11 Ways To Gain Prospective Users For Your App
If you’re developing or have already developed an app for your business, your ultimate goal is to have as many downloads as possible. Leading businesses, such as Uber and Amazon, among others, have seen millions of downloads of their apps. Apart from investing your money and time in the development, you need to ensure that your app is well-designed for excellent usability.
Right away from the icon that you use for your app, every aspect of your app needs to be appealing to your prospective users. Once you’re finished with your app development, it’s now time to get your app to the public. You need to have a clear strategy on how you can market your app. You can access a free roadmap tool and other resources online to help you reach widely to your prospective users.
This article is also a great resource for you as it illustrates some of the ways that can help you acquire users for your app.
1. Design An Epic App Store Listing
The interaction of users with your app begins from the app store. If you put your app in the app store and get no downloads, that’s a failed engagement. Take time to think about why users need your app. Have a clear understanding of the problems that your app will solve. What’s the use of the app? Concentrate on the value of your app before you think about the features.
Testers can be valuable to help you know what to use for your app store listing. Also, review featured apps from well-done app store listings, and from which you can draw inspiration
2. Reach Out To Influencers
The success of marketing your app may require that you go beyond the normal sphere of your influence. These are indispensable connections that your business needs. Seek to have authentic, honest, and mutually beneficial connections with leaders in the market, which can greatly give your app mileage.
In most cases, influencers have the clout that commands the way a certain category of people buy and engage with products. Ensure that the kind of information you give to the influencer is relevant to your target audience and the influencer. Get an influencer who values your company and not the monetary advantage they’ll gain.
You can also include an influencer in the development phase of your app and get to hear their input concerning it.
3. Publicize In An Official Blog
Including your app in the blog posts that you write can go a long way in making your app known. You can dedicate a whole blog post for the app or feature it at the end of a blog post as a call to action (CTA), where readers are invited to download your app.
In case you choose to do an entire blog for your app, let the readers know the purpose of your app. How is it going to make things simpler for them? Use some visuals, like videos, screenshots, and links, to better the readers’ understanding. You can also get leading bloggers to cite your blog post in similar posts on their websites.
4. Leverage Email Marketing
This is a great opportunity, especially if you have a good number of subscribers who trust and know your company. Sending emails to their inbox can influence them to download your app. On the other hand, if you’re publicizing a startup app, it’s better to announce it on social media platforms, where you can collect emails and use the contacts to engage in email marketing campaigns.
5. Use Social Media Platforms
It’s believed that many Internet users may spend up to 30% of their time online on social media networks. Due to the Internet of Things, many use mobile devices online, which means to influence them, you need to catch their attention on the newsfeed. Understand your target audience and the social media platform they’re most likely to use to invest heavily in it.
You’ll find many people on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, which are all frequented by different categories of users. If you’re eyeing the millennials with your app, it would be better to use Snapchat and Instagram. For B2B apps, Twitter and LinkedIn would favor you most as many businesses are on these platforms.
All platforms use similar promotion criteria—craft viral content, build subscribers and likes, and continue to repost your content to keep on spreading the news about your app. Social media has both free and paid methods. To post in your account is free. So, create good content and publications to post in relevant groups, and call on your friends to like and share your publication. Consider using visuals, like short videos and images, as they’re more appealing.
For paid social media marketing methods, create ads and post them on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. They help you define your target audience.
6. Use Multiple App Stores
App Store and Google Playstore aren’t the only app stores where you can upload your new app. Other less unpopular stores can greatly improve the downloads of your app. Other app stores that you may consider are GetJar, AppBrain, SlideMe, Amazon Appstore, Opera Mobile Store, and AppLib.
7. Allow Users Try Before Buying
If you’re launching an app that requires some log-in and authentication, let your users have some time to try and explore your app before you bring in the authentication measures. This idea is meant to show the user the importance of the app before they officially commit to it. Thus, while the users are in this read-only mode or browse mode, let there be no authentication required.
The only thing that can be needed once they require to do a big task can be prompted to create an account. This is good if your app demands a paid access and subscriptions.
8. Capitalize On SEO
The idea behind this step is for the URL of your app to be displayed in the search results once your target audience searches on the app stores. For instance, when they search for a taxi app, you want your app to appear among the top five apps even before hitting the ‘Enter’ button.
Identify the most used keywords by people to search for your application so that you can rank with them. You can go ahead to analyze the keywords you’re using for your app, and craft quality links that’ll improve your rankings. Good tools that you can use for that purpose are SearchMan and MobileDevHQ.
9. Advertise In Other Apps And Online
Many users aren’t active on social media and can be part of your target audience. So, broaden your outreach with online ads and in-app ads. Many online visitors come to know of other apps while they’re using other apps. To a great extent, in-app marketing can be highly effective compared to the search engine where there’s a lot of competition for ranking space.
To cut down on the cost of marketing in other apps, you can enter into a mutual agreement to advertise each other’s app for free.
However, you can leverage search engine advertisements using Google AdWords. The trick here is you have to choose your keywords wisely. Select the most relevant keywords for your audience’s search on search engines. For mobile device users, use filters.
Moreover, using contextual ads within Google AdWords can work wonders for you. Design appealing banners with short caption texts. AdWords will display them on other websites where your target audience visit. You can be specific to show your ads on relevant websites. If your ad deals with medical stuff, you can choose to display your ads on medical-related websites.
10. Join Groups For Developers And Entrepreneurs
You can make your app more visible by joining relevant social media groups and communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ to become known by app developers and entrepreneurs. Request them to give their feedback concerning your app and share promotion codes for them to try.
Dialogue on the current features, future updates, and bug fixes, as well as take their honest opinion with serious consideration. In the long run, you may establish a relationship for mutual advertising of each other’s apps in the future for free.
11. Make The Icon Eye Catching
It’s estimated that there are over 1.6 million apps uploaded in Google Play Store and 1.5 million on App Store. Thus, there’s a lot of competition for appealing app icons. To stand out:
- Make your icon shape unique.
- Have a max of two colors to create a contrast.
- Don’t use a photo to avoid blending in.
- Avoid much text.
- Be creative.
Finally, you can test your icon on multiple wallpapers.
Conclusion
Marketing any product isn’t an easy task. Thus, to market your app and get a good number of downloads, you have to employ a good marketing strategy. Venture heavily in social media marketing, email marketing, in-app advertising, and blogging, as well as upload your app in multiple app stores. To cut the costs of marketing, use mutual advertising for each other’s apps. Ensure that your app has an enticing icon that makes it stand out from the rest.
About the Author
Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.
