Good Job on building your mobile App. Now it’s time for it to see the world, or more accurately, time for the world to see it.
Making an app is a difficult, challenging, and time-consuming process. Unfortunately, it still could all go to waste if not enough people use the app, which is why you must have an app marketing strategy in place.
Mobile App Marketing is one of those areas of marketing that is not explored in-depth, but that’s because app marketing is relatively new to our world.
However, it remains marketing, nonetheless. Marketing an app is not much different from marketing a product; the basics are still the same, but there are quite a few differences that you must know.
Here, we will look at the best mobile app marketing strategies that could give your mobile apps the best chances of achieving the success you want.
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Set Your Goals Clearly
Similar to Most Marketing Campaigns, you need to set up your goals and KPIs clearly, so you can measure your progress and success and take action when needed.
Your Goals should be measurable and specific. You can be ambitious, and you probably should be, but you also need to be realistic. Just because your app isn’t downloaded an X million times doesn’t mean it isn’t a success.
Download times are not the only measure of success; here you need to think about the KPIs that are specific to mobile apps.
The KPIs specific to mobile apps include:
- Number of Downloads
- Ratings
- Revenue
- Rankings on Apple’s App Store & Google Play Store
- Organic & Loyal User Acquisition
- Number of New App Users
- App Open Rate
- Daily Active Users
- Monthly Active Users
- Session Length
- Uninstalls
- Cost Per Download
- Shares
Now, you need to understand the importance of each of them and how each one alone contributes to the overall success of your marketing strategies. After you have clearly defined your goals and KPIs, you need to start prioritizing them.
Decide which factors are more important to you. Do you care most about reaching your target audience, or is the revenue more critical to you? You need to put them in order of most to least necessary to track and measure your progress.
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Dedicate Proper Resources to Your App Marketing
All good marketers know that to reach your potential users, you need to spend time and money. What you get in exchange is good things like excellent customer acquisition and improved customer engagement.
This is why it is vital to dedicate proper resources to your app marketing. You have already set your KPIs, and now is the time to devote time, money, and effort to make your app marketing campaign a success.
Once you have dedicated enough resources to your app marketing, you need to have a defined plan for how these resources will be used. Your Marketing Campaign should be engaging to your customers, and it should also be ongoing.
If you dedicate a budget for your campaign but didn’t put a plan on how to spend this budget, you will find yourself going over budget quickly.
The idea behind having an ongoing marketing campaign is to maintain your app’s visibility all-year-long, especially in the key marketplaces.
You should also plan for more spending on certain times of the years, such as around the holidays, to give your app’s visibility a boost and ensure your target audience sees your app when you need it the most.
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Know Your Audience
Similar to marketing any product or service, you need to know who your users are. Meaning, you need to build user personas and understand what their traits and characteristics are.
After building out your user personas, you should start asking yourself how the app’s features benefit your audience. What are their needs, and how can your app meet those needs.
You will also be able to determine how you will reach those users and know the answers to questions like: will you need a Press Release? Is social media marketing enough? Do you need videos? And so on.
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Do Your Research
Have you heard the phrase “If you think it, there’s an app for it”?
There are 2.1 Million Apps on the Google Play Store and about 2 million apps on Apple’s App Store. This means that there are good chances that your app already has not one, but a few competitors.
You should list your top three, five, or ten competing apps and make a detailed list of their features, pros, cons, current price, app ranking, monetization model, and anything else you think is of importance.
This way, you will be able to find out how your app compares to them. You will add features to your app that already people in those apps and avoid any annoying elements that people hated about these competitor apps.
This is the best and probably most straightforward way to make your app competitive and encourage more people to download the app and use it.
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Use the Available Platforms
Did you know that only 40% of mobile users search for apps in app stores? This is why it’s a good idea to maximize content promotion across most of all platforms. Marketers do that to generate buzz before the app launches.
Here is how you can maximize content promotion:
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Create an Awesome Landing Page
Create a mobile app landing page that engages your readers and informs them about the app’s name, features, and pricing in a creative way.
You want your readers to become not only interested but hopefully excited about the launch of your app.
Your copy should be short, precise, creative, and compelling. Focus on getting the message across and engaging them to want to learn more, sign up for emails, or download the app right away.
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Use Blogging
Blog posts are a type of long-form content that is great for building interest and informing your readers. You can use it to tell your audience the story of your app, how it was developed, what went into making it, how it is designed to benefit them (the users), and how different it is from the competitors.
Use SEO optimization techniques and create high-quality content to improve your blog’s search engine rankings and make it visible.
