2017 Predictions: Manifesto

mobilemarketingmagazine.com

Jim Bowes, CEO and co-founder of Manifesto, shares his top predictions for the coming year.

As 2016 draws to a close, it is time for brands to consider which technology trends will be big in the New Year and which they should be looking to implement. This will ensure that marketing teams will be able to engage with their customers via the right channels, whilst at the same time staying ahead of the competition.

The rise of VR
It was predicted that 2016 would be the year that Virtual Reality really took off, and the availability of technology has certainly gained pace without the full impact of VR hitting our homes, but we expect to see the technology get closer to the mainstream in 2017. In the next 12 months we’re likely to see VR and AR become more widely used marketing tools with many more people experiencing them.

Large brand names are already experimenting with this technology. Car giant Volvo has been using VR to allow potential customers to test drive its latest model by taking the driver on a scenic trip down country lanes. Luxury brands such as Ferrari are perhaps some of the best placed to take advantage of this technology, tapping in to the aspirational nature of their products to engage with new audiences that could be the customers of tomorrow.

This opportunity to experience something outside of the everyday has also been taken up by the fashion industry, with well-known designers such as Dior and Balenciaga using VR this year to give customers the chance to experience sitting on the oh-so-exclusive front row at Paris Fashion Week.

Personalised conversational interfaces
2016 saw Facebook launch chatbots on its Messenger app. The service allows businesses to communicate directly with their customers through the app using AI that is able to navigate the conversations, offering a unique and personalised experience. As a result, many brands are already experimenting with Messenger and linking it to adverts on social media platforms. Customers that click on a Facebook ad in their feed will be taken to a direct conversation with the brand in-app, improving the customer experience and allowing brands to learn even more about their target audience – if combined with efficient data analysis.

In 2017, we’ll see a lot of the tasks we currently perform manually become increasingly automated through conversational interfaces. Setting alarms, changing the heating and ordering a pizza with voice commands will all soon be the norm.

AI has already made its way into the consumer’s home in the form of gadgets such as Amazon Echo. Amazon has started to link up with major brands such as Domino’s Pizza and Hive to offer the customer a complete user experience where customers can order make orders or control appliances in the house by talking directly to Alexa, the AI assistant powering the Echo. These are still mostly command-based and the learning elements are in their infancy, but it won’t be long before the devices in your house have worked out your living patterns.

We often focus on the frivolous elements of these technologies, but these also have huge potential for home security or making contact in cases of fire or medical emergency. Soon your home will know if something unusual is happening, which could literally be a lifesaver.

Many marketers are considering how they can use speech-based interfaces like these to offer a highly personalised customer service as the technology continues to develop in 2017.

Personalisation is the new black
Personalisation is definitely the buzzword in marketing this year, with many marketing companies now aiming to create personalised content and adverts to engage with their target audience – and this won’t change in 2017. In the digital world where consumers often feel bombarded by content and information, offering unique and personalised services in this way will help brands stand out from the competition.

As brands look to individualise their products by including customers’ names on Coca Cola, Nutella or Marmite packaging, mass customisation has turned personal. For some businesses, this will mean ensuring all touch points on the customer journey are specific and individual. For others, it will simply mean streamlining the purchasing process in order to make it more responsive, therefore creating an easier experience for the customer.

2016 has seen technology change the marketing landscape forever and 2017 is shaping up to be another exciting year where technologies we’ve seen for a few years become mainstream. Brands must therefore ensure that their marketing strategies remain agile in order to make the most of the opportunities that technology offers. To be truly successful, however, businesses need to remain true to their core values and not simply use the technology for the sake of it.

A great story, a strong brand and shared passion with your target audience remain more important than any trend. The next 12 months will be an exciting and crucial period for marketing professionals as more and more brands begin to experiment telling their story with new platforms to increase customer engagement and stay ahead of the competition.

