Marketing Your Mobile App Business

Marketing Your Mobile App Business

Marketing begins the day you put your mobile app idea into production. Nowadays, building a great product isn’t enough to make your app the next Snapchat. To create a sustainable app, you need to develop a solid marketing strategy to get your apps into the hands of users. It’s important to strike a healthy balance between development and marketing to ensure sustainability.

Devote Time to Market Research:

This seemingly minor step can be overlooked and regretted soon after releasing your product. Researching principal competitors in the category your app operates in can give you some great insights into what your target audience values. How are other apps named? Who are they targeting? Which keywords are they ranking high for? A structured analysis could prove to be useful in getting your app in front of the right audience. Find out where your app stands against your competitors.

Release Early and Release Often:

We’ve said it before, and we’re repeating it; if it’s not broken, iterate. This is vital for growing your user base and attracting the attention of future investors. Release your core set of features, and then leverage communities such as Product Hunt to grab early adopters before building out the two-bedroom house. If you don’t have a user base, how can you be sure you’re building something people want?

Yes, finishing up development and releasing your app is crucial, however making sure that your app gets discovered is equally essential. Don’t neglect planning the marketing activities for your app during the development stages.

Optimize for the App Store:

Does your app have the right keywords in its title and description? Can users easily find you? If your app fails to come up when users type relevant keywords into the search bar, then it might as well not exist. Make App Store or Google Play optimization an integral part of your development process.

App Store marketing has actually proved to be a highly effective strategy because a lot of people browse with keyword searches. Be sure to select your keywords wisely by performing market research and see what’s working for your competitors.

Organic marketing can play a crucial role in all of this. However, keep in mind the way in which organic rankings work within the Apple App Store and Google Play differ from each other. The App Store rankings can be improved by ad-driven links. Google Play rankings are based on app usage – the higher your usage ratio per download, the higher Google Play will rank your app.

Multi-Platform Approach:

Every app business should have a social media strategy in place. Social media can benefit your app by increasing brand awareness and draw in the right audience. We have entered into the most digitally connected era and consuming content across multiple channels has become a part of our everyday lives. The best way to market to such an era is through the platforms we trust and are already active on – social media. We spend most of our time on it anyhow.

Keep your content fresh and in reach, for instance, create a blog that’s linked to your microsite. Keeping your content fresh will drive a lot of inbound traffic to your website. Make your presence consistent on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Stumbleupon by sharing your blog posts with an active audience.

Influence Individualism:

Maintaining loyal users is vast, and this can be established by rewarding your loyal users with additional benefits – make them feel oh-so-special. Re-post photos of consumers using your brand on your own media. Give shout-outs. Create a hashtag. Spur up a competition in which those who follow, repost and create the best image using your product can win a gift. Send push notifications to your users offering them various benefits. The options are endless. When you validate your customers as individuals, they validate your brand.

Word of Mouth:

Word of mouth marketing is not dead! Prompt a conversation between current and prospective customers. Identify your brand influencers, and if you can develop a good relationship with them, then you may be able to get them to share your brand message with their followers or family and friends.

Build an Enticing Microsite:

By building a microsite, you are initially aggregating all of the information about your product into a two to three-page website. Many downloads come directly through app stores, but a huge amount of traffic is driven through the web. Microsites are designed to hook new users as soon as they hit the landing page.

A smart way to gather potential customers is by building a teaser or giveaway offer into your microsite and invite people to share their email address to stay updated on when your app launches. This provides you with a database of people interested in your app.

In Conclusion:

Each method requires continuous time investment and active monitoring for maximum benefits. It’s easy to assume your app can become the next Uber as long as you build a solid product, but what makes that app successful isn’t the fact that it exists but by the efficiencies it creates. By focusing on marketing strategies alongside product development, you can create an app that makes life better for your users.