Think about the last time you were influenced to make a purchase decision. What was it that triggered you? I bet it wasn’t an infomercial. Obviously, in 2018, the best way to capture attention is online through content marketing.

What is content marketing?

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:

… a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Pretty easy to understand, yes, but there’s more to content marketing.

Really you should look at it as well informed storytelling that appeals to either emotion or reason.

How can content marketing get more people to download my app?

When it comes to getting more people to download your app, you can market to appeal to their emotions or their rational side.

Emotional appeals are extremely effective. They utilize tone of voice, colors, music and setting to tap into our thought centers. Emotional appeals can make you feel happy, nostalgic or homesick and really hit that decision-making center of the brain.

Rational appeals play to the logical side of the brain. People who would be converted through rational appeals enjoy things like your app’s benefits, a demonstration of key features, and the presentation of facts and statistics.

The amazing thing about both appeals is the ability to not only initiate a download and install of your app, but because you won someone over on their personal trigger, they will be truly tied to coming back to your app again and again.

This increases retention which will further benefit your app in terms of organic rank.

How Headspace leveraged emotional and rational appeals to win users

For some apps, it’s important to split test creative to find what appeal triggers users’ unique needs.

For example, an app that we admire in the mental health or self-care arena like Headspace actually found a sweet spot between emotion and logic. Their campaign? “Mainstreaming Mindfulness”.

Headspace’s animated ads speak directly to viewers through a calming man’s voice and accessible (and extremely well done) animations that tap into our inner thoughts, worries, desires and fears. They combine emotional and rational appeals to call users to action to take only a few moments out of their day to use Headspace and “be a little more mindful”.

Their ads are distributed across social media platforms, Youtube ads, Spotify, and in strategic partnerships like on podcasts and in physical locations that people experience stress: like on busy trains and buses.

So, the question you’re asking is does all of this effort pay off for headspace?

Yes. Last year they raised an additional $37 Million to expand corporate partnerships, create more content, and take the app international.

The best thing is this wildly successful app is helping people everywhere.

Time to get started: choose your content marketing strategy

So you’re convinced you should at least give this content marketing idea a go. Where do you start? Luckily, there are tons of different materials you can produce, so choose what will best resonate with your target audience.

Our friends at Hubspot put together this handy list of formats: