A Brief Guide To Strategize The Marketing Of Mobile App

Most of us turn to a mobile application to start our day. It could be for logging your fitness routine, scrutinizing your to-do list for the day, or any other task. From a simple to most complex tasks, we refer mobile applications in order to accomplish things with a flair. This certainly represents how apps have become an inevitable part of our day-to-day activities. Whether one wants to know something, wants to go somewhere, wants to buy something, or wants to do something, applications play a significant role.

While it offers incredible benefits to mobile users, brands can also invest in a valuable mobile application development to leverage their businesses and build powerful relationships with their customers. However, with the fact that your application is not alone, there are millions of applications already existing in the application stores. And, many more will be released while I am writing this post. Since, all these apps are already vying for users’ attention, just developing a brilliant product is not sufficient to ensure that it will hit the market upon release.

The critical challenge that every app marketer face is to make his application easily discoverable. One needs to embrace a well-planned and comprehensive application marketing strategy in order to make his application stand out in the boundless sea of applications. Moreover, by ensuring that your application is getting into the hands of people who actually need it, you can procure the sustainable success of the application.

Thus, it won’t be an understatement to say that by striking a strong balance between the product development and its marketing, the sustainability of a product can be secured. I would like to share some tips and tricks that can help your brand tap into a whopping number of mobile users.

The Best App Marketing Strategy

If app marketing is planned appropriately, one can dramatically add to the huge success of the application. The prime goal of any application marketing plan is to spread the awareness of the application, and engage the potential app audience. When you are able to achieve these integral goals, it will eventually add to its credibility and boost its success.

The app marketing job can be divided into two sections, including pre-launch marketing and post-launch marketing. It is essential to consider both the aspects, else it will become hard to drive the requisite results.

Let’s uncover the key points to capitalize on the marketing of an application.

A Pre-Launch Application Marketing Guide

Here are the points that must be considered before releasing the application publicly.

#1. Research the market thoroughly & validate your app idea

Developing an application is not an easy pie, valuable efforts, time and resources are required to develop a prolific application. Thus, it is wise to research the market beforehand, and validate your application idea in a suitable fashion. You can review the targeted application store and learn the hot trends. This will help you streamline the type of applications that are in vogue, and are extolled by users.

Once you will identify an application category that can benefit your business, think of an innovative and helpful application that can go viral upon release.

#2. Choose a suitable app name, icon & price

You will be surprised to know that the things that can create or break an application includes its name, icon and price. Thus, it is worth brainstorming while making such decisions. Here are some useful points, bearing which in mind can help you come with an ultimate application.

• Think of a unique and fresh application name that must embrace the vital keywords. Make it certain that your chosen name doesn’t intrude on any existing brands and applications.
• An application icon is an epitome of the style and the prime functionality that the application has to offer. Since, it is the first thing with which users will interact, an impressive and visually appealing icon can encourage potential viewers to explore the app. Also, it is worth to make an eye-catchy app icon, as stores like the Apple App store consider icon design while approving an application.
• Whether you have chosen a free application offering in-app purchases, or a premium application, it is essential to plan a revenue model and decide a suitable amount for your product. To jump on a price that you can charge for an application depends upon both the application and the target audience.

#3. With whom are you competing?

Since, there is no dearth of applications in the application store, you will probably get a range of competitive applications. Make a list of all the potential competitors and then, take the app’s success and similar functionalities into account to spruce up the list of the five most powerful contenders.

PS: An application with only a few number of users is not a strong competitor, rather a five star rated application, which has a huge number of reviews and gigantic user base, is a solid competitor.

#4. Work on keywords for ASO

Ideally, a keyword represents a term that a customer will use to identify the basic functionality of an application. It is imperative to understand resourceful keywords that can aid to the visibility of your application. Thus, it is advisable to select strong keywords while keeping your application’s functions and target audience in mind.