5 Brands That Are Fueling Experiential Marketing with Hardware

skyword.com

Between the millions of apps available to download and the over 100 software programs that marketers regularly use, never has the digital world encapsulated so much of our time. Developments in software, in large part within the last two decades, have even started contributing to neurological changes in the human condition.

From this digital overload marketers have sought to reach consumers in different ways, supplementing our desire to be wired with physical experiences. In recent years, experiential marketing has quickly gained popularity.

One of the biggest and most surprising moves this year was Snapchat’s division into a larger umbrella company known as Snap, Inc. This is a brand that shunned purchase offers from Facebook in order to do things its own way, turning a self-destructing photo app into a multibillion-dollar business. Suddenly, the formerly app-only company began to offer a physical product in Snapchat Spectacles via select, pop-up vending machines, with plans to expand this venture.

By now, it’s likely that you’ve finalized your 2017 content strategy, or at least, you’re very close. But the notion of experiential marketing hardware is one worth exploring. Not just because Snapchat did it, but also because of the many other brands that are betting big on hardware, making it accessible for users and brands alike—against the conventional wisdom of the tech community. These five brands are just a few examples that highlight the role of hardware as part of the brand experience.

1. Daydreaming in Cardboard Pixels—Google

Many technologists believed that 2016 would be “the year of virtual reality,” the year when VR would take the consumer market by storm. That wasn’t exactly the case. According to TechRepublic, while the technology was hyped among consumers, a “delayed hardware releases and a lack of content led some to doubt the technology’s future as a mainstream entertainment experience.”

In spite of VR and AR’s slow progress in consumer markets, the technologies did prove their potential in business. As reported by IDC, AR and VR are well-positioned for mainstream adoption among enterprise users in the not-too-distant future, with “worldwide revenues for the augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) market [expected to grow] from $5.2 billion in 2016 to more than $162 billion in 2020.”

To that end, one thing is certain: brands have realized that they need hardware to power their VR software, and they’re starting to see that there’s a huge opportunity for them to capture market share and audience imagination if they build that hardware themselves.

And when it comes to capturing market share through innovation, few brands do it better than Google.

Google famously made virtual reality accessible to the masses (enterprise marketers among them) through Cardboard, and now it’s doubling (and tripling) down on its investment in hardware with the Google Pixel phone and Daydream View virtual reality headset. Through this hardware, Google is able to deliver the most immersive brand experience possible—placing itself directly in the hands of its consumers.

2. The Selfie Bottle—Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola launched a bottle with a built-in selfie camera for select markets, another limited-edition, beyond-its-expected-scope product from a big brand. This may be a rudimentary effort on the path toward more full-fledged, “disposable” digital hardware, but it highlights the trend of blending the physical with the emotional—that is, the consumer’s ties to your brand.

Products like this carry more weight than just the ability to place your brand experience squarely in the hand of the consumer. They give the consumer creative control over the branded experience—which results in some fantastic user-generated content opportunities. Although consumers haven’t run with the selfie bottle the way they do with, say, Snapchat filters, the concept is there: find a creative way for users to leave their marks on your brand, and they will gladly take advantage of it.

3. Nice Shades—PogoTec

As if we needed more evidence that the floodgates were opening with Snapchat’s Spectacles and Google’s staggering array of phones, Cardboard, and full-on goggles, PogoTec proves there’s room for more digitization of physical objects.

In this case, however, instead of marrying hardware to software, PogoTec is marrying software to hardware to, well, hardware—more specifically, a pair of sunglasses. The company has built a pair of sunglasses to which users can connect a suite of PogoTec products.

According to The Verge, the first product the company has released to pair with its sunglasses is, in fact, a camera:

PogoCam…is a tiny self-powered unit smaller than a tube of lipstick. It has its own metal strip that magnetically attaches to any pair of glasses with PogoTrack. The resulting package isn’t as seamless as Spectacles, but it’s also not quite as alien (or alienating) as Google Glass.The biggest benefit of this kind of design is that you can easily remove the small camera if you’re in a place or situation where people would feel uncomfortable being recorded or photographed. And when you don’t want or need to use the camera, you’re left with glasses that look almost just like any other “normal” pair.

