8 Tips to Consider When Promoting Your Mobile App
8 Tips to Consider When Promoting Your Mobile App
If your business has been working hard to create the next great mobile app, you know it’s no walk in the park to go from startup to launch. Mobile app development takes time, know-how, lots of testing and good old-fashioned hard work. Once you’ve worked out the kinks, and it’s time to tell the world about it, you should have a solid plan in place to promote it.
1. Make sure your app has a home base. Creating a unique landing page or website that focuses solely on your app is critical to your marketing efforts. This is the place to tell your story and share tips and tools that pertain to the app. This is especially important pre-launch, when you want to build interest in your product, since you need to drive traffic to one main hub.
2. Tell everyone you personally know about it. Sounds pretty obvious, right? But you need to be organized about telling your story and should create a list of contacts from day one. Add new people to the list as you think of them. To make sure your app stays top of mind, keep people apprised of your progress.
3. Reach out to influencers to tell your story. Early in the launch process (or even pre-launch) contact thought leaders in your niche and ask for their feedback. If you can persuade bloggers and other influencers to try your app and tell their followers and communities about it you’ll be ahead of the game.
4. Promote and link to your app on existing sites. If you have an existing website and social sites put your new app launch announcement front and center and talk about it frequently (tweet about it and post to Facebook, LinkedIn, your blog, etc.). Use social ads as well as promoted posts and tweets to bring brand awareness to your target market. Upload tutorial videos on YouTube and promote to your target audience through paid ads.
5. Create new social sites. As an offshoot of your core social sites, set up pages that specifically promote your new mobile app. (Then see No. 4 above.)
6. Run mobile ads. Promoting your mobile app directly on smartphones and tablets, where the app will be used, can reap huge rewards (and downloads) and will probably get you more bang for your buck than other advertising methods. Apple iAds, Google AdMob and ValueClicks Greystripe offer a variety of ad styles and solutions that work on the many different devices, platforms and carriers that come into the mix. Earlier this year, Google launched the more intuitive App Promotion Ad that is available to AdWords Enhanced Campaigns subscribers. It is easy to use and will only promote your ad on the platforms you support.
7. Create a How-To Guide on SnapGuide. KISSmetrics recently ran a post on this up and coming platform that caters to the creation of, well, how-to guides, and why it’s a good fit for mobile app developers. Snapguides are designed to be short and sweet and are easy to share. Read the full KISSmetrics post about using Snapguide to promote your mobile app here.
8. Take advantage of mobile app tools. MobileDevHQ is a tool that is designed to “Drive High Quality Downloads through App Store Optimization” (like SEO, but for mobile apps), help with keyword selection so you get found in the App Store and Google Play, plus it can provide rankings vs. your competition. Flurry is another mobile analytics option that can help you target your ads and give you intelligence to help identify key behaviors and habits to fine tune and more efficiently use your ad spend.
These are just a few ways you can get the word out and do it wisely. If you’re looking for help getting your mobile app development off the ground, Infovision can help. We offer a wide variety of technology solutions to help your business maintain its competitive edge.