Ways to Promote your app
The smartphone has become our constant companion. Our allegiance to the smartphone outweighs our loyalty to all other partners. While the raging debate continues on whether it’s a boon or a bane, its place in our lives is indisputable. We now have a mobile app to cater to every aspect of our daily living. It has quietly assumed the role of a teacher, a gym trainer, a doctor, grocer. We start our day by opening an app, in most cases to snooze the alarm. We also invariably end our day with an app, whether it’s to read a book or to listen to sleep stories. In the interim, throughout the day, we keep toggling between apps.
Billions of apps have sway over us in every one of our waking hours. The smartphone helps wrap in a library, a restaurant, a photo album, and a work desk, compressing them all into a portable device that can tag along wherever we move. Ironically, there are apps available to track our screen time too. We, therefore, have become a generation running on apps.
All businesses are now opting to move their online transactions to mobile devices. And creating a dedicated app for these devices is imperative to keep the ball rolling. The consumer is prompted to “click to download the app” on every website they visit. The market is swamped with apps and every app owner is scrambling to grab the consumers’ attention. Today there are multiple apps to help the consumer order grocery but which of these is a favorite would depend on how well the app has been marketed.
Therefore, building a successful app is only half the battle won. It now has to be marketed to the target audience so that it isn’t lost amongst the millions already existing in the app stores, ready to be downloaded. Nudging the consumers to download the apps that you have created may not be as difficult, as sounds.
There are several ways to promote your app and consistently have them appear at the top of the downloading list. Here’s a listicle of ideas to help you promote your app and have them downloaded in millions each day. So go ahead and pick the ideas and strategies that are best suited for the app that you have developed.
Make your Landing page appealing
The landing page should be a terse description of the app’s features and should be attractive enough to convince the consumer to go ahead and click on the download and install button. This is your first pitch to your target audience and should therefore clearly define why this app is most appropriate for their use. It’s the most important step for mobile app promotion.
The headline of the landing page should be able to communicate to the user the values of downloading this app. The mobile app marketing landing page should be fuss-free and concise, yet effective enough to engage the reader. It should be able to communicate its values within the short attention span of the consumer.
The landing page should not be all about text. It should make judicious use of visuals to appealingly convey the values of the app. The landing page can also be used to boast about the achievements of the app. It can use glossy reviews as well as highlight the awards won and the downloads made.
The call-to-action- button, leading the consumers to the app store, is the most important aspect of this page. The final motive should be to nudge the consumer to click on the call-to-action button.
Promote your app on Social media
Social media has become all-consuming in each one of our lives. The endless scrolling ensures that Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and its likes are the places where we spend most of our time. It is important to therefore use these platforms to our advantage to promote apps. Businesses of all sizes can use social media platforms to reach their prospects. People engage in discovering, following, and downloading apps from social media. You can easily engage with the consumers through daily posts, stories, and live videos. These platforms can easily be used to coax the consumers into becoming your customer and eventually downloading your app.
Collaborate with Influencers
Influencer marketing is quickly picking up pace in the world of marketing. Gone are the days when you had to shell out a truckload of money on a celebrity to make your app known to the world. You need to simply recognize an influencer who has a good lot of followers and essentially those who would be particularly interested in your product.
Influencers mostly promote the products by incorporating them into their daily conversations with the audience. The daily pop-up advertisements throughout the day are pretty exhaustive and consumers tend to mostly ignore them. This is where a non-traditional advertisement through an Instagram influencer could be effective in really putting across the message.
After choosing the most appropriate influencer, you need to convince the influencer to promote your app. They would be interested in promoting your app only if it aligns with the core value of their page.
You can also incentivize consumers through influencers to increase the number of downloads for your apps. These could be achieved by offering discounts for the first few downloads on your app.
And true to its epithet, influencers can quite easily influence consumers to sway towards the intensive use of your app.
Contact writers to write about your app
You can connect with bloggers who write or review apps specific to your business domain. Most of these bloggers have a wider reach and if you can pitch your app to these bloggers and get good feedback on their blogs, this could increase the number of customers you can attract to your app and boost your app.
People mostly visit these websites to read about the latest apps available in the market. If you can get your app featured on several websites, you will get some good traffic from consumers downloading your app.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)/App Store Optimization (ASO)
SEO/ASO can help your app get noticed in the app development space. SEO is used to feature your business at the top of every search engine. Similarly, ASO is used to produce the same results in an app store. The higher your app ranks on every google search and every app store, the more customers you get onboarded to your app. This way, you can promote your app for free.
You can take the help of SEO consulting services for using the right keywords for optimizing the search results for your app. While choosing the keywords you need to be certain about the purpose it serves to the consumers and the terms they are most likely to use while searching for the app.
Google’s search field can help you auto-complete the keyword you have identified with real user queries. You can now use these queries to increase the search results for your app.
Hence you need not be an SEO expert to increase the search results for your app. You need to simply follow the points highlighted here to get going.
Apply for awards and ask for reviews to Market Your App
Entering your app for awards can give it the exposure that you have been longing for. The award platforms can work as a promotional ground to reach out to customers globally. Moreover, if you happen to win the award on these platforms, you can strut out the accolades on every app store you feature on. For newbie customers, there’s no better way of judging the validity of an app than a few awards attached to its name.
Blog about your app
Podcasts can be an effective tool to help shoot up the downloads for your app. The primary reason behind this is that podcasts target a niche audience who are more likely to be interested in your product.
Since podcasts are more informative and educational, they have the potential to engage the target audience. Therefore, podcasts can have a greater impact on consumers than traditional advertisements.
Podcasts are also a great way of creating a community for your products. The specific community helps target the apt audience for the consistent promotion of your product.
Answer questions on Quora
Several debates and discussions happening on Quora and similar sites. You can participate in these discussions and help solve queries. This will allow you to leave a link to download your app while also highlighting its features. You can also talk about your mobile app development process and put in relevant content. For this, you can take help of your own developers.
Design wallpapers and posters to promote your app through your users
You can design attractive wallpapers and posters that could be made available for download to existing users. This can be an easy way to have your app promoted through your user. Do not forget to include a QR code for downloading your app on these promotional items.
Offer free trials
If your app is a paid app, try running a free trial for a limited period. This will help you draw customers towards your app and also collect their information. You can then keep promoting your apps through regular emails even in the event of them not subscribing to your app post the end of the trial period.
It is important to entice customers to download your app for a trail and then get them hooked to your app. If there aren’t great substitutes for your app at a better price, it will most likely have the customer convert to a paid subscription. It is important to retain customers by offering great festive discounts for the renewal of subscriptions.
Another important aspect to consider in your free trial is whether you want to limit the features that you want to make available to the consumer. This will tempt the consumers to upgrade to the paid subscription. For instance, certain news websites have a limited number of articles free to read every month, post which the customer is prompted to upgrade to a paid subscription.
Finally, it is important to track the engagement of the users during the trial period. This will help send customised emails or notifications to active and passive users. By doing all this, you can promote your app for free or via running campaigns.
