How to Use Influencer Marketing to Promote Your Mobile Apps

Every mobile marketer at least once thought about such a promotion channel as influencer marketing. Over the past few years, the promotion of a mobile app hardly looks complete without the involvement of influencers. 

In this article, we share the insights of applying influencer marketing techniques to promote your mobile apps the most effective way.

Introduction

Many of us start the day by opening mobile apps even before breakfast is ready. We use them for any daily business: looking for the right address, keeping a training schedule, or planning our family budget.

Mobile applications are an integral part of our life. According to Statista, some users spend an average of 5-6 hours a day on them. Apps have become our constant assistants in the micro-moments "I want to know", "I want to go", "I want to do", and "I want to buy".

Applications help companies build and improve relationships with customers. An effective app promotion strategy can boost ecommerce, increase the effectiveness of offline events (such as in-store promotions), and strengthen customer relationships. Consumers are increasingly using mobile apps, and marketers need to keep this in mind.

How to effectively reach a huge audience of application users? One of the trending ways to promote mobile apps is involving influencers in ad campaigns. Creators can bring the following benefits to mobile brands:

• Opportunity to bypass “banner blindness”

Many influencers know how to organically fit ads into their content. Some do it with such skill that it is not even immediately clear when exactly the transition from the main part of the video to the sponsored one takes place. Some talents make advertising so creative that it goes from the category “ah, another boring promo” to “what will they advertise today?”. Unfortunately, such influencers are hard to find, and the schedule for the release of advertising publications is full for them several months in advance.

• Credibility

The influencers have credibility. The audience knows and loves them. People believe their idols will not advise something unnecessary or of poor quality.

• Meme potential

Some mobile apps, especially games, are gaining huge popularity due to memes going viral on social networks. Consider the case of the indie game “Among Us”. The hype around it arose when the streamer Sodapoppin drew attention to the project - at that time he had more than 2 million subscribers. He made a funny review of the game, and the memes began to disperse on social networks immediately after. This was the beginning of the game's ascent to the top charts, although it happened by accident - the developer did not pay the influencer for advertising. Nevertheless, thanks to the creator, the game was greatly promoted.

How to Collaborate with Influencers to Promote Your Mobile App?

Today, YouTube is one of the key platforms for promoting mobile applications. 

In recent years, the video format has gained a well-deserved leadership among all types of content on social networks and on the Internet in general. YouTubers collect millions of views on their videos daily and have a huge impact on various audiences. The main advantage of promoting your mobile app with the help of influencers on YouTube is the audience's trust in the choice of their idols and a large return as organic downloads of advertised applications.

That is why YouTube is a powerful, relatively inexpensive, and, most importantly, long-lasting tool in mobile app promotion. With all the advantages, it remains underestimated, and not all potential advertisers, including mobile application developers, are in a hurry to give advertising budgets to video creators.

Among the formats of work on YouTube, it is worth highlighting:

• “Let's Play videos” or gameplays - videos of the game with a creator's comments.
• Game streaming. 
• Reviews - a detailed analysis of the application's features with the influencer’s recommendations.

Peculiarities of working with YouTubers

The success of YouTube promotion is in the audience's loyalty to the influencer, the amount of the viewers’ trust in their choice, and their satisfaction with the quality of the content offered on the channel. Most often, people are interested in watching fascinating content and are ready to download recommended applications. Belonging to an interest group is a powerful trigger for influencing the decision to use the recommendations of a creator.

The leading positions on YouTube are occupied by games and entertainment videos. The audience of such content is mostly youth. Therefore, when choosing a channel for cooperation, it is worth carefully analyzing the quality of its content, studying the comments under the videos and who leaves them. And understand if your application fits this audience.

Nevertheless, there are YouTubers posting videos in any category, and even with a much smaller coverage - science and technology - these channels are popular with their audience, and the effectiveness of advertising will be no lower than that of games. In the end, you have to find the categories and channels in them that attract your target audience.

