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Mobile app marketing is becoming more important, with the boost in app usage worldwide, making the need for app marketing companies and agencies more stronger than ever before. Find out the top platforms that know how to promote your app best from our carefully selected list of only the best in the industry.
The times when tech media pundits talked widely about businesses transitioning from a desktop to mobile or about top level businesses adopting a mobile-first approach are long gone.
Now, it is mobile right from the get-go – by default.
So, keeping this picture of a highly competitive mobile app market in mind, can you imagine what it takes for an app developer to compete and run a successful app marketing campaign?
The growth agency of Google, Samsung, Uber, and many startups... Get the right media mix with the right message, in front of the right user, at the right time.
Learn moreToday, promoting and marketing an app is as tough as developing it. One way of mastering this challenge is to hire a mobile app marketing agency that helps marketing apps via multiple channels, and has the expertise in reaching your target app users.
But this is barely scratching the surface of what an app marketing agency can do for you. So, let us first talk about what app marketing is in the first place, and introduce you to the top app marketing companies in this guide.
Mobile app marketing basically means to make efforts so that your customers engage with your product and services on mobile. And it also means boosting your app’s presence in the app store with clever marketing techniques.
While the app marketing funnel may include similar stages to the traditional digital marketing funnel, it consists to three prime stages:
Awareness
Acquisition
Retention
This concept is therefore all about interacting with your users through all three of these stages in order to drive profitable, long term action. So the question now lies in how exactly do you interact with them to successfully promote your app.
Let’s take a closer look at the three phases.
The awareness stage occurs before marketers launch their apps, in which it is all about creating a presence and building brand awareness. This strategy includes a clear brand purpose, communication and positioning – basically answering the who, when, why, where and how about your product and services.
The main goal in this stage is to interact with potential customers, by using methods, such as influencer marketing, and grab their attention to your upcoming brand.
In the acquisition stage, your app has already launched and you are implementing new strategies to continue to acquire users and generate installs.
Acquisition is an ongoing process that needs constant tweaking and extensions of previous strategies and methods of marketing.
So, the main focus here is to keep optimizing for the app store and implementing creative strategies to attract new users and continue to build a loyal customer base.
After you acquire target users, it doesn’t end just there – you want to keep them engaged and invested in your app. In the retention stage, also an ongoing process, you want to come up with creative methods to turn users into loyal customers.
In this stage, make sure you keep up ongoing communication with users, maintaining an interactive and trustworthy bond.
In this case, push notifications will become your best friend. Keeping users in the loop and sending them alerts and updates about promotions, special rewards or upgrades is a great way to boost engagement.
User experience is also an important component of the retention stage. First impressions are crucial – and you only get one chance at it. So make sure users can browse your app smoothly, and use your services at ease from the start.
Mastering these three stages belong to a successful app marketing strategy. If you are able to build a presence for your upcoming app, acquire new users effectively and keep a loyal customer base, you are doing it all right.
But a lot of research and analysis goes into this, so it is easier said than done. This is why app marketing agencies and companies are here to make your life easier by lifting the extra weight off your shoulders.
You still want to understand how the company you hire works their magic. So let’s dive into the inner workings of ‘how’ you market your mobile app.
Understanding how app marketers and agencies work is important to having an overview of the best strategies being used for your mobile app. Knowing the ins and outs of the different methods will inform your decision in choosing the best app marketing company out there.
And it always begins with market research. In 2021 alone, 143.6 billion apps were downloaded, with 55 billion of those downloads being games and 88 billion apps. So you want to find out what types of users are downloading apps that have similar services to your business.
And don’t forget about the high competition in the app market currently. In 2022, 2.5 thousand new apps were submitted to the Apple App Store, which shows how important competitor analysis is when app marketing agencies come up with their own strategies.
App marketers and app marketing agencies are committed to fulfilling their users’ needs, and therefore create user personas to help create a solid app marketing strategy. The personas typically represent a kind of target audience, containing the characteristics of that particular group.
