How to Promote a Mobile Application in 2019

We live in a mobile-oriented world where most of the communication is performed via smartphones, tablets and other portable devices. The stats claims that there were over 3.5 million apps in Google Play Store and 2.2 million ones in Apple’s App Store. And if you take a look at the graph below, you will see that their number has grown exponentially throughout the recent years and will likely continue to grow in future.

Even those business that have their assets outside mobile technology consider adding an application that should help their users to perform certain activities. Thus, they allow users to get the latest info about their products or services, purchase their goods and improve the communication between the brand and the user in other ways.

The main reasons for a brand to develop a mobile application are as follows:

• Increasing sales;
• Improving the communication between the brand and the customer;
• Winning the competition in the market

People also tend to have more apps in their smartphones. According to the recent Think with Google report, average user has 36 apps in the smartphone. This might sound encouraging, but the same report also shows that hardly one of four installed apps is used on a daily basis. People lose interest to the stuff they download very fast and often delete the app after a few days or weeks.

Taking all that said above into account, it seems that creating an application is a must-have for the most of brands today. But they should work real hard to make the application useful for a customer. And moreover, they should establish a surefire strategy for the app promotion to win their customers and keep them.

Create an App Website/Landing Page

If you already have a website and have just launched an app as a support to your main online spot, you don’t have to bother to create a whole website for your application. But if you are an app developer and seriously consider promotion for your creation, you should have a website or at least a landing page for it.

App stores offer little real estate to promote your app. So a website or a landing page should become that spot where you can showcase your application, e.g.:

• disclose app’s features and benefits in detail;
• show various processes a user can perform with it;
• invite users to Beta-test your application and gather their feedback;
• gather traffic from online ads, etc.

There are tons of guides on how to create a good website. One of the main characteristics I would like to point here, is the responsiveness of the website or a landing page. Since users are searching for a mobile app, most likely they will be browsing your website on their mobile devices. You have to make sure this process is the most smooth and effortless for them.

Consider a Perfect SEO for Your Website

The statistics claim that most of apps are still found through the organic search or the App stores research. So your website or landing page should be perfectly optimized for search to allow users easily discover your application through search.

For most apps the SEO strategy will stay the same as for any other website:

• Getting a great collection of keywords;
• Optimizing content for those keywords;
• Building backlinks to the app page.

1. Keywords

Most likely, you’re a small business or an app developer who hardly has great resources to compete ‘Big Fish’ in your niche. Thus, you has to focus more on long-tail keywords. Those keywords are usually less difficult to rank for and have a great potential to get the highly targeted traffic.

You can find a whole bunch of long-tail keyword in a few ways:

• Explore the large online stores like AliExpress or Amazon. Their categories are extremely specific and can provide you with some ideas for keywords you can explore further in keyword tools;

• Explore the “Related searches” in SERP. Type your keyword ideas into the search field and check out this section below the results. You can find many amazing keyword ideas there;

• Check out your keywords in any keyword tool you like: from Google Keyword Planner or Answer The Public to KWFinder and Ahrefs. Some will provide you with additional metrics for those keywords you’ll like, e.g. Ahrefs will show you the search volume and estimated traffic for each one, while Keyword Planner will provide you with the suggested bid info. The latter characteristic is extremely helpful if you’re searching for keywords to promote your app landing page using Google AdWords campaigns.

2. Content optimization

Modern content optimization doesn’t require you to stuff your copy with the the exact-match keyword and put them into the title, description and the first paragraph. Google now is pretty good at discovering the most relevant content for a user search. Its Hummingbird algorithm allows finding in the text semantically-related keywords and showing the users the most topically-relevant results.

What you have to do is finding the most of LSI keywords and writing them naturally in your text. A study for over 3M keyword in Ahrefs showed that Google’s Top10 results usually rank for over 1,000 keywords because they naturally use their semantically-close variations across the text.

3. Build backlinks

Backlinks is still one of the most important ranking signals today. Google explains it as the ‘link score’ calculation. That means the more links your website or a landing page has – the higher it appears in organic search.

There are numerous ways of getting natural backlinks to your page: outreach, guest posting, social sharing. The latter leads us to the next way of the app promotion.

Boost Social Sharing for Your App

Social media rule the world today. Average user spent 135 minutes a day browsing their social network accounts in 2017, according to Statista. People love chatting with friends, boasting their achievements and, of course, sharing various content.

Make sure you have up-and-running accounts on the most popular networks. But don’t try to create pages on each and every social media. It’s better to have a few pages where you post regularly than having barely alive accounts across dozens of networks.

Consider Twitter as your main social network for app promotion. The Twitter own stats say that over 80% of its users actively use mobile devices and regularly search for apps to download.

The main power of social networks is their focus on people more than on businesses. Social networks users trust the word-of-mouth from their friends, relatives and influencers, not the advertisements. So you should engage with your users and turn them into your brand ambassadors who would be likely to recommend your app to their friends.

Create a Video for Your App

Videos are one of the must-have content types today. They are extremely popular, have tons of views and are highly shareable. Videos are fun and easy ways of delivering your brand message to the users. The main focus in your app promo video should be done on three aspects: why users may need your app, how it works and what problems it solves.

Invite your team to work on creating the app video. They may brainstorm some cool ideas that will benefit the work and make your video a hit. You should also update your video regularly or create new ones to keep users’ interest to your content. And of course, as with any other content, you can share it across social media for maximum exposure.

Final Thoughts

Mobile app promotion in general can be done similarly to the promotion of other online services and software. However, here you should focus more on mobile devices use and target smartphones and tablets users.

Explore the ways users consume the information on mobile and brainstorm how you can use those peculiarities to your own benefit.

Author bio:

Helen is a content marketer at Ahrefs. She explores new things every day to impress her readers with catchy stories. Apart from all that marketing stuff, Helen loves listening to rock music, reading and travelling. A lot! Feel free to follow Helen on Twitter.