The Key to Succeeding with Your Mobile Marketing? Be Boring
What does it take to make it in mobile? Thinking big? Being sensational? Not necessarily. Sometimes being boring might just lead you to the results you’re after. By the word “boring” I don’t mean “simple”. Simplicity has been widely discussed in the mobile marketing arena for a few years now with experts to the likes of Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup) suggesting mobile apps should be created around a single idea and enable users to perform one task in the best way possible. However, when I say “boring” I mean sticking to familiar templates and not obsessing over innovation. 
Listed below are “boring” tasks and templates mobile marketers can follow to achieve true mobile success. Get into the ASO Grit App Store Optimization (ASO) is one of the most boring, straightforward techniques you can implement to boost your app. Good ASO is achieved by daily optimization and A/B testing, which frankly does not require too much creativity or innovation. Daily ASO maintenance entails the following:
- Link building: reaching out to bloggers, leaving comments on forum threads, and pursuing anything that’ll get a link to your app featured in an online publication
- Keeping up with competitors: how often they release app updates, make changes in their app description, keywords, category, etc.
- A/B testing: testing different creative materials on a weekly basis
- Taking note from user reviews: learning from negative reviews and making appropriate changes in the product to prevent future ones, as well as responding to both positive and negative reviews in order to create engagement on the app page
Although being an ASO professional requires a certain level of expertise, once you achieve it, daily maintenance activity is a bit, well, boring. However, these “boring” tasks are those that lead to great results – a significant boost in the app’s ranking and as a result, a boost in organic downloads. Stick to Familiar Templates When it comes to the app itself, sometimes being boring is what’s going to save you from losing users. There are certain focal points in the app’s flow where users often feel like their security or privacy are being violated and decide to ditch the app. Such focal points include the sign-up or registration stage, the social connect, and mobile payments. Sticking to familiar templates in such cases can boost your app’s credibility and make users feel that they’re in good hands, thus easing them into the process.
Another sector where it’s better for app developers to stick to the ordinary is gestures. Double tap, swiping right, or dragging down are already second nature to users. More and more apps use the same gestures in order to offer users an interface that’s intuitive and friendly. Therefore, being innovative when it comes to gestures can actually be extremely negative since creating new habits in users is nearly impossible. Boringly Creative Or Creatively Boring? Creative materials in the mobile marketing space are a bit restricting. The mission for copywriting is to grab the user’s attention while still presenting precise information and remaining within the realms of the text limitations. Unfortunately it’s impossible to tell the full story of an app in one sentence and while it does require creativity to come up with words to include in that sentence, the ads that usually work are those of the same template – a question and/or a call to action. Breaking away from such template almost always doesn’t guarantee a successful campaign. When it comes to creative visuals, it’s also better to keep it boring. We’ve actually learnt an extremely valuable lesson here at Moburst, from running A/B testings for one of our clients. The test included one version of an ad that featured collage of photos and one that included a single photo. The ad that included only a single photo yielded much better results suggesting that boring images are better for mobile marketing.
The term “mobile marketing strategy” sounds so big and complex, but it’s interesting to see that when we zero in on certain techniques we find out that the straightforward ones are those that achieve valuable results.
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