It doesn't take an expert to assess that mobile app market is expanding in all directions. With new technologies, design approaches and cutting edge marketing techniques, mobile apps continue to remain While every other app is vying for a slice of this billion dollar market, remaining updated with the dominant and future trends of mobile app development and marketing will be crucial for the app publishers in the time to come. When considering future ready mobile app marketing strategies for developers, the below mentioned development and marketing trends could be important.
Pushing deep links of relevant contents
Push messages already play a vital role in communicating customers and users from time to time. Apps need to deliver marketing messages to share important information that users may find valuable and relevant for different contexts. Without sending messages that contain contextually relevant information for users the app may lose relevance and can lead to sharp decline in engagement and retention.
Deep links of contexts contained within the push notification messages can deliver users access to contents they need for a particular situation. Links allow users access valuable contents through just a short message. App developers in India and elsewhere in the world are now focused on making notification more personalised and user centric with feedback from device sensors and analytics.
In iOS platform, the spotlight search provided by the platform can also index content from the apps and this allows users are finding specific contents and pages in their respective apps without needing to use the app itself.
Creating user journey with chatbots
If you still consider mobile apps as just the more accessible mobile website version, you are still at a flaw in understanding the real nature and benefits of apps. Apps represent an entirely different type of digital interactive space that users find ready in hand to use anytime and anywhere. In this respect, developers need to focus on creating typical user journey to ensure quicker accessibility, interactive call to action, frictionless prompt usability.
From the perspective of mobile marketing, apps in the future should embrace technologies to ensure more effortless and automated interaction while maintaining human qualities and warmth in interactions. In this respect, we must remember how chatbots and conversational design emerged to guide users concerning app usage and business conversion.
In the time to come, chatbots will be more common in most business to customer apps as they can faultlessly guide a user towards the desired call to action and convert sales far better. They are more dependable as far as predictable outcomes of a conversation and user interaction are concerned. Moreover, chatbots can play an impressive role as an automated customer support system for retail and mobile commerce apps.
Games continue to dominate app market
As of now, no app niche has been as successful as mobile games. With the increasingly robust performance of mobile CPUs, powerful graphic capabilities, high definition display and easy remote game playing experience with a fast connection, mobile devices are now all set for playing all sorts of complex and technically demanding games. No wonder in the fact that mobile games which used to have a 50% share of the app market revenue in 2011 continued to grow and in 2015 could garner 85% of total app revenue.
According to a recent statistics from Flurry, mobile games account for 32% of usage time for users. Such impressive engagement for mobile games is not surprising considering the kind of immersive experience they offer for game players of all ages and preferences. So, the dominance of mobile game apps is clear and in the time to come there is no sign to stop this.
For mobile app marketers, mobile games will continue to remain as most lucrative niche. Marketing mobile games through featuring mini game playing experience which is already popular as playable ads will continue to remain popular for engaging game players with other games on offer.
Using social media to promote your app is already a traditional strategy, and social game playing came as a big contributor to mobile game marketing. Social gaming with attributes like point sharing, inviting friends to challenge, rewards for every new social friend downloading the game and integrating social promotions will continue to garner more downloads and retention figures.
Location will continue to be a key element
Location based marketing is already a key element of any digital marketing strategy. For mobile apps, location is a tremendously influential tool when they need to target audience based on a particular location. But contrary to popular belief location based marketing is not only important for retail business apps, but almost all niches of mobile apps are also benefited with user location data.
Knowing user location helps marketers delivering more customised, contextual, well timed and customer centric messages to ensure more traction and engagement. With notifications sent based on the user context and location, the messages have more probability to be attended. Location coupled up with the user context analysis by an array of factors can give birth to more precision driven and actionable location Intelligence.
A bunch of single feature apps
Many enterprises now prefer a bunch of single feature apps for different specific user needs instead of creating a bigger app with many features to address different users. Though this trend as of now has mainly been limited to mainly enterprise apps, in the time to come, we can expect other apps to follow this.
A single feature, quick to use the app can just work as a ready in hand tool and can gain more engagement from users who expressly need that particular feature. For instance, apps like Google Sheet or Google Docs which instead of combining two features within an app offer separate apps.
For mobile marketers instantly accessible, quick to launch, single feature apps will be more helpful to target a specific audience and explain the USP of the app. These apps relatively lighter in size and purposive can help dealing with challenges concerning loading time, performance, design and on boarding experience better.
