Why is a mobile application an important part of your business? What might benefit from having an app your company gets? And how do you promote your app and reach more customers? We will answer all these questions in this article. Let’s dive in!
It is better to start with simple and obvious facts. The number of mobile users is drastically increasing year by year. As of 2019, smartphone users have reached 3.2 billion worldwide, and the numbers are estimated to be 3.5 billion users for 2020 (Statista, 2020). Meanwhile, 204 billion apps were downloaded in 2019, which is a 45% increase from 2016 results. The numbers speak for themselves, and there is no surprise that all kinds of businesses have to seize this opportunity.
Building an app provides you an opportunity to reach your existing and potential customers through a new channel. By creating an app, the really first question you have to ask is what value you will bring to your customers and how it will help you to solve their problems.
Just think of yourself and how many apps you have installed on your phone. Social media apps, apps to order your meal or groceries, apps for finding a way around the city, and many others. There are different kinds of apps available for any purpose and objective. Therefore, if your company hasn’t launched a mobile app yet, it is the right moment to start!
What steps to implement before promoting your app?
It is important to remember that before creating a mobile app, you have to go through all the steps of marketing strategy. Defining your business goals will help you to identify your unique value proposition (UVP), define your business objectives, and create a detailed plan.
1. Find your Customer Persona and target audience
Answering the question of what kind of problem your app solves, will bring you straight to your target audience. After you have defined your target audience, the creation of Customer Persona takes its place. Ideally, you will consider demographic factors, such as gender, age, geographical location, spoken language. What your target audience is interested in, what social media channels they use the most, level of education and professional experience, all these factors have to be investigated.
2. Examine your competitors
Checking your competitors will help you to analyze what already exists in the market, what call-to-action is used, what are the aspects of their success story as a whole. Monitor what landing pages your competitors use, and how everything is seen from the customers’ perspective. The moment you carefully investigate the methods they use, you can come up with your unique value proposition, and the better idea for your mobile application.
3. Create an applicable landing page
The landing page where users land in your app plays a huge role since it is going to help you to achieve a visitor-to-lead conversion by encouraging users to do the specific action you want them to do. Make your landing page simple, but attractive with a clearly defined call-to-action. Determine your message, make a catchy headline with the main keywords, use high-quality and relevant visuals. Don’t forget to make it fast loading, easily navigable, and mobile-friendly.
Benefits of creating an app for your business
No doubt that creating an app for your business will work to your advantage. Finding and converting the audience will be beneficial for the company since, in the end, it will drive more sales and revenues. In our digital generation, it is important to follow up on the trends and regularly improve the way businesses communicate with their audience.
– Brand awareness and brand recognition
Brand awareness is the first stage in the marketing funnel. When people are aware of your business, they will be more likely to purchase your product/service. It is obvious that by creating an app you will make people get to know about your brand. You can manipulate the way customers will experience your brand. It can be anything including the precise information about your business activity, listing your product/services with the pricing list and/or available coupons, announcements of your upcoming promotions or events.
– Higher audience engagement
A professionally developed mobile app will increase audience engagement since your app will always be available with only one click. By creating engaging and valuable content, you can motivate customers to participate in various social activities. Try to implement different activities that will encourage your customers to be a part of it. For example, launch free give-aways, repost customers’ photos on your page, or arrange funny contests with prizes. A good idea will be to ask your customers directly in a survey way of what engagement activities they prefer the most. As you see, it is all about your creativity and imagination!
– Communication advantage
A mobile application will give a chance for more direct and effective communication. Simply establish a customized way to provide solutions through customer support, complaint analysis, reviewing feedback, listen for suggestions, and answering Q&A forms. As a result, the mobile app will help you to strengthen a relationship with your customers via digital communication.
– Easily accessible tracking information
You must analyze the mobile app performance explicitly. By decomposing the collected data, you will get the idea of what was working well or didn’t work at all. The analysis will contribute to the valuable insights on how to improve the performance and activity of your mobile app.
How to promote your app?
Let’s say you have already created a mobile application for your business. But how can you reach customers and establish a strong connection with them? Here comes the crucial and specific action that every company has to implement – promotion. Let’s discover the most useful ways of how to promote your app.
– Implement ASO (App Store Optimization)
App Store Optimization is crucial and assists you with achieving a better ranking position on Google Play Store and AppStore. Certain key factors exist, just like the ones for SEO. The ASO algorithms might change, however, some aspects are steady and clear. Keyword research, title and description, backlinks, and others are unchangeable factors. The better visibility your app will get, the more downloads will be conducted and vice versa.
– Advertise through your social media channels
You definitely have to use all your social media channels for promoting your app. Announcing the launch of your app on your channels will create a buzz and awareness among your existing and loyal followers. It does not necessarily have to be a paid campaign through your social media channels, you can simply start to test the unpaid marketing and analyze the results. Above all, your app announcement has to be engaging, intriguing, and creative.
– Referral and Influencer Marketing
If your app promotion strategy includes a specific budget, you can choose this way of advertising. As we all know, people tend to trust celebrities and different influencers. Influencer marketing is growing, and it means that you can even find respectable micro-influencers with a decent audience. You can choose to collaborate with them for the mutually agreed budget or give them free samples of your products and agree for referrals.
– Paid Marketing
It is one of the most efficient ways to make your app visible and approachable for your customers. This way can create an immediate buzz and deliver your app to an exact narrow audience. The most popular paid marketing sources are Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Google Ads, App Store Search Ads, and CPI Ad Platform.
Today, we have discussed the most effective ways that will help you to promote your mobile app. Remember that it all starts with you creating your mobile app strategy, taking into consideration all the factors mentioned above. In other words, the process of promotion starts way before you decide to create an app itself. It is crucial to think about your customers, what problems you will solve and what solutions you will provide. Therefore, by promoting your app, you will be closer to the desired audience, your business activities will be improved, and the revenue will grow.