Did you know that the holidays and Seasonal ASO are a super-powerful combo? Social events provide attention, new keywords, and bring you more traffic. App owners can learn many useful life hacks for their promotion strategy. But the real celebration of life may take place in mobile games.

As soon as summer ends, the hype for Halloween exponentially grows. Spooky decorations don’t just adorn brick and mortar stores, but the spirit of Halloween becomes ever-present within the digital app stores as well.

As Fall begins, app developers should start thinking about seasonal updates for their apps. Many may want to change their app's graphics or introduce special events, but seasonal updates go beyond what’s in the app. It also means updating App Store and Google Play Store pages for seasonal App Store Optimization.

With this holiday comes the question of seasonality in general and its impact (positive or negative) on your app or game’s conversion on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Should you invest design resources into updating your Icon or Screenshots with holiday branding? How will your conversion and re-engagement be affected if you incorporate special holiday features and/or gameplay directly into your app’s functionality? What are other companies in your category doing?

Based on our analyses, seasonal app store optimization (ASO) can vary in its impact. It can be great for re-engagement to excite existing users about something new, but can also harm conversion if visitors’ expectations for special themed updates aren’t met.

Why Now?

It’s October Now, developers should begin updating their apps and ASO if they want to focus on Halloween seasonality. This will allow them enough time to begin indexing for the Halloween keywords they want as interest in those terms begins to grow.

After an app declares its keywords, it takes time to index for them. App developers shouldn’t wait until the last minute to try focusing on Halloween terms. In order to get ahead of the competition, the best time to start is now.

Once Halloween is over, it’s time to begin focusing on the next event. For some apps that will mean Thanksgiving or Black Friday, for others it may mean the holiday season. Whatever the season or cause for celebration, it’s important to update your app and its App Store Optimization to capitalize on the seasonality.

What is Seasonal ASO?

Before we start, let’s go over the basics just in case. What is Seasonal ASO? To better understand this term, let’s refer to the concepts of seasonal and situational marketing:

Situational marketing is the response of a brand to any social event important to its audience.
Seasonal marketing is the process of promoting products or services at special times of the year.

The main difference between the two concepts is that seasonal marketing stands for recurring events and you can plan it, while situational marketing can be compared to a challenge when unpredictable events occur and the task of the marketer is to catch the moment to benefit it if it’s something positive or reduces negative impact otherwise.

Seasonal Marketing

Seasonal marketing can increase app downloads and in-app purchases during certain times of the year. If you are interested in using this effective mobile marketing strategy.

There are many annual events and holidays that give digital marketers opportunities to create customized campaigns for different seasons.

They include:

Black Friday;
Christmas;
Valentine’s Day;
Tax Season;
Cyber Week,
And so much more!

With enough knowledge, digital marketers can use the fluctuating trends in app stores to their advantage by basing their campaign calendar on the various holidays, seasons, and other major events throughout the year.

The trick to getting amazing results is to present your seasonal marketing campaign at just the right time, to just the right people.

Why you need Seasonal ASO

Implementing holiday-themed events to your app can bring significant advantages, as seen in many genres of games. 

By introducing a combo of features including event-specific currency, seasonal tasks, unique game modes, and collaborations, you can greatly boost your chances of revenue growth and even attract old users that are looking for new content and an entirely different experience.

Seasonal ASO is a great way to highlight today’s agenda. Mobile games generally get a lot of organic traffic from the Browse/Explore sections of the App Stores. 

Besides, it may be essential if you want your app to get featured – by getting into a thematic collection of the App Store/Google Play, you will acquire new users and that’s your primary goal. 

And don’t forget that seasonal In-App Purchases associated with certain holidays (unique rewards, improvements, or cosmetic items) are only available during a limited time.

Tricks & Treats for Halloween ASO

Most of the year, your ASO strategy is similar — optimizing and testing different ideas and concepts based on data. You should find what works for your app and iterate on it. However, there are a few occasions for which you should break out special screenshots, descriptions or app icons: Holidays. Holidays are the perfect opportunity to add in a bit of festive flair to your app’s listing. For those who’ve missed the pumpkins and ghouls haunting grocery stores since the beginning of September, Halloween is right around the corner. Here are a few ways you can use your app to capitalize on spooky season:

Spooky Screenshots

If it’s appropriate, add some Halloween themed elements to your screenshots. Maybe throw in a pumpkin or skeleton. If your app has new Halloween-specific elements for the season, then this is a great time to highlight those in your screenshots. You can even consider unearthing a themed preview video, similar to Animal Crossing:

Imp-ify your icon

Don’t let the frightening festivities end at your screenshots. There are endless ways to add thrilling Halloween spirits to your app. Consider adding a more orange, purple, or darker themed app icon. Throw on a bat, zombie, jack-o-latern, etc. Madden NFL appropriately added a Baltimore Ravens player to their icon to get in a frightening spirit as a Raven fits in much more with Halloween than the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes did.

Add Petrifying Prizes

Consider updating your app to have seasonally appropriate challenges or limited edition prizes. Take the Madden NFL app. Their most recent update announced season 2 of the “Field of Fear” challenge that they offered last year. Even the Barbie Dreamhouse Adventure game has thrown in some Halloween fun. It’s also important to note that most of these updates have happened in the past week or so, so it’s not too late to brew up your very own petrifying prize!

Horror Highlight: If your app is based around a horror/scary movie theme, it’s your time to shine! Night Terrors, from the creators of Paranormal Activity is an AR horror game that provides a unique terror experience. The app is not explicitly centered around Halloween, but this time of year is a fantastic opportunity for them. They could really stand to gain by capitalizing on people’s newfound fixation on all things creepy and undead.