Other unique identifiers, such as demographics and mobile preferences are also dissected in order to create accurate personas to work out the typical user journey of this group. This allows app marketers to tailor their app marketing strategy to drive profitable action.
Doing a competitor analysis, market research and creating user personas will help you answer the following key questions in the early stages of the process, enabling you to effectively and successfully market your app:
Who are you targeting with your app and services?
Why would this group of users be interested in your app?
How are your competitors targeting the same users?
The first step for users to interact with your app directly is to get them to download and install your app. Mobile acquisition is therefore a must and app marketing agencies work hard to master the art of it.
So in order to attract and acquire new users, you want to nail the messaging bit, which belongs to a good app marketing strategy.
Here are some messaging formats that are commonly used by app marketing agencies to get people to use your app:
Social: Posting on your social media channels to relevant followers to gain more traction and build brand awareness
ASO: Optimizing the app store, including title, keywords, ratings and other ranking factors to acquire new users and increase app installs
Paid advertising: Creating social media ads and PPC campaigns, using Google Adwords, native and interstitial ad formats can push your app to the forefront, gaining a wider audience
Influencer marketing: Getting influencers to advertise your brand will allow you to gain your audience’s trust and therefore a loyal following that will increase your credibility and traffic instantly
Email marketing: With global the email marketing market reaching 7.5 billion U.S. dollars of value in 2020, this method of mobile acquisition can massively drive customers to your app when promoting its content, services and any offer discounts via email
When it comes to app marketing, mobile acquisition is a key component of app marketing agencies’ strategies that requires a lot of market research and competitor analysis. You need to implement a good balance of acquisition techniques to secure the long term success and revenue of your app.
But mobile acquisition belongs to a sea full of app marketing strategies and techniques that app marketing companies will focus on.
A marketing plan that an app marketing agency team will devise for your app, will usually consist of the following concepts:
An app’s marketing potential analysis
The right app marketing channels to use
Possible adjustments for your app’s marketing copy and creatives to produce
The app marketing best practices also demand an agency to carefully measure KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of such app marketing campaigns. And there is one main app promotion method that stands out from the rest – growth hacking.
Essentially, growth hacking is about finding ways for a particular mobile app to grow its number of users and revenue by integrating non-standard app marketing techniques, preferably with a low budget. Growth hacking focuses on driving scalable growth, in a short period of time, to produce ‘quick wins’.
But growth hacking and the techniques mentioned above belong to the greater process of your app marketing plan, and is integrated in a larger mobile engagement ‘loop’. Like traditional marketing, app marketing takes users through the marketing funnel that consists of the stages of awareness, acquisition and retention.
We call it a loop because users can go back and forth between stages as illustrated in the graphic below:
[graphic]
Awareness (users first hear about your app) —> Acquisition (users download and install your app, importance of app’s welcome series) → retention (membership signups, good UX, push notifications) → retargeting (regain attention from lapsed customers) ←→
In essence, app marketing is all about finding ways to reach, attract and retain your customers as well as analyzing and monitoring their behavior and the performance of your app to improve the experience.
Users look for services that fulfill their ‘needs’ and ‘questions’. So you want your app to be the number one place they go to to get the answers they are looking for. Integrating these strategies and methods and partnering with top app marketing agencies will help you reach your goals at a higher rate to start making revenue.
Now, your next pressing question must be how much it actually costs to market an app.
Because the main challenges of marketing an mobile app are both to reach and retain your users, there is a swarm of competition for users’ attention in the app store. Therefore, it is worth investing in the best app marketing company to successfully market your app and make it stand out from the crowd.
