ASO Academy

Marketing An App For Back To School

August 24th, 2022

Marketing An App For Back To School
Anh Nguyen

by Anh Nguyen

COO & Co-Founder at Gummicube, Inc

The big yellow school buses, fresh notebooks, and crisp backpacks are back. Back to school can be an exciting time for students of all ages from pre-school to college and beyond. Capitalizing on opportunities that cater to the specific needs of this user base is essential in the month of August. Whether you’re a retail, mobile game, finance app, or anything in between – there are ways to hit home competition for people looking for back-to-school savings, tools, and others.

App Store Optimization (ASO) is a constantly iterative process of refining metadata, improving creative conversion, and optimizing user actions. [Mobile app promotion](mobile app marketing plan) on the app stores requires developers to “be in tune” with the search behaviors and design best practices for their category. So, how can developers keep up to date? Seasonality.

What is App Seasonality in ASO?

Seasonality is an ASO best practice that involves updating your app metadata and creatives to fit a relevant seasonal change. Examples of seasonal changes often applied by developers include Black Friday, Halloween, Christmas, Tax Season, and others – depending on their respective categories.

Seasonality is important to incorporate into your App Store Optimization (ASO) strategy because it provides you with a competitive edge against other apps in the category. For example, when a user was to search “Black Friday” in November, an app that includes Black Friday elements has a comparative advantage over ones that don’t.

App Marketing for Back to School

Depending on which category your app belongs to, you may find that different seasons and value propositions are consistently highlighted. For example, productivity apps may be geared toward college students, while retail apps may be targeting the parents' students rather than the students themselves. Here are some more examples of how back to school seasonality may look like for different app categories:

Mobile Game Marketing

Mobile games during the back-to-school season often highlight new skins or levels. Back-to-school seasonal changes aren’t necessarily very popular among traditional mobile games, but educational games are highly in tune with this change – targeting educators, tutors and others.

Retail App Marketing

Back to school is one of the biggest events in the retail space. Whether it's clothing, dorm shopping, or school supplies – retail apps should pay particular attention to back-to-school seasonal changes in August to capitalize on prepared, eager shoppers.

Organizational App Marketing

Organizational apps are often used by high school and college students. Whether overtly “back to school” marketed or not, these apps tend to reflect back-to-school essentials like planners, calendars and schedules. These types of features are crucial to highlight in August as the demand for these features rises at the beginning of a semester.

Productivity App Marketing

Tags, notes, screenshots – another useful app category for high schoolers and college students. When it comes to note-taking, nobody takes their scribbles and ideas more seriously than young adults in school. Highlighting functionalities of the app that would make their note-taking more efficient and user-friendly is always a great way to highlight how your app can specifically cater to their needs.

Prepare Your ASO Strategy for Back to School

ASO Academy is in session! If you’re wondering how to promote your app on the app store during peak school activities, seasonality is a great way to capitalize on a user base filled with overt needs. Relevancy is key to long-term organic marketing success on the app stores. Our ASO company helps apps across all different categories change during seasons that matter most to them for app growth that lasts. Don’t get schooled by stagnancy – it’s time to ace seasonality this August!

Want to learn more about App Store Optimization? Contact Gummicube and we’ll help get your strategy started.

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