How to promote mobile app

If you are caught up with the headline, you’re probably thinking on your first app promotion in the fiercely competitive landscape. In 2017 the total amount of apps in the App Store and Google Play went over 5M. This fact means that now app developers should not only build an outstanding product or simplify people’s lives, but also stand out from the bunch of hundreds of similar apps.

Launching an online product is very similar to offline entrepreneurship. The fact that your app is available in App Store, Google Play or any other distribution platform doesn’t guarantee people will easily find it. The very next thing you need to do is work on your long-term marketing strategy. We’ve highlighted tried and proven channels to skyrocket your app promotion. Ready?

App store promotion: get the benefits and jump over pitfalls

Choose the right app store

Usually app developers start with Google Play and Apple stores. Distribution through the App Store will cost you $ 90 per month. Google Play charges developers with only $ 25 registration fee and takes 30% of the list price for all sales. Notice that along with unlocking access to millions of Android and Apple devices you will have to stand out from 3.3M apps in Google Play and more than 2.2M apps in App Store.

Check out this list of worthy alternatives to Google Play and Apple Store. Trying out Amazon Appstore, GetJar, Appolicious, or any other related platform might bring very good results for your marketing campaign.

Keywords play a crucial role if you want to make your app easy to find after the most relevant search requests. Devote enough time to adding best-targeted and related keywords to your app profile. Wrap your mind around the words you’d type in a search box while looking for the apps like yours.

Useful services:SearchMan for gathering and search of the best applicable keywords.

App description is really important in terms of app store optimisation and user experience. Briefly tell the app store visitors what your app is about and highlight its main capabilities. Try to make your icon design simple, memorable and stylish. Dashing screenshots will also be a strong point for your profile.

High rates and reviews from your users will help your app to whip up to the first positions of the charts. Kindly ask your audience to rate your app or to spend a few minutes writing a short review for your product. Providing them with additional value like unlocking new content or virtual lives will increase your chances to get quality feedback.

Mobile Advertising Agencies

Yet another efficient-proven channel for user acquisition and driving app downloads are mobile advertising agencies. The latest strengthen your brand awareness and do product promotion through mobile devices.

Ad creatives are the crucial part of your advertising campaign and a face of your brand. In case you are not willing to dwell on this stuff, ask your mobile ad agency to create unique ads with high performance for your ad campaign specifically. The vast majority of ad agencies charge an additional fee for designing high-performing ads, but sometimes you can find a truly dedicated companies, who do it for free. For example, Epom Ad Agency has a web designers team who builds banners, landing pages, native or other ad units for all types of products and brands.

Make sure you’ve discussed your ad campaign goals, budget, rates, KPIs, expected retention rate and ROI with your personal agency manager before the ad campaign launch.

Some performance-based ad agencies like Epom Ad Agency are integrated with top ranked apps through a single SDK. So getting a personal advertising account at Epom automatically opens access to hundreds of active apps.

Yes, partnership with mobile ad agencies costs money. On the other hand, you are paying for the real results: installs, users or in-app purchases whereas ad serving and tracking remain free of charge.

App Reviews

App review platforms are also good lead generators. They publish deep and entertaining reviews, feature key options and benefits of new apps. Send them an overview of your product with links to app stores and ask to write a review.They might also include you to specific lists or ratings of similar apps (if they have it). Applying to tech blogs like AppAdvice, Hongkiat or Thenextweb would definitely make a splash and bring new users on.

Social Media

Featuring an app release in social media will also help with bringing the first interested users. Entertain subscribers with useful content, hot topics and thematic infographics and don’t spoil everything with mindless copy pasting. Social Media is great for catching up with your users, getting their feedback and rolling out important updates.

Appealing Website

If you are going to promote your app before the release you will definitely need a website (or at least a landing page) for highlighting the main news, app key features and capabilities. Attract people to your website while running ad campaign with an advertising agency. Offer users additional value like free levels or personal discount in return for the subscription to the app news. An email base could become additional (and FREE) channel for interaction with customers. Just don’t spam.

The power of sharing button

People want to spread the content that makes them smile, laugh out loud, muse, disagree, protest, cry, hope, slobber over etc. Your app for certain has something more behind. Cover the best of your app in the story worth spreading.

Adopt a win-win strategy and offer users immediate valuable reward for sharing content from your app in their social media profiles or blogs.

Influencers

Brand owners and marketing experts have already revealed the real power of influencers — trendsetters, who gathered thousands of followers around their social profiles.

Partnership with influencers seems easy at a glance. But asking a person with 5M followers to post a message like ‘I am using [App Name]. Have you already tried it?’ would be a wrong strategy. The quantity doesn’t mean quality.

Build honest and mutually beneficial relations with influencers at your niche. They might be followed by less, but relevant users.

Useful services:BuzzSumo or NinjaOutreach for identifying the best influencers in your field and location.

Promo video

Let people take a stroll around your app with a short 30sec video. Show the main features, design and users’ value of your product in a dynamic video and the world will be eagerly waiting for the release.

And finally…

Creating an exceptional app is just a part of the work that has to be done on the way to its greatness. Despite there are dozens of app promotion channels, not all of them work appropriately for each specific product. Try to build your own tailored system with a specific range of app promotion tools, services and platforms. Don’t afraid of sticking out. Being different is a priori a good start for building a strong marketing strategy.