But you certainly don’t want to overspend your budget, and instead want to get the most value out of your marketing strategy at a reasonable price. Mobile app marketing costs usually consist of components that cover the entire lifecycle of an app:
Pre-launch
Launch
Post-launch
You will find within these stages that there are individual costs that will apply. Here is a brief estimation of the key data points that you can expect when working out your budget to market your app:
[graphic]
App market research – $5k…$15k
App beta testing – up to $5k
ASO tool – $25..$1,500 / month
App marketing agency pricing – up to $25k / app
App PR outreach – $100…$300 / hour
Influencer Marketing – $10…$18k / month
Average Cost Per Install (CPI) – $1.75 / install
Cost Per Action (CPA): Register – $3.5 / install
CPA: In-app purchase – $87 / install
CPA: Purchase – $75 / install
CPA: Subscribe – $37 / install
For a more detailed overview of the costs you can expect, take a look at our App Marketing Costs guide for extensive data.
The next and important question is which agency is on the top of the list for digital app marketing.
In order to simplify the answer, let’s dive into the types of app marketing agencies that are out there.
There is a range of types of mobile app marketing companies that can help you with your marketing campaign:
A specialist mobile agency can serve your app’s marketing needs via some particular marketing channel, for instance, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads, App Store Optimization, PR, and so on.
A general agency, with a mobile app marketing agency within it, which initially started as a digital one and later added mobile experience, when a smartphone took off as a new marketing channel.
A mobile advertising agency is focusing on mobile media buying. Media buyers negotiate and purchase audience-targeted time and advertising space to convey a marketing message.
Some app marketing agencies focus purely on App Store Optimization and are capable of driving mobile app user acquisition via the Apple’s App Store, Google Play or both.
Others focus on mobile campaign strategy, analytics of a mobile app user in-app behavior, traffic attribution and more.
Having the above-described picture of the mobile app marketing industry, we’ve decided to get together the facts and created a guide that covers the best mobile marketing companies 2021 to consider.
Our list includes big international agencies with broad creative marketing capabilities to boutique marketing companies focussing solely on mobile apps. Each of the companies listed has something different to offer.
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 11-50 | $17m+ | 3k+ | 20,000 |
Moburst is a mobile growth marketing agency founded in 2013 with branches in the US and Tel-Aviv. Moburst’s clients include some of the biggest brands in the world such as Google, Uber, Reddit, YouTube, Samsung, and many other amazing startups, gaming companies, and brands. Its team of growth experts promoted 600+ products in the past seven years and helped many start-ups gain more organic users, boost ROI on paid media and improve their products. Its user acquisition is achieved through a selection of hyper-targeted, remarketing, influencers, and brand engagement campaigns get the right message to the right user, at the right time. Its mixture of media channels are ideal to fit your goals and budget, including RTB/exchanges, social, ad-networks, premium publishers, video, retargeting, influencers and search.
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 11-50 | $14m+ | 9k+ | 2,000 |
PreApps is the app marketing platform for app businesses to launch and market their app to significantly boost the number of downloads and increase sales. From first time app creators to Billion Dollar apps, PreApps signature programs have helped thousands of apps reach over 550,000,000 downloads so far.
Over the past 9 years, PreApps has developed proven programs that take a first time app business owner through a unique and seamless process to launch their app successfully and reach their business goals.
Learn more about PreApps
| Founded | Employees | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 10-50 |
REPLUG is a leading app marketing consulting agency, supporting mobile-first startups and traditional organizations launching and scaling their mobile apps.
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 11-50 | - | 200+ | 1,000 |
App Growth Network is a global app marketing agency with three major area of focus – App Product Marketing, App Growth Marketing (UA) and Analytics.
Learn more about App Growth Network
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| - | 51-100 | - | - | - |
Phiture is a multi-award-winning mobile growth consultancy and agency working with the teams behind leading apps. Using the company’s industry-acclaimed Mobile Growth Stack as a strategic framework, Phiture team offers 5 key services: App Store Optimization, Performance Marketing, User Retention/CRM, Subscription Revenue Optimization services and Growth Consulting.
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 11-50 | - | 5k+ | 1,000 |
Yodel Mobile is the leading global app marketing consultancy and Mobile Agency of the Year 2019, specialising in launching and scaling apps.
