Five Mobile Marketing Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make Before Launch, and the Huge One They Make After

If You’re an Entrepreneur, Chances Are You’re Going to Make a Ton of Mobile Marketing Mistakes. Watch out for These Five.

We’re all well aware of the small percentage of mobile startups that actually make it big. There are so many focal points where companies stumble and fall, ultimately leading to their demise. After more than 2 years of running my mobile marketing agency, meeting dozens of mobile entrepreneurs, and encountering hundreds of apps, I have a pretty good idea of what these focal points are.

In this post, I list the most common mistakes made by mobile entrepreneurs before and after their app’s launch, and what can be done in order to avoid their mistakes. Let’s get started.

BEFORE You Develop, Find Out: Is There a Need?

Entrepreneurs are excited, enthusiastic, passionate. These are great traits, but they’re also dangerous. Sometimes, when entrepreneurs get too excited, they become blinded to some serious issues with their product, with the biggest one being – there isn’t an actual need for it. A product can be well-executed, polished, and bug-free, yet still, people won’t make any use of it because it doesn’t answer a need that they have.

The nice thing about digital products, is that entrepreneurs can actually check whether or not potential users are interested in the product they’d like to develop, without spending big bucks on the process. This can be done in several ways, with the most common being a media campaign that leads potential users to a landing page with a call to action. That call to action aims to indicate whether or not they’d be interested in a certain product if it were to exist (e.g. give their email to get updated once the product is launched).

Think You Know Your Target Audience?  

In my career I’ve stumbled upon numerous cases where entrepreneurs have come to me with a final idea of who their target audience was. We then proceeded into a test campaign, only to find out their target audience wasn’t optimal. In worse cases, entrepreneurs don’t think about conducting a test campaign and continue spending money on targeting the wrong chunk of the market. For this reason, I perceive test campaigns as an inseparable part of any mobile advertising strategy and a key indicator for a product’s specific, revenue-generating target audience.

Are You Transmitting an Effective Message?

When you hit the market, you should have a message that’s thought out and refined. That message should help you reach users and advance your business objectives. This is where A/B testing comes in, you never know how your audience will react to your message – you can assume, but the result will always surprise you to a certain extent. I always recommend to clients to zero in on three to five options for both their messaging and creative materials. After the decision has been made we go ahead and test our materials to spot the optimal version.  Many times we find that different messages work on different user segments.

Are You Being Too Aggressive?

Speaking of a message, part of your message and overall brand identity is how you interact with users within your app. For this reason, the “when” and “how” of permission requests is extremely important. The common mistake developers make with requests is that they bombard the user upon installing the app. This is very overwhelming for users and will have them running for the hills in no time.

The correct way to go about this is to introduce requests only when they’re vital to the app’s functionality, while explaining why you need them and what the user is getting out of it in return. For example, if you have an app that allows users to search for restaurants nearby, don’t present the location permission request right when the user downloads the app, but rather, when they’re actually trying to look for a restaurant. The notification should state that the app requires that the user shares their location in order to perform his or her desired search.

Do You Really Understand your Campaign Results?

This is a sentence I tend to repeat over and over again – don’t focus on the Cost per install too much. It’s pretty much just a shame, since data is one of the biggest luxury mobile provides to marketers, yet most marketers focus only on the top of the funnel (or tip of the iceberg if you wish) which is installs as only 23% of downloads actually convert to users it’s much more important to track what users are doing after they install your app. By implementing in-app revenue generating events, marketers are able to receive an immediate indication of how an audience responded to a campaign. Being aware of the deep results is the best information you can use to optimize towards the metrics that make sense to your business.

The unfortunate truth is, that most mobile app startups fail (according to recent numbers from Google, %80 of apps are never downloaded and %95 of apps are abandoned within a month), however the payoff for those who succeed is well worth it. Asking yourself the questions above can help you lead your app business in the right direction and avoid costly mistakes in the early stages.

Good luck!  

Gilad Bechar

Gilad Bechar is the Founder & CEO of Moburst. Gilad serves as a mentor to rising startups at Microsoft Accelerator, The Technion, Tel-Aviv University, Unit 8200 and for strategic Moburst clients, and is the Academic Director of the Mobile Marketing and New-Media course at Tel-Aviv University.