App Promotion Using Influencers
Influencer marketing has become a key channel for marketers, especially with the explosion of social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. With over 1 billion monthly users, Instagram is perhaps the best-known of the platforms. It seems every time you scroll there’s either a well-known celebrity or a micro-blogger endorsing a product or service. The big question is: how should you use influencer marketing within your mobile app strategy?
The Benefits of Influencers
Having an influencer associated with your brand can really increase brand value, reach, and engagement. The right influencer will resonate with your target market, and can even open up additional market segments that you weren’t reaching before. You can leverage influencer content to promote your app with video ads, or even use the content created by the influencers themselves. There are multiple examples of apps using influencers:
- Headspace used running expert Knox Robinson and Paul Karmiryan of “So You Think You Can Dance” fame
- The Skype app partnered with YouTube star, Jack Baran
- Audible collaborated with PewDiePie, one of the most popular YouTubers out there
- Warby Parker leveraged the stylish Glorie Steinham
- And these are just a few of the thousands of apps using influencers as part of their marketing campaigns
A Word of Warning
The ROI for influencer marketing looks good on paper. Influencer Marketing Hub claims an average earned media value of $5.20 per dollar spent on influencer marketing. While this may be true for physical products, it’s worth being cautious when it comes to apps. While it certainly can form part of a successful campaign, it’s not recommended to make influencer marketing the central pillar of your app marketing efforts. For one, you can’t know what the effectiveness of a campaign will be, and it’s really difficult to measure and scale. So if you need to scale quickly and get downloads at less than $4 per user, for example, you can’t rely on influencer marketing at all. There will be influencer campaigns that will get you users for $50 per user, and others that will get you users at $2.50 per install. The tough part is that you just can’t know for sure and most of them don’t deliver the right results. The fact that an influencer has 500k followers doesn’t mean that you’ll get more than 50 installs when they post about your app. It’s a sad but true story that we’ve seen hundreds of times across many different client types and verticals.
The Optimal Solution
For branding purposes, influencer marketing is great. When it comes to performance, however, you’ll need the solidity provided by mobile media. Only mobile media will provide you with the optimal solution (be it Facebook, Google, Ad networks, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, and so on). You can measure, predict, optimize and scale, and most importantly, you can achieve great results on a consistent basis. For true digital performance, get in touch with the Moburst team. We’ve helped both well-established brands and startups craft successful strategies to achieve mobile app success.
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