Next month is Pride Month, a time to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community and their fight for rights and equality. As a marketer, you might be wondering how to prepare your app marketing plan with the right creatives, offers, etc. to be relevant for Pride month. Here are some tips to help you nail your Pride Month marketing campaign.

 

1. Partner with LGBTQ+ non-profit organizations and influencers: One of the best ways to show your support for the LGBTQ+ community is to collaborate with organizations and influencers that are working to make a difference. You can donate a portion of your app revenue to an LGBTQ+ charity, feature LGBTQ+ influencers in your app content, or create a co-branded campaign that showcases your shared values.
   With our experience and authentic Creators Community (CGC), Zoomd’s team can help you find suitable creators and influencers in the LGBTQ+ community that can help your brand or app agenda during Pride month.
2. Align with who you are as a brand: Your Pride Month marketing campaign should reflect your brand identity and mission, not just follow a trend. Make sure your campaign is consistent with your brand voice, tone, and style, and that it communicates your genuine commitment to diversity and inclusion. Don’t just slap a rainbow on your logo or app icon and call it a day. Show how your app supports or empowers the LGBTQ+ community all year round.
3. Ask your LGBTQ+ staff to be part of the campaign: Another way to ensure authenticity and representation in your Pride month marketing campaign is to involve your LGBTQ+ employees in the planning and execution of the campaign. Just like we did when writing this blog post, we asked them for their input and feedback. Your teammates are full of ideas, so why not brainstorm with them on how to create a campaign that resonates with the LGBTQ+ audience?
   You can also feature them in your app content, such as testimonials, stories, or interviews.
4. Lobby for real change: Pride month is not just about celebrating, but also about advocating for LGBTQ+ rights and equality. As a marketer, you have the power to influence public opinion and policy through your app content and messaging. You can use your app platform to educate your users about the issues and challenges facing the LGBTQ+ community, such as discrimination, violence, or health disparities. You can also encourage them to take action, such as signing petitions, contacting lawmakers, or joining protests.
5. Choose the right language: Language is a powerful tool for communication and inclusion, but it can also be a source of misunderstanding and exclusion. When creating your Pride Month marketing campaign, be mindful of the words and terms you use to refer to the LGBTQ+ community and its members. Avoid stereotypes, assumptions, or generalizations that might offend or alienate some groups or individuals. Use inclusive and respectful language that acknowledges the diversity and complexity of LGBTQ+ identities and experiences.
6. Avoid rainbow washing: Rainbow washing is the practice of using rainbow colors or symbols to show support for the LGBTQ+ community without actually doing anything meaningful or substantial. It is seen as a form of exploitation or appropriation that benefits the brand more than the community. To avoid rainbow washing, make sure your Pride month marketing campaign is not just a one-time thing or a publicity stunt. Show your long-term commitment and involvement in supporting the LGBTQ+ community beyond June.
7. Be at the right place: Choose those media outlets that will better help your pride month campaign shine the best. Zoomd’s vast media outlets and direct connection can be exactly what you need in order to be at the right place at the right time.

By following these tips, you can create a Pride Month marketing campaign that is relevant, respectful, and impactful for your app audience.
But don’t stop there. Pride month is an opportunity to learn more about the LGBTQ+ community and its history, culture, and struggles. Keep educating yourself and your staff on how to be better allies and advocates for LGBTQ+ rights and equality.

If you need help with hitting the right target audience, and thinking about the best creatives, and media channels to use to leverage your Pride month initiatives globally, you can rely on our technologies and services. Zoomd is a leading app marketing tech company that specializes in creating inclusive campaigns for apps just like yours. We have the expertise, experience, and tools to help you reach your goals and engage the LGBTQ+ audience with your app content and offers.
Contact us today to find out how we can help you make your app shine during this Pride month.

Happy Pride Month! 🏳️‍🌈

Social media is continually evolving, and new platforms constantly come out of nowhere and take over public consciousness.
As a result, advertisers always need to remain aware of what platforms are trending, and while old campaigns can often be applied to new platforms, a refresher is usually needed.

Multichannel Campaigns

Running a multi-channel campaign is not a new demand for advertisers. Multiple channels or platforms have been popularized since early times, and often when crafting a campaign, advertisers will consider how well it will work across multiple platforms. But while advertisers often can and will use the same creative concept on various platforms, some aspects of the ad will need to be adjusted to make the most out of each advertisement.

