The most challenging part of building a mobile app is reaching out to your target customers. Besides a bad idea, most apps do not succeed because developers often fail to market their products. It’s important to market your app well so that your users know about it.
A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of only focusing on acquiring users, rather than engaging the existing ones that are actively using the app. Everyone wants a viral effect, but no one knows how to make it happen.
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett
The only thing that can help promote your product is word of mouth, which can best be spread by those that have used your product. Remember, your best marketing channel is your existing customer. They can easily let others know about your app and promote it if they like your app.
Satisfied customers are 71% more likely to recommend a company than unsatisfied customers.
Here are a few strategies for app promotion. In this blogs, I talk about ways to promote your app. Let’s read these in detail.
Referral Programs to Increase Customer Base
A referral program is one of the best strategies for app promotion. It adds to the virality of your app. You can provide incentives to your users for sharing your app with their friends, who could turn into potential app users.
It’s just like treating the users of your app as partners who can be rewarded for letting other users know about your app and sharing your message across the target audience.
For instance, Dropbox ran an extensive campaign that allowed users to share the service on Facebook and Twitter for getting additional space.
As a result, referrals increased Dropbox signups by 60 percent. Here is more on how to market your mobile app? Dropbox executed a referral program that provided incentives to users who would tell others about the product. For example, when a person using Dropbox refers it to another, they both get a 500 MB increase, once the user signs up.
A successful app is one that meets users’ requirements and is liked by all. Adding a referral program is just like placing a cherry on the cake. It helps your app get more users and more revenue thus making it one of the best ways to promote your app.
Incentives for Drawing Users
Let’s read more on how to market your mobile app. Sometimes, it becomes essential to give extra attention and care to your customers for encouraging them to fill out a lead generation form, download an ebook, subscribe to your email list, or purchase your product. Incentives bridge the gap between getting your customers from downloading your app for free, to being the most important prominent user of your app. So, from a business perspective, incentives help brands in establishing goodwill and trust. It is clearly one of the best strategies for app promotion.
According to research by Virtual Incentives, 75% of customers feel more favorable to a brand that offers incentives.
Here is a short case study that will help you know how to market your mobile app. Paul Bonea, founder of an agency and his team discovered that by displaying a pop-up banner in the WordPress dashboard with a 20% discount three days after the installation brought about a 10% lift in revenue, mainly from users who wouldn’t have bought otherwise.
The company increased its discount based on customer behavior. Customers who had visited the landing page three times without buying would enter a remarketing campaign. The remarketing campaign would bring them to the same landing page, however, they would see a different incentive this time: a time-limited (one hour) 40% discount.
Content that Inspires Sharing
We live in the digital era. This is why it’s not difficult for us to track, measure, monitor, and optimize and visualize everything. Moreover, we now have more metrics, indicators, and statistics than you could have ever thought of. We have everything at our hands to track how we are doing, what to improve, what to cease doing.
These are known as vanity metrics. They sound and appear good, they can be reported, tweeted, and bragged about, but they have no impact on the final objective. They help boost the presence of your brand. Vanity metrics include basic measures such as views and social media likes.
Users share information about a product that they use to get appreciation from friends and peers. Sharing on social networks makes them look good among their friends. It’s vanity! People love to show off and brag about themselves! So, you can easily imagine the amount of publicity that your app would get when users post interesting information about the app on their Facebook profile. Clearly, sharing vanity content on social networks is one of the best ways to promote your app via app users.
Shareable Content via Email
Here is one of the most important strategies for app promotion. You can create a landing page for your app that collects emails from your users and potential users. You can ask your users to sign in to download the ebook or to access the content on the page.You can then use the email addresses to find potential users who would be interested in your app. Thus, emails play an important role in marketing too. The key is to create content that is focused to help your customers and not selling to them. This focus on trust and value is what helps you create loyal customers and ultimately generates brand advocacy.
While creating the landing page, it’s important to keep in mind that the content you use has to be so compelling that your users want to share it with their own network! I am sure, this one of the commonly used ways to promote your app that can easily be executed.
Outstanding Customer Service
Everyone talks about customer service these days, but businesses actually fail to understand the importance of it. Delivering a great customer experience can help businesses drive loyalty and revenue in the long run. This is why,
Investing time and effort into customer experience is usually the main focus of 68% of marketers.
Rendering a good customer experience boosts your brand reputation and compels your users in staying hooked to your app.
“Customer experience isn’t an expense. Managing customer experience bolsters your brand.” – Stan Phelps
If you wish to take a cue on what’s the best way to do customer service, then here it is. Customer support is a great opportunity to connect to your customers on an emotional level. You can’t do that in any other way.
Connect with your audience and understand their requirements while creating your app. Happy customers often spread the word and help promote your app. This is one of the best ways to promote your mobile app.
“Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” – Chip Bell
Final Words
So, these are some of the tried-and-tested strategies to let you know how to market your app. These ways to get your users market your app would do wonders for you if executed in the right way. You can easily promote your app and draw people towards using your app by applying these 5 simple yet effective marketing techniques.