Interestingly, PogoTec has priced its camera at $129, which is also the price of Snap’s Spectacles. The conceptual and commercial link between the two is obvious, but it also speaks to strategies we’ll see as brands embrace this new marketing transformation more prominently. Snapchat’s goals appear to be not just owning the preferred content creation channel of a generation, but actually guiding users toward new ways to create content. Spectacles are aspirational, and video or images captured with them is immediately recognizable—and if this trend sticks, expect to see plenty more knockoffs like PogoCam. Marketers should pay attention because it gives us ample insight into the intersection between existing content channels and future tools that could shape the way we create and consume content.

4. Bringing the “One Click” Experience to Life—Amazon

As brands augment their software strategies with hardware, Amazon is taking things to an entirely new level. By capitalizing on the ease of its online shopping experience, the brand is looking to get more immersive: by building brick-and-mortar storefronts wherein shoppers can “one click order” in real time: by picking up their goods and walking out without standing in line at a cashier.

Why can Amazon take this risk, knowing full well that brick and mortars often build their brands on customer service? The answer comes down to knowing their brand (and their consumers) really, really well. For those of us who rely on Amazon for all our goods—from toilet paper to birthday presents and quick, didn’t-want-to-go-out accessories—we likely do so to avoid the experience of shopping at stores. Perhaps it’s the human interaction (so difficult on a Tuesday night after work), or maybe it’s that the lines really slow us down. Whatever it is, Amazon’s betting that they can put a stop to it in their stores, and that you’ll find what you’re looking for with twice the convenience (and none of the hassle).

5. For Here, or to Pokémon Go?—McDonald’s

While the team behind Pokémon Go may not be making the hardware, its partnerships with McDonald’s—and now Starbucks—show that they’re serious about the way people relate to the experiences their software enables. Special in-game features that can be unlocked while inside of Starbucks or McDonald’s locations and a Pokémon-themed drink at Starbucks create the type of experiential environment that takes augmented reality like Pokémon Go to the next level. Partnerships like this move storytelling further into the multimedia realm, allowing digital and physical content to interact in a way that brings stories to life—a real win for content creators wondering how to give their brand journalism a leg up in the oversaturated digital world.

You might need an app to get Millennials through your doors, and your brand’s story is only as good as your grasp of ways to tell it, but ultimately your product or service matters as much as ever. This shift toward more intimately connecting hardware and software, the online and the off, is great news for storytellers, too. It lets us reimagine where and how we can involve audiences in every chapter of content creation. Does your target market want to take pictures at an event using camera-enabled sunglasses? Should your next holiday release be a hoodie that integrates with a hot new app? We may not be able to tell you what the next big product is, but there’s little doubt that the next big way to sell it is to break down the silos between hardware and software. People exist online and in real life—your brand (in marketing as in product) should, too.

16 Free Social Media Marketing Tools

business2community.com

Running a social media marketing campaign can be a daunting and time-consuming task. With so many platforms available, and with each one often requiring daily attention, you may not know where to start.

Luckily, there are plenty of quality tools available to help you manage your social media marketing. From multi-platform scheduling tools to blog idea generators to graphic design apps, you can find everything you need to get started in this list. And best of all, you don’t need to spend a cent, if you don’t want to.

All of these apps are either free or have a generous free tier that isn’t overly feature-limited. Let’s get started.

1. Buffer

The key to successful social media marketing is posting consistently and frequently. According to studies, the average number of Tweets per day for maximum engagement is three, and on both Facebook and Google+, sharing two to three times per day is recommended.

To do this in real time, every day, can take a lot of effort and planning. Buffer is a scheduling app that allows you to set when you would like posts to be shared from your accounts – and then does the sharing automatically for you.