Having an overall concept designed to work on several platforms while creating variations for each platform is recommended. After all, a static banner that may work on Google or Facebook won’t work as well on more dynamic platforms such as Snapchat. Slight adjustments may be enough to tailor ads for some platforms, but others stand so apart, they’re practically in a world of their own.

TikTok- When Multi-Platform Media Strategy Isn’t Enough

TikTok is the latest creative platform to take over social media, with over 1.1 billion users worldwide, many of whom interact with the app daily. The app is extremely popular, particularly with GenZ users, being yet again the most downloaded app from both the app and play store. The platform has its own style, rules, and culture, and creative concepts that have worked in the past or on other platforms may need a complete overhaul when making their debut on TikTok. Using the same old content on a new platform will reduce interest and engagement, leading to low CTR and conversion rates not to mention a negative impression of the brand.

Unlike traditional platforms, which most advertisers are already familiar with, learning what works and what doesn’t on TikTok may need extra investigation. One example of how TikTok is unique is that while it does rely on video content, TikTok users are generally encouraged to keep content as bite-sized as possible. Initially, the content was limited to just 15 seconds, but that was later extended to 60 seconds and now many users can upload three minutes for more informative videos. This means that the best way to get your message across and drive engagement on TikTok is by using short, sharp creatives with a clear and convincing CTA.

Why Avoiding Ad Fatigue Matters

Similar rules often apply to other platforms. On some occasions, your creatives may only need a slight tweak before it is presented on multiple platforms, while in other cases, you may need to rethink your creative concept and redesign it entirely from scratch.

Differences such as the age and gender of users primarily engaging with a platform need to be kept in mind when developing a media budget and during the media planning stage. This is especially crucial when running a cross-channel campaign. Users who follow your brand across multiple platforms will grow bored of constantly having the same messaging directed toward them, leading to ad fatigue and lower conversion rates.

Refreshing your creative specs is essential, not just for the holiday season or special events but all year round to keep those conversion numbers growing. Remain open to change and continually run your creatives by testing to see what works with which demographics. With Zoomd’s “Best Performing Creatives” feature, available on our own developed Skipper UA platform, you can tell from a glance at your dashboard which creatives are working and what needs to be refreshed, indicated by the low CTR. By avoiding creative fatigue, you maximize every cent of your media budget and increase your chances of converting new users. Instead of struggling to understand your audience, use statistics and real-time insights to see what works and where.

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Looking to improve your creative assets? Look no further. With our strong and authentic creator’s community, you can easily scale your creative production performance in a matter of days. Let’s talk

Learn more about our creator’s community in this video:

Will you be better off with an advertising agency or an in-house team? What will drive greater app growth while optimizing operations?

Having provided user acquisition platforms for both agencies and advertisers – and having acted as a performance user acquisition agency for some of the largest brands in the world – we know there isn’t a right or wrong way. There’s just the way that’s best for you.

Here are 5 key aspects to consider, and how both advertising agencies and in-house teams can help your app succeed, depending on what matters to you most.

 

Changing Industry Requirements

Choose in-house if you have the resources for continuous employee training. With the advertising and app industries changing so frequently and so widely (remember the days we only had a couple of primary channels?), you’ve got to constantly keep your team on the cutting edge of knowledge and technology.

The benefit is that employees often see professional development as an employee differentiator, so you are likelier to attract and retain top talent.

 

Choose agency if you just need to get going or if you don’t have the resources to keep up with all the changes, then develop or find training for your team on an ongoing basis yourself. Some agencies do that for you – they continuously train their teams on new channels and strategies. Others go deep and specialize in certain aspects.

If you need access to effective influencers *and* you want to build your app’s own TikTok community, hire an agency that has already achieved proven results for each goal, and see results faster. One of the top reasons for that is that agencies tend to have much more operations volume in one channel (in comparison to a single advertiser), thus get direct account managers introduced by the platform or social network themselves. For example, as a certified marketing partner of TikTok, we received in-depth data, best practices and faster supports from the platform. To understand the real value of a technology agency, you can read in our latest article by Zoomd VP of media.

 

Broad and Deep Perspectives

Choose in-house if you want a greater cross-silo collaboration. When your marketing people collaborate with sales, customer success and product people, magical things can happen. They gain a deeper understanding, better data, and end up driving better results, because they understand your app’s customers better.

You can create intentional collaborations with agencies, but the advantage of in-house teams is that they interact informally with other teams, whether it’s at lunch or on the company’s happy hour Zoom call. The personal relationships could make collaboration simpler, and some ideas might pop up spontaneously in day-to-day conversations.

