Your new app has gone through a long process ever since you’ve come up with the idea, it had to go through a design stage, prototyping, and MVP phase until you’ve settled on a final product. Building a great, robust app is just the beginning of your new app’s journey. An essential part of creating a successful mobile app is creating an effective marketing strategy to maximize your product’s reach and increase its adoption rate.
A mobile app is similar to a restaurant – imagine investing the time and money to build and furnish the restaurant and you’re finally opening down the street from your home. After countless days of work, sleepless nights, your dream has finally come true, ad your restaurant opens its doors early in the morning – without telling a soul. All you have done to promote your new restaurant is open its doors, which have a hanging sign that says “Open”. You’ve hired the best chef, the most professional waiters, you’ve purchased the best cooking equipment available on the market, stylish furniture, and the shiniest cutlery. You’ve also made sure that your chef bakes the most mouth-watering pastries every morning and the most succulent lasagna at night. And yet, days go by without you seeing an increase in sales or the endless line of customers you were planning on serving every day. Your smashing success story is shaping up to be a catastrophic failure. Why? It’s all because of the marketing strategy, in this case, the lack of it.
Research has shown that out of 10.000 apps published in app stores, only one is successful. The same study concluded that the main reason for app failure, with 42%, is a lack of research about the market’s needs. This means that no matter how feature-rich or sophisticated your app is, if you’re not taking the necessary steps to research your target audience and advertise for it, your app is doomed. After all, how would your users download the app if they don’t know it exists or what it can do for them? Furthermore, you’ve invested a lot of time and resources into your mobile product – the last thing you’d want to do is throw all the effort away by ruining your marketing efforts.
We’ve created this article to give you an idea of why creating a marketing strategy for your app is crucial and what platforms you can use to market your app.
Your website
The primary source of app installs is mobile websites – according to research. So, if you have an existing, fully functional, mobile-friendly website, you have a great asset already set in place for promoting your app. Not only is this the easiest way to draw attention to your new app and promote it, but also conveys trust and tells your users that your brand new app aligns with an existing brand experience. Including your app on your website means that you can section off a whole part of your site exclusively to promote the app. You can use a corner of your homepage, the middle of the webpage, or even the first thing your viewers see.
You can create separate landing pages for your app, specifically designed to promote your mobile product. It can be simple and clearly describe your app’s most essential features and value proposition.
Social Media
A few years ago you wouldn’t think of social media platforms as relevant vehicles for any product’s marketing and advertising strategies. However, nowadays, social media channels have become cardinal in any brand’s sales endeavors. Facebook’s 2.8 billion monthly users make it a haven for startups and brand owners alike. There are two ways of kickstarting your marketing journey on social media:
Organic – this comes from simply having a presence on the platform – having a simple page that represents your brand/app. Growing these accounts, starting to follow brands and people relevant to your business and industry, gaining followers, and creating content that your followers will respond to are failsafe ways of gaining notoriety and increasing your reach without spending one cent.
Paid – Research has shown that 78% of consumers in the US have discovered products to buy on Facebook. So, needless to say, investing some capital in your app’s social media promotion is a great way to ensure reach, coverage, and user awareness of your brand.
App Store Optimization
It’s an easy guess, the app stores are one of the main gateways for your mobile product’s showcasing to the world. But the competition is fierce, and it’s looking like it will ease up anytime soon. Apple’s App Store has almost 2 million apps while Google has around 3 million on its proprietary store. If you want to make your app visible on the app stores, you will need app store SEO. Here are the main factors on which you should focus:
App Name/Title- your app must have a high-search traffic keyword placed in its name or app title. Defining that keyword results from time spent exploring which keyword should be based on your user and market research. And, as your app begins to rank higher and gain more users and downloads, word of mouth will do its thing.
Keywords: The second part of your ASO strategy to improve your search rankings is knowing your keywords. And once again, user research comes into play. You must know which keywords are relevant for your target audience and which ones they often use when searching for apps.
Final thoughts
If your users don’t know that your app exists, then all of your efforts to build the app will go down the drain. So remember, build robust marketing and ad strategy to complement the time and money you’ve invested in building the app from scratch. If you’re having problems with your app’s marketing strategy, or if you have questions about this article, let us know – contact us!