TikTok Notes – What is it and how might it impact creators and marketers
Luke McCarthy
April 25, 2024
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Or perhaps you’ve already launched it but want to give your downloads a boost? Either way, you can’t afford to ignore the power of influencer marketing for promoting apps.
Influencer marketing has seen steady growth over the last few years, reaching $21 billion in value in 2023. The trend is showing no signs of stopping. Influencer marketing is particularly effective with younger audiences – 55% of Gen Z and 44% of Millennials say influencer recommendations are one of the most important factors driving their purchasing decisions.
This goes to show the power influencers can have on your target audience. If you haven’t worked with influencers before, don’t fret. Here, we give you the lowdown on what influencer marketing for apps is, how to find relevant influencers for your industry, and how to measure the success of your influencer marketing campaigns.
You might have heard the phrase being tossed around, but what exactly is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is simply an approach where you leverage the online authority of an influencer or a thought leader to garner attention and hit various goals for your business. Depending on your specific aims, you could work with influencers to increase app downloads, drive trial signups, or create a buzz around new features and add-ons.
Influencer marketing can be extremely effective when done right. For the best chance of success, it pays to get the basics right before you start partnering with influencers.
First and foremost, your influencer marketing efforts need to correspond with specific goals in your social media strategy. You must be clear on what you’re looking to achieve with each influencer engagement. For instance, what KPIs should you track to know your campaign has been successful? Do you want to drive sales, raise awareness about your app, or drum up attention before a large industry event?
Once you’ve defined your goals, think about what needs to take place in order to achieve them.
You may know who your target audience is, but do you know what social media platforms they prefer to hang out on? Do you know what type of content works for them and what they care about?
You might know the ideal customer base for your business as a whole, but you need to narrow that down for each app and marketing campaign. Who do you need to talk to? How old are they? Where do they live? What other brands do they like? Knowing all this will help you to identify the right influencers to work with on the right platforms.
What’s your competition doing in this area? Are they handing out a lot of freebies or do they focus more on discounts and raffles? What influencers do they work with? How else are they leveraging social media outside of influencer marketing?
Arming yourself with these insights will help you see what’s already working and what isn’t, and help you to come up with ways to stay unique and different. What could you do to make your influencer marketing more effective than your competitors?
Influencer marketing has been around for long enough to have influencers of all shapes and sizes. From micro-influencers who may have up to 10,000 followers to mega-influencers who are followed by millions of people, all sizes of influencer have the power to truly increase the reach of your marketing efforts.
Don’t be swayed by big follower numbers. These numbers mean nothing if those followers aren’t interested in what you offer. Vamp is a dedicated influencer marketing platform, which comes with a creator sampling tool to enable brands to search influencers by age, location, and industry, and to check their number of followers, engagement rates, etc. This tool helps you easily find influencers who work in your niche and who have an engaged audience.
There are several ways influencers can help promote your apps and drive engagement.
Offer social proof: people like to buy things that other people like. That’s why so many of us check online reviews before we make a purchase. Influencers can take this social proof to the next level. They’ve already established rapport and trust with their audience, and that trust can trickle down to your brand if they promote you.
Encourage user-generated content: UGC is a goldmine for marketers. Not only do people prefer UGC, but it also takes the burden off your team to come up with original content ideas all the time. Depending on the type of content your influencers create, they may receive comments and video responses from followers on how they’ve engaged with your app.
Grow your audience: some types of traditional advertising allow you to speak to specific demographics, but it can be a bit hit and miss. Plus, the people who see your ads don’t necessarily have an established relationship with your brand. Influencer followers, on the other hand, trust their influencers. Provided that you target the right influencers, you can easily get your product in front of tens of thousands of new people who’ll trust that your app has already been vetted by the influencer.
Generate downloads: all that added exposure should, of course, translate to more downloads. If you want to double down on this, you can give your influencer a special discount code to share with their audience to encourage more downloads and engagement. Make the offer time-limited so that people engage right away.
This goes back to our first point on knowing your audience. What market is your mobile app serving? A lifestyle or food app will have a very different audience than a football game app. Even in the gaming world, different types of games will attract very different demographics.
Your job is to understand where these demographics hang out. For instance, almost two thirds of the audience on Instagram is aged 18-34, whereas around half of the audience on Facebook and LinkedIn is aged 40-64.
Lifestyle can refer to anything from travel and food to apps helping people with their fitness, fashion, and language skills. Here are some ideas on how to leverage influencer marketing for your lifestyle app:
Product placements are a simple and effective way to put your app in front of more people, provided it’s done authentically. Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are all great for creating content surrounding your product.
Make sure you give your influencers access to your app well in advance along with clear instructions on how to make the best use of it. To boost sales, you can also offer a specific discount code for each influencer and track which influencer drove the most business your way so you can measure ROI.
Influencers are successful because they’re good at garnering attention. If you want to try something new and let go of the reins for a little bit, giving your influencer access to your social media account for a day can be a fun way to grow your audience. Say, for example, you’ve developed a fitness app. Your influencers could post content of themselves using the app while they’re in the gym or out for a run. They could then challenge their audience to do the same, share their stats in the comments section, and try workouts from the app at home.
Influencer marketing is invaluable for promoting games. Not only do gamers have a strong culture of watching replays of their favourite games, they often attend gaming tournaments, and share the newest quests and features of their favourite games.
There’s nothing like a live event to drive excitement around your app. YouTube is a great platform to have influencers livestream their play. This can invite comments, play-alongs, and future play-offs. It’s a fun way to showcase your game without being overly promotional.
Hosting tournaments around your game is a great way to promote your new app. For instance, Epic Games, the creator behind the popular game Fortnite, created its Support-A-Creator programme, where influencers can sign up to promote games and earn money.
Influencer marketing can be a sizable investment depending on the type of influencer and content you’re engaging with. This is why it’s so important to have clearly defined KPIs.
What you measure will depend on your goals but will likely include:
If you’re working with multiple influencers across multiple platforms, it’s definitely worth investing in an influencer marketing management platform such as Vamp to track all your efforts in a single place.
Hopefully, you’re now brimming with ideas and keen to get started on promoting your app. While there are many moving pieces you have to consider, having a clear strategy can make your efforts much more successful. And when it comes to finding the right influencers to promote your app, Vamp has you covered.
As a specialist influencer marketing platform, we help brands find influencers, launch successful influencer marketing campaigns, and track metrics all in one place. To find out more, reach out to our friendly team and we’ll be happy to give you a demo.