“Let's Play” or “How To Play” videos

Perhaps one of the most common types of application promotion on YouTube is the “Let's Play” type of videos. There, influencers go through a game showing its features, commenting on their actions, and sharing it all in video format. Sometimes the video is accompanied by an insert of a video image of the influencer in the corner of the screen:

“Let's Play” is a good type of video because the YouTubers do not need to explain what the application is about or prepare a script. They just play the game and reveal its subtleties and possibilities in the process. They have a high level of trust and a large number of application downloads.

Online broadcasts of events

Mobile apps with multiplayer access are gaining popularity. So among influencers, the emergence of multiplayer provoked a surge of interest in even fairly old games. There are even eSports competitions among mobile players. For example, SuperCell holds Clash of Clans tournaments with tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. And the winners of the Hearthstone Championship Tour in January 2018 shared $1,000,000 prize money.

Reviews

In addition to games, there are hundreds of mobile application formats, from various schedulers to all kinds of services that simplify our lives. They also have a place on YouTube. App reviews from influencers have become an effective format for promoting mobile applications. And here it is important to select a creator for cooperation not only by popularity but also by the correspondence of the application with the interests of the target audience. Everything is important - from the appearance of a YouTuber to their attitude.

Viewers, for the most part, are already accustomed to the fact that video creators regularly recommend something, and do not feel negative about this, perceiving the information as friendly advice.

Placements with popular creators who have 1M+ subscribers can bring thousands of application downloads. But you need to be prepared: the influencer you’ve selected may not provide absolutely sweet and positive reviews for an app, they may speak about personal impression since they have nothing to hide from the audience. However, it’s different when you pay the influencer for their services and have a contract signed - in this case, you have to negotiate what they can and can’t say beforehand.

Features of working with influencers on Instagram

Instagram is another top platform for influencer marketing. The most common brand promotion formats for influencers are the following.

Regular photo post 

The oldest, but still well-functioning method. A deal of this kind is one of the easiest for both parties. The influencer makes a post with a single photo backing it up with a description of their experience using the app. The post should not stand out from the general theme and at the same time should be unobtrusive.

Stories

Many companies, when collaborating with influencers on Instagram, want to work with the post-in-feed format and do not recognize ads in stories. We would recommend not to exclude and not be afraid of this format.

First, the chances of viewing an Instagram story are higher. Followers are used to this format and are waiting for new stories from certain creators.

Second, it saves the advertiser's budget. Stories ads are normally cheaper, but that doesn't mean they'll be less effective. It all depends on properly drawn-up terms of reference and how well the creator knows their audience, whether they know how to create content appealing to this audience.

Storytelling

A more developed version of a photo post. An influencer accompanies such a post with an entire life story, along the way supplementing it with an advertisement for an app or brand. It is usually mentioned at the end.

Promo code

Suitable for cases of open advertising. An influencer can offer a promotional code to be used in the app for a discount or a gift. Such a marketing ploy allows a follower to feel chosen, which works well for promotion.

Where to find the necessary information about previous ad campaigns?

The advantages of working with influencers on YouTube or Instagram are obvious - this is real influencer marketing, when experts advise, show and tell about the apps they use themselves. This is what is most effective in 2022. Moreover, the price of installing mobile applications after working with creators is up to 10 times lower than motivated traffic.

Nevertheless, there are no fewer risks with such cooperation, since due to inexperience it is easy to run into scammers with cheated subscribers who do not have their own high-quality audience and simply drain the budget. Usually, these are novice influencers who want to make money quickly, but there are also large channels - they are distinguished by a lower price for advertising than colleagues with a similar number of subscribers.

Statistics will help you choose a creator by popularity and engagement rate. Where to find these? At the BuzzGuru platform! It provides complete statistics for each recommended influencer and guarantees the safety of cooperation.

Moreover, with the help of our platform, you can study the mobile app ad campaigns of your competitors. We will take the “RAID: Shadow Legends” app as an example to show you what kind of information is available on the BuzzGuru platform:

First of all, you get the general statistics about the total number of influencers mentioning this app, the total number of mentions and the number of ad mentions, the total number of YouTube video views, and the approximate budget. 

