A Beginner’s Guide to App Marketing

In this day and age, a smartphone is a device that has upgraded its place from a luxury to a necessity. A smartphone is being used for anything and everything. The thing that lets it do so are apps. Launching your own app does seem like a good idea as the audience is huge. However, according to statistics, there are more than 3.4 million apps on the Play Store and nearly 2 million on the Apple Store. Hence, the competition is also huge.

Now, how do you give yourself an edge among so many competitors? The answer is good marketing. Marketing is the difference between the apps that are doing amazing and the ones which are on the third-fourth page, rarely getting any downloads. Many companies nowadays even pay for app marketing services. If you are trying to launch your app or finding ways to make your app the next trend, then this article might be for you. Here’s a beginner’s guide to app marketing.

Researching the Market

The mistake most beginners make is that they don’t do enough research about the market of the app they are launching. Apps are utilities that solve a certain problem. Your app should be the one that solves a problem that other apps in the category are not able to do. If there is another app in the market that does the same job as you, then finding success can be very difficult. 

If you don’t want to face this problem, you will have to do thorough research on what the customers need and what they are getting instead. If you can pick up that point and build your app around that, the chances of your app launch being successful are very high.

You could go through blogs, forums, groups, and websites that are prominent in your category. You could also follow your audience and see what content they are consuming the most and then build on that. The ultimate goal of your research must be finding your audience and their needs which aren’t getting fulfilled effectively.

Building User Personas

As mentioned, the audience is of the utmost importance when it comes to marketing. A user persona is a generalization of your loyal audience, i.e., if there were an ideal customer, this user would be it. They are made by generalizing your users’ demographics, background, mobile devices, interests and hobbies, and other specific identifiers.

A user persona will help you understand the following  information:

• Difficulties that your audience is facing and how you should tackle them.
• The operating system they prefer. This information will come in handy as developers could focus on building the app for that operating system only.
• The content which appealed to them the most.
• Visual patterns that catch their eye the most.
• The ad platforms which they engage with the most. This can be used to gain sponsorships and promote ads, engaging them even more.

Building a Landing Page and Carrying Out Competitive Analysis

If you haven’t released your app yet, a pre-release website can give you a huge head start on launch days. A website allows you to gather user data, which can be used for a lot of things. It is especially good for marketing, as websites can collect a ton of emails. You can use these emails to keep your audience updated, just incorporate a good bulk email software in your toolkit and you are all set.

You should only mail your audience on big occasions. If you start spamming every little thing, chances are people will start getting annoyed, and you will lose a lot of audiences. Keep it subtle, and only provide useful and apt information.

Knowing your competition is one of the best things you can do. Anyone who ignores their competition is likely to fail. Make a list of top competitors and list out everything that they are known for. It may be their pricing, their ranking in the app store, UX advantages, content, etc. Apart from positive things, you should also look at their defects and learn from them. If you could provide the utility of the app more efficiently than your competitors, then the only way is up for your app.

Conclusion

After you’re done with the first stage of marketing, you can then move on to gaining users for your app and generating installations using different marketing strategies. Keep in check what your users are experiencing and what complaints they have. Work on solving them and keeping your audience happy. 

Always try to keep your ranking somewhere in the top 5 of the search pages. If it seems like too much of a job, you can always try to pay professionals to do it for you. Investing in app marketing services is a very good idea if you have the budget for it. Do all that we’ve mentioned, and you should be good to go.

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