the corner, but stores are soon to be filled with pink, red, and heart-shaped chocolates in no time! Though Christmas is certainly the biggest shopping event of the year, seasonal marketing is not something to be neglected at any time of the year.
Seasonal marketing can be a great strategy to market mobile apps. With new seasons come new consumer needs and new apps downloaded. Some several recurring holidays and seasons have a sizable impact on the app market. Some may apply more to certain apps than others. How can we harness the power of seasonal marketing?
Well, we have Black Friday, Christmas, Valentine’s, Halloween, Easter, Cyber Monday, Summer vacation, and even Tax season! Don’t forget Summer Vacation, Back to School, and Spring Break! The list goes on and changes depending on which region you are advertising to as well as your demographics. How do you know if seasonal marketing is an effective approach for you? Which seasons should you market? Moreover, what should you be doing to increase mobile app installs?
Which apps benefit from seasonal marketing campaigns?
Not every app benefits from a seasonal marketing campaign. Depending on its purpose and audience, your mobile app marketing campaign efforts may be better spent elsewhere entirely.
So which apps stand to gain with seasonal marketing? More importantly, does yours?
Shopping apps are, of course, the first genre that comes to mind. Certainly, if you are an app in the retail category you probably already know and are implementing several seasonal marketing strategies.
However, other apps also stand to benefit from the ups and downs of app usage at certain times of the year. The trick is to pinpoint why those are happening and adjust accordingly.
Investigate your user base – what holidays are they celebrating?
Check out where your app is getting the most downloads from. Different countries have different holidays and ebb and flow in app downloads. This data will help you create a customized app marketing strategy.
It is also wise to investigate if there are certain natural highs and lows in your specific app downloads. Does this match up to a regional event or festivity?
Let’s take, for example, Onet 3D – Classic Link Puzzle
This puzzle app is getting most of its downloads from the United States, the UK, and Australia. These are all countries that celebrate Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and Valentine’s Day quite heavily.
The content of the game has many varieties visually so it would be easy to integrate a Christmas-themed one in there or a Summer fun theme, whatever they find to be suitable. The purpose of this app is entertainment, so it is unlikely that a memorial day theme or a tax season theme would perform well.
The application would then look at their demographics and see if they would be a good candidate for some seasonal marketing.
As it turns out this app does have a few seasonally tailored boards. They also are promoting some of them in their creatives.
Examine the season’s marketing trends
Now check out the trends related to your niche and your app. You can see if there are specific search terms that are trending for your app or your competitors, you can see what types of keywords your competitors are ranking for.
Certain search terms gain traction at certain times of the year. App Store Optimization is one of the most useful and important tools in your seasonal marketing plan. The app store search is where the majority of downloads come from so it is crucial to optimize your app to suit it.
With the search term “game” as a baseline, we can see how holiday marketing is no joke. But just because a search term is gaining popularity doesn’t mean you have to jump on the bandwagon. You should also keep in mind that if a search term has gained popularity then many apps might be taking advantage of it already.
It is good to examine your keywords and see if you can tailor some to express the trend but also in a way that relates to your niche. Keep in mind your specific audience. Keywords might peak at different times in different countries, so do your research.
Customize creative assets for the season
Depending on the research that you have done and the purpose of your app, what creative strategy you will take may differ. If, for example, you have a retail app or another app that is heavily influenced by seasonal changes you can consider a complete seasonal overhaul. For this, you would want to update your icon, screenshots, and videos.
The first thing viewed by your audience in the app store search is your icon. This is the strongest creative asset in generating conversions and should take the most care.
Many customers like to see their gaming apps celebrating the holidays. A spooky icon for Halloween or a Festive Santa hat for the Christmas season could impact downloads.
Like we saw in our previous example, games are also a great place to implement themes within the application as well. You can make sure to showcase these changes in some of your advertisements. Each seasonal campaign should have a specific message and goal in mind.
Heads up, for example, does particularly well during times where families are gathering together. This is a Charades game that is played in groups of people in real life, so when families are together in person, it experiences a spike in the apple app store. You can see here that the peaks in the United States in November and December of 2019 were on Thanksgiving Weekend and Christmas day.
The game also includes a few holiday-themed variations of the game as well as the classic Charades categories.
You also may want to consider what in-app ads you want to run during the holiday season. These should also be festive and inviting. Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween and Easter have very festive and set visual identity and iconography. Don’t shy away from being festive!
Test results of your seasonal marketing
Lastly, it is important to monitor the results of your campaign. App promotion is an ever-changing beast that must be monitored closely.
You should keep an eye on your campaign metrics to see if your campaign is achieving its desired results. Adjust your campaign if need be and continue ASO adaptation. In-app ads and ASO are more important in holiday marketing. You run a seasonal campaign and get many users quickly. Among other tools, you can use our app store optimization keyword tool and visibility tools to aid you in this process.
You can also keep tabs on your competitors and their campaigns. To simplify this process, you can sign up for a demo with us and kick off your next holiday campaign with a bang.
