In 2013, Apple announced more than 1 million apps in the App Store. It boggles the mind to consider how much the number has grown and continues to grow every day. The sheer volume of competition is just one thing, you need to know about app marketing, but don’t let it dissuade you from starting app marketing, there are plenty of other things to learn to help your mobile application stand out from the crowd. No matter how nice your mobile application looks and how cool are its functions, if it is not reachable to your customers, it is useless. In this article, I am going to share some amazing tips to make your mobile app marketing strategy more visible and access a maximum number of people. You can choose any mobile application marketing strategy based on your mobile application type and the nature of your audience. If you don’t have the right mobile app marketing plan, you won’t be able to get more customers and your app will fail eventually.
Read this article to find some best marketing strategies for your app.
Table of Contents
Onboarding
Maybe your mobile application contains a lot of functions and navigations and the users find it confusing and difficult to use while using it for the first time. Onboarding is the solution to this problem. It includes showing the user some guidelines to effectively use your app, whereas representing the main value proposition. Usually, it is like a quick step-by-step tutorial or flashes up useful tips and pointers as the user starts visiting the app.
Bring Back Your Customers
As you think about your new mobile app, think about how you can get customers to come back and use it regularly. The vast majority of apps are fun once or twice, but customer interest fades. Be aware of this and plan for ways to bring their attention back. Your mobile application should provide some legitimate value to users to keep them revisiting your app. Find a way to save money or users time, entertain them along the way, solve a problem, or make their lives easier. You need to deliver value that they would not have without you.
Treat Customers Personally
Apps give you the ability to be literally in the palm of a customer’s hand. This means you should be thinking about how to personalize that connection as much as possible. Let customers create a personalized aspect within the app and build a sense of relationship on the part of the customer. Treat your customers with respect and appreciate their needs. Give them immediate solutions to problems. Listen to their feedback and say thank you more often.
Consider an App Inbox
Your app is a great way to communicate with customers, but communication only works if you leave customers a way to get it. Sure, a push notification might get their attention, but unless there is an inbox storing those important messages for later consumption, it will be next to impossible for customers to read them later. App Inbox is a screen in your mobile application that stores determined messages. It is very much similar to the email inbox, but it exists inside your app. App Inbox lets you send rich media messages that you can store on your device.
Invest in Marketing Research
The idea of a new, shiny phone app is exciting. But don’t let the excitement of the app overpower your good sense. You need to know more than how to build the mobile application – you need to know how to sell it to the parties who want to download it. And that requires specific market research.
There are many ways you can invest in marketing research. for example, you can also make questionnaires to conduct the survey from your audience and get responses online. It is a good approach to get primary data from your audience and by analyzing that data, you can have a better understanding of your customers’ demands and interests.
Seek Feedback
If you ask your customers to tell you nice things, they probably will. Set up a system of rankings, stars, thumbs, or likes within your app so that customers can quickly and easily give you feedback about their experiences and purchases.
Gathering feedback from customer shows you are worth their thoughts. You need to understand the interests and demands of your clients which is possible by asking them for feedback. In this way, you will involve them in making future decisions about your business’s products, and they also feel more connected with your company.
Be Responsive to Change
The world of media moves quickly. It’s important to stay in tune with the constant changes so that you can bend and flex appropriately in whichever direction the technology wind is blowing. That flexibility will serve you well in the development and marketing processes as well. Evolving with time and following the trends is important for the long-term growth of any business. Successful new ideas exploitation is critical for a business to improve its overall processes, bring innovation and improved services and products to market, raise its competence, and, most significantly, get higher profitability.
Involve Marketing Before Launch
Speaking of marketing, your marketing team should be involved in the development of your new app well before launch. Marketing knows your customers. They know about color preferences, response rates, and industry comparisons. Why would you not want them as part of the design team? From a marketing point of view, you have to keep in mind different aspects to make your mobile application more accessible to people.
You have to do good user and competitor research, do email marketing, create your website for the app, promote it on social media, reach out to influencers, etc.
Plan the Launch Date First
When you take on a new app, you’re taking on a huge project. For this reason, set your launch date first. If you know that you will be launching your new app on June 1, you can structure your intermediate deadlines and requirements accordingly. If you start building without a deadline in place, the building may truly never get done. Before launching you should test your app. App testing ensures that it is safe for general use. Effective timing of an app launch is significant for appealing to more customers and making your mobile application successful in the market. Launch your mobile application during a time window with more opportunities. This means that you should launch your mobile application when there is a maximum need for it.
Take Relevant Measures
You’re already asking clients for feedback. Now be sure that the feedback you’re seeking and any other measures are relevant to what you’re trying to do. Consider the most important parts of the customer experience and the parts that are most lucrative. Measure those first.
Measures are very important to analyze, how much your customer is satisfied with the app. You should also make sure that you are taking your business in the right direction and that your products are compatible with the needs of customers.
Don’t Measure Too Much
But don’t measure too much. If you measure every click on every button and every elapsed time for every item, you’re never going to emerge from your data. You will have beautiful data telling you everything, but you’ll never have time to do anything with it.
Provide Plenty of Customer Support
Even the best app might have the occasional hiccup. Your company surely focuses on customer service and customer experience. Shouldn’t your mobile application give customers a way to reach your customer service department when things aren’t going well?
One major benefit of good customer support is that it encourages people to do business with the company repeatedly. Remember that repeat sales are not unintentional, and without generating an effective customer experience, you cannot turn your buyers into loyal customers.
