For a mobile application to stand out, it must be high quality and strongly branded. Thus, it is essential, and no.1 step, to implement the brand strategy when building an app.
According to Statista, during the first quarter of 2020, 2.56 million apps were available on the Google Play Market and 1.85 million apps on Apple’s App Store. Competing against such a large number requires much work and a strategic approach.
The competition today is more significant than ever before. With thousands of mobile apps running every day, the question is how to ensure that your app stands out among all other apps? Three magic words. Design, functionality, and branding.
Mobile apps need high-quality design and development and strong branding in today’s competitive market. In this article, we share our practical tips and guidelines on building a mobile app brand.
What is branding in app?
Branding is a complex process of creating your company’s personality or product. It represents the complete expression of your business in the market.
App branding is how users perceive the app, its reputation, communication, and visual image. Branding affects our customers and business partners, future employees, and everyone who has the desire to work with us.
Branding aims to attract and retain loyal customers by offering a product that is always in line with the brand’s promises. Good branding allows recognition in the market, helps you stand out from the crowd, and become recognizable.
Creating an emotional and social connection with customers results in a long-term relationship that both customers and website or app owners are happy with. This relationship is the best description of the term branding, which is essential for achieving a successful online presence.
Quality branding aims to convey the message clearly and loudly, confirm your credibility, emotionally connect potential consumers with your brand, motivate the customer to take action, and create consumer loyalty.
When building the brand for your app, you’ll have to answer a few questions:
- Who will use your app and why?
- What makes your app unique?
- What is the main message the app transfers with its visuals?
- Does it evoke emotions?
- What is the tone and voice of your app?
- How will users get information about it?
5 simple steps for a winning brand strategy
Branding app leaves a strong impression on user experience. You must answer all these questions before starting with design and development to make mobile branding effective.
Let’s dive deeper and see what you need to know about building a brand app, making it stand out, and creating a successful brand strategy.
01. Design a logo, name, and visual for your brand
Before starting to communicate your business on social media or any other channel, developing your brand’s name, logo, and typography will be essential.
To come up with a catchy name, you need to keep in mind the functionality of your app. The name and logo are the first impressions and what will catch the eye of your target audience, so make it striking but straightforward. The app logo is the first thing that appears when users start searching for your app. Believe it or not, the app’s logo says a lot about your branding.
Although aesthetic satisfaction is one of the most vital desirability factors, your logo is more than just aesthetics. It is a long-term investment. The logo has to be recognizable, memorable, and endurable and differentiate you from everyone else. Assemble a top-notch team of designers, determine the right target audience, and you are on the right way to creating a successful brand.
02. User experience
A brand is much more than a logo and a name. It’s an experience you create for your users. A good user experience means guaranteeing customer satisfaction. To create a memorable user experience, you need to focus on the usefulness of your app.
The customer must be the center of your attention. Research in detail and make a list of things that your customer is searching for through your app. Once you get a good idea of your customers’ demand, you’ll be able to create a customer-focused brand.
The market today is full of complex, confusing, and limiting applications. While the design you’re working on makes sense to you because you’ve spent a lot of time developing it, that doesn’t mean your customers will like it either. The branding app solution should provide customers with a memorable and excellent user experience.
Once you have a familiar name and a strong brand, users will likely find out about your application and use it first. If you are new to the market, social networks are a great channel for brand recognizability, awareness, and the best platform for building a brand. Don’t wait until your app is ready for launch. Run a pre-launch marketing campaign to generate hype.
After launching the app, sponsored social media ads are the best way to promote your app and reach your target audience. Encourage your users to write reviews and then promote them on social media as proof that your app is changing someone’s life for the better.
04. Build a landing page for the app
Building landing pages is essential for mobile app branding.
The landing page is a web page that emphasizes a specific goal and a quick CTA (call-to-action). It is a tool necessary for building an online presence for mobile app branding.
The purpose of the landing page is to provide a direct link to download the mobile application and brief details about its use and benefits. It should contain a clear picture of your app and describe its best features so that people get an insight into how your app works in one place.
Before launching an app, you can also create a landing page to interest users, industry experts, and application developers.
Pro-tip: Add a newsletter subscription box to the landing page. This will help you update interested customers on new events and build a database for future email marketing campaigns.
05. Help and community support
Customer service is an essential option and an integral part of branding strategy. Your app should allow users to get answers to all queries, problems, and feedback. Authentic branding apps are much more than leaving a fantastic first impression and attracting attention.
Always consider all users’ experiences and provide the support and community they need in any step of interacting with the app, especially when it comes to more complex apps like e-commerce.
To have a positive image, a brand must provide a Help and Support section on which the user can always rely. Use the “Help”, “About Us”, or “Contact Us” options to let users know that they can contact you whenever they need any help with anything related to the app.
Communities are the best places for customers to ask questions, search for answers, share ideas around complex topics, give feedback and help you build better content. Community Support on social media is significant because it responds to user comments and reviews, gives answers, and helps them fix a problem. You can enhance existing services by monitoring the community and hearing their issues to create a better customer experience.
Examples of successful brand apps
Learning from the brand’s most successful applications is the best way to develop ideas for your product. Here is an example of how brands can raise brand awareness and uniquely improve user experience.
MyDubrovnik – City Guide app
MyDubrovnik tourist guide is an iOS and Android application that provides a structured overview of the most exciting places in Dubrovnik, extracted into different tours with readable and audio details. The idea of the app was to provide a tour guide through the most exciting and most famous points in Dubrovnik.
An app integrates existing solutions through API upgrades to become an indispensable product for every tourist who uses smart devices. We merged the initial concept with everything our Async Labs team knows about mobile tourist apps. The result was an excellent design that makes an app run smoother and provides a unique user experience.
Revuto
Revuto is a one-stop solution for all subscriptions. The app offers recurring payment blocking services, including prepaid debit cards, subscription payment management, peer-to-peer payments, and cryptocurrencies. Revuto app lets you quickly choose between your credit or debit cards to approve a specific payment. This way, it protects you from unwanted subscription charges.
For this project, we did product and brand design and web and mobile design & development. This project was in development & implementation for over 15 months and included a wide range of Async Labs professionals from Copywriting, Design, Development, Analytics, and Project management.
HubSpot
HubSpot is inbound marketing, sales, and service software that helps companies attract visitors, grow, convert leads, and close customers. HubSpot’s CRM platform has all the integrations and tools you need for marketing, content management, sales, and customer service. It combines various functionalities and allows marketing and sales departments to manage all their activities in one place.
IKEA
IKEA has an IKEA Place app, which uses augmented reality to show users how IKEA products look inside the real-life environment. With these 3D models, users can see what they can expect before purchasing. The success of IKEA Place has encouraged more brands to invest in augmented reality experiences for their users.
Branding for a mobile app can increase the popularity of your product or services and sales.
Keep in mind that people like a simple and easy-to-use interface. And make the target audience and UI/UX design the main components of your branding strategy.
When developing a branded app, you have to consider what value a branded app brings to user experience, what drives your customers to convert, and what will incentivize them to return to your app.
Making mobile app branding deals with app UI/UX and outer channels for reaching users. If you neglect one of the directions, you risk failing another. A well-designed and developed application will not experience success if the target users do not receive information.
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