This post -- written by our Craig Palli -- originally appeared on Boston.com.

With more than 1.5 million apps in the Apple and Android app stores, mobile app marketers face the enormous challenge of achieving discoverability, sustained user engagement and, ultimately, monetization. Successfully marketing your app requires more than strategic mobile media buying and compelling, creative advertising. High-performance mobile app marketers have a laser-like focus on targeting and acquiring loyal users – those who take a specific action, such as an in-app purchase or registration. It's these loyal users who become repeat customers, word-of-mouth advocates, and deliver real, ongoing ROI.

The following eight tips for marketing your app are focused on driving more of these loyal users. They're based on more than 70 billion user-based app actions, including launches, registrations, and in-app purchases, as well as real time bidding requests recorded on our platform, and they're proven marketing tactics for putting your app ahead of the competition:

1. Establish goals for loyal users. Exactly what constitutes a loyal user will vary from app to app – perhaps it's opening the app a certain number of times or completing an in-app purchase or registration – so define that metric before launching any acquisition campaigns. You'll also need to determine your lifetime value per user so you can set cost-per-conversion targets (i.e., determine how much to pay for different traffic volumes to deliver the best possible ROI).
2. Promote your app across several traffic sources. There are several types of traffic sources for mobile apps: ad networks, real-time bidding exchanges, incentivized download networks, and more. Using just one source – or even one from each general type – gives you too small a universe to be successful. You'd be missing out on valuable opportunities to identify the best sources for large volumes of loyal users. In fact, working with several traffic sources can improve loyal acquisition results by up to five times.
3. Track post-download activity. As your mobile ad campaigns are running, it’s critical to track users’ post-download activities and tie this data back to its traffic source, ad creative, and other campaign variables. This helps to pinpoint which specific traffic sources and campaigns are driving your most loyal users – not just the most downloads.
4. Optimize ad campaigns in real-time. By analyzing real-time data, it’s possible to eliminate inefficient ad spending and shift budget to those traffic sources and campaigns that are delivering loyal users.
5. Employ a campaign optimization solution. Optimizing advertising campaigns based on post-download actions is challenging but there are automated solutions available. Instead of managing a huge matrix of ad networks, costs, creative, downloads, and conversion rates, it's worth investigating a solution that incorporates everything and adjusts your campaign spending on the fly.
6. Conduct ongoing closed-loop analysis. Continuous analysis of marketing campaign performance, post-download usage and revenue return helps you understand, at a granular level, what's moving the needle. It’s important to dive into these analytics frequently to fine-tune campaign planning and align with marketing objectives.
7. Conduct a loyal user acquisition test. Not convinced that the concept of marketing specifically to bring in loyal users will produce results? It's easily testable. Assign a portion of your marketing budget to a test that employs the above-recommended strategies. You’ll gain valuable insights into how a loyal user acquisition strategy can directly impact your bottom line.
8. Benchmark performance against industry averages. The best way to improve your mobile marketing results is to more precisely understand the competitive landscape you're pouring your budget into. By benchmarking how your mobile app marketing stacks up against industry averages, you’ll gain a larger, more accurate picture of the trends impacting your business goals, allowing you to adapt and plan with more agility.

Mobile app marketing shouldn't require guesswork. By deploying these tested strategies and tactics, mobile app marketers can achieve high-performance results that not only drive business objectives, but also acquire large volumes of loyal users.

Still waiting on an iPad Mini that Santa forgot? Fiksu might be able to help. All you need to do is refer a friend or colleague and we'll give you a free iPad Mini as a thank you.

We take it as a great compliment when our clients recommend that their contacts work with us, so we're excited to launch our new Refer a Friend program which makes it easy for anyone to make a referral – and allows us to say thank you.

The program is simple: introduce your friends, clients, or other contacts to Fiksu so they can reap the benefits of our high-performance marketing platform. In return, for any new client you refer, we'll give you a free iPad Mini.

