In the process of building and publishing an app, one of the last stages includes having well-thought-out app marketing strategies to help you reach your target audience and accelerate your app’s growth.
These strategies include practices and techniques you need to implement to maximize promoting your app, including pre- to post-launch stages.
In this article, we identify 8 app marketing strategies to help increase brand awareness, fuel user engagement, and generate revenue for your app.
Master App Store Optimization
App Store Optimization is a practice that allows you to maximize your app’s visibility and reach in the App Store. It involves implementing techniques and strategies that place your app in the search results when your target audience searches for apps similar to yours.
These techniques include:
- Keyword researching
- Writing compelling titles and descriptions
- Creating appealing app preview images
Keyword research
Doing keyword research means finding out what specific keywords or phrases your audience enters into the search engine. Once you know what these keywords are, it is easier to implement them into your marketing strategy and place your app at the top of search results.
Write compelling titles and descriptions
Your app title is one of the first things users see when searching for apps. Aside from adding relevant keywords, consider including your app’s main functionality to attract more attention. Meanwhile, your app’s description is the part of your app’s listing where you can share more details about your app. Maximize the 4,000-character limit to explain what it is about, what it offers, and the “pain” it will be addressing. Don’t forget to include a call-to-action to encourage users to download your app or visit your website.
Create appealing app preview images
First impressions are important, especially when you’re trying to stand out from the millions of apps on the App Store. This is where appealing preview images come in handy, as they are effective in showcasing your app visually. Eye-catching images create good first impressions and help you communicate faster and more effectively with your audience.
Research your target market
The success of implementing the techniques mentioned above depends on how well you understand your target audience. Once you have a clear idea of your target audience, you’ll know exactly their likes and dislikes and the factors that affect their behavior when interacting with mobile apps. This gives you an advantage in reaching and attracting your target audience.
Conduct competitor analysis
One of the best ways to know how to market your app is by looking at what your competitors are doing. What strategies work, and what needs improvement? If you’ve only finished building your app and started working on your marketing strategy, chances are, your competitors have gone through everything ahead of you.
While this may sound like a disadvantage, it can also mean the opposite, because the practices they used may not be as effective now as compared to when they first started working on it.
With such a fast-paced industry, it is no surprise that constant evolution and updates can affect how effective some tactics are to a certain point. However, understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses can fill the gaps and help improve your marketing strategy.
Create your app’s explainer video
Videos are an engaging piece of content because they can be entertaining and educational at the same time. This makes an explainer video an important part of your app’s marketing strategy. Consider your audience’s behavior and preferences and base your content on that, so it’s easier to convey the message to your audience. Remember, the goal is to connect with them in ways that are most effective for them. Put yourself in their shoes and create an explainer video they will love to interact with and consume.
Pitch to relevant content creators and influencers
Content creators and influencers are the new wave of marketers. They are effective because their approach to sharing content is deemed more personal and less market-y in a sense. What’s more, they’ve already built an empire that believes in them and what they offer.
When looking for content creators and influencers to work with, keep in mind to pitch only to those who are relevant to your mobile app. Don’t just pitch to someone with millions of followers for the sake of it. Numbers are important, but they’re not the only ones that matter. Engagement and connection to followers are prime factors you should also consider.
Leverage social media
In this day and age, social media is everything. People spend an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media every day. Make noise where there are people, and that is online on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. But which of these platforms are you supposed to use? You don’t just pick one or two based on instinct. You base it on your target audience’s behavior.
The only way you’ll know which platform you’re supposed to use is by understanding your target audience and knowing where they are spending their time.
Create a website
A website adds credibility to your marketing strategy. Aside from using it as a blank canvas to design it in a way that emphasizes your app, you can also share FAQs about your app’s functions and features to minimize confusion and offer customer assistance.
With a website, you can utilize SEO strategies to increase your app’s ranking and use Google Analytics to receive valuable insights on user behavior, which helps in improving your marketing strategy.
Create a marketing timeline
Make the most of every stage of the time to boost efforts in marketing your app. This includes pre- and post-launch and everything in between. Small marketing efforts, such as sharing video teasers and small snippets of your app before its launch, can create a buzz within the community and hype them up for your app launch. A timeline will help you oversee everything and visualize each stage to ensure you don’t miss out on anything that needs to be done.
At the end of the day, these marketing strategies can only go as far as placing your app where your target audience is and utilizing its reach. Before anything else, the main priority is building an app that solves a problem and functions properly because a great marketing strategy will never mask a failed product that is incomplete, full of bugs, and lacks important features.
Need help fine-tuning your app? Learn and master the basics of iOS Foundations and be ready to build and market your app! Click here to learn more.