There are two main reasons to create an app. One reason is to help yourself be more efficient at a task or to entertain yourself without a care of others seeing it. Another reason is to share your app to the world which could be for a slew of purposes (money, recognition, to educate, etc.). For those who are concerned with the latter, you would be interested to read on. Those concerned with the former, need not worry about how to market their app to get more users.
1) Attract Interest Prior to Launch
ASO is one of the strongest elements to creating a buzz for your mobile app. ASO is the SEO of the mobile app store. Whether you are building your mobile app for ndroid or iOS, ASO is a huge piece of the successful app pie.
Everything from images and screenshots to keywords to your app’s title will determine where your app stands among the competition. Having said that, looking at competition prior to launching your app is a great way to determine successful and popular keywords that you may want to include within your ASO strategy.
Another item worth noting prior to app launch: get yourself in the press. Get potential users excited about your app before they are even able to download it. Target your press releases accordingly based on your target users, not just anyone and their grandmother. This target audience will be the users who get excited about your product and will more likely not just download it when it launches but tell their friends about it and encourage them to download it as well.
Press releases can also be very useful to attract bloggers who write for your target audience. Nothing better than free press, right? Why not target bloggers who will then relay your app’s message to their (hopefully) massive audience?
2) Pricing Model
There are a few different ways to position your app to increase its downloads based on how you price it. This can be a blog post in its own, so I will keep it brief.
A freemium model is one where your app is free to download, but once inside there is additional content, features, etc. that a user can then purchase (i.e. new levels to a game or specialty articles in a news publication). Free apps bring in more than 80% of traffic in the Apple App Store. Take that for what it’s worth.
Paid Apps are just as they sound. You must pay for them in order to download and use them. Take a peek at what your industry and/or competitors are doing in terms of pricing strategy. Customers in the Apple App Store are more likely to pay for an app than users in the Android Market.
You may also choose to keep your app totally free and rely on advertisements within your app for revenue.
These options can always be combined to change around your model to test what works better. If you’re looking for a download surge as a paid app, perhaps you make it half off for a week to see what kind of action you get in the rankings.
3) External Marketing
Social Media is a great resource to utilize due to its low cost and viral potential. Bloggers and groups that involve your target audience are perfect resources to market to both before and after launch. Different networks may be better suited for your target market such as LinkedIn for a business focused app or Facebook for the next best entertaining game.
Social networks are great platforms to share your press releases and other newsworthy items to get your app recognized. Always remember, less is more when it comes to social media posts as nobody wants to, will, or has time to read long posts.