Seasonal App Marketing: Creative Strategies to Stand Out
Seasonal app marketing is one of the most powerful tools for improving the visibility, downloads, and revenue of your app. However, seasonal app marketing does not automatically work for you. You need to make sure that you know how to do it properly in order to obtain its powerful benefits.
Thus, in this post, you will learn what seasonal app marketing is, what creative strategies you can do, and how you can better improve your chance of succeeding in your app.
What is seasonal app marketing?
Seasonal app marketing, as its name suggests, is the process of marketing an app based on specific seasons, holidays, and current trends and events. The main goal of seasonal app marketing is to take advantage of the current interest of people and leverage it to promote your app.
Undeniably, special occasions and seasons affect new search trends in app stores. The changing behavior of users also changes what’s popular. This tells you that seasonality can have the potential to make your app increase or decrease your ranking. Thus, it is crucial that you make necessary adjustments during special holidays.
Overall, seasonal app marketing’s main strategy is to tailor your marketing campaigns to align with the specific sentiments, themes, and activities associated with each season. What makes seasonal app marketing super effective is you try to tap into the desires and even emotions of what people experience during different times of the year.
By aligning the design and messages of your app to what people experience, you create a stronger connection with them, thereby increasing your engagement and conversion rates.
What are some creative strategies for seasonal app marketing?
When it comes to seasonal app marketing, creativity plays a huge role in capturing the attention of your users and helping you stand out in a crowded app store.
Now, remember, your competitors would also take advantage of the season or holiday. Thus, you need to have effective seasonal app marketing strategies to gain an advantage over your competitors.
So, to help you, here are some of the most creative strategies you can use to perform your seasonal app marketing:
1. Plan ahead
The most important part of seasonal app marketing is planning, and you need to do that way ahead of your target season or event.
If you plan and execute on the same month or day, that won’t be too effective since it takes time for the algorithm of app stores to recognize a simple change in your metadata. Aside from that, people usually prepare for the holidays many days or weeks before the actual event.
Image source: Unsplash
Planning involves knowing the time when popular holidays happen. Just to give you a heads-up, here’s a quick list of the popular holidays around the world:
- January 1 – New Year
- Between January 21 to February 20 – Chinese New Year
- February 14 – Valentine’s Day
- Between March 22 and April 25 – Easter
- Third Sunday in June – Father’s Day
- Second Sunday in June – Mother’s Day
- Between October to November – Diwali
- October 31 – Halloween
- Between November and December – Hanukkah
- Fourth Thursday of November – Thanksgiving Day
- December 25 – Christmas – December 25
Be sure to take note of these important dates to ensure you can plan ahead. Remember, depending on how much change you want to make in your app, you may need to make a lot of adjustments just to ensure your app is ready for the season. So, planning and executing your plan weeks or months before could dramatically make a great difference in your app’s success.
2. Choose the right season for your app
While you can certainly target all possible seasons in the calendar, you might want to think twice before doing that. For one, you might have a limited budget and energy to cover all seasons. Even if you have the budget and resources, your app might not be a perfect fit for a specific holiday.
Thus, you need to have a list of seasons and identify the most important season that would fit your app and then cover the other seasons if your budget or resources permit.
For example, if you are running a dating app, the most important holiday for you would be Valentine’s Day. If you are running an online buying and selling app, then Christmas and Black Friday could be your best season.
As you can see, there are seasons that are more fit to your app, and you need to prioritize those so you can have a better chance of succeeding in your seasonal app marketing.
3. Localize your app
Now, you probably know by now that each country, geography, or culture has its unique seasons or holidays. While yes, there are holidays that are popular all around the world, there are those that are just popular in specific countries or populations.
To give you an example, think about Diwali. Diwali is the biggest and most popular holiday in India. It is primarily celebrated with a festival of lights.
Image source: Unsplash
Diwali isn’t popular in the United States, Japan, or other European countries. Yet, it is a great opportunity for you to get more users from India. That’s where the importance of localization comes in.
India is one of the biggest app markets. In fact, the largest market of Google Play includes India. This tells you that Diwali is a great opportunity for you to get more users to download your app.
Your app might already be available in various countries. Think about those countries. What are the unique holidays they celebrate? From there, you can then localize your app and take advantage of those holidays.
4. Add seasonal updates
Alright, so now you have already identified the holidays you want to utilize and the audience you want to target. It’s time for you to add updates based on those seasons. You can change your app’s design elements, features, and content to make your app more relevant.
For example, you can add cobwebs on your app icon during Halloween. You can add Santa hats to your in-app characters during Christmas. You can add various elements that represent holidays, from your screenshots to your app previews.
5. Use Seasonal push notifications
Push notifications can be pesky and annoying at times, but if you know when and how to deliver them, you can dramatically increase engagement and conversion rate.
Obviously, you can only send push notifications to your existing users who are already using your app. The upcoming holiday or season is a perfect reason for you to send push notifications. Most people won’t mind getting notifications about how your app is celebrating the holidays.
When sending push notifications, be sure to use personalized, useful, and relevant messages. You can notify your users about exclusive deals, seasonal offers, limited-time events, and even helpful recommendations and tips related to the season.
6. Seasonal contests and giveaways
A lot of people love contests, especially when they have a great chance of winning. For example, if you’re into Christmas, you can do an exchange gift contest where you pick one user and give them gifts in exchange, perhaps for a like on your app’s Facebook page.
Another good example is giveaways, where you give gifts to your users who would share your content online.
You can run tournaments or in-app events to celebrate the holidays. If you have a photo editing app, you can run a contest where people share their Halloween costumes.
There are endless ways for you to run your contests and what types of seasonal rewards, exclusive offers, and discounts you can give to your loyal users.
7. Do keyword research
A change in users’ behavior leads to a change in the use of their search terms. That’s why there are certain keywords that become more popular at a particular time of the year.
The challenge here is to find the keywords that increase in popularity scores during the holiday. Thankfully, there are now App Store Optimization tools to help you perform keyword research.
You can start using the keyword research tool provided by app stores such as App Store and Play Store. You can also check third-party ASO tools to improve your keyword usage further.
Take advantage of the season
These are just some of the best and most creative ways for you to stand out during the holiday. With the right seasonal app marketing strategies, you’ll surely stay ahead of the competition and begin to get more users and downloads.
Of course, seasonal app marketing can be a daunting task. Thankfully, you don’t have to do this alone. ShyftUp is here to guide you all along the way.
ShyftUp has the right expertise and tools to help you run app marketing based on holidays, seasons, and current trends. Give them a try today and see how much success they can bring to your business!
How can I make my app stand out during specific seasons?
Creativity is the key to ensuring that your app stands out. You need to think of a new and unique way for you to promote your app. Take Christmas for an example. What is a new way for you to get users during this holiday? You can run a caroling or drawing contest. You can ask your users to create a video of them using your app during the holidays. You can ask your users to create testimonials about how the app helped them. The possibilities are just endless and it is up to your creativity to find a way to stand out from the crowd of apps.
What are the benefits of seasonal app marketing?
Seasonal app marketing offers various benefits that would surely improve your app’s success. For example, seasonal app marketing can improve your app’s relevance, increase user engagement and conversion rates, differentiate your app from other apps, and so much more.
What is an example of a seasonal marketing strategy?
An example of a seasonal marketing strategy is to change the design of your app icon, screenshots, and videos that reflect certain elements of the season or holiday.
