5 trends shaping the future of app marketing
The Boston Consulting Group conducted an interview, asking what consumers would give up instead of their smartphones. The results were quite compelling:
Time flies, the Apple App Store and Android google Play have now been around for 10 years, led to the creation to a combined 5 million apps so far and app usage will indeed keep on growing. Here are a few forecasts by Business of Apps:
- downloads will keep growing at an annual growth rate of about 8% to reach 325 billion in 2021
- time spent in apps will double between 2016 and 2021, to exceed 3 trillion hours worldwide
- in-app purchase will reach $139 billion in 2021, growing nearly 30% year over year
So because of all this — app marketing is now more important than ever. In fact, mobile marketing it is forecast to have one of the biggest impacts on marketing organisations by 2020
In an ever-changing environment what can we anticipate as the key trends that will shape App Marketing in the upcoming months?
- Artificial Intelligence
Let’s get AI out of the way because you’ve probably heard a lot about it.
As for every other sector, AI will play a big role to transform App Marketing. From marketing automation to complex predictive analytics algorithms, from personalised customer journey to enhanced customer services, and from automated multi-variants testing to AI-powered content generation, AI will soon affect every aspects of marketing
If this topic is of interest to you, I wrote a previous article here on how AI will change marketers’ lives for the better.
2. Consolidation of martech and adtech
If you’ve been reading about marketing over the last 2 years, you know that reconciling anonymous users (ad world) with known users (CRM world) has been a fantasy.
Especially tricky on mobile, due to specific tracking systems and unreliable technology such as fingerprinting, it seems that we are now on the edge of achieving a global view of customers.
With major announcements in 2018 from top players such as Salesforce (launching Salesforce Customer 360, creating a unique Customer ID across all platforms) and Adobe (buying Marketo for $4.75bn), it seems that everyone is trying to bridge the gap.
While some issues have not yet been overcome — such as the third-party tracking on iPhones — this will still enable more personalised, consistent and efficient customer journeys, across channels and departments.
3. Internet of Thing (IoT)
In an increasingly connected environment, mobile apps are soon going to be key to controlling your day-to-day life.
Gartner Experts expect the IoT — excluding PCs, tablets & smartphones — to reach 26 billion units by 2020 (compared to 7.3 billion units for PCs, tablets & smartphones). We can imagine that most of these devices will be controlled by your mobile phones, paving the way to new apps for developers and new opportunities for app marketers.
At the same time, voice has emerged as a key user interface and app marketers will need to integrate these experiences into their customer journey, alongside more traditional GUI experiences. I think a common example will be to integrate AI based assistants such as Siri.
4. Augmented Reality
A few weeks after we all discover that Magic Leap is real, and as both Apple and Google enable apps to be developed and launched with AR — it’s time to question ourselves on the use cases of AR for app marketing.
Before jumping into use cases, it is important to think about the consistency and relevancy in regards to the user journey. AR shouldn’t be implemented just because it is a new toy in the marketing toybox. While IKEA have already jumped into it, offering customers the ability to “test and try” their new furniture virtually in their home before purchasing it, experiences won’t be that obvious for all marketers.
5. Fraud detection & Transparency
It’s probably the most frustrating and time-consuming trend, because any customer journey, is still vulnerable to fraud.
Both acquisition and App Store optimisation suffer from fraud, especially by botnets. Allocating clicks and installs to the wrong source can lead you to reallocate budgets to fraudulent ad networks. Automated click hijacking is a common technique, deploying malwares to mobile devices and taking credit for all following organic installs — corrupting all path to install analysis.
On the other hand, users are asking for more transparency and security regarding their personal data, as lots of stories about hacks and leaks pop into the press every month. Advertisers will need to find a way to automate security checks without slowing down the user experience with an exhausting verification process.
These are just 5 of the disruptive trends facing the marketing industry today and the reality is there are many others we didn’t have time to mention. The rapid pace of digital technology development makes this a very exciting time to be a marketer but it is also challenging as consumer expectation is constantly changing.
The best thing marketers can do to stay ahead of the curve is to automate as much as possible when it comes to mundane daily tasks. That way, their time is freed up for creative thinking and innovating within their business.
