13 App Marketing Strategies That Startups Must Know

According to statista.com, approximately 88.5 thousand mobile apps were released through the Google play store in February 2021.

Naturally, this increases competition and newly released apps face the risk of remaining in the shadows.

So, while focusing on your mobile app development, you should think of boosting your app marketing game. For that, understanding the best strategies to market your app is essential. It will help your app stand out and reach the right audience.

Read on if you want:

• • To learn the sure-fire strategies to market your app right away
  • Get more users for your app
  • Stay ahead of your competitors and much more

Let’s get started.

13 Effective App Marketing Strategies

1. Identify your target audience

Identifying your target audience is crucial before you start developing the app. If you don’t know who is supposed to benefit from using your app, then what is the purpose of creating it?

So, if you plan to create an app, you should know the specific set of people you are trying to reach. For example, understand their age group, lifestyle, their interests, spending habits, etc.

And find out the media platforms where your target audience is most active and promote your app on those platforms. This will help you market your app effectively among your target audience.

2. Research your competitors

Another point that you should never miss. You should also be looking at your competitors. If you are planning to develop an app, look at what has worked for them. And if you see any of your competitors have already tried a marketing technique and failed, you can avoid making the same mistake.

Understanding their tactics will also help you create effective strategies for marketing your app.

Also, it helps you to avoid stepping into the same market with the same tactics and being seen as an imitation.

You should understand that knowing your market is not just about knowing your audience. It is also about understanding what your competitors or peers have been doing. So that you will remain relevant and original.

Read: How to Do Market Research for a Business Startup?

3. Do pre-launch promotions

You consider starting the app marketing strategies after launching your product. But, depending upon how confident you are about the app, it is often better to do pre-launch promotions.

Many mobile apps fall behind when businesses don’t make effective marketing plans right before the launch. The app store is crowded. So, you need to grow your customer base and stand out from others by promoting your app before its launch.

You can follow many strategies like releasing a short video, running surveys, creating a buzz on social media, etc., to promote your app. This can create excitement among customers and lead to one of the most efficient marketing strategies like, word-of-mouth promotions.

4. Prepare your press kits

Collect all the crucial information about your application that the audience should know. Then, prepare your press kits and send the details to the. It will spread awareness of your app and gain free exposure.

The more the relevancy of the information that people receive, the better the promotion will be.

5. App Store Optimisation

It is estimated that over half of the people find and download apps only by searching through the app stores. So, creating a useful store page is significant, and it plays a vital role in your startup app marketing.

While creating the store page, you should optimise your app with an appealing icon, descriptive title, high-quality screenshots, detailed description, using keywords wisely, app preview video, and more that will help you stand out.

A proper app store optimisation strategy will help your mobile app to outperform and find a position in the top 10 list.

6. Get feedback from users

Feedback from your potential users plays an essential part in the success of your app. Even though you make your app store pages as appealing as possible, it doesn’t mean that you have a sale. People would look at the reviews of previous users before they download your app.

So, an independent third party like a user review plays a crucial part in your brand’s promotion. For this reason, you just do not read the reviews. Instead, you should analyse them and respond to the reviews, if any.

This will also help you fix bugs on the app and improve customer experience. Better customer service means your app will become more popular and boost your brand awareness.

In addition, it will enhance your app’s rating that impacts the ranking in search, which can increase the chance for downloads.

7. Do Content Marketing

You need to do content marketing on guest blogging sites and other platforms apart from the company blog. It guarantees results as it will help you reach your competitor’s audience and others.

You can also post videos on YouTube as it is one of the best mobile app marketing strategies. For example, you can create “How-to” videos to guide your user about the working of your app, the best ways to use its features, and more.

Guiding your users on how to use the app will be more efficient than just highlighting its features. It will improve the chance of getting more downloads.

8. Be active on social media

As your intention is marketing your app, you should not miss any social media activity. According to emarketer.com, users spent an hour and 22 minutes on social media every day in 2020.

