You might think that marketing and promoting your mobile app shouldn’t be a big deal; it is as simple as listing it on the Google Play or Apple App Store and waiting for downloads. But in reality, creating a successful app marketing strategy requires much more. You need a well-rounded marketing strategy if you actually want to make a successful marketing of your mobile app. In this guide, we’ll explore how to market your mobile app in 5 easy steps to ensure a strong launch and long-term success.
What Is Mobile App Marketing?
Mobile app marketing involves promoting your app to attract users, increase downloads, and enhance user engagement. You get to present the app in front of consumers and users and convince them to use it. You also want to increase app engagement generally.
Mobile app marketing spans the entire customer journey, from generating awareness and driving installs to encouraging long-term usage and loyalty. It involves the creation of marketing campaigns for various touch points of the customer journey.
Why You Should Market Your Mobile App
While people spend an average of 4-5 hours on their phones daily, that doesn’t guarantee that they will discover your mobile app. With millions of apps available in the stores, competition is fierce, and attention spans are short. Moreover, the tendency is that users will download popular apps or those in the top search results.
It is, therefore, more important to create a comprehensive mobile app strategy that stands out, attracts downloads, and retains users.
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5 Easy Steps to Market Your Mobile App
Let’s dive right in on the effective steps to market your mobile app.
1. Understand Your Product & Research Audiences
It may sound trite, but it remains true that you cannot give what you do not have. You do not only need to know your product, but you should also be able to communicate its brand messaging, positioning, and unique selling points (USPs). So, before setting a launch date or even doing anything, you need to know your app inside and out.
Your next step should then be to conduct proper research to understand your target audience because understanding your target audience is key to crafting a strong marketing message. You should set clear goals for your app’s performance
Conducting Market Research
Researching your target audience helps you understand user pain points, preferences, and the competitive landscape. You need to know who your prospective users are, where they are likely to be (both geographically and online), and what their interests are. This insight will inform your marketing strategies, giving you an edge over competitors.
Creating User Personas
You have researched the demography of your users and even segmented them according to interests, income, location, and age. The next logical step is to create ideal user personas for the different sets of users who you expect to use your mobile app. You can use the audience segmentation data to create fictional depictions of your ideal user. Remember that you ultimately want your brand messaging, features, and functionality to resonate with your target users. The user personas you create are a useful tool to guide your strategies and get you to this goal.
Defining Your Business and Pricing Model
If you want to monetize your app, you will need to clarify its business model and design a marketing strategy for it. Typical business models for apps include the following:
- Freemium Model: here, you can offer a free limited version of the app to induce a maximum number of downloads. Users can, therefore, become familiar with its functions and be convinced to go for the paid version.
- Payment model content: Here, users can access limited content and expand add-ins through downloads from within the application. They do not have to go to the Marketplace.
- Subscription Model: This model allows users to subscribe to the app to gain periodic access. The level of engagement is usually higher from the outset.
- In-App Purchases: Offer free downloads with optional in-app purchases for additional content or services.
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Benchmarking Your Competitors
Competitive analysis is a necessary part of audience research. You need to know the strengths and weaknesses of your mobile app relative to those of your competitors. You can create a list of the top 5 competitors and compare features, pricing, monetization model, pros and cons, rankings, and other factors.
Thereafter, do all you can to make your app stand out in terms of customer experience.
Dating Your Mobile App Launch
Having an early idea of a launch date can help you prepare for unexpected delays and issues. For instance, you should have an early grasp of the review policies of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and plan ahead. Another reason to properly plan your launch date is to reduce the likelihood of other events overshadowing your app launch on that day.
2. Managing the Pre-Launch/Awareness Stage
Your mobile app marketing campaign should have an awareness or pre-launch stage. After all, you do need to raise awareness about your brand. Here are some things you need to do during your mobile app pre-launch phase.
Setting Up a Central Hub – A Website
An effective mobile app marketing campaign can hardly be done without a website. Users need a place to go for updates about the app launch, and you can build web traffic as you go about your multi-channel marketing campaign. So be sure to build a professional website. Add visually appealing pictures, high-quality and engaging videos, and effective marketing copies to the site. In this way, you can not only keep increasing traffic, but you will be building credibility and working towards more app downloads.
Do not forget to incorporate email marketing into this process by collecting emails from your audience. You can use this medium to give them updates on the launch process. Remember, you want to create a buzz and build excitement for your launch, and you want to use every relevant means to do that.
