What are the Best App Marketing Strategies? 5 Practices You Should be Following

Mobile apps are in demand, there’s simply no arguing here. As the market for mobile devices and smartphones continues to grow on a yearly basis, users will naturally require more and more applications for their various, day-to-day activities.

In fact, there are plenty of reasons for which your business needs a mobile app, besides the constantly expanding market.

And while there’s a staggering amount of applications on the market, not all of them are able to triumph in celebration of millions and millions of downloads. As saddening as it may sound, especially for developers, marketing your application is probably just as important as developing it in the first place. Don’t take our word for it, though. A recent study revealed that no less than 31% of mobile app budgets is spent on marketing in 2018. This only highlights the importance of proper marketing.

But how do you do it? How do you get people to actually download your app? What is more — how do you not burn cash in useless campaigns?

We’ve taken the liberty to look at 5 particularly important, better yet — effective strategies which will help you position your application despite the mounting competition.

Plan Ahead

If your app is ready and you’re just now starting to come up with a marketing strategy, we’ve got some bad news — you are a bit too late. Have you ever wondered why they play a whole bunch of annoying movie trailers everytime you go to the cinema? The reason is incredibly simple, yet immensely powerful — anticipation.

Anticipation sells. Better yet, anticipation hypes. So when is the best time to start marketing?

It really depends on how quickly you’d be able to deliver the finish, market-ready product, but you ought to formulate a cohesive marketing strategy at the time of conceptualization.

Why? Well, at that point you should already have the vision for your app ready — hence, it’s a great time to identify the most reliable market channels. This is the time when you want to start thinking of putting your app on a silver plater and feeding it right to your customers.

What we’re currently talking about is most commonly referred to as a “pre-launch” phase. Here are a few things you have to consider during this time:

• Determine a release date (and be spot on with it!)
• Conduct market research and UNDERSTAND your future customer
• Identify the PERFECT customer
• Analyze and understand your competition
• Establish a UNIQUE value proposition
• Define positioning and brand messaging
• Create your own branding style

It’s absolutely critical to be spot on during this initial marketing phase. While anticipation is a strong driver, so is a disappointment. If you fail to live up to your promises now, your job becomes that much more challenging.

Optimization — It’s Key

App store optimization. Perhaps the phrase you least likely want to hear, yet, one that can be a real game changer.

You need to make sure that your app is properly optimized for searches on the most popular app stores. Regardless if you are rolling it out for Windows, iOS, Android, or for all of these combined, you need to polish up each and every one of your app store pages.

*Hint: Your title should contain the keywords with the heaviest traffic. If you haven’t already, spend time analyzing them and make sure this happens!

But why is app store optimization so important? Well, why is search engine optimization so important? Because that’s how people discover you — plain and simple. Instead of spending thousands on ads, you can optimize your app and garner a considerable amount of searches towards it through app store optimization.

In other words, you’d have to think about the readability of your page, the graphic content you present there, the keyword density, the tags, and, in general, pretty much everything related to properly formulating your content.

But it’s resourceful! Properly optimized app store page will help you scale up and catalyze your marketing efforts. Which brings us to our next point.

Be There

Omni-channel marketing will be one of the hottest trends of 2019. People are now socially active more than ever! Let’s be realistic — almost everyone you know has a Facebook account and at least one other type of social media — whether it’d be Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or something else.

What does this tell you?

You need to be there — everywhere. Regardless of your app, chances are that your audience is on social media.

We’d also like to make an important note here. Copy-pasting the same content on different social media will not work. We can’t stress this enough. People on LinkedIn look for different type of content than people on Facebook.

Which brings us to the same old narrative that you should follow, regardless of whether you’re marketing an app or an apple — relevancy! Understand what content your audience is looking for and where and act on it!

Influencers — You Need Them

Before you start getting all worried about how much money this would cost you, understand that not all types of influencers are paid for in advance.

There are plenty of people with a substantial amount of following on different social media which would agree to work on some sort of revenue share agreement. You’d have to grant them access to your app, they’d review it and post their thoughts to their audience.

Naturally, you’d first have to determine whether or not your product has mass appeal, but unless it’s a very tightly specialized app, chances are that it has.

Here’s where we’d like to revert back to a point made many times in this post — relevancy! Make sure that the influencers you attempt to engage with have a relevant following. In other words, it doesn’t really make much sense to reach out to a clothing blogger if you want to release a food-oriented application.

Stand Out!

In a multi-billion dollar market riddled by millions of applications, standing ut is not exactly an easy thing. But don’t look at it from that perspective.

Remember — a comprehensive marketing campaign is all about personalization. Make your potential customers feel as if they receive your most special attention. How to do that? There are plenty of easy (relatively) and fairly inexpensive things you can do.

1. Be there! Remember how we said you have to be on all social media? Make sure you are actually there. What we mean is — you need to interact. Don’t just answer that op comment, go the extra mile — engage with your audience, and you will quickly see the results.
2. Be visible! One of the easiest ways to do so is to get some creative imagery or better yet — videos done for your marketing campaign. Again, you don’t need to spend a fortune here. A great idea is to start creating contests with certain prizes in exchange for visual content from your users.
3. Be smart! You don’t need to swim against the tide. In other words — don’t try too hard to outcompete your rivals — instead, do what they do, but only better! Explore their marketing strategies and enhance them.

To Wrap it Up

Marketing an app in the current dynamic environment isn’t easy. In fact, as the market progresses, it’s only going to get harder. However, the above will always remain paramount.

Remember, identifying and sticking to a properly crafted, comprehensive marketing strategy will help you turn your app from one of the many into the one.

Originally published at medium.com on December 19, 2018.