About.com says the app saves them, “one to two hours a day,” has doubled their Facebook followers, and has increased Twitter followers by 60% in the past year.

The app is compatible with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest and you are allowed to add one account from each platform for free.

Buffer also offers some insightful analytics on your posts such as comments, clicks, reach, and shares.

2. Hootsuite

Like Buffer, Hootsuite also offers post scheduling.

But its most useful feature is that it allows you to consolidate all your social platforms’ streams into one place. You can easily navigate between timelines, notifications, messages and more for each platform with a single click.

The free version also offers a social media report, giving stats on most popular links, top referrers and more.

3. Circloscope

Circloscope is a management tool for Google+ that has everything you need for managing your circles. It comes as an extension for the Google Chrome browser and lets you:

• Remove inactive profiles
• Remove profiles not circling you back
• Add users from shared circles and posts
• Find and add influencers

The free version is fully functional, but if you want to add and remove people in bulk, a $47/year Premium upgrade allows you to do just that.

4. Followerwonk

Followerwonk by Moz is a one-stop shop for Twitter account management. The web app has a multitude of functions to optimize your Twitter account and marketing. You can:

• Track followers
• Organize followers by certain characteristics such as influence, keywords or number of tweets
• Analyze accounts, including those that don’t follow you
• Track when followers are most active

Being able to track when your followers are the most active is a powerful feature. The lifespan of a tweet is finite with some researchers saying 18 minutes and others saying 24 minutes.

In any case, with such a small window of opportunity, you need to make sure your tweets are being seen by the maximum number of followers – and this functionality lets you pinpoint the prime time for posting. It also features Buffer integration to create a posting schedule based on your optimal times.

The free version does have some limits, and to manage multiple accounts or for more advanced analytics, upgrades start at $29/month.

5. ManageFlitter

It’s all well and good having a big following on Twitter, but this does little for business if the majority of your audience is unengaged.

ManageFlitter is a Twitter follower management tool. It helps you to analyze your audience to see who is engaged and who is not. The app displays your followers in order of who has followed you most recently and displays statistics such as if they are following you and when they were last active.

You can go through the list and remove accounts that are inactive, spammy or offering little engagement. The free plan lets you unfollow 200 accounts a day. For more features, reporting and unlimited unfollows, paid plans start at $12/month.

6. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a social media management app similar to Buffer and Hootsuite – aimed specifically at online stores.

The free version of the app allows you to schedule posts and even offers content suggestions, but its unique selling point is the integration it offers with your online store.

It allows you to send out branded Facebook posts and pictures of products directly from your site. Connect Pinterest, Instagram or other image-based sites to maximize product sales.

7. Zapier

Zapier describes itself as an app that “moves info between web pages automatically.” It links applications together so that an action in one automatically performs an action in another.

Zapier has a multitude of uses but it can be used to automate your social media marketing by share content across multiple channels with one click. You can link your Facebook to Twitter or Twitter to Pinterest, for example, so that when you share on the first platform the same post is shared automatically on both platforms.

Zapier offers a number of platform combinations such as Twitter and Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and many others.

The free plan allows you up to five, two-step “Zaps,” with upgraded accounts starting at $20/month for 20+ Zaps.

8. BuzzSumo

It can be tough coming up with content ideas that will resonate with your target audience. BuzzSumo takes the stress and guesswork out of this by allowing you to look at what is already working in your industry or niche.

Matthew Barby of Hubspot describes BuzzSumo as the “most important tool” he uses for content marketing and SEO. With BuzzSumo you can search a specific keyword, topic or industry and it will show you the most popular related articles.

It also breaks down the number of shares each article has on each of the main social platforms, and who exactly has linked to them and shared them.

BuzzSumo offers another free feature that is extremely useful: Influencer Search. This function allows you to search for other people in the social sphere who are making marks in your field. Then you can follow these people or just look at what they are doing to get an idea of what marketing strategies are working well.