 

Choose agency if you want proven strategies that have worked for apps like yours – or if you want the benefit of cross-industry experience. Folks who work at agencies typically work with many more app companies than the in-house marketer that “only” changes companies every 2-3 years.

It’s a different type of experience. The in-house marketers go deeper into one brand, while the agency marketers get a broad perspective. They can see how app users in both your industry and in complementary industries have responded to certain marketing initiatives, and what works in other industries that your audience might not already be used to seeing, allowing you to differentiate your messaging further.

 

Hiring and Compatibility

Choose in-house if you want to decide who you work with. First, you might care about certain skills that your agency doesn’t. Maybe your agency hires very creative people who design stunning campaign assets (link to assets article once it’s published), but you need someone on your team who’ll prioritize diversity and inclusion, or empathy toward your app users.

Second, maybe your agency’s team members check all your professional checkboxes, but you want someone who’ll just be fun to work with. When you hire advertisers yourself, you have more control.

Choose agency if you want access to a pre-vetted pool of industry pros, who have experience taking apps and campaigns to the next level. The hiring process can be extensive and expensive, and partnering with an agency that’s already done the heavy lifting can make your life easier and save you money. Make sure you meet with the people who’ll be working on your campaigns, to ensure compatibility in personalities and work process preferences.

 

Work Velocity

Choose in-house if you want greater control over your schedule and over your team’s availability.

You can tell an employee you need a project ASAP – it’s your company and you decide what to prioritize – but if you need a deliverable within two days, and your agency is already fully booked with commitments to other clients, you’ll need to find an alternative solution for that deliverable.

Choose agency if you want to grow fast. Agencies already have team members, plus relationships and partnerships with freelancers. They can likely add people to your app’s campaign quickly.

Alternatively, hire 2-3 agencies at once. You make 2-3 hiring decisions and book entire teams instead of 2-3 people.

 

Customization to Your Needs

Choose in-house *and* agency for the best mix for your specific situation.

Have some in-house advertisers to ensure your app campaigns remain on-brand across partners, and to simplify cross-silo collaboration. Simultaneously, partner with agencies that specialize in areas that complement your team’s strengths, have broad experience to help you differentiate yourself from the noise, and have the ability to help you scale fast.

Here at Zoomd, we have performance marketing solutions to help you whichever way you choose. If you need an agency that specializes in meeting ambitious user acquisition goals, we’ve got your back. Prefer to do it yourself? We recently started providing access to our proprietary AI-based platform. You gain the benefit of 500,000,000 daily data points, leverage what works on one channel to inform campaigns on other channels and increase your app growth efficiency. See what’s possible here.

 

You’ve done your customer research, analyzed your data and designed the perfect user acquisition strategy. Now it’s time to create that magical moment when your ad and ideal app user stumble across each other on the feed.

Today’s guide to creative assets that convert is all about that moment. It’s about helping your ad stand out, about starting a conversation (or continuing a previous one), and connecting your app with the people whose lives it can improve most.

Advertising for apps? Whichever Creative Assets You Choose, Set Your App Advertising Campaign to Success.

1. Choose a Goal

You can achieve every conversion goal you want for your app, you just can’t achieve all the conversion goals with one single ad. Choose a goal first, then reverse engineer the creative assets that will help you get there.

2. Be Inclusive

82% of people believe brands must take a stand on social issues to earn their trust, revealed the 2020 Edelman report. 60% even said it impacts their purchase decisions.

The easiest way to start? Be inclusive. Showcase a range of genders, ethnicities, ages and abilities.

Source: Edelman

 

3. Create Instant Trust

Whenever possible, include trust triggers in your campaign – success stories, testimonials, amount of customers, recognizable customers, everyday app users just like the ad viewer, coverage in popular media, you name it.

4. Analyze and Tweak

Review your assets periodically to make sure they align with your app’s message and the current times. Rotate assets in a previously-determined, strategic order. Analyze conversions, let go of what doesn’t work, and create more of what does.

Best Practices for HTML5 Assets

5. Draw Attention Strategically

Animate the beginning of your ad to draw immediate attention to it in a busy feed. Also animate the most important part of your ad – for example, your product – to help it stand out within the ad experience

6. Tell a Story

Take advantage of the fact you can include multiple frames in one ad, and use it to share the story behind your app, or the narrative of transformation awaiting those who download it.