So, it is smart to post regularly on social media and use the platform for more than just raising your product awareness.

With the help of social media, you can build a community and get user reviews directly. So, they don’t need to contact you in-app or through your website.

Positive feedback will motivate others to download your app. And if you receive any negative feedback, respond to them immediately, saying that you will take care of the issues. This helps you build trust with your users.

You can include blogs, discussion threads, competitions, etc., as content for your social media channels. Always use the right channel to promote your app.

For gaming apps, you can try the YouTube platform. The mechanics of YouTube will help you place the game link immediately below the video in the first line of description. It improves your chances of getting more clicks.

9. Enable push notifications

Enabling push notifications is one of the effective ways to promote your app. It helps you to keep your app at the forefront of users minds and help boost engagement rates.

According to uplandsoftware.com statistics, push notifications have been shown to increase user retention, and show an increase anywhere from 56% to 180%. So naturally, a higher retention rate means a better ranking in the app store.

By strategically using push notifications with an official opt-in message, giving users updates about your app, leveraging personalised content, etc., you can always stay connected with your potential users and keep them engaged.

You can also offer your users an incentive to use your app, like specialised content access, special promotions, coupons, and other offers that will help boost conversion rates and encourage engagement.

10. Use social media influencers

According to the statistics, nearly 82% plan to allocate a budget for influencer marketing in 2024

Modern social media marketing is closely linked to influencer marketing. It is a way to promote your app or products and services with the help of influential individuals.

Influencer marketing plays a crucial role in multi-channel product promotion. These influencers can spread the word about your product on various channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

So, collaborating with genuine influencers to promote your app can be a smart move to increase downloads on your startup app.

11. Leverage SEO

Never forget the power of applying the proper SEO tactics. People will use hashtags and search engines if they want to know more about your app. By applying the right SEO strategies, you can make sure that people will quickly find the information that they are looking for. Of course, that applies to the app store and general search engines like Google.

Try to apply SEO to all your marketing efforts. For example, use proper keywords, provide meta-description, etc., in your blogs and videos. It can help improve the visibility of your app.

12. Make the app shareable

Developing the app with user-first intent is important for a successful startup. So, you should make it easy for users to share your app with their friends, family, etc.

You can ask your mobile app development partner to incorporate native elements for easy sharing on social media platforms and others. This is a brilliant app marketing strategy that can help make your app go viral instantly.

13. Monitor your app performance

Your app success should be tied to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It will help measure your app performance. KPIs factor in campaign performance, and in-app activity matters most to your goals.

With the help of KPIs, you will get a clear picture of how well your app is performing and the areas you need to improve.

Important KPIs include:

• • The number of active users (Daily, Weekly, Monthly)
  • Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
  • Cost Per Install (CPI)
  • Cost Per Mille (CPM)
  • Click-Through Rate (CTR)
  • Conversion Rate
  • Retention Rate
  • Churn

At the same time, you should also monitor the analytics of your marketing efforts. For example, if you think some strategies like videos are working more than others, then put more effort into those working tactics, and cut down the less effective ones.

However, to improve your performance, try alternative routes, review your customer feedback, and monitor your performance. It will help you figure out what works and what not to promote your app.

Also Read: Growth Hacking Process Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide For Your Startup.

Conclusion

Marketing your product is equally important as developing your product. It helps create a path, make your movement more effortless, and helps you reach more customers in a short span of time. And the key to efficient marketing is to target relevant platforms.

Start pre-launch promotions, gain user reviews, use influencer marketing, and monitor your app performance. Then make further improvements. It enables you to improve your brand visibility, build authority and credibility, stand out from your competitors, and more.

To achieve them, a reliable app development company like NeoITO can help you develop robust mobile apps that you can successfully market to your audience.

We are recognised among the Top 1% of 1M International Companies and Startups for our firm commitment to deliver quality products and services.

We helped many entrepreneurs transform their businesses by assisting them to grow quickly from zero to multi-million dollar evaluation.

So, contact us and share your app idea for your successful app development!