Your handbook to successful mobile app branding

Your mobile app brand is crucial to its success. Functionality and UX are crucial, but before users can experience that, they need to be aware of your brand and attracted to your brand’s icon. And, once a user experiences your app, you want to ensure they remember, value, and trust your app’s brand. So, whether you’re branding an app or revamping its current branding, you’ve come to the right place to learn how to create a brand. Get started with the following brand design tips and brand guidelines app marketers need to know.

Mobile app branding is the creation of an app’s identity, consisting of the app’s tone of voice, visual design, icon, and mission. Branding an app requires careful consideration of the app’s intended users, as ultimately, an app’s brand can be employed to establish an emotional connection with the users.

What is a branded app?

A branded app is one that is created by a pre-existing company to promote its brand and expand its services to the digital realm. Famous mobile app examples include the eyeglasses store Warby Parker’s app, in which users can virtually try on glasses, order them, and communicate with the store, and the Swedish home furniture store IKEA’s app, which lets users see how furniture items would look in their home.

Your mobile app branding impacts the entire user journey—from user acquisition to retention rates to retargeting. The brand identity of your app should be trustworthy and consistent.

Here are some branding statistics from Zippia that reveal how a great brand can drive your app’s bottom line.****

• Revenue is increased by up to 33% if a brand presentation is consistent.
• A stunning 83% of shoppers like to buy from brands they trust.
• 90% of customers will pay more if it’s a brand they trust.
• Customers that completely identify with a brand are 52% more valuable.

So, how to create a brand identity? In order to create your brand’s identity, you first need to answer the following questions:

1. Who is my target audience?

Determining your target audience is an essential step to building your brand. In order for your app to appeal to this audience, you must understand their likes and dislikes, communication preferences, and more.

Figuring out an app’s target audience is easier for some apps than others. For example, an app for a university has a clear audience of students, the majority of which are likely from a younger demographic. However, the most interested parties for a piano-learning or haiku-writing app may be less certain.

Tactics to define your target audience:

• Perform market research
• Analyze possible competitors already in the market
• Develop personas

Once you nail down your target audience, the work isn’t over. You should revisit who your key audience should be on a regular basis and optimize.

2. What is my unique selling proposition?

It is imperative to define what makes your app different from the other apps in your vertical. In marketing, this is called a unique selling proposition (USP). So after pinpointing your target audience, next ask, “What problem am I solving for, and in what unique way am I doing so?” Is your app obviously better than your competitors, or does it offer a service that doesn’t exist yet? This is your USP and should be fleshed out in your branding.

For example, grocery delivery app Gorillas’ tagline is “Faster than you”, indicating the app’s USP is that users can get their groceries delivered to their doorstep faster than it takes them to go get or pick up groceries from the store.

With over seven million apps across Android and iOS platforms, standing out requires your app to produce a stellar visual identity. In a 1979 New York Times article, Nancy Beach wrote, “ The clothes we choose to wear — and how we choose to wear them — send out messages that reveal many aspects of personality.” The brand design of your app is no different.

Visual mobile app branding elements

• Logo/app icon
• Typography
• Images
• Color palette

The above four elements cover how your app’s visuals will create your brand design. Users will take in your app’s icon, screenshots, in-app visuals, and layouts to assess whether or not your app’s personality is relevant to them.

Your app’s icon is important

Don’t underestimate the power of your brand application to your app’s icon, as this is often a user’s first impression of your app. We cover this in detail in our article: How to create an app icon: Insights and best practices.

App UX matters

The last point we’d like to highlight here is to prioritize your app’s UX design when laying out the user flow of your app. Personalities aside, all apps should strive for a cohesive and intuitive flow from one screen to the next. In doing so, your app will gain a reputation as one of the most trusted app brands. Get UX brand design tips and brand design examples here: Mobile app UX design 101: Tips for success.

Now that you’ve spent time building your brand’s identity, it’s essential to share it with your target audiences. For example, a human can say, “I’d like to be known as a happy-go-lucky and loyal individual”. But if they don’t communicate and act in ways that reflect this, they won’t be known for these things. The same goes for the branding of your app.

Here are some examples of apps promoting their brand’s personality.

Wendy’s maximizes user engagement to show personality

Wendy’s fast-food restaurant and delivery app is notorious for its snarky, fun-loving attitude geared toward a younger audience. The brand is known for its roasts and high-level user engagement on social media. If you look at the brand’s Twitter bio, you’ll see the text matches Wendy’s witty personality.

Whether you’re launching a brand new app or embarking on a rebrand for your app, tracking the impact of your efforts is critical. We’ve listed several key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most commonly used to monitor the success of branding an app.

For a user acquisition campaign, follow these KPIs:

• Cost per install (CPI) /Cost per mille
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Lifetime value (LTV)

To see if your rebrand had any impact on user engagement, look at:

• Retention rate
• Active users
• Session length

Be pro A/B testing

A/B testing isn’t new to the marketing realm, and yet still, app marketers could apply this mobile app strategy more often. There are two types of A/B testing to run during your app’s brand development phase.

• Marketing campaigns A/B testing: Monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns.
• In-app A/B testing: Review how changes to app’s UX and UI design impacts KPIs.

It’s essential to define what you would like to test and carefully segment your audience. After analyzing the results, you may be surprised as you uncover important insights. Read Everything you need to know about A/B testing for mobile apps to learn more.

Ensure the data you act on is accurate

Do not, we repeat, do not put in a mountain of effort into measuring your mobile app branding if you aren’t certain the data you’re using to monitor your endeavors is clean. After all that work, you deserve to see and act on the results.

To ensure your data remains accurate and error-free, we recommend partnering with a mobile measurement partner (MMP) like Adjust. With our measurement and analytics suite, marketers can drive fast results utilizing real-time measurement data on their branding campaigns.

Ready to jump-start your app growth and launch your new app brand with Adjust? Request your personalized demo now!