Blogging is also a great way to build trust. You want your audience to see you as experienced leaders who know what they are doing, which can be done using informative blog posts that showcase your experience and knowledge.
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Reach your Audience via Social Networks
Social Media is where your users at, and you need to go to them, not wait for them to come to you. Social networks give you the ability to learn more about your target audience; their interests, likings, habits, and more.
You can utilize this info to optimize your advertisement and connect and communicate with your audience on social networking sites.
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Create High-Quality Video Content
People love visuals, and video is currently the most popular form of content today, and it’s only going to get more popular. Your goal is to create high-quality video content that will hopefully go viral.
Video is a powerful tool to reach your audience and inform them about your app. Use whatever trends you see fit, use superheroes, animations, famous people, or whatever you think will work with your target audience.
When creating promotional videos, try to remember that we, as humans, have been having problems with our attention span lately.
So, keep it short, get right to the point, focus on the benefits the app’s features will provide, and end with a strong call to action.
We also would like to tell you or inform you that if you are going to post your videos on Instagram, make sure it makes sense and gets the point across even when muted. Statistics have shown that People often watch videos while muted on Instagram.
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Do PR Work
There are plenty of things that need to be done when talking about doing PR work as part of your marketing strategy for mobile applications, but let’s take a quick look at some of them to help you get the general idea of it.
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Collect PR Material
Collect your pitch templates and organize them, so it’s faster and easier to send your pitches when the app is launched.
You also need to create a Press kit that includes high-quality photos of your logo and icons as well as your marketing videos, promos, images, and any other marketing material that includes information about your app, the team of app developers behind it, features, and benefits, and so on.
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Reach out to Media
Start by building a media list of influencers, bloggers, vloggers, YouTubers, Authors, and anyone else who might be interested in your app and could write about or mention it.
Contact them and see who of them is willing to do it; some won’t reply, some won’t be interested, others will be willing for a price, and a few will be willing to even work out a promotion strategy with you.
Backlinks to your website is also a good way to gain visibility on Google and increase your ranking, so use that to your advantage, too.
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Begin PR efforts before Launch
When you start your PR efforts before launch, influencers such as bloggers and reviewers will appreciate it. They will like having early access to the app before launch and getting to try it out before anyone else does.
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Use Marketing Automation to your Advantage
Marketing Automation is very important in the modern business world, and it plays a critical role in mobile app marketing.
Use Marketing Automation to free up resources such as time and money for other uses that need them. Marketing Automation is also a great way to capture, and nurture leads more effectively.
One way marketing automation can help you is by using email sequences to educate potential users on the app’s functionality and features. You can use it to list the essential features and tell them how they will benefit from it (such as push notifications that will not let you miss an important update or a great offer).
Another way is with pop-ups on your website that directs potential users to the landing page or the download page. There are plenty of other ways marketing automation can help your app marketing strategy both in the long term and the short one, so try your best to make the most of it.
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Focus on Convenience and the Experience
We are lazy species. We like things to be easy. Let’s take Spotify, for example.
Spotify is super easy to use. Signing up is super easy; you don’t even need your credit card to sign up. Once you’ve signed up, you can find pretty much any song that comes to your mind and press play.
They make it super convenient for you that most users would just rather pay a monthly subscription than be bothered with buying new music any other way.
That’s what consumers are looking for nowadays: Convenience, which is why you should focus your marketing on the experience, not the functionality. The benefits, not the features.
Don’t confuse your users. Make it as easy as it could be. Show them how this app will simplify their everyday life and not what features it will do.
Do Not Market your app, but rather focus on the experiences. Show them how using the app is just more convenient than not using it, and you will have the loyal customers you want.
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Post Launch Mobile Marketing
As stated earlier, a mobile marketing campaign should be ongoing for visibility’s sake. You also need an ongoing marketing campaign to keep your audience engaged in order to establish loyalty.
You also need to consider what is known as “Burst Campaigns”. A Burst campaign is basically an aggressive marketing campaign to provide a burst of exposure for your app. This is often done by purchasing paid media exposure over a certain period, usually about 24 to 72 hours.
A Burst Campaign aims to get as many paid installs as possible to increase your app’s ranking in the app store. If a Burst Campaign is successful, your app will see a jump in the volume of quality organic installs due to the improved ranking.
Even after the Burst Campaign, you should not stop your paid advertising. If you do achieve the high ranking you want, you still need advertising to maintain this ranking. Continued Paid advertising is key to keeping the momentum going and keeping steady downloads.
I hope you found this helpful. If you did, why don’t you share it with a friend or a colleague who might find something useful in there as well?
If you have a question or a comment, leave it below and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
