After development comes continuous marketing.
You’ve spent 3-8 months focusing on getting your app launched, now it’d be a total waste to go on without marketing efforts or building a steady user base. How do you make people trust your product, and trust it enough to want it on their phones?
Paid or organic, there are many ways to get people to notice, love, and download your app. Here are a few.
Start a Blog
You know what they say — content is king. If we look at today’s “unicorn” startups, which make up only 1-2% of startups, a big part of what made their success journey is content marketing. Content is the top traffic driver that leads crowds to products.
Take Mint for an example. They started a personal finance blog with content-rich articles that speak to young professionals, and from there they started building an audience base. The results? They grew 1.5 million users and sold for $170 million in 2 years.
If you’re thinking of jumping onto the content marketing bandwagon, focus on coming up with relevant, attention grabbing content. The best way to start is by coming up with a few content pillars and working your way through from there. Ride the waves and touch on current topics in your industry to attract the right audience.
Get People Talking
Word of mouth marketing is proven to be one of the most effective ways to gain traction for products, services, or anything at all.
These days, consumers trust one another more than they trust brands and organizations. We are more likely to believe someone we personally know than paid ads on billboards, and the reason is obvious — people we know are more likely to be honest, and have less reason to lie.
But how do you get people to talk about your app? Here are 3 ways.
1. Influencer Marketing
Influencers that center their content around topics related to your brand are more likely to have an audience base that will be interested in your product. Getting them to post about your app can expose your app to the right people and spark conversations about it.
2. Referral Marketing
Referral marketing can be great for increasing brand visibility and awareness. You can offer small incentives like cash, coupons, prizes, and other attractive rewards to those who spread the word to their friends and family.
3. User-Generated Content
You can also repost or feature your customers on your platform in exchange for their reviews and shares. This strategy is often effective because it’s a win-win situation for both parties — your app gains exposure from their sharing, and your users gain exposure from your resharing. It’s great for building credibility because as mentioned before, people trust people they know.
Seek PR Opportunities
Public relations are also a great way to build credibility for your app. There’s nothing like a certified third-party endorsement for your products, especially from digital publications and media sites, whether international or local.
Online publications can be a great help in building links for your app’s landing page, especially if you manage to score ones with high domain authority. With PR quotes on your landing pages or case studies, users are also more likely to trust the quality of your product.
However, it’s important to first have a good PR plan before reaching out to journalists or writers. If you need guidance on preparing for your reach out campaign, we’ve also covered 5 Powerful Tips to Get PR Coverage for Startups on our blog.
Be Active on Social Media
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, having a digital presence is crucial for your business. On social media, you have immediate access to people from all around the globe, as well as useful tools that can boost your brand visibility by a mile. Besides, people are more likely to have a better perception of your brand if you have a strong digital presence.
When it comes to social media, you can opt to spend on social ads or build your follower base organically. Regularly post content that informs and entertains your target audience on your app and topics related to your app, and you’ll slowly start to see engagement.
Social media can also be great for directing traffic to your website through repurposing your blog posts as social posts. This will help in gradually building trust for your brand and eventually guiding them towards downloading your app.
If you need to maximize your brand visibility, social ads are effective for acquiring users that are highly likely to be interested in what you offer. When you first run an ad campaign, make sure that your audience is targeted (or else you would be paying to reach the wrong people who aren’t interested in your app). From there, you can start looking at your ad insights and analytics. When it shows positive results, you can scale up by increasing your budget and reaching more.
Get Optimized on the App Store
Being aware of and well versed with App Store Optimization can help you increase visibility and boost app conversion rates. Your efforts of reaching out to potential users is incomplete without making sure that your app is discoverable on the App Store and Google Play Store.
The key in this step is to understand consumer behavior. To get the right people to find you, you must first do your research on the keywords they’re using to find apps like yours. Just like for SEO, get on any reputable blog run by experienced marketers online to get useful tips and tricks on ASO.
Get Help from an Agency
Getting a team of growth hackers to give your app a boost in the market is of course an alternative to doing the work on your own.
Here at Snappymob, we are all-rounders at app development. That means we provide services from research and design down to development and growth strategy.
If you have an idea sparked and ready to be fanned into flame, talk to us about it!