How to Use the Power of Influencer Marketing to Promote Your Mobile App

For many people, the Internet has become an alternative to personal communication. People do everything online: communicate, shop, search for information, etc. At first glance, they seem to get everything they need from the World Wide Web. But in practice, many feel a lack of personal communication. This duality has given modern companies an idea to implement a new approach to attracting target audiences – interaction with influencers.

Influencers are people who are considered experts in a particular topic or are simply influential among the masses. They have the strongest influence on millennials and Generation Z. 

Work with influencers has a separate branch in marketing called influencer marketing – promotion of a product through the interaction of a brand with an influencer. The most popular influencer marketing channels are YouTube and Instagram. 

Influencer marketing is more delicate and less intrusive than traditional advertising. Influencers do not persuade their audience to buy a certain product – they rather recommend it from their personal experience. Thus, modern companies often appeal to the trust and favor of potential consumers to certain people and cooperate with influencers. 

There are the following key types of influencers:

• Networker – has a large number of contacts and connections.
• Opinion leader – has authority, understands their niche, has an influence on group members.
• Discoverer – versed in new products, constantly in trend, looking for new niches for work.
• Social media influencer – makes regular posts about a specific topic that they have expertise in on their preferred social media channels and generates followers.
• Sharer – is engaged in sharing information on various channels.
• User – works with average brands.

They are also divided by the number of subscribers:

• Macro – over 1 million.
• Mid – between 100,000 and a million.
• Micro – between 5,000 and 100,000.

At the same time, the quality of promotion is impacted not only by the number of subscribers but also by the involvement and loyalty of the audience.

Benefits of Mobile App Influencer Marketing

Mobile app marketers can use the power of opinion leaders to promote their apps. Here are the advantages that your brand can get with app influencer marketing:

• With this type of marketing, you can promote literally any type of app. There are no limits – all you have to do is choose a popular influencer with a large base of followers and implement a campaign.
• Influencer marketing is perfect for small businesses. Previously, only big businesses could afford to attract large influencers in advertising. The reason is simple: they were only very famous people (actors, musicians, politicians), whose riders included impressive amounts. But today, even a small company can come to an agreement with a local blogger.
• You get an opportunity to increase direct sales. In an advertising post or video description, the influencer leaves a link to an app that they promote, providing a direct traffic stream. Confidence in a particular opinion leader boosts conversion as compared to traditional user acquisition methods. Statistics show that 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations.
• You get closer to your target audience. Collaboration with popular influencers teaches the brand to speak the language of its audience. For example, according to statistics, 70% of teenagers trust YouTube influencers more than traditional celebrities.

As a result, influencer marketing can fulfill a huge list of company goals:

• Increase brand awareness of the target audience.
• Improve SEO and ASO due to backlinks.
• Demonstrate new and unusual ways to use the product.
• Increase sales.

App Influencer Marketing Strategies

Choosing the right strategy is one of the key success factors for your app influencer marketing campaign. You can use one or several of the following strategies:

Giving away personalized discount codes and links

An influencer offers a personal discount code or download link that their subscribers can use to purchase your app or unlock its premium version. Postmates food delivery app partnered with influencer Nicole Cogan who promotes gluten-free food. Nicole posted a photo of gluten-free food that she had ordered through the app and offered her followers a discount code to get a $10 delivery credit. Another example is Audible, Amazon’s app offering audiobooks, which collaborated with the New York Times bestselling author and investor Tim Ferriss. During his podcast, Tim gave a short spot about his partnership with Audible and directed users to his custom URL. By following the link, the users could get a free ebook and see a list of Tim’s favorite books.

Expanding the target audience

An influencer that does not belong to the app’s key target audience shows their followers that the app can be used for other purposes as well. For instance, Bumble dating app collaborated with Caroline Receveur, a social media influencer. Caroline showed her subscribers that she used the app not only for dating but also for meeting new friends in a foreign city or networking. As a result, the app got a chance to expand its target audience with people not necessarily looking for romantic relationships.

Source: instagram.com/carolinereceveur/

Using deep links

An influencer embeds deep links into their social media posts. By clicking (swiping) those links, a user can navigate to a specific section of the app. SeatGeek, a ticket selling app, partnered with Instagram influencer Alex Morgan who used deep linking in her Instagram stories, offering a personalized discount of $20 on tickets booked via SeatGeek. By swiping up, the users could open the SeatGeek app from the app store with the code already entered so they can directly order tickets with the discount from Alex Morgan.

App Influencer Marketing Risks

Along with undeniable advantages, influencer marketing carries certain risks, specifically:

• Fake influencers. These are influencers whose followers are mostly not real people but bots purchased to increase the number of subscribers. Collaboration with such influencers can negatively impact your ROI and even damage your brand’s reputation. To spot a fake influencer, it’s enough to go through a list of their followers. If most of them have no profile photos or posts – these are not real accounts. It’s also a good idea to look through the comments. If they sound unnatural, then it’s very likely that you’re dealing with a fake influencer. However, with the rise of AI technologies, specifically, “deep fake”, it may become very hard to identify if the person is real, in the nearest future.
• Choosing the wrong influencer. A study by CMSWire shows that 61% of marketers find it difficult to identify the right influencers for their campaigns. It’s important to choose a person who aligns with your brand and can speak to your target audience on your behalf. However, it may take you quite a long time to find such a person.
• It may be difficult to track the influencer marketing-related metrics. According to Media Kix, it can be because the brand sentiment and brand lift are difficult to quantify. Besides, Instagram in-feed posts are difficult to measure because Instagram post captions do not allow linked CTAs. Additionally, some bloggers can pretend to collaborate with certain brands and this can confuse other brands. In such cases, the brand analyzes the account, concludes that there is a demand for advertising of this blogger, orders advertising from them, and does not receive any return from this campaign. Finally, you may partner with an influencer who was publishing successful content in the past but fails to produce efficient content for your business in the present.

But the good news is that you can avoid those risks. Here are some tips and tricks:

• Choose the right influencer for your brand. At this stage, it is important to understand the portrait of your perfect user and not to forget about the features of local markets where the product will be advertised. Do not overpay for the names of top bloggers, because millions of reaches do not guarantee getting into the target audience. In addition, keep in mind that the conversion in response to the first contact with the blogger is close to zero. 
• Be as specific as possible. Be restrained in creativity and specific in restrictions – formulate your message clearly and distinctly. For example, with YouTube influencer marketing, the shorter the integration in the video, the better the results (recommended length is between 30 and 60 seconds). Indicate direct motivation for the audience – for example, an attractive bonus for new users.
• Consider technical details. Be prepared for technical difficulties on the side of the influencer. Carefully check the correctness of links and quickly respond to changes. Besides, do not forget about the time zone differences if you work with multiple regions at the same time.
• Choose the metrics to track. Decide beforehand which metric will become the key one, and make both optimistic and pessimistic forecasts. When forecasting, it is best to focus on the median by views. The second option is to rely on the minimum and maximum values. Before starting the main campaign, we recommend making a “test drive.” It will allow you to get a clearer picture of the real cost of user acquisition and predict the final metrics (CR, CPI, ROI). And remember that, like any new tool, opinion leaders are a complex source that can only be learned through testing and experimenting.

We also recommend trying out GetSocial Smart Links for tracking the performance of influencer marketing campaigns. Smart links help measure which of your power players or (micro) influencers are making an impact on the growth and optimize your campaigns accordingly. Here’s how they work: 

Wrapping Up

If used correctly, influencer marketing can become a valuable tool for the promotion of your app. We hope that our tips have given you a better idea of app influencer marketing and how to get the most out of it for your business. Good luck!