9. Portent Content Idea Generator

Content is the driving force behind your social media campaign and it can be tough constantly coming up with titles for your blog posts. Portent’s content idea generator is a web app that instantly gives you potential post title suggestions when you type in a keyword. It’s quick, easy to use, and best of all, free.

10. Canva

Using images as part of your social media strategy is a surefire way to maximize engagement.

A study by Social Bakers found that 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook were photos. In a study by Skyword, posts with relevant photographs or infographics had 94% more views than those that didn’t.

But editing your own images can be complicated and costly if you use one of the popular paid solutions such as Photoshop. Canva offers an easy-to-use design suite with the convenience of editing a large number of image types including:

• Blog graphics
• Infographics
• Facebook cover pictures
• Facebook posts
• Twitter posts
• eBooks

It has drag-and-drop functionality so you can quickly create professional looking images in minutes, and you can also apply filters to images – and add text. There is a selection of free fonts, templates, and backgrounds you can choose from, with premium options available for purchase starting at $1.

11. Bitly

URLs can get a bit long sometimes and sharing them can look untidy and unprofessional. Bitly condenses your links into a smaller format. All you have to do is copy and paste a link into the Bitly homepage and it converts it for you on the spot.

12. Klear

Finding the people that are influential in your niche is an important part of an effective social media strategy. Not only can you network with them, but you can also look at what they are doing that is effective so that you can implement it yourself.

Klear is a powerful influencer research tool that is informative and easy to use. Simply search a keyword and it will display a list of the top ten influencers in your industry.

You will also be given the following statistics about the influencer:

• Popularity
• Reach
• Relevance

You can search any influencer you already have the name of to check them out. This search will give you in-depth information including:

• Top content on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook
• Activity and responsiveness levels

13. Feedly

As well as coming up with original ideas for content for your social media strategy to be on point, you need to keep up to date with what your competitors are doing. Feedly gives you a feed of the latest blogs from sites in your industry.

You can choose a list of blogs compiled by Feedly, or you can compile your own. If you compile your own list, Neil Patel of Quicksprout recommends only selecting sites of the highest quality because, “if you start mixing in lower quality sites, you’ll have to dig around through the bad content to find good content to share,” defeating the purpose of using Feedly as a filter.

14. Social Mention

Once you’ve started publishing quality content, you need to be able to see how far it reaches people so you know what works.

Social Mention is perfect for this as it tracks over 100 social media sites to see where your company is being mentioned. It breaks down the search into 4 main categories:

• Strength
• Sentiment
• Passion
• Reach

It also includes useful information such as who has mentioned you and the top keywords in each mention.

15. Google Analytics

Once your social media strategy is in full swing you need to be able to look at the effect it is having on your site.

Google Analytics is, by far, the most popular and powerful free analytic tool out there. It takes a few steps to connect Analytics to your website but just follow their instructions. Once connected, Google Analytics has an abundance of robust information to help you understand your website growth like:

• Gender of visitors
• Country of origin
• Bounce rate of each individual page (how long visitors stay on your site before leaving)
• Returning visitors
• Age
• Devices used (e.g. tablet, mobile, laptop)
• Operating system used

You can use this information to monitor the success of current campaigns and plan what you will change in the future.

16. LikeAlyzer

LikeAlyzer is a fabulous tool for optimizing your Facebook Business Page and checking out your competitors.

Simply type the URL of your Facebook Page into LikeAlyzer’s homepage and a number of statistics about your page will show up – as well as some recommendations for improvement.

The app will give your page a ranking out of 100 to give you a rough idea on how it’s doing. It also displays stats such as likes and engagement rate and will tell you how this compares to the industry average.

You can repeat the same process for competitors’ pages. Social media examiner recommends paying, “close attention to suggestions the tool spits out.”

Wrapping It Up

Online marketing doesn’t have to be difficult, and you don’t have to do everything manually, yourself. Investing some time into learning how to use popular tools and apps can save you a ton of time in the long run, as well as give you insights into the performance of your marketing strategies.

