Mobile App Marketing Budget – Plan It The Right Way

Developing a mobile app can be a challenging and exciting journey. Whether you are developing an app for an E-commerce store, LMS, or any other type of business, there will be involvement of a lot of costs. Generally, the app development process starts with pre-launch expense planning and continues until post-launch expenses. And the job is not over even after a successful app development, not until the world knows about it.

A lot of funding goes into the app marketing strategy department. With nearly 55.68% of web traffic originating from mobile devices (with some sources reporting this share as high as 70%), app marketing campaigns and social media platforms are viable options for reaching out to the target audience. However, the entire affair may not be pocket friendly. Therefore, preparing a mobile app marketing budget is advisable to avoid any shrinkage in investment.

The main objective of mobile app marketing is to drive the business forward and turn leads into hard-earned profits. Therefore, you must strategize a well-planned mobile app marketing budget ahead of time. Follow the top app development companies to have an overview of a well-thought mobile app marketing budget planning or consult APPWRK IT Solutions for a better approach. 

This blog explains the importance of the mobile app marketing budget along with the process of creating a mobile app marketing budget and its major components. At last, this blog will give you an overview of how much it cost to market a mobile app.

Let’s dive into it. 

Why is it So Important to Set a Mobile App Marketing Budget?

App marketing can propel your company forward by attracting leads that convert into profits. It may also be a leaking cauldron, resulting in a costly mess, which is why properly regulating your app marketing expense is critical. The top four reasons why setting up an app marketing budget is important are below. 

Tie App Marketing to Business Goals – 

It is evident that business goals are of utmost importance. They define and impact every decision you make, including the app marketing strategies you will use to market your app. The objective of each campaign is to help you achieve the business goal, and a marketing budget lets you stay within the limit to attain fruitful results. A mobile app marketing budget will help you select the desirable campaigns that are beneficial for the business within the affordable range. 

Control Over Spending – 

For every business owner, it is essential to keep a record of every penny spent. Without recording the transactions, there might be a possibility of some extra leaking cash, which can turn into a disaster with time. An app marketing budget might provide you with an outline of how much you should spend on the campaigns and other app marketing strategies. This provides a vivid picture of an overall budget. 

Creates a clear-cut plan – 

It can seem scary if all the money just rushes out and the bank balance vanishes one day without any trace. And advertising your newly launched app can demand a lot of capital investment. Whenever a new idea for a campaign is in front of you, along with a clear-cut budget,  mobile app marketing will become easy. 

Invest in profitable campaigns –

A detailed budget can provide insights into the performance, and thus, you can choose to invest only in profitable campaigns. Remember that the main objective is to utilize every penny to generate a return on your investment. With time, after analyzing the patterns, you will be able to identify valuable campaigns.

How to Plan a Mobile App Marketing Budget?

It is crucial to develop a strategy while marketing your app and making it approachable to the customer. And establishing a general financial responsibility is one of the important aspects of app marketing. Because in every component of a successful business journey, spending money without any clear plan can become a disaster. So, it is advisable to adopt a healthy mobile app marketing financial strategy and stick to it for the complete mobile app life cycle.

Step #1 — Assess Your App Marketing Funnel

This is the fundamental step in app marketing budget planning. The marketing funnel refers to the user’s complete journey before installing the app. A generic marketing funnel contains different elements. Firstly, it starts with the awareness phase, where the user becomes aware of your app’s existence. Then they move on to the next step, the interest stage, where the user thinks of getting a similar tool. Moving further to the third phase, the desired stage, they start leaning on a particular option or brand. In the last and final step, the action stage, the user installs the app on their device. 

The marketing funnel plays a vital role in the mobile app marketing budget as it gives you an accurate picture of how users move from the awareness stage to the action stage. You can learn about the actions that let the user download your app. 

Step #2 — Define Your Goals

Apart from treasuring the maximum number of downloads for your app, many more goals can help finalize the mobile app marketing budget. For instance, users can sign up for monthly or annual subscriptions. On the other hand, you could make your app an extension of an eCommerce site and drive purchases of physical goods. Both of these scenarios would have different app marketing strategies and different budgets. Look beyond the need to get more downloads; instead, adopt the smart goals for long-term success.

Step #3 — Identify Your Most Profitable Marketing Channels

Experiment with different marketing strategies and identify the best channel that brings you profits. And eventually, discard the ones that are not beneficial. Different channels are available, such as e-mail ads, search ads, or paid social media ads for mobile app marketing. Once you are getting successful results, you may shift further to more organic content. To strengthen your app marketing strategy, you may want to explore more strategies by running campaigns. Design the app marketing budget accordingly after doing thorough market research.

Step #4 — Compare Your App Marketing Budget With Other Mobile App KPIs

A clear look at your competition’s performance can help you define your goals more clearly. Study and compare other campaigns with your campaigns and gather the results to find out the loopholes. Resolve the situation by creating solutions for those loopholes. Once you narrow down the anomalies, you can re-design the app marketing budget by adding the requirements or discarding the unnecessities. 

