Five things that mobile application developers need to know about cross-marketing

The creation and promotion of mobile applications is becoming increasingly difficult, as competition intensifies, and the costs of development and advertising are constantly increasing. Developers who sell applications in Russia need to focus on keeping old ones and attracting new users to their projects and applications.

1. What is cross-marketing and why is it needed?

Despite the fact that ad networks are one of the most important channels for acquiring users in a mobile, there are several free ways available that can help show the application to new users. Typically, the operation of these services is that they allow developers to share users (downloads) with each other.

But, besides this, it makes sense to pay attention to potential partners who offer related products. Offer the user a successful solution to his problem, the most relevant at a particular moment, and you will immediately feel a great benefit from co-branding and cross-marketing. As, for example, this is done in the Aeroflot application. A user who arrives in a foreign city is offered to order a taxi of a specific company by the time they leave the airport.

Regardless of whether we consider cross-marketing within the framework of mobile applications or not, cross-marketing means combining the efforts of several companies to achieve common goals. Cross-promotion involves the practice of introducing such a mechanism by which applications will promote each other for their audience. This is a great way to advertise for free, which is great for a limited budget.
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Despite the fact that developers do not exchange any real currency, they still get their benefit - they increase the number of downloads of applications, which is also comparable to one of the forms of currency. Whatever you choose - the exchange of impressions, clicks, downloads or sales - the same principle will be used everywhere: you - me, I - you. It should be remembered that the key value of successful co-marketing lies in properly assessing the capabilities of a partner and its own assets.

2. What are the benefits of cross marketing?

Cross-marketing has several advantages, and one of the most relevant today is the ability to expand the functionality of your application or advertise in someone else's application absolutely free. New users come through partner channels, which allows increasing the coverage and positively influences the rating of the application.

Cross promotion in mobile is becoming more and more interesting for any companies that have their own application or adaptive version of the site. There are many platforms that allow you to use this channel for promotion. Applications such as AppFlood and Appnext offer functionality for advertisers and data processing. Chartboost offers great opportunities for advertising in third-party mobile games.

The Russian “Wallet” also demonstrates a high interest of users to the catalogs of companies based on the application. The mobile platform allows advertisers to post information about their loyalty programs, which is one of the ways to attract new customers.

The famous messenger Viber announced the creation of a full-fledged trading platform on the application platform. Users will have access to the new functionality - it will be possible to book a table in a restaurant, select the product of interest or buy a ticket to the concert. Naturally, for many companies, participation in such a project will be an additional step to attract customers. After all, it is much easier to start cooperation with a well-known well-known application, instead of trying to achieve the same popularity on our own.

At the peak of its popularity, the Foursquare app held joint promotions with stores and shopping and entertainment centers. So, for a check in the application, you could get a bag of green tea in the “Ozcia” store chain. And in the shopping center "MEGA" for the same actions, users were handed out Christmas balls as a gift. Such stimulation of user activity was only for the benefit of Foursquare. What did the partner companies get in return? Knowing about the popularity of the application, they received additional advertising and loyal customers who distributed information about participation in the campaign not only in a specific application, but also in social networks.

3. What formats does cross-promotion include?

To implement a cross-marketing project through applications, there are many ways.

A. Organization of direct deals with other developers. Offer your application as a channel for organizing traffic to the partner's application. In return, you will receive new traffic from the affiliate application. The main thing is to properly configure the mechanism for tracking new traffic.

B. Use of special services for the implementation of advertising in the application. The world-famous InMobi affiliate advertising network allows you to create your own ads and run them in other applications. To find partners, you can also use the Russian-language platform of the Association of Co-Marketing of Russia. The portal contains proposals from organizations of various fields of activity and directions for creating joint projects, including those based on mobile applications.

C. Use your own advertising service to attract partners for cross-promotion.

4. How to make cross promotion effective?

Any advertising guarantees a return if the project is properly planned and clearly falls into the target audience. When the developer has already released a series of games, he knows perfectly well who its users are and for what they like specific games or applications. Cross-marketing allows you to expand your audience by attracting users of other applications - similar, but not competing.

5. What to look for?

When organizing cross-promotion, you should analyze the sections of the application again in terms of payback. Positions where ads work well may have a higher CPM. The same applies to the display of advertising to users with a premium account.

It is worth remembering that barter projects must be constantly monitored to avoid bias in the direction of return in comparison with the result. For a full assessment it is worth preparing for a thorough analysis of the data, optimization of the funnel and a large amount of testing.

As in the offline version of cross-marketing, you need to make sure that the audience is exchanged with a non-competitive company. Also, before starting a collaboration, read the history of the company and its reviews.