Since their inception in 2007, they’ve launched and aided the growth of over 200 apps. They work with clients from single territory start-ups to established, multi-territory, international brands such as mytaxi, NBCUniversal, UKTV, Bauer Media, Fujifilm, The Economist, Teletext Holidays and Gymshark.
Learn more about Yodel Mobile
| Employees | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10-50 |
URLgenius offers app marketers and developers a patented, cloud-based alternative for app linking and QR code capabilities that increase conversion from any channel. Our technology streamlines the mobile experience with links that open specific screens in your app while bypassing the website login friction typically encountered when clicking from social ads or from inside other apps.
Learn more about URLgenius| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 11-50 | - | - | - |
There is a science to app marketing, and most companies do not know how to do it properly. We utilize every digital marketing tool at our disposal to get your app off the ground.
Flexible Marketing Subscriptions | Human experts & a smart platform
| Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10-50 | - | - | - |
Launchpad is the innovative SaaS solution for marketing. Build a custom plan on our online tool to get an instant quote, then get stellar marketing services on a flexible subscription. Track all your projects, analytics and messages on Launchpad ClientHub, one platform that streamlines all the marketing noise.
| Founded | Employees | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 101-200 |
Zorka.Agency is an international digital marketing agency focused on creating ROI-forecast strategies with a risk assessment that helps businesses scale up. At Zorka.Agency, we treat our clients as our partners.
Learn more about Zorka.Agency| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 10-50 | - | 200+ | - |
We’re Favoured. A results-driven performance marketing agency specialising in app marketing to drive growth, stickiness, and retention. Formed in 2017 by a former Apple Marketing Lead who wanted to bring his experience from “inside the machine” to app companies directly.
Learn more about Favoured
Singular is an end-to-end marketing platform analytics designed to maximize ROI with combinations and algorithms using different data silos in order to gain valuable insights. Since 2014 it tracked $10 billion + in mobile app ad spend and has 2,000+ integration partners.
Learn more about Singular
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 11-50 | $5m+ | 2k+ | 10,000 |
Gummicube revolutionized mobile marketing in 2010 as the first App Store Optimization company. Gummicube’s DATACUBE ™ software leverages proprietary ‘big data for mobile’ to understand search trends and the competitive landscape inside of the app stores. By using DATACUBE, mobile search data and user behavior is no longer a black box — resulting in greater visibility, more high-quality organic downloads and a lower overall cost of user acquisition.
Learn more about Gummicube
| Founded | Employees | Social | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 51-200 | 1k |
Zoomd offers one platform for both publishers and advertisers looking to acquire and expand new and existing users, while increasing engagement.
For advertisers: Zoomd’s platform acts as a User Acquisition control centre, integrated to over 90% of global mobile media (over 600 digital media sources), including all major mobile measurement solutions (MMP) under one unified dashboard. The ultimate UA control centre. The platform also serves as a second layer of anti-fraud solution for advertisers. Zoomd is a high scale big data platform, generating over 500,000,000 daily measured events from more than 3000 daily campaigns running on the platform .The platform is a performance based platform including an AI based KPI engine that allows advertisers to set and achieve KPI’s and drive users based on them.
Learn more about Zoomd| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 10-50 | - | 20k | 70k |
MobileAction is an app marketing insights & intelligence tool. Founded in 2013, the company has become the only platform that provides intelligence and analytics tools for every step in the app growth journey.
Learn more about MobileAction
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 10-50 | $5+ million | 1k | 10,000 |
The ASO Project is a full-service App Store Optimization agency. Increase your app\'s organic installs with a data-driven App Store Optimization strategy, a dedicated team of ASO Pros, Apple Search Ad experts, designers, video editors, mobile strategists and a custom reporting dashboard.
Learn more about The ASO ProjectAdjust is an attribution and analytics software package for mobile applications, enabling mobile app marketers to examine store statistics, advertising sources and advanced analytics to fully monetize their application. Adjust is the choice of such established brands as Yelp, Zynga, Spotify, Soundcloud, Runtastic, Hotel Tonight.