Connect With Influencers and Partners
It’s not too early to begin reaching out to influencers, bloggers, publications, and industry leaders for reviews and shout-outs. They can do so much to make your pre-launch and launching phase a success. Their endorsements can create a buzz around your app and boost visibility. You can receive honest reviews and backlinks and can even leverage the high engagement rates on the platforms of relevant influencers.
In other words, you can use their help to build an audience and create a fuss about the launch of your mobile app.
Leverage Social Media and Blogging Platforms
You can start from the inside and move outwards by creating awareness about your app from the blog channel of your website and your social media platform. Then, you can move on to multiple platforms to do the same, perhaps as a guest contributor or blogger.
You can also move on and become active on social media platforms where your audience is likely to be. You ultimately want to create awareness and build trust among your audience while staying relevant in your industry. Do not forget to start building a community while you’re at it.
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Tighten Your Content Marketing Strategy
Create a content marketing plan that includes blog posts, videos, podcasts, and social media updates. You need an effective content marketing and distribution plan, a content schedule and calendar, and, more importantly, a content engagement plan. After all, you want to do all you can to inform, educate, inspire, and entertain your audience.
3. Managing the Acquisition Stage
Your goal during this stage is to launch your app and acquire as many users as possible. This means you want to generate as many downloads as possible, especially within the first week of the launch. Again, you need to nail down your marketing strategies for this phase to ensure that your app ranks well in the app store.
Here’s how to make it happen;
Running Paid Ads
One of the quickest ways to generate results is to run ads on social media platforms. Paid ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can help you reach a larger audience quickly. Target your ads based on the insights gained from your audience research.
You can also decide to run in-app ads to retarget existing users or simply advertise on third-party apps.
Leveraging App Store Optimization (ASO)
Just as you would have paid attention to search engine optimization (SEO) during your website building and content marketing processes, you should also pay attention to app store optimization. ASO can increase the visibility of your mobile app and help it to rank higher in search results. This means that your potential users will be more likely to see your mobile app. Some things to pay attention to here regarding ASO include keywords, descriptions, number of downloads, app title, screenshots and videos, and ratings and reviews.
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Pitching to Be Featured in the App Store
An excellent way to boost your app’s visibility and downloads is to get it featured in the Apple app store. You can pitch your app to the Apple team to increase its chances of getting featured.
4. Managing the Retention Stage
The buck doesn’t stop at ensuring maximum number of downloads during the first week of launching. You have to ensure that you retain the users you have acquired and convert them into loyal users. You therefore need a good retention marketing plan. Here are some great strategies to help you retain your users:
Communicating and Engaging with Users
In-app personalization and push notifications help keep users engaged. In 2019, as many as 25% of users abandoned apps after a single use. Subsequent in-app personalization, however, reduced the abandonment rate to 19%. It is encouraged to use in-app messaging to provide updates or address issues and push notifications to reward users with special offers or content. The end result is that you will likely increase the engagement and retention rate of your mobile app.
For example, you can use in-app messages to provide product updates or give payment failure warnings. In the same vein, you can use push notifications to reward users with an incentive and make them loyal to your app. Your app can send them discount offers, access to exclusive content, coupon codes, and special offers.
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Using Chatbots
It is important to listen to your customers and respond to their queries. However, you cannot always be there, and that is where Chatbots can come in. Chatbots can handle common user inquiries, resolve issues, and enhance the user experience by providing instant responses, even when you’re not available. They can also easily place orders, give feedback, and cancel reservations.
5. Tracking, Metrics and Tweaking Performances
You will not be able to assess the effectiveness of your mobile marketing efforts if you do not keep track of what is working. You should ensure to set goals, define key performance metrics, and measure them to assess your campaign. Examples of mobile app metrics to track include number of downloads, churn rate, session interval, and daily active users.
After identifying what is working and what is not, you can tweak the necessary parts for improved performance.
Asking for feedback should also be a necessary component of the acquisition and retention stages. The room for occasional feedback gives your users the opportunity to express their views, and you can use the insight to improve their experiences.
Making a Success of Your Mobile App Marketing
The landscape for mobile apps is quite competitive and you should be ready to do your part if you want to successfully market your mobile app. For your app to stand out, you will need to follow the five easy steps including doing good audience research, managing the awareness creation process, driving user acquisition, implementing good retention strategies, and tracking key metrics. Such a well-rounded approach will help you attract new users and keep them engaged. You will also boost downloads and ensure long-term success for your mobile app.
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