How to put your app on the map 🌐

App marketing tips and tricks for beginners

You’re a dreamer. You thought up something simple, beautiful. You rallied a smart team around you and now you can hardly believe it — you’ve got an app.

But, what should you do now?

In many ways, I’m a beginner marketer, too. I studied art, worked in design, started my own business and then got hired at an HR tech startup in Cape Town. So far, I’ve learnt a lot, and what I have, I give to you 🤗

First things first: who are you?

You’re an app, you’re a company, you’re a service… Who is it for? What problems are you solving in the world? (Yes, that’s important to know!)

A lot of resources on “proper marketing” tell you to make customer profiles like “Hannah the Head of People” or “Devon the Developer” (whomever the profiles of potential customers are that you want to attract) and map out how to reach them.

This is a good exercise to help you understand which marketing channels might best serve you, but finding out who they are is not the most important thing right now.

The most important thing at first is to figure out what your brand is — who you are.

Your app

Your app is the interface with your end user, and ultimately the product that they buy.

• It needs to look good
• It needs to answer a problem in a simple, elegant way
• It needs to work
• It doesn’t need to be finished

What I mean when I say, “It doesn’t need to be finished”, is that here at Hi5 we’ve gone the lean agile route for app development, and therefore always focus a lot of our energy into delivering a simple, working MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

What next? Put your ear to the ground and listen to your users. Believe me, this is more valuable than any other marketing you can do.

We’ve seen over and again, through measuring campaigns with UTM’s and Google Analytics, that new features always trumps content when it comes to driving more traffic and sign-ups.

Your company

It’s essential to have an app (duh, otherwise what will people buy from you), but what’s a great product with a junk culture behind it? (Some say, Amazon 🤑)

Look after your team, take care in how you approach problems and weigh up solutions. If your team is really amazing, you will want to keep them. Remember, the captain goes down with the ship — so if the team sinks, it’s all on you!

• Involve your team in decision-making (voting works).
• Meet together when it benefits everyone (whether for work or play).
• Find out what’s important to your team, and make space for them to realise their dreams for the company.
• Establish your company values together.
• Delegate new employee onboarding — mentorship is a great way to upskill existing employees!
• Be open to change.
• Admit when you’re wrong.
• Give praise and recognition openly.
• Set company, team and individual goals in a group setting.

Your service

Once the ball is rolling with your app and your company, you can put that drive into offering an amazing service.

Time and again, we are complimented by staying clients on our amazing customer service — I reiterate, this is a marketing opportunity that no content could ever give you.

Why does it work? Because, service is personalised and interactive. It is intrinsically people-centred. Also, if your app and company is not living up to what you put out on social media, your service is a tell-tale and can make or break your business.

In short: don’t underestimate the influential power of good customer service.

Put yourself out there

Now that you’ve got the basics going (note: not perfected! It’s always a work in progress), you can start selling that rich experience of a fabulous app, created by an amazing team who delivers exceptional customer service.

When it comes to marketing and advertising, the general rule is to be relevant.

As long as your product/company/service is relevant to whomever you’re reaching out to, you can’t go wrong.

(OK, but you will still get the door slammed in your face from time to time!)

Choose your channels

So, on one end, more is more. But, on the other hand, you probably have limited resources (like us) and every decision needs to be strategic and timeous. Therefore, you may need to weigh up your social media options and only choose the ones that will work best for you.

Think of the internet as a place to network. Where will you meet your potential customers? At a cocktail bar, an event, a workshop, an online game? Social media are the meeting places of the internet, so if you’re selling a funeral policy app, you’re probably not going to be posting videos on TikTok for 12–18 year olds.