Sound easy? It is – there are just a couple of conditions. Your recommendation needs to become a client within 60 days, with a minimum spend of $20,000, to earn the iPad. And if you already got an iPad Mini for the holidays (lucky you), we will alternatively donate the full cost of an iPad Mini to the charity of your choice. (Full terms and conditions are on the Refer a Friend page.)

In summary, it's just three easy steps:

1.     Send in your contacts' information on our Refer A Friend page

2.     They become a Fiksu customer

3.     We send you a brand new iPad Mini

We reward those who spread the word about Fiksu!

It’s been a busy few weeks for Fiksu! Last week, in between stops at the Game Monetization Summit, Mobile Gaming Europe, and AppNation, we debuted FreeMyApps for Android. Today, we’re introducing a number of innovative enhancements to our flagship Fiksu Platform that make it the first and only platform to provide comprehensive tracking, centralized media buying access, advanced optimization, and detailed reporting for mobile app marketers. Put simply, it's a high-performance platform for mobile app marketing.

At the center of these updates is our new powerful reporting and analytics dashboard for tracking mobile app advertising performance and media spend. Our platform also now features the most technologically advanced approach to attribution and tracking for real-time bidding (RTB), removing the guesswork from bidding and buying decisions and solving the historically difficult problem of mobile targeting.

We recognize that a robust mobile advertising platform is the future of mobile app marketing, and we're committed to leading the charge. We’ve already seen impressive results for our customers’ user acquisition programs, including up to 60 percent reduction in media costs, up to a three-time increase in loyal user acquisition, and significant revenue for 30 of the top 50 grossing gaming app publishers.

Here’s a quick look at the new and enhanced features:

• New analytics dashboard: The new Fiksu dashboard provides full transparency into mobile advertising performance including detailed statistics on post-download behaviors such as purchases and registrations. It equips marketers with deep, customizable analysis into loyal user acquisition and monetization tactics by ad network, campaign, country, and device, moving targeting beyond CPI to focus on what really matters: finding users that engage and monetize.
• Tracking and attribution: With five patents pending around mobile ad tracking and app marketing, our platform delivers the most accurate, measurable results and the greatest buying power. A multitechnology approach, including UDID, Advertising Identifier, Digital Fingerprinting, HTML5 cookies, and MAC Address tracking, enables access to more than 225 billion global monthly impressions across hundreds of ad networks, real-time bidding exchanges, social networks, and premium publisher sources.
• Broadest campaign tracking: Our platform now allows marketers to track all their campaigns by providing tracking links that can be used to monitor and report on social media, email, QR codes, and other campaigns — all in one central location within the Fiksu dashboard, regardless of the campaigns’ origins.
• Centralized media buying: We can now connect app marketers to more than 95 percent of all available iOS and Android inventory. Our platform’s ad buying capabilities are fueled by recent enhancements to our demand-side RTB platform, enabling the most value through targeted, highly cost-efficient media buying. Unparalleled technology advances give us access to this valuable RTB inventory without the need for UDIDs or identifiers.
• KnowledgeBase: Our platform draws upon 59 billion tracked app events, with an additional 1.7 billion added every week, to deliver unprecedented insights that drive precise targeting, removing guesswork from bidding and buying decisions.  

We are truly excited to launch the new platform and looking forward to continued growth in 2013. 

Is a new smartphone at the top of your Christmas wish list? If so, you're not alone. Last year, 6.8 million new iOS and Android mobile devices were unwrapped and activated on Christmas Day. And more than 1.2 billion apps were downloaded in between Christmas Day and New Year's Eve.

The holiday season screams opportunity for mobile app marketers. It may indeed be “the most wonderful time of the year,” but it’s also the most competitive time of the year. So we’ve teamed with Localytics to help marketers weigh the best strategies for sprucing up their apps for the holidays, cost-efficiently promoting them, and securing large amounts of engaged, loyal users – during the holidays as well as into the first few months of the new year.       

You can also catch our joint on-demand webinar – How to Market Your App During the Holiday Season – for additional details and tips.

Thanks to ADOTAS for helping to spread the word. 

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