Marketing Mobile & Seasonality: How to adapt your marketing campaigns ?

In mobile marketing, seasonality matters: it determines a large part of your budget share-out. Therefore it is really important to adapt its acquisition to the use and the consumption periods. Most of the apps will undergo a seasonal phenomenon. Thus, seasonality can be a real sales argument: you’ll have to adapt and offer a new range of your acquisition and marketing contents for the indisputably big events of the year, which represent the greatest consumption periods for your users. 1. Sweet Merry Christmas Christmas is a usual period to offer (or receive) a new cell phone. And who says getting a new device, knows it will be leading to apps downloading. It is critical for apps to climb in the Top Rankings (main source of new app research) before Christmas, and to keep this pace until the 27th of December. You must also notice that rankings in the App Store are frozen from the Saturday preceding Christmas until the next Saturday. Therefore you should get a high rank early enough on iOS, allowing you to improve profits on this period.  It is then important to have an important and dedicated marketing budget starting from December to the end of the month. Another tip we can give you is: give a whole new range of graphic contents (interface & design) to your app through a “Special Christmas” edition, in order to feel the celebration’s tone. 2. Sales time : a real opportunity As a matter of fact, setting up promotional offers before every sales periods is an effective way to attract new customers. Brand-based apps, such as m-commerce and retailers, will see their traffic raise, with a sale peak during this time. Advertisers, in order to increase their traffic, might choose to create special contents illustrating “exceptional” discounts. In the US, the well-known Black Friday (the 3rd Friday of November, following Thanksgiving) is a public holiday propitious to consumption. The announcers controlling an app must absolutely anticipate this day in order to allocate a proper marketing budget, and not only in the US: this trend has seen a real development in Europe. 3. Holidays : peak time for travel apps Travel apps answers mostly to a user’s immediate need (“I’m taking the train, I’m downloading a train app”). It is consequently critical on this field to contextualize its communication strategy by anticipating the biggest holidays of the year (school holidays, seasonal breaks such as summer holidays but also extended week-ends). Another noticeable event we encountered during our research is: it is known that gaming apps recognize a usage peak in Europe during the summer period. July and August are some of the key months to spend money on media buying in this sector, especially as CPIs (cost per install) are lowering in Europe. Finally, photo apps also recognize a downloading peak after holiday’s periods. Nevertheless we should notice that the seasonality of these downloading enhancement is somehow different from a continent to another. As an example, in the US, the downloading of travel apps are usually made from November to January, for Thanksgiving and Winter break. In Asia we acknowledge a rise of the apps downloads through September and November, mostly linked to the Chinese New Year. 4. Take every opportunities: sports events, week-ends, … Sports and massively broadcasted events offer real opportunities for an effective communication. The Europe Football Cup, for example, is an event that will allow many advertisers to use this contest’s fame to sell their products. You also shouldn’t neglect the “evergreens” that are : the start of the school year, mother & father’s day, Valentine’s Day and so on. However you must be careful, these days differ from one country to another. Valentine’s Day, known to be celebrated on February the 14th worldwide, will be celebrated on June 12th in Brazil. Another noticeable pattern is that the entertainment apps (media/gaming/dating) will know a stronger use on week-ends. This trend can also be seen on downloads stats; increasing the marketing budget on Saturdays and Sundays can thus be interesting. Conclusion: You got it now: key time periods exist for your mobile marketing campaigns. Taking advantage of this seasonality, in order to plan specific acquisition strategies on mobile apps, will allow advertisers to reach a higher traffic but also a better user’s conversion rate.