Learn more about Adjust
| Founded | Employees | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 201-500 |
WakeApp is an award-winning mobile marketing agency and a leader in the promotion and acquisition of mobile applications for blue-chip organizations globally. Key Features Using our 8 years of experience in driving good quality, high volume traffic to our partners, we developed the WakeApp InApp Network.
Learn more about WakeAppBango – a custom data platform that helps app marketers to acquire 2x more in-app purchase (IAP) users through Bango Marketplace. Bango analyzes detailed payment information from its global payment partners to gain insights into the buying behavior of hundreds of millions of users. Bango Marketplace creates high life-time value (LTV) audiences by applying these insights. App developers use these audiences in Facebook ad campaigns to boost user acquisition.
Learn more about Bango
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2002 | 135 | - | 19k | - |
Perform[cb] is the #1 Performance Marketplace in the world, offering strategic plans tailored to meet their clients’ specific marketing goals – all while only paying for new customers versus simply impressions or clicks. Perform[cb], formerly Clickbooth, Adperio, and Ignite OPM, empowers brands to acquire new customers through incremental digital channels on a pay-for-results model. Our proprietary technology, specialized strategy development, and highly curated partner marketplace align “cost-per” pricing with customer lifetime value.
Learn more about Performcb
Airshipis global mobile app marketing automation platform that helps brand owners to grow their business. Plus to the extensive suite of app marketing tools, it provides sophisticated mobile analytics system. It features user-level customer intelligence tool to reveal mobile app users cohorts that drive revenue, tools to predict and prevent mobile app churn, as well as to track mobile users behavioral patterns.
Learn more about Airship
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 40-50 | - | 6k-13k | 72K |
AppTweak is the leading ASO tool driven by data science. AppTweak empowers mobile leaders – such as Amazon, Jam City, Yelp, Zynga and Adobe – to grow their apps and games with actionable insights in a simple interface.
Committed to developing the most accurate, transparent and easy-to-use ASO tool on the market, AppTweak supports over 1,500 app developers and game publishers worldwide. AppTweak’s all-in-one platform offers ASO Intelligence, Ad Intelligence, App Intelligence and Market Intelligence.
Services: ASO Intelligence, Ad Intelligence, Market Intelligence, App Intelligence
Offices: Brussels, Belgium – San Francisco, USA – Bangalore, India – Tokyo, Japan
Tagline: #1 ASO Tool for Apps & Games Driven by Data Science
Learn more about AppTweak
Bamboo is a mobile advertising agency, founded in San Francisco, US in 2014. It specializes on mobile campaign management, mobile growth strategy, creative strategy and production, advertising iteration service. The agency ran paid ad campaigns on top social media networks to acquire mobile app users for leading brands like Dropbox, Hotel Tonight, Peloton, Microsoft and others.
Learn more about Bamboo
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 10-50 | - | - | - |
Recognized as an elite influencer agency, at HireInfluence we develop intent-driven influencer marketing campaigns that merge the needs of brands, audiences, and influencers. We hand-select influencers for each and every campaign to ensure an organic fit and authentic feeling content.
As a full-service influencer marketing agency we source and cast right-fit talent, develop creative content strategies, execute comprehensive, interactive, cross-channel influencer campaigns, and report back on campaign analytics.
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 100+ | - | 15k | ~5 Million in 2021 |
+250,000 developers, from indies to large enterprises, trust in Appodeal to manage their Ad Monetization. A light full-stack ad monetization solution that puts app publishers first – the way it should be.
By just integrating one simple SDK, you will gain access to +70 ad networks & demand sources, competing against each other in a real-time auction for every single ad impression.
Learn more about Appodeal
| Founded | Employees | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 10 - 50 |
ASOMobile is a comprehensive mobile app analytics for developers, marketers and ASO specialists.
Learn more about ASOMobile
