Course Teaser: App Marketing. A step by step approach

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Slatecube Stories

6 min readAug 8, 2017

Since the smartphone industry is growing rapidly, and it is transforming the internet user’s behavior as well. Therefore marketers have taken it as an opportunity and reaching out to the very specific audience by their devices.

The Most recent update in digital marketing is app marketing. Companies (Big organization as well as medium business) are showing their interest in Apps because users love it.

Now if you are working in a cutting edge Technology Company and your company is developing & marketing apps, so this post is for you…

Building an App has always required a lot of effort and expensive skills as well. But it is also important to market that app. In this post, I shall be writing on the indispensable technical skills which can help in the marketing of any app.

Before creating the blueprint of your app marketing, ensure that your app is SEO enabled. Utilize the resources and build an app for billions. Check following guidelines and steps to make it more user-friendly.

Core App Quality guideline:

Internet users always expect the high-quality apps to download. Whenever your developer is building any app ensure that it should follow the quality guidelines provided by Google itself. These guidelines will not only help marketers to promote the app but also help users to navigate. Few of them are listed down.

Visual Design and User Interaction:

a) Standard design

This criterion helps the developer to create an appealing application to ensure that their users are getting the best user experience. Once can take reference from Google’s design Guideline page & UI patterns and icons.

b) Navigation:

Navigating user one screen to another is always a critical job. Before creating the navigation structure, it is important to draft the app structure. In the case of android apps, there are a few stander guidelines and these are listed down.

Screens should have re-launch button.
All screens should have back button and once back button pressed all dialogs should immediately get suspended.
All screens should have home button
Pressing the home button on any screen should navigate the users to the home screen.

c) Notifications:

Notifications should not contain any advertising
It should not contain the unrelated function which is not defined in the core app.
It should be related to ongoing events

Details about the notification guidelines can be explored here.

d) Functionality:

Apps should support both screen types; landscape and portrait orientations (if possible).
App correctly handles rapid transitions between display orientations without rendering problems.
Apps should not leave any services running when the app is in the background unless related to a core capability of the app.
Apps correctly preserve and restores user or app state.
When the app is resumed from the Recents app switcher, the app returns the user to the exact state in which it was last used.
When the app is resumed after the device wakes from sleep (locked) state, the app returns the user to the exact state in which it was last used.
When the app is relaunched from Home or All Apps, the app restores the app state as closely as possible to the previous state.
On Back key presses, the app gives the user the option of saving any app or user state that would otherwise be lost on back-navigation.

Apart from these few other things what you should focus when you are developing any app. Ensure that this app is not getting crashed, or freeze, or forcing users to close the device. Along with these, check if the app is consuming unnecessarily battery or the bandwidth. If so, get these issues fixed. All these checks should be enabled and well tested.

Enabling the core SEO functionality:

Process for app indexing:

Understand your site links
Connect your site with your app
Receive incoming links in your app
Handle incoming URLs
Control indexing

Working with deep linking & app indexing:

You worked hard; your team did their best to translate your idea into an app. But after few days of its launch, you realized that nothing is happening on your app… The first thing you should check if your app is index or not? If the app is not indexed, just enable the app indexing in your application.

Google App Indexing

To enable the app indexing, you need to show the relationship between your app and website. You can do it in following steps.

Example:

The XML snippet helps to specify an intent filter in the manifest for deep linking. The URIs “example://abc” & “http://www.example.com/abc” both resolve to this activity.

</intent-filter>
</activity>

Link this with associated webpage or sitemap

Deep link in your Webpage:

Deep link in sitemap:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<urlset
xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:xhtml=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<url>
<loc>example://abc</loc>
<xhtml:link
rel=”alternate”
href=”android-app://com.example.android/example/abc” />
</url>
…
</urlset>

Allow Google boats to read API content.

User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: /api/
Disallow: /

2- Bing App Linking:

Recently Bing has also started indexing the app content. Therefore they have suggested using applinks.org framework (which is used for Cross-platform, open source, and simple mobile deep-linking).

A web page that provides App Link metadata might look like this:

File: documentation.html

<html><head> <meta property=”al:ios:url” content=”applinks://docs” /> <meta property=”al:ios:app_store_id” content=”12345″ /> <meta property=”al:ios:app_name” content=”App Links” /> <meta property=”al:android:url” content=”applinks://docs” /> <meta property=”al:android:app_name” content=”App Links” /> <meta property=”al:android:package” content=”org.applinks” /> <meta property=”al:web:url” content=”http://applinks.org/documentation” /></head><body>Hello, world!</body></html>

About app links protocols you can read here — http://applinks.org/documentation/

Submit your app on Google search console:

Add your app as a new property to Search Console by clicking Add a property on the Search Console home page. Use the syntax android-app://{package-name}/

Note: Google search console allowed adding android apps & website only. You cannot upload IOS app in search console.

A note on formats for app links

The format for an Android HTTP link is: android-app://{package_name}/http/{host_path}

The {package_name} is the app’s “Application ID,” which may referred as it is showing in Google play store. So a link to the (example) the Montcalm app might look like this:

android-app:// com.precisproperties.My_Montcalm/http/themontcalm.com/example For IOS app we use app id instead of the package name.

ios-app://{itunes_id}/{scheme}/{host_path}

For HTTP links the {scheme} is “http,” which would mean your URL would look like this:

ios-app://id1022389877/http/themontcalm.com

How to create Noindex in app:

You might have been working with the no index tag earlier. In the apps creating no index is pretty simple you just need to create an xml file under the xml resource directory. ( res/xml/noindex.xml.)

The following example shows a noindex.xml file that excludes a specific page, hidden directories, and limits app notifications from appearing in Google Search:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?> <search-engine xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android”> <noindex android:value=”notification”/> <noindex uri=”http://appindexingsample.com/teachers/hidden-page“/> <noindex uriPrefix=”http://appindexingsample.com/chefs/hidden_prefix“/> </search-engine>

Reference the noindex.xml file

After you add the noindex.xml file, reference it from the application section of the app’s AndroidManifest.xml file with the following line:

For example:

Enable Google analytics:

If you are using google firebase console you can get the configuration file in google-services.josn it will look like.

“services”: {

“analytics_service”: {

“status”: 2,

“analytics_property”: {

“tracking_id”: “UA-1111111”

}

Where you can see reports:

For IOS — https://analytics.itunes.apple.com/

For Google — https://play.google.com/apps/publish

Tools & links:

Source: WebKit24