Mobile apps are now part of our daily activities, with research by internet analytics company ComScore showing there are now more mobile-only internet users than desktop-only internet users, with mobile apps accounting for more than 50 per cent of the time people spend using digital media.

With almost 1,800 iOS apps being launched every day, not to mention the number of Android apps, marketers are now looking at ways in which they can get apps attention, downloads and engagement.

Rapid shift

Digital marketing news website Business 2 Community Contributor Rahul Singh outlined what we can expect to see from marketers in 2016 with regards to apps. He said shoppers are spending 86 per cent of their time on apps because it bypasses the need to go on the internet, presenting an opportunity for marketers to ‘hyper-personalise’ messaging and customer handling.

Mobile app marketing guide Smart App Marketer Founder Andrew Hubbard said there will be a “rapid shift towards app discovery outside of major app stores” in 2016. He pointed out that currently apps are mostly found by users in Apple’s App store or Google’s Play App Store, but that with over 1.5 million apps now available in both, he believes that this has become an “inefficient process and does not provide a great user experience”.

Content

With both Apple and Google building app content indexing into their mobile operating systems, content will be key to mobile app marketing in 2016. Apple has added application program interfaces (APIs) to iOS 9 that enable content inside apps to be appear in Spotlight search results; Google is building similar features into Android.

Stag Party planning experts The Stag Company’s Digital Marketer Tom Bourlet, mobile app content “now has the opportunity to rank on Google via mobile search”, which means businesses are “having to increase the number of deep links they are building to mobile app content”.

“You may also start seeing a lot more mobile-only content, with exclusive offers just for people that arrived via the app on search,” he added.

Promotions

Singh said that, in 2015, many apps featured paid promotions for other apps, or promoted apps from the same developer, but that this will change in 2016. Mobile apps will instead be promoted through social media Instagram in particular. According to online form builder JotForm’s Vice-President of Marketing Leeyen Rogers this is because Instagram is mostly used on mobile devices, making it ideal for getting people to download an app.

Growth marketing and user engagement platform Iterable’s Customer Happiness Officer Sherry Chao said marketers will look to reach users using in-app notifications, push notifications and email in 2016 in order to get them to “complete desired actions”, while mobile app advertising platform has shown how geo-fencing and geo-targeting can be used to increase installation of location-specific apps.