How to Market An App To Surge Downloads in 2023? - Ultimate Guide

ASO probably should be your first step in your app marketing process. Without proper app store optimization, your app won’t be visible to your ideal users either in the Apple app store or Google play store.

To improve your app's awareness, you will need to target the relevant users who will, in turn, download your app.

Start your procedure by optimizing the app details and information that the platform asks you to fill in. Your app details should be clear, concise and comprehensive.

Consider and implement the following KEY POINTS to improve your app’s organic ranking:

An apt title and effective description will attract the right users towards your app.

• The app icon design and size should fit the given space appropriately.
• Ensure to select only high-quality screenshots and preview videos.
• Utilize the given keyword limit of 100 characters.
• Sprinkle relevant keywords in the app name, tagline and description.
• Cover all your important features in the description and explain them briefly
• Mention clearly whether your app is free or paid. Mention in- app purchases if your app offers them.
• Gather more positive reviews and ratings

If your app description captures the users' pain points and provides solutions to those, you will see a surge in user downloads.

Do you think if you already have an app, you don't need a website?

Well, let us tell you that a website is the best companion of your app. When you market an app, having a beautiful website will redirect your users from the site to your app and subsequently increase the number of downloads. This simply widens the scope of user downloads.

Your website must have dedicated sections for the description of app features, user experience, app insights, must-explore sections of the app, etc.

Write comprehensive blogs and guides on your website regarding or related to your product. For example, if you are promoting let’s say “a dating app”, you should write blogs about love, relationships and lifestyle. Optimize your blogs by using the best SEO strategies and try to rank them on the Google SERPs. This will drive user traffic and make your users aware about your app.

Dedicate one section of your blog for “How to guide” about your app and news updates about your product. A whole new documentation or FAQs section would be a plus point.

Press release or media release would be a convenient and free way to market your app.

Consider the following 6 points while writing a press release for your mobile app promotion:

• First paragraph must answer the 5 Wh- questions - Who,What, Where, Why, When.
• Include only timely and topic-relevant information.
• Choose to add quality content over a large quantity of content.
• Avoid excessive use of exclamation points and question marks.
• Ensure that the text has good grammar and accurate punctuation for a professional touch.
• Lastly, ensure that you add an original quote that adds value to the reader’s knowledge.

Another way is to maintain good professional relationships with the media and it would be a great strategy for your app marketing. Explore communities where media personalities hang out. Try to interact with them, albeit it’s not easy to get in touch with some high profile press personalities. However, it’s possible if you are clear on your product and convey the usability quotient of your product to media people.

Probably the two biggest players in the forum and online communities are Quora and Reddit. No one skips these two platforms whether they are promoting their product or service. If used in the right way it could take your product awareness to another level. Spamming and bragging about your app without providing value to the community would straighly lead you into the category of spammers. Reddit especially is critical about its spam policy.

So, what can you do to promote your app on forums in a genuine way?

• Find your product related questions on Quora. Try to be as genuine as possible and answer them deeply. Slowly build your reputation as a trustworthy and valuable contributor. Once you are established as someone who gives out useful tips and solutions to related questions, you can easily promote your app and people would be happy to at least check out your app. Quora has its communities in the form of Quora spaces. Join which aligns with your interest and build up from there.
• Reddit is the biggest community on the earth right now. Again be as honest as you can be on reddit. Discuss interesting topics with communities and gather KARMAs ( Reddit’s way to validate your trustworthiness on the platform).The more you answer, the more Karmas you will generate. The more Karmas you will generate, the more redditors will trust you and give you back in some way. And then you know what to do…(Introduce your app to the community.)

Here are two communities on Reddit where you can launch your app:

Ios App Community & Android App Community

If your definition of social media is merely scrolling the feed and swiping through the stories, you are doing it wrong!

Planning social media activities requires a lot of brainstorming. You must prepare everything - from the post's concept to its timing, from engaging with the comments to responding to the user reviews.

Each social media platform has different requirements, therefore your strategies to promote your app must be different for all. For instance:

• Group posting on Facebook. Join relevant groups and invest your time in value creation to those groups.
• Personal branding on Twitter. Try to become a personal brand. If you are the CEO of your product, engage in a meaningful way with the twitter community. Post threads about your product, post threads about your knowledge surrounding your app. Post threads of threads, and you will realise the power of twitter as a marketing and branding platform.
• Instagram reels are the new in-thing today, must try! They are well-known for extended reach and impressions.
• Pinterest is an image based social media platform. Create infographics about your product and related topics. There are high chances of getting traffic from Pinterest.
• LinkedIn is the place where you can easily meet the decision makers. If your app is B2B, you can find people who would definitely look into your app.

According to LearnHub's recent research, videos are 1200% more successful than other content like text, images, etc. In our opinion, you must keep time and budget for videos in your app marketing plan.

Videos can be about the app, its features, functionality, etc. You can freely use vectors or human-based videos. Youtube channel should be your first goal. Grow your subscriber list and put the best video content out there.

Recipe for Viral App Promotion Videos

A catchy script + Brilliant Visual Edits + An Engaging Background Tune + Original USP of the App = A Viral Video

Ensure that your friends, family, and social network followers also share the video as much as they can.

The proactive way of sending out emails to prospects (potential users) and existing users helps them remember the app. You can plan out email campaigns for different purposes. Say for example, you want your blogs to be read and increase traffic to your website. A weekly newsletter containing your blog would bring the much needed traffic. You can strategize email around your app for offers and discounts. You can also send news about your new feature launch and how it could improve their way of life.

