Mobile app marketplaces have become more competitive than ever before. As apps both in numbers and niches are expanding to encompass all recesses and spaces of our life, being discovered and visible in app stores became a big challenge now. Any marketing strategy for mobile
app success should take this competition into account.
Over the years, mobile app marketing strategies have evolved to accommodate many new trends, metrics and parameters. In spite of this evolution, some marketing strategies remained constant and validated by most app publishers. Here through the length of this post, basically we are going to explain some of the most effective and time-honoured app marketing strategies that every app marketer and publisher should know.
1. Know Your Audience As Deep As Possible
This is the basic and irreplaceable first step with which any mobile app marketing initiative should begin its journey. Your app idea, execution and marketing should have the foundation of solid knowledge about your target user market. You not only need to know your audience but actually should know as deeper as possible.
Two questions you need to deal with in this respect. First of all, what you should know about your target users and secondly how you should know about your target users. Let's answer them one by one.
- What you should know about target users?
Obviously knowing your target audience has a limit. But getting a detailed picture of your typical audience with varying personal attributes and preferences can help you creating precise user profiles to help you sharpen your marketing efforts. Here are the important attributes to know about your users.
* Demographic information including age, ethnicity, languages, gender, etc.
* You should also know the socio-economic position and constraints of your audience in general.
* You should have a detailed idea about the cultural factors and constraints influencing their behaviour.
* You should also know typical user behaviour in different use cases and situations.
* You should also have an idea about the most detested and despised performance and design issues and pain points.
* You should have an idea about the typical triggers that boost business conversion, in-app sales and user engagement.
- How you should know about target users?
Now, it is important to focus on all the avenues and methods to father the above-mentioned information about your target users. There are already a few time tested methods and ways to gain detailed knowledge about your target users over a period of time.
* When knowing your target audience grossly is important for validating the app idea, you can research other competitive apps of your niche and make an idea about the demographic category and gross user profiles.
* For existing businesses and websites beginning their journey with mobile apps, it is important to research their existing customers and decide about the typical user profile and demographics.
* For startups, conducting professional market research on the target user audience can also help to get a detailed picture of the appropriate audience they should focus upon.
* Social media engagement and conducting user research for your existing website can also help you get detailed inputs about user behaviour, preferences and pain points.
* Industry stalwarts and influencers can also help you with relevant inputs and insights about the user behaviour and constraints for your app.
* Lastly, always remember that knowing your target users and profiling of users should be taken as a constant process that over time gets to perfection.
2. ASO Coupled Up With SEO
Many marketers equate App Store Optimization (ASO) with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in different contexts. They think what SEO does for websites is equalled by ASO in the context of mobile apps. While both are important to boost the visibility and discoverability of websites and apps in different contexts, the marketers should know that they can be used in a complimentary way.
For example, if you have an ecommerce website and a mobile commerce app for the same online store brand, you can provide a deep link of the app in your blogs and other contents created targeting search engine ranks. You can provide banners on the website telling your users about the ease of shopping with the new mobile app. You can also promote the app through promotions and additional offers for each new download.
Apart from grabbing active SEO help from your existing website, it is extremely important to run proper ASO campaign to boost discoverability. Let's mention here the key takeaways of the ASO campaign.
* Catchy title and logo: You need a very catchy title that connects to the users instantly and that can easily be remembered.
* Keyword and description: Provide a neat and small description of your app rich with appropriate and search-friendly keywords.
* Optimise it with screenshots and video: Lastly, optimize the app description page by using high-definition screenshots and small videos perfectly describing your app benefits.
3. Social Media Ads
Social media ads allow you to target a lot of qualified users with a very precise and well-targeted marketing pitch. All major social platforms are willing to give exposure to sponsored or marketing contents targeted towards a portion of their huge user base. A vast majority of them allows running marketing campaigns using a variety of contents. Often these ads offering wide exposure helps to
boost app download number in quick time. For example, you can just run a Facebook ad for your new app targeting thousands of users for just a week and get hundreds of downloads that other marketing channels could not have achieved so smoothly.
For using social media platforms for advertising your app, it is extremely important to target the right demographic category of people. Precise targeting of users representing a specific income group, gender, ethnicity, location and certain interests can help you get better results instead of running a campaign without any precise targeting of users that are more appropriate for your app.
Lastly, you should also have a retargeting plan well in advance. Many of these people who visited your website landing page once, can actually respond later with a retargeted marketing message. Major social media platforms like Facebook also helps you to grab precise analytics about the traction and response you received through your ads. When running campaign always keep an eye on the analytics for precise insights and feedbacks and accordingly fine-tune your future campaigns.
Lastly, while running a marketing social media campaign for the app, it is also important to localize the ads to target specific people from a locality. This actually enhances the engagement for many apps, especially the apps providing services in different locations. For example, hoteliers, travel, tourism and restaurant apps which developed by
android app development company will always enjoy better traction with localized apps.
4. Influencer Marketing
Every niche has some authoritative and popular voices that enjoy a lot of influence on common users. Marketers can actually reach a wider audience through these influencers. We call it influencer marketing which is one of the most effective ways to market your apps and reach out to your target audience at large. In 2018, a survey found that more than 50% of buyers cited the influence of friends and peers as the reason behind their buying decision. Influencer marketing is all about using this influence for boosting app download numbers.
But many marketers are clueless about reaching influencers and getting their help for marketing the app. Here are some tried and tested ways to use influencer marketing for mobile apps.
* Make a list of some industry influencers and stalwarts you want to reach out for marketing your app.
* Make also a list of micro-influencers who can engage in conversation and tell people about your product.
* Reach out to industry influencers with an email describing your app in brief along with a direct free download link created for them.
* Wherever applicable, ask for their association and collaboration for a mutual interest. Cross-promoting with a reputed app can help you garner wider exposure.
* Give incentives to influencers for speaking out about your app to his/her audience.
* To create a group of micro-influencers, engage with people of your niche having large followers on social media and create satisfactory conversations. Nurture the relationship and ask them to spread the word.
5. Content Marketing
Most web and social media users consider quality contents to be the biggest moving force behind any of their decisions. These people are often serious enough to decide to download an app only for prolonged use. You are likely to have more loyal users from them. An informed content marketing based on the searches, preferences and interests of your audience can help you tap on this valuable audience. You can check some of the
top guest blogging websites for blog posts.
Your content marketing for the app should cover the following content categories.
* Blog posts and articles about your app and industry niche.
* Small videos, webinars and interviews with people.
* Infographics, charts, audience survey, statistics and various inquiry reports.
* Newsletters.
* Podcasts.
* E-books and free guides.
Do you know the vast majority of online sales happen and business decisions are taken based on the published contents on the web? Yes, content marketing plays the most influential role in influencing decisions and spreading the marketing message.
