As the mobile landscape continues to grow, it is becoming more and more difficult for entrepreneurs to grow their apps and retain their users. The market is hyper-competitive and oversaturated, and most people only use the apps they really need. Many people don’t realise that the work on the app continues even after you have launched it through the app stores.
Effective app and mobile marketing requires optimising for the full app user lifecycle, ensuring those users are high-intent, engaged and activated. Holistic app growth marketing considers the whole user funnel, through acquisition, activation, retention, monetisation all the way to your referral activity. It includes the incentives offered to prompt engagement and the overall visibility of your app in the app store.
We’ve put together this guideline on the key mobile app marketing tactics to consider as you build a mobile app marketing strategy.
Diversify your marketing strategy
When it comes to setting a broad app marketing strategy, it is essential to diversify your marketing strategy. Some people will connect with video, others with images or text. Create diversified content and make sure app reviewers always have easy access to it. Remember that your strategy should be dynamic with iterations and continual optimisation will be the key to finding the perfect balance of different approaches.
App Store Optimisation (ASO)
This should be the foundation of your marketing strategy for any mobile app. It is one of the most underrated areas of marketing today, and getting it right can have a profound impact on your apps ability to generate thousands of organic traffic from the app store.
The concept is simple, find the high volume and low competition keywords that you believe you can rank your app high for. Imagine your competitor is ANZ bank, but you are the Commonwealth bank. What if you were to appear on the app store when someone searches for ANZ bank? It’s called ASO. The ability to find this in-direct or even direct competitors keywords that you put in your keywords, app title and description are so important and tools like AppAnnie and AppTweak allow you to find and store this data. Apple and Google play store also has an algorithm to determine who ranks for these words.
You need to boost traffic with paid advertising, and sometimes inventive installs to boost that variable and get trending on the app store. Once you are there, in the top trending charts, you will attract thousands of people naturally and almost always rank for the keywords you have set when listing your app. By combining this strategy with 5-star reviews, a healthy budget on paid Instagram ads and App Store ads, you will be sure to find your way to 100 000 installs.
There is no denying that developing an app requires effort, but what comes next demands an almost equal amount of effort. Your app cannot succeed, nor benefit your business, if you do not promote it, maintain it, and analyse how it is being used. And none of these are once-off tasks; they continue in cycles for as long as your app is part of your business plan.
Apps are complex and without deep links and indexing, apps are isolated black boxes. Tracking post-install performance metrics, directing traffic seamlessly to and from one another, app advertising, attribution and LTV modelling are all complex, idiosyncratic processes with little resemblance to web counterparts.
App-growth knowledge is inaccessible. While some of these basic concepts are discussed in blogs, publications and help centres, a deep, specialised understanding of app growth is necessary and for this you need to engage with your app developer. At Appello, we specialise in designing, launching, and scaling apps. We drive sustainable business growth for our clients through a process of impactful optimisations across the user lifecycle to acquire high-quality users and maximise user value.
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