How To Promote An App: Marketing Guide. Part 2

This second part of our app marketing guide covers beta feedback, acquisition, localization and experiments. Promotion brings people to your app; the experience decides whether that spend becomes a customer or another uninstall. If the store promise, first session and core task do not connect, buying more traffic only makes the leak more expensive. If you haven’t read the first article check it out here.

Invite-only Betas

A lot of notable startups began using the invite-only beta app marketing strategy. You could do the same thing for your mobile app idea too. All you need are a few prospective users or some other industry connections and you can launch an invite-only beta app. This means it is a private release where select users get to try it first.

The benefit of this app marketing strategy is that you will get to test the app with other users besides your app development team. These users will give you honest reviews and feedback about your app prior to its release. Use that feedback to improve the journey before the public launch: watch whether people can reach the app’s main value, not just whether they like the idea.

Recommended Reading: “10 Tips For Perfect App Launch Plan”

Also, a private beta is more attractive than a public beta because it will only give a select number of people the chance to experience your app first. These people can be influencers in the industry and provide helpful advice and future word-of-mouth traffic.

Design invitations around a clear reason to share: let a user invite a collaborator or someone who benefits from the same task. ANODA maps the invitation, signup and first-value journey together so your growth loop leads somewhere useful.

Increase Visibility

Not a surprise that increasing the visibility of your app is one of the primary goals of app marketing strategy. You can make your app more visible to people in several ways, such as:

• Put your app in front of communities and publications where your intended users already look for solutions. Match the pitch and landing page to their problem.
• Invest in acquisition channels that reach your intended audience, and connect each campaign to a clear app-store promise and first-session journey. Retire old channel lists: Apple discontinued the iAd App Network in 2016.
• Consider additional distribution channels where they fit your audience and platform. Apple also supports authorized alternative marketplaces in the EU; choose a route around your actual market and launch plan.
• Conduct social media contests that include giveaways. This will cause people to want to share their information. For instance, when the location-based app “Drop Messages” was first starting in New York, they attracted users by letting them find prizes as they simply walked down various streets.
• Communicate with the media/press.
• Offer limited-time discounts on your app if you are charging money to download it. Then you can get your app featured on certain websites which have “on sale” or “discount” lists for apps. This will attract more attention to your app for sure.

Focus on Your App Store Page

You can attract millions of people to your app store page but if it’s horrible, your app marketing strategy will be useless. You need to make the description of your app:

• Error-free
• Engaging and to the point
• Include all the best features of the app
• Point out which problems can be solved with the app

Recommended Reading: “This is how you increase app store ranking”

Here are some additional tips for your app store page:

• Post informative and visually appealing screenshots
• Choose good SEO keywords and place them in your description.
• Make your description localized so that it reaches other markets with more users.

Localizing your Mobile App for the World Marketplace

If you want your app marketing strategy to succeed and your app to become successful and popular worldwide, then your app needs to be available in more languages than just English. If you are trying to attract a global audience, then you need to reach out to the vast majority of people that don’t speak English. Choose languages around your actual users, acquisition markets and support capacity. Start localizing your mobile app to all the markets that are relevant to it. As your app becomes more popular, you can expand your level of support for it. Use translation tools to accelerate drafts, then have the target-market experience reviewed for meaning, layout, payments and support. Take advantage of the numerous app localization companies which can assist in launching your mobile app to the world marketplace.

Cross-Promotions

If you have already released more than one mobile app, then using cross-promotions to motivate your existing users to download and try your other mobile apps is the right app marketing strategy.

Start with a relevant audience and a natural handover between products. Explain why the second app helps, keep the promotion out of critical tasks, and make the destination match the promise. A cross-promotion that interrupts the main experience can waste the loyalty you already earned.

Mobile games use cross-promotions a lot, but you can use it for other types of apps too. Make sure you are not exchanging advertisements with companies that you are competing against because you could potentially lose users over it.

Use A/B Testing to Enhance UI/UX

The visual appeal of an app will be very effective when promoting it. Just one icon could cause a disastrous app launch. If you can make the usability better, then you can attract new users and keep the old ones. Test the decision that matters to growth: what users see first, how they understand the promise, and whether they finish the task. Your team designs and implements the alternatives; an experimentation platform such as Optimizely Feature Experimentation assigns variants and tracks the events you configure. Start with the offer, sequence or explanation that blocks progress before spending your test budget on button colours.

Make your next campaign lead to a product people want to use

ANODA connects the message people click with the journey they enter. We map the first session, uncover the screens that make users hesitate and design the path to the app’s useful result. Your marketing team gets a clearer product story, and your developers get flows and states that support it. Start with our mobile app design approach and use the launch checklist to connect that work to release preparation.