With the oversaturation of Google play store and Apple App store, App Marketing has become the need of the hour. While there are countless marketing techniques available, app marketing being a fresh industry has still kept the developers engaged in deciding which tactics are to deliver better results for their app. Talking about the marketing techniques in particular, the terms ATL (Above the Line) marketing and BTL (Below the Line) marketing will precisely help us in figuring out the right techniques and also which methods would have a major impact in promoting the applications.
Above the line marketing as we know, makes much of the traditional or conventional marketing tactics that involves promotional activities done on a larger scale. The basic aim of ATL is to establish brand awareness of any product. It includes mediums like TV ads- serving as the most popular medium, radio advertisements, cinema, newspapers, magazines and Press that we all are well-versed with. Through these mediums what ATL majorly does is to create an impact about the company and the app. However, ATL is meant for mass audience and hence it becomes difficult to an extent for the marketers to gather feedbacks and sales and thereby measure the useful insights on the return of investment. What adds to the downside is the amount of cost incurred in the production of traditional advertisements.
But these factors haven’t stopped the big players from trying out their hand on marketing their apps via TV advertisements. For instance, the mobile game Candy Crush Saga became the first game to be advertised independently on TV . While Rovio considered announcing the advent of Angry Birds star wars on the new operating system by getting featured in the Windows 8 commercial, Wechat and Line opted for big bucks strategy by investing in TV ads featuring celebrities having devoted fan following.
Wechat that belongs to the china’s largest listed internet company Tencent , extended its spending up to $200 million for advertising and marketing in a foreign country including the Messi commercials. While Line owned by a Korean firm Naver Corp, has considered not to disclose its spends on its television commercials featuring celebrities. Now the very next question that arises is which factors would have instigated Wechat and Line to opt for a strategy that came heavy on their pockets? Apart from the obvious reason of outperforming the four year old messaging app WhatsApp, the necessity of reaching out to the mass audience across the globe seems to have given a considerable push to these companies to invest in these TV commercials.
Wechat that already has its live 236 million users in China,witnessed a sudden shoot up in its international registered customers after introducing the Messi commercial in 15 countries in July 2013, Line’s downloads in Spain, are said to have tripled to 15 million in five months after TV commercials starring celebrities from a popular soap opera went live. While according to BI Intelligence , Line has recently cracked 330 million new users in less than 2 months. It is undeniable that Wechat and Line have made considerable efforts on expanding overseas after positioning themselves well in China and Japan respectively, where in ATL marketing seems to have done tremendous justice for these messaging apps.
However, these ATL marketing techniques apart from being widely popular and trusted for its loyalty in serving the purpose since several years, have been witnessing a considerable downfall in the recent times according to the latest stats. Blame it on the advent of Digital Marketing strategies that have been gradually outperforming the traditional marketing strategies by establishing solid social media platforms across the globe.
Now these social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Youtube are devotedly helping the companies to generate sufficient leads. These leads then further allow them to develop eCRM and then utilize the acquired data in many different ways. More or less, Digital marketing has become an essential part of Below The Line activities today. BTL marketing focuses on customer centric targets. This allows the marketers to acquire the insightful data and measure their ROI with an ease. BTL or better call it the Digital marketing campaigns have proved to be much more rewarding for the marketers following the engagement rate of people on social media platforms. With that, its cost-effectiveness makes it worthier all together.
Moreover, today the digital marketing frame is highly influenced by the video ads or should we say that the digital video ad market is carving a solid place for itself in the app industry. The insights reveal that Digital Video Ad Spending Will Increase by 40% and TV by 3% . This clearly suggests that, investing in digital videos or app demo videos for the App and spreading them across will help the developers in making the greatest impact on their app business.
While Digital marketing has become a core function of marketing an app efficiently, ATL marketing solves the bigger and much more essential purpose of the apps that are particularly serving the mass audience. Tencent corp. And Naver corp. that are going for high budget ATL promotions of their applications have a rich background connected to online products et. al. Large corporations such as these are bound to have a long term vision when they create a mobile app which are supposed to emerge as basic tools of communication for future. Hence, banking upon a large number of users becomes important and this clearly justifies their magnitude of ATL marketing budget. Do you also come with a long term, mass user driven strategy for your application?
Apparently, apps that particularly fall within categories that are driven by a large mass of users and whose aim is not limited to serve a specific target audience, have a greater potential and can go for ATL marketing activities to have a sure shot success backed by a huge app marketing budget.
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