You have developed and published the best possible app, with zero bugs and a well-planned monetization strategy. You think your job is done, don’t you ? Well, actually it has just begun.
Indeed, with almost 5 billion mobile apps available across both Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store, having the best app is not enough. And here app promotion comes into play.
Mobile App promotion refers to all of the app marketing activities, both organic and paid, designed to bring users to your app and to face the fierce competition in the mobile app industry. There are plenty of app marketing strategies to promote your app and grow your user base; therefore, here we will provide our suggestions by listing 7 tips and best practices to follow when planning your mobile app growth strategy.
Below are the 7 tips we think will help you with mobile app promotion:
- Know your target audience and keep improving your app;
- Run offline advertising;
- Make the most of your website;
- Leverage influencer marketing;
- Grow organically with app store optimization;
- Establish your presence on social media;
- Scale your app with paid user acquisition.
As you have seen, there are advertising activities meant to increase brand awareness and advertising activities specifically designed for mobile user acquisition. We believe the success of any app depends on both and that’s why the combination of branding and user acquisition is a match made in heaven!
Now let’s start diving deeper into our 7 strategies!
Although it looks obvious, the essential way to grow your user base is to know who your ideal users, and potential customers, are. Through market research and competitor analysis, advertisers and app developers can identify the profile of their target users by defining demographics, age, gender, and even interests and lifestyle.
The next step for mobile app promotion is to monitor user behavior inside the app in order to increase your understanding of the ideal customers but also to identify what users like and dislike about your app. You may edit some features to improve the overall user experience and user journey, according to your app monetization strategy.
As mentioned in our introduction, activities meant to increase brand awareness play a crucial role in app promotion. Strong brand awareness enhances user acquisition efforts, growing both organic and paid traffic. Examples of offline advertising activities aimed at promoting your brand are multiples, from TV advertisements to billboards, radio and print marketing activities.
Although it may be difficult to assess the effectiveness of these channels in terms of new users and, as a consequence, to compute their ROAS, they are definitely worth your money. That’s because greater brand awareness and app visibility make users more likely to try your app both organically and when they are shown more targeted ads.
Still about brand awareness, even your website can be helpful to app promotion. Make it easy and fast to download your app from your website, with a clear call to action and visible icons. Many brands use most of their web pages to list their app’s benefits and features without providing the direct link to the app stores in order to download it. This is a fundamental mistake that you need to avoid, especially if the app is your main business product.
Then, work hard to improve your website visibility and ranking across web searches. An effective SEO strategy may lead your blog or website to the top of search results for your keywords of interest. High ranking combined with strong app visibility in the web page is a powerful tool for organic app growth.
Are you interested in the most relevant app promotion KPIs in 2023? Download our latest mobile user acquisition report for free here!
Our next tip to promote your app is use influencer marketing. Indeed, nowadays influencers play a big role in online advertising activities and can lead to excellent results in a limited amount of time. Influencers are people who bring with them thousands if not millions of followers on social media. Making them promote your app has two great advantages.
The first one is to grow your app visibility by showing it to the large audiences who everyday follow any update provided by their favorite influencers on social media. The exposition to these audiences is the first step, and word of mouth will do the rest.
The second advantage is that the journey from influencer promotion to app download can be really short since people follow influencers on social media apps on their mobile phones, where they can directly download your app by clicking on the links usually provided by influencers when they do these kinds of promotions.
As the website mentioned in earlier paragraphs, social media represents a way to increase brand awareness and app visibility. Social media platforms have dramatically grown in popularity and have gradually become part of everyday life for most people.
On top of that, platforms like Facebook and Tiktok allow advertisers to run their advertising campaigns for app promotion within those platforms, providing huge targeting capabilities and machine learning-powered optimizations.
App Store Optimization, a.k.a ASO, is similar to SEO for web searches but refers to app promotion. It aims at improving the listing of your app in the search results within the app store, be it Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store.
Keywords, app descriptions and ratings/reviews all affect the listing in the app store and can be edited by the advertisers. There’s no doubt that a high ranking in the app store search results can lead to a higher number of installs and a significant growth in the app user base.
Last but not least, paid user acquisition is the advertising tool that really allows you to scale your app promotion efforts by acquiring a large number of users while also increasing your revenues at the same time. Advertisers can indeed run app install campaigns specifically designed to acquire new users.
In addition, programmatic platforms not only are able to provide sophisticated targeting options in order to reach your target audience, but they can also optimize app install campaigns towards acquiring high-LTV users, who are more likely to generate in-app revenues. The specificity of these channels makes it also way easier to assess their performance and your mobile app marketing ROAS.
Wrapping up, app promotion is as important as app development, and any advertiser must design an effective app user acquisition strategy in order to grow their app in terms of both user base and revenues. We suggested 7 tips which can be combined in a successful marketing mix and reward your app promotion with excellent results.
