Apps can be very powerful tools for businesses today. The right app can dramatically enhance your user experience and send your profits skyrocketing. However, making a good app is one thing – getting it noticed is another. There are plenty of fantastic apps that are languishing unnoticed and unloved in the app store simply because no one can find them. After making the significant time and financial investment required to produce a high-quality business app, you don’t want to undermine all of your hard work by failing to market it properly.
Marketing an app successfully isn’t easy, especially if you cater to a relatively niche audience. However, with the right approach, you stand every chance of success. Here are 5 tips for marketing your business’s app successfully across all the most important channels.
Use App Store Optimisation
Just as search engine optimisation is essential for ensuring that your website can be found in internet searches, app store optimisation will ensure that your app is visible to people searching through their ap store. However, whereas webmasters only really have to focus on Google when they are working on their SEO, both Apple and Google use their own algorithms to provide users with search results. That means that you need different strategies for both platforms, as there isn’t one single approach that will work universally.
Make Sure Your Promote Yourself on Social Media
Every modern business needs a social media profile to promote themselves through and to use to interact with their audience. Of course, simply existing on social media isn’t going to achieve anything; you need a proper strategy for using the platforms effectively. If you don’t have a social media marketing expert on your team, consider hiring someone to help promote your app.
As well as maintaining a presence on social media, you should also make sure that you are present on sites like Quora and other more niche networks. If your business is relatively niche, then these might be much more fruitful hunting grounds for you when you are trying to find those all-important first users.
Build Viral Mechanics into Your App from the Beginning
By coding your app so that it encourages users to share it with their friends and leave reviews, you make it much more likely that your audience will do just that. If you can get the people that actually use your app to promote it and talk about it, word will spread fast. Baking these features in from the very beginning can help your initial growth significantly. For example, if you can get every user who downloads your app to get one person they know to download it, you will have sustainable linear growth.
Work with Established Developers
If you aren’t developing your app in-house, then working with an experienced development team to make your vision a reality gives you an easy line to use in your marketing. For example, Appetiser is an Australian app developer that has a lot of experience producing bespoke apps for businesses. Not only this, but when you choose appetiser app development, marketing is part of the package. You can contact Appetiser today for a free consultation and to discuss your app and marketing needs.
Don’t Buy Reviews
A common mistake that people make, often due to frustration at the difficulties of getting an app off the ground, is to pay for artificial reviews in an effort to boost their profile on the app store. However, this is a serious error in judgment and can have dire consequences for the future of your business and your app. User reviews are an important part of building up your app’s profile and solidifying its reputation, but you want organic user reviews, not artificial ones.
Don’t Forget Email Marketing
Many people think of email marketing as being an outdated form of marketing with little relevance to the modern marketplace. However, this is completely wrong; email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing techniques there is. If your app has any kind of signup or login process, you have a golden opportunity to build an email subscriber list. You can then use email marketing to prompt lapsed users to return to your app, update your users about new features and other developments, and inform your audience of any new projects that you are involved in.
Getting noticed on the app store is difficult. However, if you can crack the formula and get your app trending, then its growth can become self-sustaining. Sticking to the advice above will get your app noticed and downloaded as soon as possible and enable you to start building the momentum that you need to climb to the top of the app store. Remember that Android and iOS are two distinct platforms and you will need a strategy for both.