Step #5 — Account For Other Operating Costs

Launching an app involves many stages, from marketing to pre and post-launch operations. You should pen down the budget in advance to execute these stages without hindrance. The budget must include design costs, developers’ costs, third-party service costs, utilities, subscriptions, and back-end services associated with app development. You must add additional costs such as accommodation charges, app marketing agency, content creators, website creators, etc. Therefore, remember that you must not associate your entire bank balance with mobile app marketing services only; there are other services also.

Components of a Mobile App Marketing Budget

The market is full of potential applications, with around 5 million apps up to date. However, only a few are among the top favorites. And most of the time, people spend their time on just one favorite app. Needless to say, it is tough out there for app owners and marketers. Therefore, below are a few essential key ingredients for the marketer to understand how and where to spend money during app marketing. 

Market Research

Mobile app marketing usually starts with the pre-launch procedure, and market research is the most crucial component. Market research does not mean identifying the potential customer base, but it involves evaluating the market funnel and channels to reach the customer. Instead of choosing just any platform, look for places where your customer likes to spend most of their time for app marketing. For instance, if you have a fitness & health app for people over fifty, then marketing it on Snapchat would not benefit you.

Beta Testing

For any app’s long-term success and functionality, beta testing is essential. It comes in handy whenever the app owner wishes to know the functionality of iOS and Android platforms. However, beta testing is an overall overlooked aspect of app marketing. The cost of beta testing depends on the number of users involved and the testing duration.

App Promotion Assets Costs

Another significant component of app marketing is creating a digital space to market the app. Visual ads on social media pages can push the marketing scale considerably. Promoting an app costs money unless you are a designer or content writer. The final price of app marketing depends on the number of content writers or a designer you appoint.

Viral Marketing

Viral app marketing can happen with the help of campaigns that have the potential to go viral. For instance, an educational app creates a cutting-edge video to promote the app. The visual representation of the app will require you to do some initial planning, like the budget and expectations from the video, before you send it to the market.  Typically there is no fixed price associated with this mobile app marketing technique, and it can be a costly affair from the video.

Social Media Marketing

Launching your app on social media is a great way to do app marketing. Nowadays, Instagram and Facebook are the greatest channels to broadcast your app to the public. While creating the accounts does not cost money, keeping them active requires time and money. Even if you keep a hold on spending money on social media app marketing, getting the content for posting will need you to hire a content writer.

Push Notifications

Push notifications are a modern-day tool for app marketing. Sending reminders and personalized messages can drive the sales of your app and keep the user active. Push notifications for mobile app marketing mainly target existing users. For instance, a personalized go-push message based on the customer’s location can drive them to motivate the non-users to install the app. However, remember the push notification app marketing platform costs money, so keep an account in your budget.

Influencer Marketing

Utilize this app marketing strategy where you can pay the influencers on social media to use your app via their platform. It can be as simple as doing an Instagram live or Facebook post to feature your app. Now, a partnership with the influencer could be a long-term or a one-time investment only. If you have trouble finding the right influencer, contact a PR agency. But remember that it will add additional costs to your pre-planned mobile app marketing budget.

Website

For successful app marketing, you need to have an online presence and a promotional website for your app. You could divide this process into two categories: creating a website from scratch or an already existing website dedicating a landing page to your app. If your business is new and you wish to create a website for app marketing, use Webflow or WordPress.

App Store Optimization (ASO)

ASO enables organic downloads of your app from the play store. ASO app marketing technique helps you to optimize your app with a relevant keyword so that it stands out from the other apps in the same category. However, it is essential to know that the ASO mobile app marketing strategy for the android play store is entirely different from that of the iOS app store. This is because of the different algorithms of each platform.

How Much Does it Cost For App Marketing?

After knowing about all the prerequisites, you must be wondering about the mobile app marketing budget. While many options are available in the market with a promise to deliver the best services for mobile app marketing, we at APPWRK IT Solutions focus on making your app the best out of the others. We offer you both pre-launch and post-launch services at the best possible price.

Pre-launch Mobile App Marketing Cost

Post-launch Mobile App Marketing Cost

• Cost Per Install

• Cost Per Action

Conclusion : Mobile App Marketing Budget

Developing an app is no longer a challenge. No-code app makers have made it possible to bring your idea to reality without learning to code. The bigger challenge is making it approachable to the customer. With innumerable apps available in the market, you need to develop an app that stands out from the crowd and market it with smart strategies. 

App marketing involves a huge amount of time and capital investment. An average of $10,000 is mandatory for mobile app marketing and quality promotion. However, keeping track of the capital investment requires regular monitoring of the activities and a budget. A marketing budget is a guide to ensure you stay on target with estimated costs vs. the actual costs. If you are still struggling with deciding on the right app marketing budget and strategy, APPWRK IT Solutions is the right place to start. With our expert team always ready to assist you, we will make sure that your app reaches the right kind of customer as quickly as possible. Contact us now to get an overview of the mobile app marketing cost.