Next, you can observe a complete report for 1 month (the options to get a report for 3 and 6 months are also available, as well as you have an opportunity to specify the period yourself). The report includes the dynamics of the number of influencers dealing with the app, number of mentions and ad mentions, number of views, and approximate budget. 

Moreover, we provide a chart visualizing the dynamics of mentions by views and videos on YouTube:

Further, you can also find the section “Mentions geography” to discover the distribution of publications by country. 

You can also learn how the competitors distribute the funds between the social media platforms to promote their apps from our chart “Budget allocation”:

Next, we offer to analyze the chart showing the distribution of publications by day. For your comfort, we have marked the mentions and ad mentions in different colours:

You can also get an impression of what influencers your competitors cooperate with. For that, study the “Influencer portrait” chart, showing their division by category, the average number of views and subscribers, average engagement rate and price per influencer: 

Finally, we’ve collected some general rankings of the app:

Besides, you can overview the videos with this app mentioned in the “Videos” section:

Finally, you can study the influencers mentioning this app in the “Influencers” section:

How to Find the Right Influencer for a Mobile App Promotion?

The "market" of creators offering their promotion services is now full. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that collaboration with a well-known YouTuber whose services can cost several tens of thousands of dollars will be effective. The traditional approach to choosing an influencer over the past year has become significantly outdated. A large number of subscribers does not guarantee the quality of the output.

The following factors will help you choose the right creator whose advertising will not just be on the account, but will work:

• Subscriber quality

The number of subscribers can be a deception. That is why the quality of the subscribers is decisive. It is necessary to choose profiles that have real people among their followers. It is easy to check: if there are more empty profiles without publications among the followers - no sense in paying for advertising for such a creator.

• The right target audience

It is necessary to cooperate only with those profiles whose target audience will fit your mobile app parameters. Influencers who do not have many followers are often in closer contact with their subscribers, upload videos, and create live broadcasts. Such social activity creates a niche of trust.

• Engagement rate

Calculating this parameter is simple - add the number of likes and comments, and divide the result by the total number of posts. Before buying ads, note that all activity on the page must come from real subscribers.

• Price

Accurate calculation and analysis are meaningful here. Sometimes it is better to choose a few inexpensive posts from a little-known creator than to order one ad from a celebrity.

However, searching for the right influencer is a time-consuming process. You can do so on social media platforms by applying necessary hashtags or looking for those influencers your competitors have already collaborated with. Doing so, you also have to make all the calculations manually and check the quality of the accounts, too. Wouldn’t you like to spend this time on your business development? Or even on your mobile app improvement? We offer to use the BuzzGuru platform. It will help you find and analyze all the metrics of an influencer that seems just right for your ad campaign and pass to secure cooperation. 

With the help of our platform, you can search for creators by studying the ad campaigns of your competitors, as we have shown in the previous paragraph. But there is another way, too.

On the platform’s dashboard, select the “Influencers” tab:

Next, specify the platform you would like to promote your mobile app. You can select between YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok:

Further, click on the filters button and just specify what is more relevant to your mobile app. In particular, we offer to determine the channel topic, the number of views, the number of subscribers, publication date, the approximate price of cooperation, the influencer’s country, and broadcast language. 

Bonus: if yours is a gaming app, you can also specify the game genre or even select a particular game, choose the period, and select what to display - all selected games, any of them, or everything except the selected ones:

As a result, you will get the list of influencers matching the selected parameters. We bet the selection of the right influencers has never been that easy!

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a trending way to promote a mobile app on the Internet. The leaders of social networks like Instagram or YouTube do not just influence the opinion of their followers, but set the trends. This method helps create native unobtrusive advertising and increase brand awareness.

If you have a promising mobile app, choosing the right influencers and negotiating with them yourself can be a difficult task. BuzzGuru has created a powerful tool collecting the data of the influencers from YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok and providing detailed analytics for any parameters you may wish to check.

Thinking about promoting your mobile app through influencers? Give an eye on our analytics and discovery platform - and start your secure cooperation!