Also Read: What is Application Support?
Advertise in Your App
Don’t forget that customers using your app are essentially a captive audience (until they close the app at least.) It’s perfectly reasonable to advertise to your customers or your app users. It’s truly just another way of upselling at check-out.
Putting different ads in your mobile application can help you to monetize your application. You can put ads for other related companies to redirect your audience to their platform and get some commission. Make sure to don’t put a lot of ads on your mobile application because it can annoy your customers.
Use Push Notifications Sparingly
As tempting as it is, don’t give in to the desire to send a push notification about every single thing. If you send too many notices, you’ll burn out your customers and they will turn off all notifications. It’s far better to send a rare notification that will get read than lose the trust of your customer. There are many benefits you can get from using the push notifications.
- Arouse user engagement.
- Raise conversion rates.
- Track actionable metrics.
- Enhance your customer care strategy through useful content.
- Re-engage/retain users.
- Target the right users.
- Improve the consistency of your brand.
Make It Easy to Share
Along the same vein, one of the best ways to spread the word about your new app is to allow customers to share it. Include an easy way for users to reach out and send notifications, information, or invitations to others who would enjoy the mobile application as well. Encourage your customers to share by visibly displaying how their network can grow to do this. Put the sharing option very visible in front of customers.
To make your app go viral, you have to make your app strategy wisely. You have to focus on App Store Optimization (ASO), use social media, your website is the best way to promote the Android app, create offline campaigns, etc. to improve the credibility of your app.
Keep Everything Simple
When you’ve finished the app and feel like it’s pretty straightforward, simplify it again. And again. The easier a mobile application is to use, the more it will be used – and that is certainly the goal you’re shooting for.
Just like anything else in advertising, app marketing can be hugely effective if you plan well and implement your strategies carefully. Do your homework, plan accordingly, and cut yourself a share of the billions of dollars being spent on mobile apps every year.
Ask for Reviews Personally
Your app has been asking for feedback for your information and development purposes, but you can use the same technique to earn reviews for your product in the app marketplace. Simply ask users to leave a quick review, especially if they are using your mobile application frequently. Online reviews and ratings give customers a voice, improve product visibility, increase customer confidence, and increase your sales dramatically.
One more reason, why reviews are significant is that they help increase the loyalty of customers towards your brand. If a person takes the time to post a positive review on Yelp about a product chances to return for more business will arise. The online reviews of your customers also help in the buying decision process of new customers and it also raises your brand credibility.
Summing Up!
In this article, I have shared with you some amazing app promotion strategies that you can use to make your mobile application successful. There are many ways you can do your app marketing, such as onboarding, considering an app inbox, investing in marketing research, seeking feedback, being responsive to change, planning the launch date first, taking relevant measures, not measuring too much, advertising in your app, provide plenty of customer support, ask for reviews personally, make it easy to share, etc. the tips I have mentioned in this article are used by most of the mobile marketing companies to do application marketing.
Applying the mobile app marketing best practices can make your mobile application go viral and be a permanent source of income for you. If you still have any queries related to mobile application marketing, you can ask me in the comments section.
Ryan Biddulph
Hi Oleg,
I dig #1. Build an app. Because apps are streamlined, tight, convenient bundles with supreme functionality while websites are clunkier and heavier. Big difference between the 2. Thanks for sharing 🙂
Ryan
Joy Healey
Hi Oleg,
Thanks so much for these tips on building and marketing apps. This isn’t something I had ever considered before, but your advice has made me wonder if I’m missing out on a huge audience.
My favorite of your marketing tips was being sure you have ways to make the audience to return to the app and use it regularly. I have to confess I have downloaded far too many apps and then never done anything with them.
Joy – Blogging After Dark
Lisa Sicard
Oleg, having an app sounds like having another website, almost:)
What type of apps do bloggers have or use?
Thinking what function they could serve in that way. I like Brand24 ‘s social listening app and the Buffer app on Mobile.
Thanks for these informative tips.
Oleg Kaluger
Hey Lisa,
Thank you for the comment,
Not really another website, think about it in terms of presentation – do people read your blog on feedreader? I do!
You can render your blog posts on your app and your readers will read your posts on their apps. That way you can be closer to your readers as smartphones are something that most people have and it remains a lot more closer to them than their laptops.
thanks,
– Oleg
Shameem
Hey Oleg
Great write up!
I haven’t tried App Marketing which is getting more trending as people are into mobile device users rather then Desktop. Recently I have launched an app submitted in play store and ios alone which I didn’t proceed further. Hope this makes me to look out on my app marketing thanks again
Oleg Kaluger
Hi Shameem,
Thank you for the comment,
Yeah, Apps seems to work out better than just websites – because getting into your customer’s cell phones is far closer than have a mobile responsive website.
Good to know that you have created your own app, keep promoting it so that it gets a lot more downloads,
thanks,
– Oleg
Emenike Emmanuel
Hi Oleg,
Thank you so much for sharing. I just built the mobile app for my blog but I’m yet to host it.
I’m happy reading it because I have seen areas I can make some amendment to g ET more downloads and I won’t annoy my customer.
Best regards.
Emenike
Oleg Kaluger
Hey Emenike,
Thank you for the comment,
Congrats on the App, always good to have your own app – do let us know when you launch it, will share it on the social media,
Glad you liked the tips and found them actionable, do let us know your feedback when you apply the tips,
thanks,
– Oleg