The Asia-Pacific region, especially India and Indonesia, continues to lead global application growth, so that this region accounted for 53% of all application revenues in 2016, and this proportion will show a rapid development trend by 2020.

However, as more and more new applications enter this booming market, users of the market and applications have more choices than ever before, and more innovative methods are needed to find and attract the most valuable users. Here, we will introduce how marketers in the Asia-Pacific region can effectively attract and gain their most valuable audience in the fast-growing and highly competitive application market.

The future of the application’s target user marketing

Mobile technology unlocked the control, authorization, and choice of consumers in the search market to an unprecedented degree, thus triggered a revolution in the super market segment.

As we move from mass marketing to mass customization (from focusing on average to targeting individuals), I believe that in the future we will build a brand in a market segment. For marketers who are accustomed to creating and marketing brands through traditional models, this means a completely different marketing idea from the past.

Who is the target audience of today's application?

Nowadays, consumers with powerful functions and enhanced technology can increasingly control the brand information they receive. Consumers' expectations for value, convenience and brand response are also increasing.

Search is absolutely crucial here. It acts as a filter so that capable consumers can get what they want at any time and anywhere. People(myself included) don't remember how it feels to not be able to do things before putting their phones in their pockets.

What should marketers pay attention to during the entire operation process?

1) People-oriented.

Use data to gain insights into new and complex user experiences and user habits, and clarify where your brand should be displayed to add maximum value. Focus on the user, gradually develop product marketing, and dig deeper into the needs of users, so that your application can acquire more and more high-quality users.

2) Build a brand by creating a compelling user experience.

People not only want to buy a certain product, but also want an idea to be accepted by people. Once the goal is clear, the brand can create an engaging experience. Compared with just talking about new products or seasonal promotions, it can maintain a longer and richer consumer dialogue.

3) Unleash the magical combination of data-driven consumer intentions and outstanding goal-oriented creativity to establish a profound and meaningful one-to-one relationship.

Marketing is a combination of magic plus logic, art plus science. As marketers, we have never been able to solve the logical half of the equation that data provides us today. At the same time, because consumers’ attention is more diverse, we have never needed magic so much. The brands that lead this trend will win in the future and provide consumers with a frictionless experience both online and offline.

Three ways to help your application establish contact with the high-value users:

Online shopping, booking holiday destinations, playing games, chatting with friends, apps can provide consumers in the Asia-Pacific region with all these and more features. Therefore, it is not surprising that the average number of applications installed on mobile phones of users in the region has soared to 35. Although they are not short of choices, consumers usually only participate in about 8 of them. This highlights the simple fact that even if there are a large number of (and growing) app users worldwide, only 17% of users drive 85% of all app revenues.

For smart phone users, new mobile phones are pre-installed with a bunch of applications in several major application markets, some of which many people would never use. Many people have downloaded some applications which are never opened until they are deleted from their mobile phones. The key to sustainable growth is to find ways to attract the most dedicated and focused audience with the right information in the right channels. Good news for app marketers? Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have driven the development of new digital technologies, making the process simpler and more efficient than ever before.

Here we share the ways as below which may help your application to acquire more valuable uses:

1. Make full use of the big data analysis of the search market to find high-quality users

Considering how important it is to find the right users, marketers need to focus on displaying their apps on the right channels and advertising formats. Without complete user positioning and user portraits, this may be a complicated process.

Universal App Campaign helps to promote your app in Google’s largest resources (including search, Google Play, YouTube and Google display advertising system), it combines Google’s information on user signals and app external intent (e.g. their Searched content), what other apps they downloaded, what content they watched on YouTube), and information about user actions in apps by advertisers. Then, Universal App Campaign(UAC) use big data analysis technology to analyze more than 300 million potential data signal combinations (including platforms where users are most likely to interact with your ads (such as YouTube or Gmail), and the correct advertising format (whether it is video, Text, or a combination of the two) and keywords, they are the best for marketers’ KPI goals.

Marketers can also use the big data analysis of the search market to optimize advertising for different goals. For example, marketers of food delivery apps can choose to optimize advertising based on a target cost-per-action (CPA) (such as the number of food orders placed), or they can focus on other goals, such as return on advertising spend (ROAS) and users with high total order amount.

2. Only three simple levers can drive user growth

Now, with UAC, application marketers can attract high-value users in more than 2 million websites and applications in the Google Play Store, Gmail, Google Search, YouTube, and Google Display Network through a single campaign. What marketers need to do is to concentrate on the three major strategic inputs that support UAC: the quality of advertising ideas, bids and budgets, and conversion data.

Develop a series of creative assets: Provide more different types of text, image and video assets that are consistent with your KPI goals, whether you want to drive more installations or certain in-app operations. UAC will use these assets as building blocks to create the most relevant ads to be placed on the various platforms where users spend their time.

Define your bids and budget: Setting a higher budget will help expand the scale and reach a wider audience, while UAC’s different bidding strategies allow marketers to target KPI targets (such as target CPA, target return on ad spend and target cost-per-click) automatically adjust its bid to install (CPI).

Share your conversion events and value: Data about the value of user actions in the app will help you continuously optimize your campaigns for actions that are most important to your brand.

By controlling these three levers, you can quickly and easily find a suitable user group for your application.

3. Improve brand awareness through high-quality advertising resources and innovative advertising formats

Innovative and dynamic advertising formats are the key to connecting with high-value users in many different channels, and searching on the app store is one of the most common ways for users to discover new apps. This is why it is important to master this point when users start to search and browse the next favorite app in the app store.

Access to exclusive premium inventory is just one way UAC enables you to easily expand and attract new users across different channels. For example, when a user visits the Google Play store to search for new apps, UAC allows you to easily find them in prominent locations on the homepage and app list pages (shown below) within the store.

UAC also uses machine learning to create dynamic creatives to attract users, whether they use the device in landscape or portrait mode. Most video assets are created in landscape mode, but on AdMob, 70% of the full-screen ad view is seen in portrait mode.

When converting from landscape to portrait, UAC will not cut the necessary part of the advertisement, but uses a big data analysis system to analyze each video frame, and automatically recognize and select the portrait mode to capture the most important part of the advertisement. The result is an increase of 18% of the click-through rate.

Conclusion

Brands have a huge opportunity in this mobile marketing environment to help simplify life in this complex world and make a large number of choices easy. Likewise, brands can help simplify the online world of seemingly endless content and continuously improve people’s experience in the search market.

As the number of application users in the application market continues to grow, user demands are becoming more and more diverse. Only by constantly studying the deep-seated needs of users and innovating ideas can smart marketers attract and interact with appropriate users. Utilizing big data systems is just the first step to connect with target audiences, simplify app installation campaigns, and promote sustainable growth in a crowded app market.