The Application Store Optimization (ASO) is yet another crucial aspect related to the application marketing. Different application stores have different guidelines. As an app marketer, it is your job to adhere to the guidelines of the targeted store. By appropriately including a legible and intriguing app description, explicit screenshots of application, and other related app details, you can ensure a remarkable look and feel of your application on the application stores. Moreover, don’t forget to include the suitable keywords in the app description, and flaunt the USP of the application to make them easily notable so as to attract viewers’ attention.

#5. Create a buzz!

If you are able to create a buzz for your application in the market before launching it publicly, it will help you easily capture the attention of your target audience. This will certainly make your application discoverable even before it is available for use. For this, you can ask bloggers or tech enthusiasts to review your product, and share the info about your upcoming application on the Internet. However, it is essential to ensure that they share only positive reviews.

A Post-Launch Application Marketing Guide

So finally you have released your application in the market. To ensure that your painstaking efforts are not wasted, you must invest in valuable time and plan thoroughly. Here are the crucial points that must be considered to promote an application once it is launched in the market so that you can further boost its discoverability and make it highly engaging.

#1. Consider RERO!

RERO is a common philosophy that is used in context to time-based releases. By frequently releasing updates of an application, you can create a strong feedback loop between developers and users or testers. This eventually augments the application development and helps deliver features that best cater to users’ need. Moreover, it will also facilitate you to expand your user base.

It is advisable to release the core features initially and leverage suitable communities to help you attract early users. This is so because it is imperative to have a user base, else it will be hard for you to ensure that you are developing a product that will be lauded by potential users.

#2. Promote organically

You can definitely choose paid acquisition marketing to attain new customers, but only if your pocket allows so. It requires a hefty amount that is not affordable for most of the application marketers. Thus, organic marketing makes more sense.

There are several ways of promoting your product organically over the Internet in order to increase the number of downloads. For instance,

• Embed social sharing feature – You can make your application easily discoverable, and attract more new users by allowing the existing users to share your application or content with others over the popular social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, to name a few. It is better to make sharing as simple as possible like with the click of a button.
• Seek reviews from leading app review websites – Users are quite fastidious about the applications and prefer going through their reviews before installing them on their device. Thus, it is vital to get positive reviews from the popular app review websites or other media outlets so that you can drive a colossal number of downloads.

#3. Develop a conspicuous online presence

This is yet another way to leverage organic promotions. While mobile presence is eminent in this modern age, the worthwhile benefits of web presence are undebatable. When a search for an application is made on Google or any other search engine, both the link to the homepage of your website and the link to the application store is found. Thus, it is practical to create an enticing and interactive web landing page. However, don’t forget to make it responsive, so as to aesthetically target desktop as well as mobile users.

#4. Acknowledge your users’ feedback

The applications that have happy and satisfied customers are often good at impressing and captivating more users for obvious reasons. If your application possesses a good rating and valuable reviews that amazingly flaunts its credibilities, you are more likely to inflate your user base. However, to attain this, you need an incredibly useful application and proficiently manage the users’ issues. In order to handle the issues appropriately, make sure that your users can reach you with ease. You can either allow them to contact you through email, message, tweet, or any other medium.

Once they contact you with an issue, revert them with a feasible solution as soon as possible. By doing so, not only your user will get a satisfactory response, but it will also enhance your app performance.

In A Nutshell

Mobile application marketing is something that must be done with a great precision. Oftentimes, app marketers are involved lately in a project. However, it is beneficial to involve them at the earliest possible. Since, the success of an application is not only confined to superior features and interactive interface, it is essential to execute a wisely planned marketing strategy.

While one may assume that his app can become the next big hit in the wobbly mobile marketplace, but the efficiencies that it generates are the one that add to its success. I hope the points deciphered in this guide will help you promote your application among the potential audience with a flair. Thereby, you can heighten the app discoverability, user retention rate and conversion rate to ultimately benefit your business.

About the Author!

Lucie Kruger is an application developer working with Mobiers Ltd, which is the leading mobile application development company. She provides concrete information on latest information on mobile technologies like iOS or Android development processes.