Why do you need to know about burst campaigns? As one of the most popular techniques for app marketing, their popularity has gone through the roof in the past few years. Developers who use them credit burst campaigns for elevating their app’s ranking in the app store by ensuring innumerable organic downloads.
Put simply, if you have just developed an app, and you want the world to know about it, and won’t mind if its installation rate rose beyond your wildest imaginations, there aren’t many techniques that will deliver better (and faster) results than burst campaigns.
What is a Burst Campaign?
In contrast to other marketing techniques, burst campaigns require app developers to spend their marketing budget over an extremely short period of time. An obvious advantage of this approach is that the app is exposed to the largest possible audience within a span of 24 to 48 hours.
Following are some of the other major benefits of the ‘burst’ marketing approach:
- Astronomical increase in app downloads (organic and inorganic)
- App gets prominent place under the ‘New Release’ menu in app stores
- Sharp growth in user-base within a matter of days
- Better visibility in search engine results
Burst Campaign FAQs
Q: How to do a burst campaign?
A: In plain English, a burst campaign is initiated by the marketer who sends a ‘’push notification’’ to the smartphones of target users. People who click on the notification are led to a unique landing page that explains the benefits of the app.
Here’s the key thing about these burst campaign ads: it will target only those users who have checked ‘app of the day’ notification on their smartphone. Those who haven’t won’t see the ad. So the reach of the ad would depend on the number of people who want to see ‘app of the day’ notifications.
Q: What is the best time to launch a burst campaign?
A: Having seen examples of successful burst campaigns, these three times are the best:
- New app launching: Provided you decide to launch a burst campaign right at the start of your app’s life, it would give your app a head-start over its competitors. Even if it doesn’t get a large number of organic downloads, you’d end up creating brand awareness.
- App isn’t getting new downloads: If you feel that things have gone off the rails for your app, a burst campaign can set the house back in order.
- During a holiday season: Most marketers worth their salt would tell you that holiday seasons are the best time for launching a marketing campaign. Users are looking to try out new things in these periods, and a burst campaign can nudge them towards downloading your app.
Q: What to avoid while launching a burst campaign:
A: Sidestep these pitfalls while initiating a burst campaign for promoting mobile apps:
- Do not use a single ad network: What would happen if you use a single ad network to launch your burst campaign? Apart from the low reach of your campaign, the probability that it would touch more unique visitors would be extremely low.
- Do not promote niche apps: Let’s assume the FIFA World Cup is going on and you launch an app about the same. What would happen once the World Cup has ended? Don’t launch burst campaigns for an app that is based around a time-bound event.
- Do not ignore analytics: Make sure your app has the appropriate analytics in place before you initiate a burst campaign. They would help you in determining the profile of users who might be installing the app, their preferences, and how they engage with your app. You can use this priceless data to fine-tune your future campaigns.
Q: How to increase the chances of success of your burst campaign
A: Here are three tips for a successful burst campaign for promoting mobile app:
- Know your targeted audience: Assuming that your app isn’t the next Twitter, it won’t have a mass audience. That’s why you should decide the type of users you want to target, and then tailor your ad according to their needs.
- Start small: Just because it is a burst campaign doesn’t mean you have to unleash it on the entire population of your country. If your app isn’t above-average, exposing it to the world might result in a wave of negative reviews. So start small, measure the results, make the required improvements and then go big.
- Know the algorithm of your app store: You might already know that Google Play Store’s ranking algorithm is different from that of the Apple App Store. That means that the same burst strategy will deliver different results in both. So you should tailor your burst campaign according to the ranking algorithm of the app store you are going to run it.
Q: How many downloads do I need as a result of a burst campaign for my app to rank high?
A: Remember, we are not talking about the number 1 rank here. Achieving it is extremely difficult and would require a budget that might not be in your range. Even if you have the budget, you should never wager it on the success of one campaign.
Having addressed that simple but crucial point, let’s turn our attention to the question. Provided you’re targeting a high rank for your app in the US, your burst campaign would need to provide your app with at least 120, inorganic downloads.
Conclusion
While it goes without saying that burst campaigns can give your newborn mobile app a head-start over its counterparts, they shouldn’t be the only tool in your app marketing arsenal. As stated earlier, you should use the data about your users you gained during the campaign to come up with a user-acquisition and user-retention strategy. Only then you could expect your app to dominate the chart for years to come.