No matter the industry, it’s an almost guaranteed inevitability – performance marketing efforts are affected by seasonal trends. For many industries, not only is business seasonal, but the opportunities are so large during certain times of the year that they can be critical to overall success.

For many mobile performance marketers, peak season is Q4 and the holiday season. As we close up Q3, do you have a plan for ensuring your app marketing strategy is up to snuff for the impending influx of traffic? If not, we recommend starting now.

Research the Validity of Seasonal Performance Marketing for Your App

Before delving into time-based strategies for your mobile performance marketing plan, you’ll need to establish your app’s true purpose and identify the target audience for your app.

Look at your app’s trends and similar app trends around specific seasonality. How does engagement change? Does traffic increase? There’s a small chance your app will be virtually perennial in popularity – but more likely than not, you’ll notice spikes and dips surrounding specific times of the year. A weather app will see more visits during times of the year when there’s more ‘extreme’ weather, while a sports betting app will see surges around high-value games or tournaments. Retail apps will see spikes leading up to Black Friday and the other gift-giving holidays of Q4. Working with a marketing partner that has experience in seasonal marketing for numerous verticals can give you a leg up in the research process, as they can utilize existing data already in their arsenal.

Once your app’s peak season and your users’ interests have been established, a schedule for ramping up your mobile advertising efforts will need to be created. The sooner you can have your content and creative ready, the better. During certain times of the year, many mobile advertisers will simultaneously amp up their marketing efforts, so those with assets prepared first can act the fastest.

Stay Nimble with a Diverse Set of Performance Marketing Channels

To help establish your marketing schedule around your app’s seasonality, it’s important to know which mix of marketing channels you intend to employ in your campaign. One of the most common marketing errors is utilizing too few channels. You end up without backup methods should your primary marketing channel dip in traffic, segments of your target audience are neglected, and you stymie your brand awareness progress.

Utilizing a diverse set of performance marketing channels helps you reach potential users throughout the marketing funnel, from those first hearing about your brand, to the users ready to download and use your app. As you fight competing apps for the user’s attention during your peak season, it’s crucial that your branding is widespread and effective. At Adperio, we offer and manage a strategic blend of mobile performance marketing channels:

  • Display Campaigns – An incredibly popular channel used for CPI campaigns, display ads provide one of the most direct paths from ad to app download. This greatly reduces the chance of your leads dropping out of the funnel before making it to install. Display ads come with numerous benefits across the marketing funnel, from greater brand awareness, increased visibility, to improved data tracking over other common marketing methods that back into performance marketing. Display ads also allow for audience targeting at a lower cost than many of your other mobile channel options.
  • Re-Engagement Campaigns – Many successful app campaigns go beyond just attaining the install. Re-engagement campaigns are a strategic way to increase user engagement and pull back those users who may not be utilizing your app as frequently as you’d like. Not only can you offer seasonally themed notifications to your users, but since you know exactly who your user is, you can make them more personalized than ever.
  • Pre-load – Mobile app pre-loading allows your target audience to access your app upon a phone’s first boot. At the moment of phone activation, when a user is first exploring their Android phone, your app will appear in the Featured Apps section. Once clicked, the user is lead to the app store where they can download your app. This marketing channel is an effective choice around the holidays as new device activations spike.
  • On-Device Notifications – On-device notifications provide a scalable, efficient discovery solution.  Notifications entice your target audience to download your app, and are an efficient way to help your brand boost performance, increase engagement and maximize revenue.  By starting your push notifications leading up to peak season (think Black Friday for retailers, or NFL opening weekend for fantasy sports apps), you start familiarizing your audience with your brand, encouraging a download when peak seasonality hits.

Diversifying your mobile performance marketing channels gives you the ability to scale up channels that will perform the best during peak season, and scale down those that are not as relevant to the season or event you’re marketing around.

Coordinating your chosen marketing channels can come with pain points. Tracking, scaling, and delegating budget to your mobile performance marketing channels is a time-consuming task, with plenty of room for mistakes, should you not have sufficient resources. Working with Adperio, advertisers are able to consolidate the management of all marketing channels down to one platform. With your spend and metrics consolidated to one place, your mobile marketing campaigns are able to be quickly analyzed and optimized in real-time.

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Test Your Mobile Performance Marketing Channels

Your test strategy will help identify your engaged audiences, profitable marketing channels, and most compelling creative/copy. This testing phase is crucial if you want to see optimum success in your mobile marketing seasonal campaign, and its importance is one of the biggest reasons why we recommend utilizing the business quarter leading up to your peak season to prepare. The less time you use up in testing during your valuable peak season, the better.

At the start of your mobile marketing testing strategy, identify your marketing components – which channels you want to test, target audience, messaging, and creative. Once all components are confirmed, you can establish your testing plan. This plan will lay out the timelines for how long you’ll test each channel, when you’ll deploy your A/B tests, and how much budget you’ll devote to each channel. For the most accurate comparison, we’d recommend splitting your budget equally among marketing components during your testing period.

Factors to track during your testing phase include traffic quality, scalability of each channel, spend efficiency, app retention, and brand recall. In reviewing the performance reports from your test campaigns, you can then determine how to allocate your media spend for your seasonal campaign.

At Adperio, we are already analyzing these factors for you when managing your CPI campaigns. We help our customers review all testing phases, then build out their KPI benchmarks. An experienced mobile performance marketing partner can also contribute to the seasonal marketing knowledge they already have at their disposal from years in the business. We know how to take the marketing strategy developed based on testing results, and optimize it as cost per install costs fluctuate during the busiest times for your industry.

Getting Started on your Seasonal Mobile Advertising

Whether your peak season is in the quickly approaching Q4, or you’re simply looking to start your planning process sooner rather than later, Adperio can help you kickstart the process. By nailing down your seasonal campaign strategy, you set your brand up for its best chance of success. Reach out to us today to discuss your seasonal marketing strategy.