From downloads to delight: The art of content marketing for apps

In the pursuit of capturing and retaining the attention of a marketer’s target audience, content marketing has become well-known as a powerful strategy for a reason. Creating compelling content across organic platforms is an effective strategy to engage users, build brand loyalty, and drive sustainable growth for mobile apps.

By leveraging the art of storytelling, valuable information, and relevant experiences, you can elevate your mobile app marketing efforts to new heights.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Content marketing works because it aims to provide valuable information, solve problems, or entertain the audience, rather than directly promote an app.

Content marketing vs. social media marketing

While content marketing is often directly compared with social media marketing, social media content marketing is only one of the many channels used for this marketing strategy. Content marketing includes various formats like blog posts, videos, webinars, infographics, and podcasts across a range of channels like websites, social media platforms, email, and apps.

The main goal of content marketing is to build trust, establish credibility, and ultimately drive profitable user actions. Content marketing attracts potential customers by connecting with a target audience on a deeper level through valuable and engaging content.

Benefits of content marketing

With content marketing, apps can benefit from:

• Drastically boosted organic search rankings.
• Improved user acquisition (UA).
• Increased user engagement and retention.
• Establishment as a thought leader.
• Differentiation from the competition.
• Strengthened brand awareness and credibility.

Content marketing plays a crucial role throughout the entire digital marketing sales funnel.

1. Top-of-funnel content grows awareness and establishes credibility.
2. Middle-of-funnel content encourages consideration and builds a deeper connection with potential users.
3. Bottom-of-funnel content encourages the decision-making process.

Search engine optimization (SEO) content marketing is a sustainable long-term strategy that aligns with search engine algorithms and establishes your brand's authority. Tactical SEO enhances your organic visibility and drives targeted traffic to your website.

The foundation of seo content marketing is keyword research. This step can be accomplished using SEO tools like SEMrush, Screaming Frog, and Google Search Console. These keywords can then be used to create content that answers search queries, as well as optimize existing pages with relevant keywords. SEO content can include both copywriting and visual content, which we’ll delve into below.

SEO content marketing’s purpose is to own the conversations around your app so that users (or potential users) are not going elsewhere for answers. Here are a few examples of search queries about popular apps.

These apps have the opportunity to answer these questions on their respective websites. Owning these queries brings potential users into your funnel, where you can lead them through a journey to install. It also creates an opportunity to improve the retention of existing users.

Both written and visual content marketing formats can be used across a variety of platforms.

Website content marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing go hand in hand.

Your website is the ultimate place to cover your content bases without the character count limitations of other digital platforms. Examples of components of a website that can be leveraged by app marketers for a cohesive content strategy include:

• Home page
• Resources/FAQ section
• Campaign landing pages
• Blog

Blogging and content marketing

Sometimes under-estimated in the mobile app marketing industry, blogging remains a fundamental pillar of content marketing. Once thought of as a personal online journal, blogging has since transformed into a trusted source of information. A content marketing blog offers a platform to establish thought leadership and engage with your target audience.

Blogging can help to build trust, attract organic traffic, and nurture leads, positioning your brand as a go-to resource in your industry.

An effective inbound marketing content strategy revolves around attracting, converting, and delighting users throughout all stages of their journey. Each stage of deciding how to distribute this content should be approached thoughtfully and strategically.

1. Gain a deep understanding of your target audience.

Understand your app's target audience, and the various segments that make up this audience. What are their interests? Where do they spend their time online? This information will help in selecting the most relevant distribution channels. Hot tip: Adjust’s Audience Builder helps with this step!

2. Clearly define your objectives and KPIs.

Outline what you wish to achieve with your content distribution. Is it increasing app installs? Improving user engagement? Or driving brand awareness? You will likely have a combination of these objectives and corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs), which will help you identify which content formats and channels to use at various stages of your content marketing funnel.

3. Focus on building high-quality content first.

Develop engaging, valuable, and relevant content that resonates with the target audience and aligns with your objectives.

4. Curate a relevant mix of distribution channels.

Now that you have your content, you know who it’s targeting, and what you want to achieve, you can select a diverse mix of marketing channels where you can reach various segments of your audience.

5. Optimize content for each channel.

Tailor the content for each distribution channel to ensure it fits the platform's format, audience, and tone. This may involve resizing images, adapting video formats, and crafting platform-specific copy.

6. Develop a content calendar.

Outline the timing and frequency of content distribution. Consistency is essential to keep the audience engaged and build trust. Analytics from your first few rounds of distribution should help you create a strategic schedule that’s best suited to your audience.

Evergreen content can be planned well in advance, but bear in mind that topical and trend-based content should be implemented in a timely manner, and that search volumes for SEO keywords may have peaks and valleys depending on the time of year.

7. Engage with your audience.

Be responsive to comments, messages, and mentions across platforms. Engaging with the audience fosters a sense of community and encourages more interaction with the content.

Content marketing measurement is the most critical step in any content strategy. To begin measuring your content marketing, clearly outline which stage of the funnel each piece of content was created for. This will allow you to directly compare its performance against your pre-determined KPIs.

Then, consider any other notable secondary metrics that you may not have anticipated, as some content may perform better for a different stage of the funnel than you originally intended. This is important when considering how to refine your content distribution strategy.

You’ll also want to find a mobile measurement partner (MMP) like Adjust who will provide a unified dashboard for your analytics. Measuring content marketing effectiveness requires gathering and analyzing data from multiple sources such as web analytics, social media platforms, SEO tools, and more.

The task can become overwhelming and time-consuming, making it challenging to obtain a clear, comprehensive view of your marketing performance. However, a unified dashboard like Adjust's Datascape simplifies the process and offers a streamlined view of the impact of your content marketing efforts on app installs and in-app events.

By integrating data from various channels into a single platform, Datascape de-clutters the analytics view, allowing marketers to access real-time, unbiased insights in one place. This not only saves time but also facilitates easier cross-channel analysis, enabling marketers to identify trends, patterns, and correlations more effectively.

Content marketing remains an indispensable tool for mobile app marketers seeking to forge meaningful connections with their audience and drive business growth. By embracing the ever-evolving landscape of content marketing trends and staying agile in adapting to audience preferences app marketers can unlock the full potential of their content efforts.

Learn more about Adjust’s suite of products as well as our technology partners, or chat with the team. We’re here to help give you the support you need in building your content marketing strategy from the ground up.