Building a marketing app is more than just creating yet one more dashboard that monitors social media sentiment or visits to your blog site. There are plenty of apps, including marketing apps, that do the same thing as everyone else. We need apps that clients, fans, users, and subscribers will actually use.
There are five guiding principles we always address with clients when they want to create a new app for their own clients, whether it's a marketing app or a general app.
1. What do you want to be known for?
More specifically, what do you want to be known for on the home screen? How do you want your little piece of real estate to be known? You have to define that before you build an app that will actually do it.
LinkedIn wants to be known as a business network. Facebook wants to be known as a place to catch up with friends and family. Instagram wants to be known as a photo sharing tool.
Rather than just creating an app for the sake of having an app, create something that no one else has. I don't need another photo filter app, I have Instagram, plus dozens more to choose from. I don't need another way to stay up-to-date on business contacts, I have LinkedIn. I don't need another way to keep up with family and friends, I have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If I want to communicate with my internal team, I have Slack. And if I don’t like these, there are already plenty of other apps that serve similar functions.
When it comes to apps that fulfill a simple purpose, I like Todoist. It essentially gamifies productivity. You create your to do list, and as you complete items, you earn Karma points. The more you complete, the higher your points. The more points you earn, the higher your level. You progress from Novice and Intermediate through Professional and Expert, up to the highest levels of productivity, Grandmaster and Enlightened.
Todoist is also a cross-platform app that works on your mobile phone, tablet, and laptop. There's even a Chrome plugin to add to your Gmail, so you can turn emails into to do items.
But regardless of its reach, Todoist does one thing very well: help people be more productive by making productivity interesting. They don't try to create a distraction-free environment. There's no Pomodoro timer. There's not a built-in web browser or Facebook blocker. It just creates to do lists for you to check off.
Bottom line? Don't worry about creating a mission statement. Create a simple, two or three word idea of what you want to be known for.
2. The interaction should be simple, when necessary.
In theory, your app's entire design should serve a focused function. Your job is to figure out how users will most effectively use your software. In theory, apps should allow users to get an optimized experience from the interface.
Which means don’t try to be all things to all people. A mobile app should be optimized for mobile use, which could mean fewer controls and less functionality; a desktop/laptop app shouldn’t be oversimplified, eliminating important functionality for the sake of simplicity.
It's why there are mobile apps for WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. You can share basic thoughts, ideas, and images while you're on the go, as a way to keep your audience interested in things you're doing.
Interestingly, as mobile technology continues to evolve, there’s a high likelihood these apps will become much more robust, allowing for heavy-duty functions like content creation, animation, and even web development.
Regardless of these changes, your app’s functions should be focused, usable, and consistent in providing the best user experience possible.
3. It's not a static interaction.
People want apps they can engage with and use, rather than passive apps that we just look at to glean information. There are plenty of news apps that will tell you what has happened. Instead, users want an app they can engage with and get something out of. Users need something that comes out of the app as a result of its use- something they have created.
In short, we need an app that will create additional, unique value to the user's life. If an app already repeats the value of an existing app — say, another photo filter app — why would anyone choose it over what they already have?
I like the app Over, which was created by Aaron Marshall in Louisville, Kentucky, just two hours from here. The app is more than a photo filter. In fact, it lets you add doodles, artistic paints, symbols and icons, and my personal favorite, captions and words in a variety of fonts. Imagine taking your own photo and writing your own captions, right on your phone.
At one point in 2013, Over reached #6 in the Paid Apps section of Apple's App Store, and it's been used by designers, photographers, and even professional sports teams like the L.A. Lakers and bands like the Goo Goo Dolls.
This is a perfect example of an app that lets you take something, like a photo, and create something much more with it. There are a variety of fonts, filters, artwork, and even Photoshop-worthy tools like drop shadow, blur, and blend.
4. There has to be a network effect.
Users want to be able to share their creations with each other. This sharing will be one of the most important factors in your app’s success, because it builds word-of-mouth awareness. Remember the first Instagram and Pinterest photos we saw on Facebook? Those two apps succeeded, because there was a way to share their creations with as many people as possible.
Successful apps also have a “invite/find your friends” feature that lets users share their creations with their own networks. This has been one of the reasons for the success of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Users could plug their address book into the app, see which of their friends were already there, and then invite the ones who weren't on it.
But app growth has gone beyond that. Now we need to share creations in order for people to see the benefit of using the app.
There's a reason Instagram plugged into Facebook for its sharing — take pictures, slap on an artsy filter, and share them with your friends and family. Your friends and family wanted to do that too, so they downloaded their own copy of Instagram. This behavior repeated itself over and over, all around the world, that Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012.
Apps these days are more than just people sharing ideas. Successful apps allow product to be created in the app as well. As the app (and its users) get stickier, people will log in more and more. They'll build relationships, share more product, build more sharing relationships, create, and so on.
5. You need analytics to do smart targeting.
As your app grows and becomes popular, you need to see who's engaging with what, how they're engaging, and what they're sharing. If you don't have engagement, and you don't know what it is, users will abandon your app. Your engagement needs to center around the localized touchpoint and the interaction thereafter, so you need to be able to measure it all.
Mobile phones are no longer a separate device from us, like laptops or cars. According to Pew Research, 72% of people own a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011. And you can count on your users having their phone on them at all times. It's no longer a matter of will they receive your message, it's where they receive your message. If there's any way for your app to include a where component, it becomes more powerful, especially in our geolocated world.
Learn the right way to location marketing in your app.
The Right & Wrong Ways to Use Geofencing
Knowing the where of our interactions may even tell you the way you should interact with your users. For example, if I engage with your location-based app when I'm mostly in Indianapolis and on my laptop, that tells you how I prefer to interact. And then, if I'm in Orlando once and we interact, that's an anomaly. You may want to engage with me differently at that time.
But if I'm a regular traveler, and I interact with you on my mobile phone more and not on my laptop at all, you can tailor your messages and delivery to me via mobile-friendly means (e.g. mobile friendly email and websites), and not laptop-dependent methods (fully functioning websites with large photos and videos). For example, I may not want to read a 10,000 word article on my phone at home, but I might be more willing to do that when I'm traveling, and it's nighttime.
So imagine creating a version of Feedly — an RSS reader — so it only shared certain types of content based on where I am. For example, only sharing LongReads.com articles when I'm not in Indianapolis, and sending a notification to my phone at 9 pm. Or only sharing tech and marketing news when I'm in Indianapolis, and presumably at work.
This is where smart targeting — sending the right message to the right person at the right time in the right place — helps build an audience for your app and lets you tailor an app experience to the person's where. You can remarket to people, you can do A/B testing based on location, and so on.
This is why we appreciate Localytics, because they’re taking an approach to complement this mentality. They're able to measure the effectiveness of mobile marketing, to see if app makers are reaching their audiences, and if certain tactics like remarketing and geolocation are working properly. Want to learn more? Check out the Localytics platform, free.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shawn Herring, Torchlite CMO
A dynamic and enthusiastic leader, Shawn Herring built and managed the global demand generation team at ExactTarget. His team helped increase return on investment across all marketing channels and was instrumental in ExactTarget becoming one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world before being acquired by Salesforce.com. Shawn holds an MBA from Indiana University and has previously been in marketing roles at Harlan Laboratories and Roche Diagnostics.