But the prime concern is how to gather Email Ids for this newsletter prospects. Maybe you could try cold emailing by gathering email IDs from LinkedIn. But these are permissionless techniques. The recipient might consider it spam, no matter how good your app is.

The answer??

Try permission based email marketing for your app. Gather their email IDs by asking for subscription to your newsletter on your blogs. If you have free eBook or whitepapers written on your website, they would surely want to give their email ID.

Newsletters usually have content as well as images for visual appeal. You can send over theme-based newsletters on festival seasons. For instance, your emailer can look a little Christmas-y or follow the theme of orange and brown shades for Thanksgiving. The CTA (call to action) in the end can contain the links to your app’s landing page on both Play Store and App Store.

Benefits of sending a newsletter is that on receiving the newsletter, the user gets reminded of the app he or she had downloaded a few months ago.

Free app promotion strategies might be good on your pocket, but your app without a paid promotion would be visible only to a saturated market segment. Once you have enough budget running paid ads is a powerful solution to cross that limited number of views and reach out to more viewers.

You can do paid advertisements on Google ads, Google play store, Youtube, Quora, Reddit, all social media platforms, and other sponsorship based programs. Set campaigns according to your budget and guidelines of particular platforms. Not working ads on the first attempt? Try to optimize your ads by adjusting your budget and relevant parameters.

It might be a little expensive to run paid ads but, if invested in the right ad campaign, you can have wonderful results.

Steps to nail paid Ads:

• Define Your Goals (More downloads or Product awareness)
• Decide on a Budget
• Plan Ad concept according to platform

Yes, you can market your app with the help of guest posts.

Guest posts are a win-win situation for both parties - the guest writer (you, in this case, app owner) and the website. Get a link back to your app in the App store or Playstore.

Writing articles related to the app, its concept, features, etc., and linking the app's landing page can help you reach a new set of audiences who might click, install and sign up on your app.

By the end of the year 2021, influencer marketing will grow up to a $13.8 billion market.

The USP of influencer marketing is that it is an affordable, simple, and easy method to implement.

There are both paid and free influence marketing that you can try, but keeping a percentage in the app marketing budget would be nice.

The concern is to choose the right influencers. Having a massive network on social media is not a big deal these days. The conversion rate and influencing quality of the influencer are what matter the most. Twitter, Instagram, or Youtube influencer, you can choose any of these as per your app’s niche.

Who doesn't like rewards?

To make someone download the app and share it with their network is a pain. But, when you monetize this activity with money or redeemable coins and coupons… not much needs to be said furthermore. You know this has always worked and will work in the future also!

You must be wondering how to market your app via limited membership methods?

Have you ever observed whenever we receive early bird passes for a music concert, we rush into getting the passes at low prices?

Similarly, if users have the opportunity to have the app's lifetime membership for a lesser price than usual, they will go ahead and get it ASAP! They would not want to miss out on the opportunity.

Let's first discuss the statistics related to ad retargeting:

70% of marketers use ad retargeting techniques to attain user attention for new mobile app promotion.

Did you know that CTR (click-through rate) for retargeting ads is ten times better than regular display ads?

70% of consumers are more likely to convert into leads with retargeting ads.

It's not rocket science to understand that creating ad concepts, shooting, editing - as exciting as these processes sound, they consume equal time, energy, money, etc.

You can re-use the ad in different ad campaigns as well as broadcast it on other platforms to drive traffic.

TV commercials are usually 30 seconds or less. This duration is enough for a good marketer to present the value proposition of the app with panache. Did you know that ads on TV are proven to be the creatives with the highest converts?

Yes, that’s true!

Advertisements on television allow creativity to flow out and have a large target audience belonging to different age groups. If you have the budget for it, you can choose numerous channels that fall under the ‘most-watched’ category to stream your ad.

Podcasts have gotten immense popularity these days. People often listen to their favorite podcasters and these podcasters have sponsored content. You just have to find the right podcaster whose content aligns with your App’s purpose.

You can also market your app and bring awareness to your brand by advertising your app on the audio streaming services like Spotify and Google podcast. They have millions of listeners who tune into these services on a daily basis.

We dare you to try everything you can to make your app popular and reach as many users as you can. Neither you nor we know which of the above-mentioned methods will work. But, there is one technique that will give you sureshot 100% .

It’s time to reveal the winning strategy that we mentioned in the beginning!

Drumrolls...

Register your app on AppsHive for free!

AppsHive is world’s #1 app directory that lists your apps by location, profession, categories and various other subcategories and that’s free. You can flash your current offers and coupons on this portal to drive more traffic on your app. You can add videos, screenshots, FAQs regarding your app and ensure that when the user comes to your profile they can find everything your app has to offer.

The transparency of AppsHive is top-notch. Also, you get the ‘Badge of Honor’ recognition that you can flaunt on your website.

What is AppsHive & What is for App Owners?

Always remember: User is everything! Be passionate, when you market an app, try new marketing methods, and don't stop even after you get regular daily downloads.

Defining the target market of an app is done by creating user personas. Various user personas are created by taking into consideration ample factors - viz.:

• Age
• Gender
• Linguistics
• Geographic location
• Level of education
• Occupation status
• Marital & Familial status
• Personal interests
• Device configuration

Well, we would advise you to take AppsHive’s premium plan that will list your app to a total 15 number of AppsHive listicles. Your app will be shown in multiple categories, locations and profession based listing.

Every ad network has different technical requirements, hence the cost that you would have to pay is going to vary. If broadly divided, there are three categories of ad networks:

• Blind network based on CPC (cost-per-click basis)
• Premium blind network with high priority to premium publishers
• Blind networks that focus only on premium publishers