From using Hootsuite to automate your social media scheduling to using Klear to connect with top influencers in your industry – all the way to using Google Analytics to gain a better picture of your overall tactics – it will help your business measure goals and successes with your marketing strategies.

The best thing about these tools and apps is that you don’t need a big budget to access them.

Over to you – what social media marketing tools do you like the best? Or, if we haven’t mentioned your favorite, let us know in the comments below.

Answers to 6 Burning Questions From App Entrepreneurs

newstimes.com

Let's talk about how to turn your app idea into profit.

The web ecosystem is far more evolved than the mobile app ecosystem. Mobile apps have been in existence just under a decade. Even with that, the competition is quite intense given the number of people who are starting their own businesses recently.

If you’re an entrepreneur who wants to build a mobile app business, but you don’t have technical knowledge, you join the ranks of a majority of appreneurs who have never written a single line of code, yet run a successful mobile app business. You’re not alone.

The real challenge isn’t learning to code. Appreneurs don’t necessarily need to learn to code because they can simply hire a team (in-house or external) or use one of the app building platforms to create the first version. But, some of the biggest concerns are how to turn your app idea into profit, what to do next once you have an idea, how to raise money, how to ensure that an app developer doesn’t scam you and how to market your mobile app.

I’ve been mentoring first-time app entrepreneurs for six years. These are some of the pertinent questions I’ve come across, that first-time aspiring app entrepreneurs or appreneurs have.

1. Find a profitable app idea.

While there’s no way to know if a startup’s going to work or not -- believe me, if there was a formula, there would be more venture capitalists than entrepreneurs -- there are a few methods to ensure you build something that has market potential or demand.

There are many factors that make for a profitable business, but a good idea is a starting point. The way to evaluate what works and what doesn’t is to validate your app idea before you build the actual app. If your research tells you there’s a demand for your app, you’re at the first step of building a profitable mobile app business. This way, you won't spend thousands of dollars building something people don’t want.

2. The right way to validate your app idea.

There’s a myth that you must build a product to validate your idea. The truth is, it really depends on the type of product you’re building and the competitive landscape around it. If your app is in a competitive landscape -- like if you’re building the next on-demand taxi app -- the competition has already validated the need for the app because of existing successful apps in this space.

But if your app is in a completely new space, with little -- meaning no one’s a big enough player -- to no competition, you must validate the concept before building a product. You can do this by putting up a landing or a sales page, promote it with a few hundred dollars spent on Facebook advertising (because you can target your segment very specifically) and see if there’s any interest in it.

Once you’re confident of the interest or curiosity generated by the landing page, go ahead and build the first version of the product.

3. The right time to raise money for your mobile app.

Ideas don’t get funded. At least not anymore. The barrier to entry in terms of product development is very low. Anyone can build an app. But not everyone can build a business. Investors are interested in you as a person and your ability to build and grow a business more than your ability to create an app. By the time Buffer App raised its $450,000 seed round, the team already had 55,000 users and were making about $13,000 a month. Buffer's co-founder Joel Gasciogne admits, "We would have really struggled to raise funding without that traction, and so I advise others to just get started and try and build something that people will pay for."

The Appreneurship Academy suggests 13 creative ways to raise money, but here’s one of them. Get funding as a birthday gift. In 2008, as Cynthia Kersey, a divorcee who neared 50, wanted to pursue her dream idea of securing a child’s right to education. She threw a party for her 50th-birthday and invited everyone she knew. She asked each guest to bring, in lieu of gifts, $100 and announced that she would use the gifts as seed money to open her Los Angeles non-profit, The Unstoppable Foundation.

4. The many ways to build an app.

There are many ways to build an app, depending on the objective and the app’s landscape. You can build an in-house team, hire an external or outsourced development team or leverage one of the app building platforms. The Appreneurship Academy recommends using BuildFire app builder and even shows a step-by-step tutorial on how to build an app using the platform.