But don’t push it. Keep it to 3-5 frames. Otherwise, you risk exceeding both viewer fatigue and platform weight limitations.

7. Gamify Your Ad

Make your ad interactive. Let customers answer a quiz, for example, at the end of which they can click through to your app to get the results.

Or let them replay the experience in-ad instead of clicking through right away. For example, give them multiple attempts to ensemble the perfect look out of your brand’s clothing items, before they click through to buy. Or play a small portion of your game multiple times before they download, to build a stronger emotional connection.

8. Provide Actionable Guidance

Include captions to direct people to the next step – both in-ad, for a better ad experience, and when it’s time to click through and download your app.

Best Practices for Video Assets

9. Make the First Few Seconds Count

Whether you advertise on YouTube and viewers can skip your app within five seconds, or you advertise on Instagram or TikTok, and viewers can skip right away… the first few second influence whether they’ll give your ad a chance.

10. “Design for Sound Off, But Delight with Sound On”

If you’ve been advertising on Facebook the past few years, you might have noticed the often-quoted stat that “85% of Facebook video is watched without sound.” Therefore, it’s crucial to add captions to your videos.

However, Facebook itself, which owns Instagram, reports that “60% of Instagram Stories ads were viewed [with the] sound on, and… Instagram Stories ads with sound were perceived as more relevant than those without.”

So, as a creative strategist, Isabelle Quevilly recommended to Facebook advertisers, “design for sound off, but delight with sound on.”

11. Make Video Ads Loopable

This might make sense especially on platforms like TikTok, where viewers are used to watching loop after loop of the same short video. But ideally, you’ll want viewers to replay your ad wherever they can, whether it’s on their Instagram feed or on YouTube.

The more time they play your ad, the more connected they’ll feel, and the higher the brand recall will be as well.

Of course, the intention is to move them off the current platform, so you could leave an open ending, requiring them to download your app to know how it ends.

12. Align Your Ad Tone with Your Conversion Goal

Yahoo, Nielsen & Hunter Qualitative surveyed 14,000 consumers and discovered that different tones help generate different types of conversions in video ads – at least when targeting millennials, according to Clickz.

Check it out:

Source: Yahoo and Nielsen & Hunter Qualitative, via Clickz

 

Best Practices for Image Assets

13. Test Faces vs. Products

Follow LinkedIn‘s example, and test whether your app targets consumers or business buyers. When LinkedIn advertised a business report, it tested a photo of a hand scrolling a phone versus a photo of a human face. The photo with the face converted more downloads.

Source: LinkedIn via YouTube

 

But your situation might be different. You might want to show how food photos that make customers drool enough to download your app and make a purchase.

So test it out.

 

14. Test Product Focus

If you do feature products, test just how closely to zoom in on them. Maybe for one app, closing in on red shoes will convert better, because it will emphasize the unique features this pair of shoes has.

Source: Zazabest

But maybe for another app, or for a different audience sector, a photo of a woman wearing red boots to a picnic of sweet potato soup and pumpkin spice drinks, set against the backdrop of mountains covered in fall colors, will create a greater urgency to “buy now.”

15. Test Complimentary vs. Contrasting Colors

You might need the contrasting colors to pop up on a busy page or feed, and fight banner blindness, but again, every audience is different.

Source: Lingokids

Maybe the soothing or inspiring aesthetic of complementary colors is what will get your specific customers wanting more.

Source: Wowcher

16. Let the Visual Tell the Story

Amplify your ad with copy, but make the image 80-ish% of your banner ad. Remember that some people will see it on mobile. The more text you add, the smaller the font needs to be… and the harder it is to read.

On that note…

Unless you do it to qualify your audience – say, your app targets a specific type of artist – don’t add all the visual details to one image. Your image needs to be interesting, but it needs to be easy enough to understand within a mere second or two, even on a small screen.

Source: NordVPN

 

If you need to show more details before customers download your app, create additional banners for the campaign, or direct them to a landing page to learn more.

Bonus Tip for advertising app: Gain Deeper Data

Data is crucial in understanding how well your creative assets are performing for you, and how to improve your user acquisition efforts.

Make sure you use an advertising platform that lets you compare campaigns in an efficient way. If you partner with a platform that lets you leverage one channel’s data to empower results on other channels, even better.
Zoomd offers 3 solutions that do that. You can check them out here, and see which one is best for you. But either way, remember – always be testing.