How to promote an app: what is mobile marketing?
Imagine users daily collecting at least nine apps on their smartphones. Imagine your app floating among billions of apps available on the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store. How many of them will survive the fierce competition?
It may sound too tragic, but it is a matter of life and death to know how to promote an app at best. Before diving into all the strategies, you should adopt for your 2023’s app campaign, let’s get started from the basis: what app promotion is and why you need it.
“Mobile app promotion” refers to all mobile marketing strategies aimed at bringing new users to your product. If you want to promote your app effectively by scaling up the volume of users, both paid and organic activities do it for you.
If now we envision the app promotion as a process, we can even try to identify three main stages: the «awareness» stage before launching the app, the «acquisition stage» to generate new users, and (last but not least) the «retention» stage. Indeed, users’ acquisition process is not the end of the game. Once you have hooked new customers, it is of core importance for you to know how to increase the revenues generated from users but also how to keep them engaged.
There are several ways in which you can promote your app going across this three-staged process. Let’s dig deeper into this!
How to promote an app through targeting and retargeting
At an early stage, the ambition to scale up the volume of your users comes with the necessity to establish your app buyer personas based on demographics, device, gender, age, interests, and users’ behaviors.
In other words, market research and competitor analysis provide you with the main features of your ideal paying customers. If you know your target audience, you can have more chances to engage with the right audience and avoid wasting your paid efforts.
As we said in the introduction, not only do you need to know how to promote an app, but also how to keep your users engaged. After acquiring several users, you still may find yourself between a rock and a hard place when it dawns on you that half of your users are likely to drop off your product after a few months or weeks. For this reason, re-targeting operations, as part of «the retention stage», provide you with the right strategy at the right time.
This technique aims to re-target existing users that have stopped visiting your app. In other words, it encourages users to re-engage with or re-install your product. Moreover, it tries to hook potential new customers that have already shown interest in your app through some ads but have not converted yet.
How to market your app
At the core of the acquisition and optimization process, there are two other marketing activities you cannot neglect if you wish to learn how to promote an app.
Let’s start with ASO or App Store Optimization, a process of optimization that works as SEO for web searches but concerns app promotion. Utilizing exact algorithms, ASO aims to boost the app ranking and the volume of organic installs on the app store, be it Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store.
Finally, it is paid user acquisition, the advertising strategy that makes a difference and improves the situation. What do you need to know about paid user acquisition to learn how to promote an app?
In a nutshell, paid user acquisition enables you to scale up the volume of your users and increase revenues to optimize your app promotion efforts.
Furthermore, within the framework of paid user acquisition, it is down to programmatic platforms that targeting operations are far more sophisticated and detailed.
Consequently, advertisers can reach their target audience and optimize their campaign by acquiring high-quality users, those more likely to convert and generate in-app profit.
How to advertise your app from your website
Along with targeting operations, the design of your website and landing page are two indispensable steps to start off your campaign. It is indeed a matter of brand awareness and part of the «pre-launch stage» actions.
If you are wondering how to promote an app by promoting your website, the answer is simple and regards just the use of some tricks. For instance, users must be allowed to easily visit your website once they have interacted with an ad.
So, make sure that your website informs them about all benefits and features of your product. Indeed, users must have immediate access to your website and find a direct link to the app stores where they can download the app.
Brand visibility for your app promotion
When you launch your campaign, from the very beginning, you need to assess your brand visibility through exposition and word of mouth to reinforce brand awareness. If you wish to know how to promote an app, you may need to manage many different advertising strategies, marketing techniques, and media platforms.
Let’s have a look at some of them!
- Influencer marketing plays a key role in advertising. Influencers can boost the app visibility in a limited timeframe by displaying the product to millions of followers. They also tend to provide to potential customers daily updates, new features, and the direct link to download the app.
- Social media is a trove of potential long-term customers. One way to use them is through content marketing. As part of an SEO strategy, you can use it to grow traffic and then drive users from social media to your product using deep links. You should be able to ideate different pieces of content to reshape and repurpose on various platforms (e.g., an Instagram story can become a Twitter thread) to generate more impressions.
- Podcast ads are considerably less expensive than other forms of advertising and allow you to personally shape your ads and direct them to more specific audiences. Considering the steep rise in the podcasting industry expected in 2023, they seem a good option to gain awareness and visibility.
- Branded newsletters have nothing to do with regular newsletters. Branded newsletters are sponsor newsletters coming out on the same time and day each week, with the same format for each topic and a unique brand sponsoring them.
To wrap up, we have talked of app promotion as a real process not less important than app development. This article has tried to sum up in 4 steps several operations involved in a three-staged process that, if well followed, can lead you and your app to success.
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