In today’s privacy-first landscape, the adage ‘Creative is King’ has never been more relevant. With increasing privacy regulations limiting traditional targeting methods, the role of creative assets has grown significantly in driving user engagement and conversions. From seasonal creative campaigns to leveraging user-generated content, adapting your strategy to stay relevant and impactful is essential. This post explores advanced tactics that can help app marketers unlock growth by refining their creative strategies, increasing user engagement, and driving higher conversion rates.
Driving engagement with seasonal creative testing
For any app business it’s important to really hone down your creative for your BAU campaigns. However, those looking to scale should strive for agile, creative strategies and really capitalise on seasonal opportunities. Aligning your creative assets with high-impact seasons can significantly boost engagement. This strategy involves tailoring your store listing and ad creatives to resonate with users during specific times of the year. This is a clear indicator to your user that your app has relevant, fresh and enticing content in tune with the season.
Tips for elevating your creative strategy
- Develop themed creatives for major holidays and events
Create ad variations that reflect the mood and themes of holidays like Christmas, Halloween, Black Friday, Eid or major sporting events like the Olympics or Euros. These periods tend to be high- traffic and high-revenue opportunities for apps in various categories and a great opportunity to also leverage promotions to convert and re-engage existing and new customers.
- Test seasonal variations of your best- performing ads
Take your top-performing ads and create seasonal versions to see if they can drive even better results. Use insights from past seasonal campaigns to refine your approach for upcoming events. We also recommend keeping an eagle eye on the competitors and see how you can cut through the competition and stand out against the standard seasonal creative strategies they take.
- Don’t let your seasonal creatives stop at your ad creatives.
Bring back the use of seasonal creatives through ASO for your store listing screenshots and icon or leverage Custom Product Pages (CPPs) and Custom Store Listings (CSLs) to drive those high CVRs!
Expert insights from AppTweak
“One overlooked aspect of creative optimization is the psychological trigger behind seasonal campaigns. It’s not just about aligning visuals with holidays or events – it’s about understanding the emotional state of your audience during these times. For example, holidays like Christmas trigger nostalgia and togetherness, while events like Black Friday are driven by urgency and exclusivity. The most successful creatives don’t just reflect seasonal themes; they tap into these emotional drivers to create a deeper connection with users, enhancing engagement and ultimately driving higher conversion rates.”
Alexandra De Clerck, CMO, AppTweak
Scaling success through high-volume creative testing
Continuous creative testing is crucial for sustained growth and importantly, inventory unlocking. This involves regularly introducing new ad creatives and comparing their performance against existing ones. We recommend building a thorough testing roadmap early on in your creative strategy so that you and your creative team can prepare for volume and direction of your creative iteration.
Tips for implementing high-volume creative testing
- Build a pipeline for creative testing
We recommend keeping your concept assets broad and allowing your testing cycle for granular variations across copy, CTA, formats, buttons and colours. At Yodel Mobile, we leverage a robust testing framework that starts with wide-ranging concept testing. Winning concepts are iterated through execution style testing and finally, variable testing to drive incremental improvements in CTRs and CPIs.
- Test new creatives against top performers
Use A/B testing to compare new creatives against your best-performing ads. There are certain channels that are better suited for A/B testing such as Meta, so focus your efforts on these channels first and leverage insights across your other channels.
- Regularly refresh your creative inventory to combat ad fatigue.
Replace underperforming ads and rotate successful ones to maintain engagement. This requires vigilance as although some platforms will give you a notification/signal when creative is underperforming, others will need to be recognised manually. Regular creative reporting goes a long way in assisting holistic creative strategies.
Expert insights from Yodel Mobile
“Running expansive and efficient creative testing is key to the progression and longevity on any user acquisition activity. Balancing iterative development with creating new and fresh content ensures that creative testing is cyclical, and fatigue does not become an issue. Furthermore, testing a variety of creative formats will allow you to maximise available placements across your chosen channel mix.”
Joel Saunders, UA Lead, Yodel Mobile
Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-Generated Content (UGC) has grown in popularity in the app marketing world over the last few years. This refers to any form of content created by users of your app, such as reviews, photos, or videos. In the context of UGC for app campaigns, videos from creators can provide authentic, relatable content that resonates with potential users and are especially effective on channels such as TikTok and Instagram. We have also found that adapting UGC across the likes of Meta and Google can positively impact CTRs also and inject a fresh format into your creative testing strategy.
(TikTok, 2024)
Tips for kick-starting your UGC journey
- Leverage creators to craft UGC aligned with your brand
Ensure that you are clear with your brief but allow the creators to authentically share their experience with your product, leveraging various concept formats such as ‘a day in the life,’ ‘skits,’ and other trending formats that work particularly well for UGC video content. Ensuring brand guidelines are clearly communicated at the briefing stage will lessen the rounds of feedback required.
- Repurpose top performing assets across channels
Once you’ve received your creative assets from the creators and tested these on the likes of TikTok and Instagram, you can curate and repurpose high-quality UGC for your other marketing campaigns and channels such as Google or Facebook. Select the most compelling user content and adapt it for use in your ads.
- Compare UGC performance with other formats
It’s always worth testing to see if your UGC content outperforms other content formats. Trial running UGC-based ads against your other creatives to compare the performance of UGC ads with your standard creatives. This way, you can determine their effectiveness and scale the strategy that works best for you. If it’s proven to bring you the best costs and engagement, then it’s clear that UGC should be at the heart of your creative strategy.
Key takeaways for winning creative strategies
The success of your app marketing efforts hinges on the strength of your creative strategies. By embracing seasonal opportunities, optimizing creative testing frameworks, and integrating user-generated content, you can effectively capture attention and engage your target audience. These tactics not only help navigate privacy-first challenges but also position your app for sustainable growth. As user behavior evolves, staying agile, data-driven, and innovative with your creative assets will ensure your campaigns continue to deliver exceptional results. Now is the time to elevate your app marketing strategy and unlock your app’s full potential.
