In the last year and a half, influencer marketing for app promotion has transitioned from a trending topic to a must-have performance marketing channel. The early adopters have been tinkering, and the results indicate there are a lot of opportunities. A CivicScience study found that among daily social media users, 23% to 34% of users had been influenced to make a purchase by an influencer on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube or Facebook.
As time spent on mobile and social media sites has been consistently increasing year over year, it has made its way into performance marketing and app promotion. Loeading app marketers have figured out how to make this new channel work to promote their apps, so we asked the Mobile Masterminds to share their current influencer marketing strategies. Check out their insights below.
The Mobile Masterminds’ Influencer Marketing Strategies
Marta Masachs Gonzalez, 21 Buttons
“Instagram stories have transformed the influencer landscape. The candid snapshots into daily life give an intimate window into the trials and triumphs of an influencer, and makes it possible for followers to become “friends”, with a dash of idealization.
21 Buttons is in essence, a fashion app, so influencer promoted user acquisition has been an extremely effective and natural channel for us. Our influencer strategy is focused on the actual users of our app, which makes it possible for our influencers to recommend the app in very authentic ways. As each influencer is unique, we have to work hard to avoid falling into boring and repetitive advertising. We are always looking for new and personalized formulas for each influencer to foster authentic strategies. But we have also had to keep in mind that in some countries, the influencer market is still very much in development and that it is important to be flexible and patient.” -Marta Masachs Gonzalez, Head of Growth at 21 Buttons.
Rocío Pérez, Liligo
“Working with influencers I’ve seen that it is important to pay attention to the type of campaign you are running and recognize that you can’t simply trust your tracking URLs for all types of campaigns. For campaigns with non-incentivized tracking links, for example, even though influencers ask their audiences to download and use a specific link, followers don’t always come to your app as you would expect.
We were able to spot this phenomenon last year during the Christmas season when we sponsored a Youtuber contest. To participate, followers needed to download the Liligo app, type in their dream travel destination, and make an Instagram story with a screenshot of our app and our hashtag. As a reward, we gave the winner 2 flight tickets to the destination they mentioned in their story.
During the day of the contest, we saw an uplift in installs of 30% but many appeared to be coming through organic channels. If we had relied on only the tracking link we would have missed a large percentage of the impact the contest had. We were able to spot the misattributed installs because we were measuring the organic impact and we were not running multiple promotions at once. But the experience showed us just how much influencer-driven installs can leak into organics when you are working with campaigns that do not incentivize users to interact with a tracking link or discount code.”-Rocío Pérez, Acquisition Manager at Liligo.
Anna Juan Sala, Scoot
“Our current strategy at Scoot uses a performance-based influencer strategy not just for brand awareness and acquisition, but for content creation as well. It’s been a great way to produce very natural and spontaneous content that gets high engagement on Social Media platforms. Of course, finding influencers who can reach our target audience and who can create compelling content makes it even more difficult to find the right influencer match.
What has worked really well for me has been to look for influencers among our existing user base. Partnering with people who already voluntarily use our product has enabled our influencers to create more trustworthy content. Even though it can seem counterintuitive, it’s more effective to choose an influencer that connects with your product and brand values, rather than chasing influencers with lots of followers. “- Anna Juan Sala, Marketing Manager at Scoot Networks.
David Cremades, From The Bench S.L
“At From the Bench, we’ve been working with influencers for the past 3 years and had a lot of successful campaigns. Although we have worked with some influencers directly, we are currently using an agency and marketplaces (shout out to Famebit.com). It is admittedly more expensive but dealing with influencers is not an easy task, and it has been overall cost-effective to outsource some of the work.
Sam McLellan, Yousician
“Currently influencers play a dual role in our growth strategy: acting as an acquisition channel, but also as potential content producers in our app as well. This approach has allowed us to partner up with some of the larger music education influencers in more complex promotions as we can look to share each other’s platforms rather than simply buy some mentions on one of them. It’s a great two-way street in which we can provide an easy way for influencers to teach their audience new songs using our platform while we can use their platform to show off how easy it is to learn new songs or tricks on a guitar or piano.
Finding influencers to partner with is relatively easy for the music education space as there are multiple sites out there with large music communities (YouTube, SoundCloud, even our old friend MySpace). As with any influencer campaigns, fully tracking everything can be a bit of a challenge, but, in our case, we can use a combination of MMP links and promo codes + in-app interactions with influencer content to get a full picture.”- Sam McLellan, Head of Growth at Yousician.
Michael Jessen, eCooltra
“We have tried various tactics to increase our acquisition through influencers. Because we are a service-based only in cities, it is hard to find influencers that have big audiences located in the specific cities we need. Therefore what we found works best is to focus on micro-influencers (up to 10K followers). It’s much more cost-effective and gives us the local look, feel, and audience that global influencers were lacking. We track our influencer efforts with specific promotional codes generated for each one and track the performance through our mobile attribution tracker, Appsflyer. “– Michael Jessen, Mobile Marketing Manager at eCooltra.
Lorenzo Rossi, Free2Move
“Performance influencer marketing can be a very powerful channel. When the content is well done and the audience is targeted with a micro-influencer approach, it can be really authentic, and attract valuable users from multiple platforms (Youtube, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc.). I’ve built several different influencer strategies for very different apps, and every strategy has been different. However, there are a few things that are good to keep in mind, regardless of the app you are working with.
1. Working with multiple small influencers, rather than one big one, might mean more work (because of the time and resources spent managing multiple relationships) but the improved targeting is often worth it (run tests!).
2. Often times, young/smaller YouTubers are better for performance influencer marketing because they are willing to work on a pay-per-install basis. While bigger influencers that are managed by agencies often charge per post or follower size. Above all, run tests, to find out where your target audience is most active, and find the right influencer to reach them cost-effectively.
3. Special promos and giveaways can be a great way to make your audience feel special and increase response rates. Just be sure to give your influencer a unique tracking link from your MMP, watch for organic uplift (people might search for your product after seeing the content but might not do it through your link) and whenever possible use a unique promo code for each influencer, at track how many users redeemed it the code.” – Lorenzo Rossi, Head of Marketing at Free2Move.
