What Is The Best Way To Market A Mobile App On Facebook?

Mobile apps are all around us, addressing a variety of different needs mobile users have, from easily communicating with friends and family to increasing productivity, offering accessible entertainment, and even educating yourself right on your phone. It’s estimated that in 2020 there were around 592 million daily app downloads, which puts creating an app and promoting it into a whole different perspective.

While creating the app itself can certainly take some time, it’s the marketing part that most people stress about. If you go to any of the app stores, you can easily find several ones that are in direct competition with each other, which means that any newly launched app must go the extra mile to attract the attention of the target audience.

So, how can you effectively market your app and convince people to download it? Facebook might have a solution.

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How Facebook Helps You Promote Apps

Creating and promoting an app can be achieved through the classic means:

• Adding it to Google Play, the App Store, and other similar platforms that host mobile apps;
• Add links to your app across several media channels, such as your website, email, Facebook Page, Twitter, and other social media sites;
• Send the product to app reviewers, news sites, and other such players to generate some buzz around the mobile app;
• Create paid advertising campaigns with the goals of getting people to download your application, etc.

But, Facebook ads provide a more efficient way to target people with your mobile app with an object specifically designed to assist the process of downloading your app.

To do it, you first need to register the mobile app with Facebook for Developers, either by registering yourself or asking your app developer to do it. By doing this, you will be able to add app events that you need to track and access better targeting options that could generate better results.

Optimising Your Mobile App Campaign

Running a successful app campaign on Facebook takes a bit of preparation, and understanding of how the platform can support your goals.

First, Facebook offers three types of objectives regarding app campaigns:

• App installs campaign – this optimises the campaign to deliver the ads to the people in your target audience most likely to install the app;
• Traffic objective – used to get people who’ve already installed your app to re-open and use it. It’s a way to engage an existing audience. If you have a meditation app, this objective helps you reach the people who’ve already installed it and get them to open it and use its features;
• Conversions objective – similar to the traffic objective, expect with the conversions goal you want to get people to take a particular action on the app. For instance, if you have a new feature in your meditation app, you can run the conversions objective to reach the existing audience and tell people to use that new feature.

Choosing the right feature helps design the campaign for success. It tells Facebook who from your target audience to deliver your ads to, and even optimises the way your budget is spent.

But like with most Facebook ads, the secret to success often lies in how you target the ads.

Let’s look at some of the ways you can select your target audience for a Facebook mobile app campaign:

Facebook Mobile App Campaign Target Audience

1. Core Targeting

Core Targeting is best used to find new people. Facebook allows you to target people based on their age, gender, location, and other demographic information. This is a good option if your app is intended for a broad audience, such as a local news site app where you’re more interested in targeting people in a particular location, than focusing on more detailed audience information.

But, if you do have more specific or niche audiences, your targeting might need to go into more details. Luckily, you can do that within the Core Targeting as well.

Apart from demographics, you can choose the interests, behaviour, and connections (other pages potential customers follow) of your ideal customers. This is ideal to help Facebook deliver your ads to the right people, and coupled with the objective you choose, you’re able to deliver your ads to those most likely to install the app.

2. Custom Audiences

Use Custom Audiences for the engagement objectives (traffic and conversions), as this allows you to deliver ads to an existing audience, such as the people who have already installed the app.

There are 3 ways you can use Custom Audiences:

• Upload a contact list
• Set up the Facebook pixel to track website visitors and add them to the Custom Audience
• App users – as a Developer, you can install the Facebook SDK to track in-app behaviour and retarget your existing app users to engage them.

If your app launch and initial promotion occur on Facebook, the platform will track enough data to allow you to create Custom Audiences in case you want to re-engage. If you’re promoting outside of Facebook too, you may need the Facebook Pixel or customer lists to reach all app users.

3. Lookalike Audience

Lastly, you have the lookalike audience, which can also help you reach new potential customers, but a lot more effectively. Facebook can take the Custom Audience you have and target new users that fit the same characteristics as your existing customers.

It’s a more efficient way to get to a new audience that is likely to be interested in your app.

Mobile App Campaign Best Practices

The app is ready, and you need to create a Facebook ads campaign to promote it. How do you do that?

Facebook has a very intuitive advertising system, so setting up the campaign itself is not that difficult from a technical standpoint. However, your attention is needed for some of the following components:

1. The Right Set-up

Choose the right campaign objective and target audience. While the campaign may be clear depending on what your goal is, the targeting part could give you some problems especially if you have to tell Facebook who to target.

Try to research your ideal customers and see who your audience is. If needed, you can test different audience sectors at a smaller scale to see who is your most valued customer.

2. The Ad Itself

The ad copy and its visual support matter a lot. People scrolling through news feeds need a reason to stop and check out what you have to offer, so the ad needs to be eye-catching.

Moreover, since it’s a mobile app, Facebook delivers such ads straight to mobile users, so a conversion is easier to achieve. Both ad copy and visual imagery need to take that into account. Copy should be as short as possible, preferably to avoid the ‘See More’ mark and encourage people to take the action you want.

Similarly, the ad creative should also be calibrated to the goal. Videos have a much better chance of catching people’s attention, but they require a bit more resources. You can choose the Carousel format, which lets you add multiple images in the same ad instead.

Finally, the ad will include a call to action button, which for app ads are:

• Play Game
• Use App
• Install Now

Depending on the objective. So, if you want more app purchases for a mobile game, you can add the ‘Play Game’ call to action, or the ‘Install Now’ if you’re promoting any other type of application. For re-engagement, the ‘Use App’ CTA is most appropriate.

3. The Landing Page

Facebook will redirect those wanting to download the ad to the App store, so while you don’t have to create a landing page on your site, the app page is your landing page in this context.

Be sure to provide this page with information about the app, what it does, its benefits, and even screenshots to give users a better idea of what they’re getting should they download it. The app page and ads should work together to convince the users to download and install the app on their own devices.

And if you’re also running other types of campaigns for the app, the pages in the app store should take those into account as well.

AIAD Is Happy to Support Your Facebook Marketing Efforts

Facebook marketing has many benefits, but it can be easy to get lost in the details and know how to fully leverage the social media platform. But we at Australian Internet Advertising can assist small businesses with all their marketing efforts, from creating an effective campaign strategy to helping you implement it for maximum results.

To find out more about us and how we can help, reach out to our team online, or call us at 1300 304 640.