How To Promote An App: Marketing Guide. Part 2

Published in

ANODA Mobile Development Agency

5 min readOct 22, 2018

Second part of our guide to promoting your app with app marketing strategy tips. If you haven’t read the first article check it our here.

Invite-only Betas

A lot of notable startups began using the invite-only beta app marketing strategy. You could do the same thing for your mobile app idea too. All you need are a few prospective users or some other industry connections and you can launch an invite-only beta app. This means it is a private release where select users get to try it first.

The benefit of this app marketing strategy is that you will get to test the app with other users besides your app development team. These users will give you honest reviews and feedback about your app prior to its release. If your focus group ends up giving you positive feedback on your app, then you will have the confidence to officially launch your app to the mainstream public.

Also, a private beta is more attractive than a public beta because it will only give a select number of people the chance to experience your app first. These people can be influencers in the industry and provide helpful advice and future word-of-mouth traffic.

The music streaming service app, Spotify, had an interesting beta model. It allowed invited users to invite five other users each, so they could try the service. This caused the user base to expand quickly and it became Spotify’s primary app marketing strategy.

Increase Visibility

Not a surprise that increasing the visibility of your app is one of the primary goals of app marketing strategy. You can make your app more visible to people in several ways, such as:

Simply submit your mobile app to websites which promote new apps, such as Sus, Launching Next, or Rate My Startup. You can use these services to get more user reviews for your app, which will then draw more attention to it.
Invest in internet advertising on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. You can also purchase ads on networks like Google Admob, StartApp, or iAd.
Find other app stores to publish your app in. This only works for Android apps.
Conduct social media contests that include giveaways. This will cause people to want to share their information. For instance, when the location-based app “Drop Messages” was first starting in New York, they attracted users by letting them find prizes as they simply walked down various streets.
Communicate with the media/press.
Offer limited-time discounts on your app if you are charging money to download it. Then you can get your app featured on certain websites which have “on sale” or “discount” lists for apps. This will attract more attention to your app for sure.

Focus on Your App Store Page

You can attract millions of people to your app store page but if it’s horrible, your app marketing strategy will be useless. You need to make the description of your app:

Error-free
Engaging and to the point
Include all the best features of the app
Point out which problems can be solved with the app

Here are some additional tips for your app store page:

Post informative and visually appealing screenshots
Choose good SEO keywords and place them in your description.
Make your description localized so that it reaches other markets with more users.

Localizing your Mobile App for the World Marketplace

If you want your app marketing strategy to succeed and your app to become successful and popular worldwide than your app needs to be available in more languages than just English. If you are trying to attract a global audience, then you need reach out to the vast majority of people that don’t speak English. Some of the best languages to have for your app include English, French, Japanese, German, Korean, and Chinese. Start localizing your mobile app to all the markets that are relevant to it. As your app becomes more popular, you can expand your level of support for it. Refrain from using any automatic translating technology because it is not often accurate. Take advantage of the numerous app localization companies which can assist in launching your mobile app to the world marketplace.

Cross-Promotions

If you have already released more than one mobile app, then using cross-promotions to motivate your existing users to download and try your other mobile apps is the right app marketing strategy.

You can use cross-promotion networks like Tap for Tap, Tappx, and Tapdaq to expand your reach. They use a credit system where credits can be earned from downloads, taps, and expressions. Other people’s apps will be advertised in your own app, which will earn you credits. These credits can be exchanged for creating your own app advertisements in other people’s apps.

Mobile games use cross-promotions a lot, but you can use it for other types of apps too. Make sure you are not exchanging advertisements with companies that you are competing against because you could potentially lose users over it.

Use A/B Testing to Enhance UI/UX

The visual appeal of an app will be very effective when promoting it. Just one icon could cause a disastrous app launch. If you can make the usability better, then you can attract new users and keep the old ones. You can make improvements to the UI/UX without going through a complete cycle of coding and designing. Instead, you can take advantage of the many A/B testing tools which exist. There are services on the internet like Apptimize, Optimizely, and Taplytics which can help you with this. They will generate 2 different versions of your app’s UI/UX. After that, they will keep track of the responses that these versions get from users. For instance, you can change the background colors and layouts. You can also find a button color that will draw the most attention. Once you do, go with a variant that is the most successful one.