Here’s my take on the some of the more popular channels available:

• Twitter is a great all-rounder social media platform: there’s enough opportunity for new potential followers and comments without having to pay for it (compared to Facebook), and it’s common practice for customers to reach out to companies publicly on this platform (so make sure your team is able to check and reply on Twitter at the drop of a hat).
• Linkedin is great for business, and people don’t mind if you ‘drop your business card’ in comments or private messages as long as you’re discreet and sincere.
• Facebook is way more business than you think, and the ads are well-priced. Even if your potential customers only use Facebook for sharing baby photos, you can still get decent exposure. Plus, Facebook owns Instagram and you can run the same ads and stories on both platforms.
• Instagram is all about visual appeal, but wordy posts get a lot of traction as well. One of the biggest potential blockers with Instagram is that their algorithm is designed to stop you from ‘spamming’ (I prefer the term, owning) certain hashtags, so you need to be consistent and fresh with content.
• TikTok is relatively new and is blowing up in a big way. There are rumours of banning the app in certain countries because of security implications, but in my honest opinion the app is too brilliant and entertaining to be canned. It’s easy to get started and get 1000 views on your second post (we did it), but remember this social media app is currently mostly being used by a younger audience.
• WhatsApp, although not technically a social media, has a lot of potential for engaging existing customers and reaching out to contacts who are potential customers. Customer service delivered via WhatsApp is especially powerful, because it’s mobile, instant and allows the client to share multimedia content. (P.s. they’re also owned by Facebook)

*Disclaimer: These are apps mostly used in English-speaking countries, which is where I’m from (OK, I’m actually Afrikaans, but you get the point). This list does not consider the social media apps used in monolingual countries outside of the ‘west’ or countries where English is not spoken widely.

Yes, you still need a website

The necessity of having a website these days is arguable, considering the rise of social media and the powerful marketing tools it offers (for instance, if you switch to an Instagram Business account, you can add a business address and phone number so that customers can reach you).

That said, content marketing is still a big thing, especially for Google indexing and ranking when people search for answers on the internet.

You want to be that answer when they’re searching for something your app can solve, your company has expertise in, or your service can offer. Your website should:

• Have the right code structure in place (H1, H2, H3, meta data, Alt texts, etc.)
• Reflect the personality and design details of your app
• Be ultra-simple and easy to navigate
• Offer media-rich resources (text, image, animation, video, sound, and if you’re into it and it makes sense, even VR)
• Be updated regularly (at least once a week or even once a day) to keep Google interested ;P
• Have a chat bot so that potential and existing customers can reach out to you instantly
• Offer related content, services or other documents of interest to your customers (this is called evergreen content and drives traffic to your site), eg. How-to’s, Help docs, blog articles, whitepapers, podcasts, etc.

There’s a ton of other stuff you can do with your website, but this is a beginner’s article ;)

Consider online ads

We still consistently see more actual conversions (sign-ups) via our website through Google Ads. This is the only ads platform I’ve worked with, so I can only speak from my experience with Google Ads, but there are others out there like Bing Ads, Apple Search Ads, and so forth.

At first, I could not wrap my head around the beast that is Google Ads, but once I did their free online certification course, and with a little help from my friends, we built some really great ads from scratch that target the right audience who search for specific keywords that we can help answer.

The Google Ads software is free to use, and you can set your own campaign and ad budgets.

• Make sure your ads are relevant! Build out your audiences carefully.
• It’s cheaper than you think. Start your budgets low.
• Make sure you use high quality images set to Google Ads specifications.
• Build your keyword list based on the strength and price of keywords (you don’t want to bid for really expensive keywords, or for really weak ones). Google Ads has great tools to help you with this.
• Ask for help from an expert. I know I had to, multiple times!
• Set a monthly reminder to check on your keywords, campaigns and ads performance — chuck out what’s not working and put more spend on what is.

Famous last words

I could say if you follow the advice in this article, it will help you skyrocket your app. But, that would be a tad overplayed on my part.

The truth is, I’m still learning and have by no means discovered the secret sauce to marketing (there are much more qualified, more highly-remunerated persons out there who probably have).

All I know is that the best thing you can do for your new business is to discover what you love about it, and then find ways to make other people love it, too.

Sometimes, you will need to make a choice and stick to it for long enough to figure out whether it’s working or not. Other times, you need to do something completely offside to see what happens and learn from it.

Have fun!

About me

A qualified artist (if you get such a thing) by training and a digital designer by trade, Sharné McDonald joined the Hi5 team in 2017 as a Happiness Hero. She currently holds the role of Product Marketing Manager and it’s one of her joys to delight customers and leads with great content, technical information and funny GIFs. She loves being a generalist and is currently completing a Masters degree in Art Education in her spare time.