• by Sisi Todorova , Columnist, July 13, 2018

When implemented within a holistic marketing strategy, burst campaigns can catapult an app to the top of the charts and have a significant impact on user base growth and brand awareness. With more than 5.8 million apps in Google Play and Apple App Stores, marketers face tough competition, and visibility is key. Burst campaigns can be a golden ticket to those coveted top positions in the charts.

Here are five best practices to consider when running burst campaigns for your mobile app:

1. Utilize the new app store layouts to engage organize users

Gaming and non-gaming apps are now split into different categories in Google Play and Apple Store. This improves app visibility, as it reduces the apps you’re competing against. The new layouts of the top charts now offer you the opportunity to better engage the organic users that the burst campaign will bring to your app through category features.

2. Test in a smaller market before going global

Running a burst campaign in a smaller market is a great way to test stickiness and user behavior before reaching your main market. Bursts are also a great way to collect user insights and test your monetization mechanism on a smaller scale before going wide.

3. Make it a multi-channel campaign

A multi-channel approach will drive greater reach to a diverse set of users, so time your bursts with TV, social influencer or video campaigns. This can increase your organic uplift (in certain cases up to 10 times) and sustain your organic users for a longer period of time. To prepare for a burst campaign, engage more actively in App Store optimization (ASO) at least three months in advance in order to ensure that your app is ready to be exposed to a bigger audience.

4. Match traffic to your vertical

Different traffic sources yield different results for each app vertical. Ensure that your burst campaign uses traffic that is best suited for your app category, or you could end up acquiring a high volume of users that aren’t your core audience and don’t convert as well.

5. Consider more than one burst to reach your goal

If you run more than one burst campaign, consider that they typically run 3-5 days for iOS and 7-14 days for Android. You should space 1-2 months between consecutive bursts to ensure campaign success and avoid market saturation.

Conclusion

Successful burst campaigns depend on multiple factors, such as app size, app quality and rating, level of market competition, user interaction, monetization method, and timing. Ultimately, burst campaigns involve a personalized strategy that can spur the growth of a newly launched app, or rejuvenate the user base of an existing one to prolong its life cycle. While it’s important to take a customized approach, the key best practices shared here can be universally applied by all marketers planning their next burst campaign.