The mobile apps market is snowballing. As a side effect, it is becoming more and more competitive. Nowadays, you can't hit the top of app store lists after mastering some kind of ASO magic. You need more, deeper analysis, as well as creative marketing campaigns.
Today we will talk about methods for promoting your app, from the beginning of the project to the later stages of its life. For each step, we will review relevant, helpful tools and websites. Let's go!
Step #1. Create a community of early testers
Giving a product a boost at the very beginning is always a great idea. If you manage to attract some attention to your app just after it is released, it will help you to grow your audience in the future.
You can try to solve this task using specialized websites for startups promotion. The top site in this niche today is Product Hunt. It is a community where users share links and descriptions of nice products they've built or just discovered.
A successful release at Product Hunt may lead to hundreds and even thousands of users, mostly from the US and other English-speaking countries. All this means that you might not only attract some beta testers, but paying users too.
Here are several tips on conducting a successful Product Hunt launch:
- Don't try to cheat and ask for upvotes, you'll get banned. The rules for launching on Product Hunt are described in a guide written by the PH team. Make sure you read it.
- Try to find a hunter. All subscribers of a specific user get a notification when he or she publishes ("hunts") a new product. This is why it is a good idea to find a power user ("hunter") to post your startup. This will give you a boost from the very beginning.
- Launching on PH is a 24 hour job. The new day on the website starts at 00:00 PST. You need to be online for the next 24 hours to reply to comments and questions. This is the best way to get to the top of the page for the day.
- You can use the website for long-term promotion. For example, there are pages with alternatives to popular products. If you manage to get onto such lists, it will bring you a steady flow of traffic for the future.
There are also other websites where you can post your mobile app:
Post your announcements on each of these sites as this will help you in building a community of your apps' early adopters just after the release.
Step #2. "Stealing" your competitors' ad traffic
Project announcements are great, but to really succeed with your app in the long-term, you'll need a thorough marketing strategy. It will be much easier to come up with an approach by analyzing your competitors' activities. To get more traffic and paying users to your app, you can't just use organic methods: paid traffic is a must-have as well.
Struggling with ad networks and campaign settings by yourself is not the best idea. Repeating the effective moves of your competitors is a much more effective strategy. If they run a similar app and the specific campaign worked for them, chances are a similar campaign will do well for you as well. This will save you tons of money on experiments.
Apptica is one of the best tools for analyzing in-app campaigns for mobile apps. It can be helpful for analyzing:
- the top advertisers and apps used for ad placements on different markets;
- The most effective ad campaigns and even types of ads (a large gallery of ads in various formats for multiple networks, including Facebook and Instagram);
- The most popular ad networks with all relevant stats on impressions, traffic sources, etc.
All these will be super helpful in developing a comprehensive marketing and monetization strategy for your app, all of which will affect the number of your users.
Step #3. Using an innovative marketing approach
To be competitive, you need to find cost-effective yet attractive methods for the promotion of your app. Surprisingly, one such way nowadays is by using QR codes. This technology has been on the rise in recent years, and it allows users to download and install new apps quickly just by scanning a code. This makes QR codes a perfect solution for a mobile marketer.
There are multiple ways of using QR codes for driving installs. First of all, you need to create the code using the QR Code Generator tool.
After that, you can use your code for your app ads. Place it along with the description: you can set it either offline, or online. There are use cases of companies using QR codes with links to their apps on business cards, banners, adverts inside malls, as an element of an email signature, contextual ads, etc.
Step #4. Localization
One of the best and simplest ways of attracting new users for a mobile app is to localize it for multiple languages. According to Statista, the number of app downloads in many markets will grow fast. So, translating your app from, say, English to Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian, will give you access to millions of potential users.
The best way to solve the localization task is by using the Lokalise tool.
This service has teamwork functionality, webhooks export, API, and built-in suggestions for translation. In using this software you will be able to localize both iOS and Android apps, as well as, update apps for your users over-the-air.
That's it for today, thanks for reading! Share your insights and useful tools for apps promotion in the comments!