The life of app marketers is increasingly complex as they weigh a litany of advertising options and shifting consumer preferences against new initiatives, priorities, and budget considerations. Finding the right mix of ingredients that together create a successful recipe for maximizing growth is an ongoing challenge that often requires experimentation and iteration. 

For non-gaming app marketers, the continued reliance on their traditional channel mix is a recipe for stagnation and limited growth. With the holidays fast approaching, here are three essential strategies that I believe are critical to drive scale and unleash your app’s true growth potential through the peak season and into 2024.

Diversify beyond social media and search

No one can argue that prominent search and social channels have tremendous reach. But limiting your marketing to these is no longer a winning strategy to maximize growth. There’s a reason why agencies are slowing ad spend on these channels: The ROI no longer justifies it. Many businesses reported that reducing their ad spend on social media resulted in fewer clicks but had no impact on sales.

The paradigm of reliance on social channels as the sole source of growth began changing in 2022, and 2023, and is on pace to be less than half of what the spend share averaged over the past 10 years. It’s a trend that’s likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Marketers must recognize the undeniable importance of diversifying their channel mix. Mobile offers a unique opportunity for marketers to ensure their messages reach audiences that might not be active on mainstream social or search channels. 

Work with an established partner to reach mobile users

Mobile represents too large an opportunity to ignore. The good news is that testing mobile need not be complicated or expensive. That’s where working with a large, well-established partner comes in — one with legitimacy, scale and the technology to drive successful outcomes.  That will make your job easier as you begin adding mobile to your channel mix, as there are various apps to get your product in front of prospective users outside of social platforms. 

The right partner can typically provide benefits like economies of scale and sophisticated tech that delivers higher ROAS with less manual oversight. Your partner may also help with creative ideation and production to craft the best messaging to connect with your audience. 

Utilize AI to drive speed and accuracy

It’s also important to ask your potential partners how they are leveraging AI on their platforms. AI can drive speed and accuracy that can’t be achieved manually, by leveraging the power of predictive analytics to target the right customers via advertising. This allows campaigns to hit goals within a few days of launch, with better accuracy, on a global scale – without the need for manual optimizations. For example, DealDash, an online auction and shopping platform with more than 20 million customers, boosted its campaign performance and scaled its digital user acquisition significantly thanks to its ad tech partner’s AI capabilities. DealDash achieved a 71% increase in Day 7 ROAS with a 22% drop in CPP.

Relying on your partner’s technology will lower the costs associated with testing mobile advertising. Without a doubt, there are a number of factors and decisions to weigh in the development of a successful campaign, but it’s clear that diversifying the channel mix is critical. Committing to testing mobile is a great first step. The right partner can simplify the process and deliver quick, cost-effective results.

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