How to execute your app marketing plan effectively

Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, a professional speaker and a freelance writer. This post originally appeared on the Appcase blog. 

Once you have a killer app marketing strategy in place, it’s now time to execute against that plan.

Execution is often one of the most difficult aspects for businesses, since anyone can have compelling ideas on how to grow a company but making those ideas come to life is a completely different story.

The execution of your app marketing plan often begins before the development of the app, continues through development, when it’s first released in the app store and then continues forward to drive ongoing engagement with you app.

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If you’re starting from the very beginning of this journey to execute the marketing plan for your mobile app, it’s best to start focusing on your budget.

Budget to fund marketing programs

From the start, it’s important to set a budget associated with each aspect of your app marketing plan to ensure it can be fully executed.

The budget at your disposal will really craft how the execution is achieved for your marketing campaigns, which will often require your business to alter its approach to some or many parts of your upcoming advertising activations.

For instance, if you’re planning to advertise your mobile app on Facebook it’s important to understand how much each part of your strategy will cost, in order to properly plan for this piece of the overall app marketing puzzle.

Whether it’s a $500 or $50,000 spend per channel, this is a critical step in executing your mobile app marketing strategy. Also, be sure to set aside a budget that allows for your team to add more spend to the aspects of your marketing efforts that are producing results.

Craft your budget for your marketing campaigns based on your market research and continue to build upon your experience with each of these marketing channels from there to better inform how your spend is allocated.

Delegate to team members

Delegation is an important part to an execution since there obviously needs to be a member of your team to actually own each part of the overall app marketing strategy.

Choose roles for yourself and staff members that are best matched with their individual skillsets to ensure each part of your marketing plan is executed properly.

Ask yourself the following questions about each delegation decision:

• Does this person possess the skills to own this piece of the marketing plan?
• Will this person need further direction on how to best execute their part?
• Which member of your team is in need of a challenge?
• Who has the most interest in executing this type of marketing task?
• Which team member has the best experience to back their efforts?
• How much time and workload does your team member have to perform this task successfully?

Create content for campaigns

Once you’ve established a budget and the team members who will own each part of the execution of your strategy, it’s time to create the content that will help fuel all of your marketing efforts.

Most of your content can be developed ahead of time in a content calendar before beginning your advertising campaigns, but some of it will have to be created along the way when it comes to social media and other marketing channels more focused on real-time messaging.

Whether you’re creating landing pages, writing blog posts to help boost your search rankings, developing email templates, designing visuals for use on social media or building other content, it must be relevant to the interests of your audience.

For example, this interview with Arjuan Arora, the CEO of ReTargeter, explains the specific preferences and habits of iPad users, specifically shoppers on the device.

When you’re creating content to best match your audience, keep in mind the unique feature sets on the device you’re developing the app for, how users will use these features, the preferences of your audience and their habits on these devices to understand what types of content to create on a regular basis that interest these potential customers.

Distribute your marketing assets

Your app has been approved and published in the app store; it’s now time to turn on your marketing campaigns aimed at driving buzz from the very beginning.

With the use of an extensive marketing calendar, you’ll begin to turn on your Facebook marketing, send out emails to your segmented list, post on relevant social channels like Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ and begin to distribute your content and messaging to where your audience is most active online.

This is an ongoing process, requiring a lot of time and commitment to make sure each part of the execution is properly delivered to your audience on each channel.

The app ecosystem is a crowded place, which requires a 24-7 approach to marketing in order to achieve your company’s goals of more mobile app revenue, increased downloads and long-term app engagement.

Measure the success of your strategy

Use a mobile app analytics platform like Appcase or Google Analytics to continually track the success of your marketing campaigns overtime. An important part of executing a marketing plan is understanding what parts of your campaign are working and which channels and activations are not delivering results.

By using analytics tools to inform your app marketing success and failures, you’ll be able to quickly stop spending time and money on the initiatives that aren’t working and putting more efforts and execution time in the areas of your marketing plan that are really working.

When it comes to what you should know about the measurement of your mobile app, focus on the metrics that help determine whether you’ve reached your goals or not.

For example, if you’re looking to generate more sales from your mobile app, analyze where your conversions are coming from in terms of traffic sources, the frequency of these conversions and the correlation with the average time spent in your app and the number of conversions.

Efficiency is key when it comes to running a business; the same goes for the task of executing the marketing of your mobile app. To remain efficient for the long-term, use the analytics to inform future experiments in marketing to better understand what types of executions work well for your business.

Until you try, there’s no telling which executions will go as smoothly as your marketing plan outlines or will not resonate well with your audience. Constant iteration with your mobile app marketing campaigns is what it takes to stand out and achieve success with your app.

What recommendations do you have for executing an app marketing plan? Share your thoughts and suggestions on executing a mobile marketing plan in the comments below.

Image credit: Shutterstock/Peshkova