Be sure not to get scammed when hiring outsourced developers by doing a background check and asking pertinent questions that help you assess their credibility and experience.

5. The many ways of making money from your mobile app.

The most common ways to generate an income from an app are advertising, in-app purchases or a subscription service. What most people don’t know is that there are tons of other ways to make sure appreneurs make a lot of money from within the app and outside of it.

One of the ways is to secure a partnership with another brand. This can  significantly ramp up your monetization. What you’ll need to do is find a partner with a similar customer base who can add something to the experience of your users.

A partner or a network of partners can seriously benefit your customers and your businesses alike, especially if you create an integrated experience -- like when Localytics andOptimizely partnered to deliver mobile analytics as a combined service.

6. In marketing, there isn’t a one size fits all strategy.

Depending on which expert you talk to, you’ll get pitched a number of ideas, each expert saying theirs is the most effective. There’s Facebook and Google advertising, there’s App Store Optimization (ASO), social media marketing, PR, etc. You can't possibly do it all, nor should you.

Figure out where can you easily find your potential customers with the least path to resistance when opening a dialogue. You also have to consider that the money you spend on marketing should bring in at least three times the return on investment. The lifetime value of your customer should at least be three times that of the cost of acquisition of the customer.

Once you identify a marketing channel or a combination thereof that brings the maximum return on your investment, double down on it to scale up your business.

App installs boom during the holidays: report

luxurydaily.com

The report found that iOS apps tended to perform better than Android during the holidays

To gauge the potential growth of mobile marketing, a new report looks at the successes marketers saw last year with shopping applications, which saw a spike in app installs that was between 150 and 175 percent larger than average, according to Dot Com Infoway.

The report took a look at app behavior in the fourth quarter of 2015 to analyze how customers interacted with them. DCI found that as shopping transactions rose, apps rode the wave and saw similar spikes in installs and uses.

“As the world goes digital, the holidays are intrinsically linked to more time spent on mobile apps," said C.R. Venkatesh, CEO of Dot Com Infoway. "As e-tailers predict a giant push in activity during the holiday season, most of this activity will be driven through mobile devices.

"It is thus imperative for app owners and marketers to cash in on the holiday spirit.”

Holiday boost

As marketers and brands continually turn to mobile apps as the ideal way to interact with consumers and drive traffic.

DCI was aware of that propensity and took it upon itself to study how exactly app behavior changed and grew over the course of last year’s holiday season to provide a better insight into this year’s holiday season for mobile marketers.

To do this, DCI took a look at app install data and purchase data for the end of 2015 from a wide variety of popular apps and mobile devices.

The report divides the data between iOS devices and Android devices – the two most popular operating systems in the mobile world right now.

Overall, the holiday season had the greatest effect on mobile apps on the iOS platform. There, consumers installed new apps at 175 percent higher rate than the rest of the year.

Android was no slouch either however. On that platform, apps were installed at a 150 percent higher rate than normal.

The report also found that users were more likely to make purchases through a shopping app with a 60 percent increase for iOS and 42 percent increase for Android in that regard.

App marketing

DCI found in its report that during the holiday season, consumers are much more active on their mobile devices than in other parts of the year.

This can be attributed to a number of factors, not the least of which is that consumers have more free time during the holidays and are doing more shopping as they buy holiday presents for their friends and family.

Many brands, whether aware of this data or not, have already begun making use of the holiday season to market their apps. Some, such as Honda, have begun using the holiday season as a jumping off point for marketing campaigns (see story).

Facebook also released the newest addition to its dynamic ads platform – which is geared towards app installs – at the perfect time to take advantage of the holiday seasonal app boom (see story).

With the holiday season fully in sway, brands should watch out for how the app market changes this year and compare it to last year’s for even more insight.

“The infographic by DCI comes at an opportune time to help app owners make the most of the Christmas cheer,” Mr. Venkatesh said.