A Step-by-Step Guide to Marketing Your Mobile App

With over 6.3 billion smartphone users across the world, it is not the least bit surprising that the mobile app industry is exponentially thriving! Having finally developed a fully functional app is a difficult feat to achieve but now that you have taken the big step, do you know what’s next?

Marketing, marketing, and consistent marketing!

Your app like Clubhouse will not have many users if you do not market it well enough. Practically, there is no way your app could generate too many users after it has just hit the stores! There are around 2.87 million apps available for download on the Google Play Store alone, imagine trillions of apps you may find at different stores.

Your entire hard work put into developing an app won’t amount to even a penny if you do not have users! That’s the harsh reality when it comes to outwitting your competitors. However, it is not the end of the road because there is always a way if there is a will, right?

In today’s ultra-competitive market, making your mark is the toughest road to pursue but inevitably the most rewarding path for your business’s success.

Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation. – Milan Kundera.

An app without marketing is no less than opening a business and telling no one, keep going on like that and you will fall right on your face. With the increase in mobile app usage, the download of these mobile apps worldwide also increases.

To gain a competitive edge and stand out in the industry, there is no better solution than to market your mobile app with the absolute best you have got. The most crucial part of marketing that forms an epitome of a thriving business is a customer relationship and user interaction!

Take my words for this, the world’s best luxury is to have an indestructible base of loyal customers. With a head for business and a heart for the world, you can create wonders for your customers! So, without further ado, let’s unwind the genius behind mobile app marketing.

What Are The Steps Involved in Mobile App Marketing?

Before diving head-on into the important steps on how to market your app, let’s counter some of the important principles to give you a kick start.

Any kind of marketing be it content marketing, digital marketing, or social media marketing, it is very important to define your target audience. As and when you get to know what your target audience wants, you can devise ways to reach them.

Reaching out to them requires you to analyze their in-app behavior so that you can make improvements and optimize the buyer’s journey to your benefit!

A buyer’s journey is a process of a buyer’s stages of acquisition to make a purchase! In the marketing world, it is known as the customer acquisition funnel. This funnel begins from:

1. Generating awareness about your brand, product, and service – Lead Awareness
2. Interacting with the brand for adequate consideration of whether it is worth the investment – Lead Acquisition
3. The decision to make a purchase and thus enable conversions – Lead Conversion

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The ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to acquire prospects, convert them into leads, leads into conversion, and finally, these customers become loyal advocates for the product because “advertising brings customers, but word-of-mouth brings in the best customers.” – Jonah Berger.

In this step-by-step guide, we will proceed with the ABCs of marketing and examine it through some of the best tips and tricks to boost your mobile app marketing.

The ABCs of marketing are Advertising, Branding, and Customer! To begin with advertising, you must create enough awareness to increase your app’s visibility and discovery:

How to Promote Your App For Free?

Unlock the AIDA Model

Before the product is launched, you need to leverage all of your best bidding stakes by using the AIDA principle.

This AIDA principle can be further broken down into Attention/Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. To attract the audience, you build your brand’s awareness by mastering the brand topic, gaining a thorough understanding of brand messaging, and determining the best positioning or delivery.

Brands use the AIDA model to determine the way they should craft and distribute marketing messages to their target audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

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Use the Tactic of Reverse Positioning

Marketers have started to use the technique of reserve positioning wherein the awareness about the values of customer appreciation is of paramount importance.

Building the brand value is the primary goal and is subsequently launched but selling the features of the product or moving the buyer to purchase the product is secondary. The features are revealed later to create hype in the market! The idea is to intrigue them and keep them hooked by not giving away everything in advance.

Defining the brand position also enables your users to truly connect with the product, it is important to understand that people buy people, not products.

Therefore, leverage the core values and prospects that connect with your audience, instead of solely marketing on its product features and its complex functionality.

What Are The Best App Marketing Strategies?

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Curious to know the steps towards gaining the best customers? Here’s a digital marketing plan for mobile applications:

The Biggest Memory to Commemorate is The Launch Day

Make sure that you are ready to encounter any contingencies by far-sighted planning because Apple stores have a strict review policy that might delay your release date.

Always try and research which seasonal campaign works the best for your mobile app launch. This helps you in building up the hype and connecting your application to an event that further escalates it.

Word of Caution: But in doing so, you have got to ensure that these events that are lining up do not overshadow and steal your thunder!

Identify Your Target User Persona

Induce FOMO, hit their pain points, and angle your app as a one-stop solution to all that they desire.

The most premature decisions and moves are made when they are not pondered on enough. Dive into extensive market research and analyze the key pain points that attract the user, tease them to tweak their interest, and finally, tap into their desires and grant them the best solution – your mobile app.

You might wonder what is a user persona? Customer persona, client persona, or user persona is a depiction of your ideal user consisting of an ideal user demographics, background, preferences, interests, etc.

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There may be multiple categories of users and each user persona has its unique user journey for your mobile app.

Use a Blended Approach of Inbound Marketing And Consultative Selling – The Perfect Dovetail

An in-depth analysis of your user persona helps in consultative selling: A model whereby extensive research into the buyer’s persona helps you develop customized solutions that enable you to tap into the needs of your target customers.

Consultative selling began as a sales strategy introduced by Mack Hanan back in the 1970s that revolves around the concept of value-added selling and customer satisfaction through the customization of products.

In a nutshell, it is focusing on your customer’s pain points and their needs first before even thinking about offering your products as a solution! Customer-first, sales second.

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Every feature, from the branding, application content to functionality, platform choice, and monetization strategy needs to resonate with what is relevant to the target user. This provides you with essential insights that guide your entire marketing strategy as well as your in-app design, business strategies, and product functionality.

Conduct A Thorough Competitor Analysis

Every niche in this industry has fierce competition! Analyze the features and USPs of your mobile app to compare them against your top competitors in terms of their pricing, monetary model, reviews, popularity, app store ranking, user experience, and interface, etc.

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Once you know where your competitors are heading, you can make your mobile app stand out by providing unique features!

How to Promote An App On Social Media?

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Create A Website And Opt For Social Media Outreach

Contact trending bloggers, community groups, forums, influencers, and publishers relevant to your niche industry that your target audience visits to secure backlinks and get great reviews.

Create your blog posts to get organic traffic by following strategic content marketing. Use social media platforms, content marketing, and digital marketing to your benefit and build your strongest community of advocates!

Expanding your web presence allows you to directly interact with your users and resolve their queries or fix the bugs! It is also the best way to feature your updates and build up the hype.

Optimize Your App Store

It has been reported that 65% of apps are discovered from a search in the App Store directly.

App Store Optimization is similar to Search Engine Optimization, the only difference is there you optimize your App Store page to rank higher in search results. The higher your app ranks, the higher the visibility and discoverability, leading to higher rates of conversions!

Over to You!

Make sure that you humanize your content to relate with your audience, ask for their feedback, engage your users, and surprise them with newer features.

Engage, Improvise, Surprise – the mantra for mobile app marketing!

The idea is not only to market your application but to also retain your conversions through enhanced user experience and customer service.