30 Aug 2016

What Are The Great Ways To Promote An iOS App?

Apple App Store is a huge place to upload your app and it continues to grow rapidly. If you just throw your app there and hope for the best, unfortunately, that is not going to work. You have to invest a lot of time, effort and sometimes money to follow the key points of a successful launch.

Develop A Mind – Blowing App

This is the biggest requirement, of course. With all the marketing strategies in the world, you can’t sell a product if that product isn’t worth to it. There are some major aspects that every developer must follow to obtain such an app as follows.

Improve User Experience

First of all, your app must be intuitive. If your users struggle to understand it or to use it, then it was a waste of time to develop it. Try to give them some insights before you release it and ask their opinion. Other aspect to consider is the design. You can get some free templates from AppDesignVault. Keep in mind that little details make big impression. Think about sounds and pictures that can enhance user experience.
One of the most important things you should consider in terms of UX is your app category. Analyze the big players in your category to see the common behaviors in terms of design. Another thing to remember is following the instructions and best practices of both UI and UX that Apple wants to see in your app. Here you can find the detailed lessons if it is your first IOS app.

Make Onboarding Flow Smart

Onboarding flow makes the difference between a great app and a mediocre one. It is not only a way of increasing engagement but also a great tool to increase your app installs.

Here are some best practices to make on boarding process right.

• Don’t use too much text in the screens.
• Use only 1 feature or benefit in 1 single screen.
• Create a rational flow to make it easy to remember and useful.
• Don’t frighten your users by asking for too much personal information.
• Keep it educational but don’t forget fun.
• Let users take action in the meantime.
• Create smart onboarding campaigns.

Watch Your Competitors To Find New Useful Features

To increase your success you can take a peak to your competitors to check their features and to be one step ahead of them always. You can use tools like Mobileaction to get a list of your competitors.

Create Free And Paid Versions

You will have more users if your app is free. But consider adding more interesting and useful features and developing a paid version too. Envato made an useful study on this topic. Before you decide what to do you can check it.

Conduct A/B Testing And Update When Needed

A general rule for every developer is to test the app and always improve it. It’s a great strategy to test different ideas and to use the best of them. There are a lot of tools available to test your iOS app.

Build A Social Community

Today is very easy to be active online. There are so many channels that can help you promote your app. The biggest decision is to choose from all of them, the ones that suit your activity in the best way.

Use Social Media Install Ads (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)

If you search for fast results and you have an appropriate budget you can use Social Media Install Ads which provide models for ads like CPC (cost-per-click), CPM (cost-per-mile), CPI (cost-per-install) and CPA (cost-per-action). You can check another useful article about Best practices of creating Facebook app ads.

Post On Related Facebook & LinkedIn Groups

Choose some Facebook and LinkedIn groups and post articles or comment on other articles on a regular base. That will help you with every of your projects not only when you launch a new app. You can find very useful information about your industry and you can connect with influencers from your domain.

Offer incentives To Increase Engagement & Sharing

You can offer your users a discounted coupon or a giveaway contest where the prizes can be promotional products like hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs. This way you can reach a larger number of users.

Encourage Users For Social Sharing

Building a reputation using online communities is great but you can do more. Find an easy way for your users to share your app with their friends by implementing in-app features. Nike+Run Club do this in the best way. They let users to share their run in different platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This helps apps to reach more users via word of mouth.

Do Real Time Marketing

After you create a strong presence on social media, people will start to speak about you and your app. You can use tools like Mention to find out who is talking about your brand and to be able to answer them immediately. Give them all the information they need to make a great impression and to involve them into the whole promotion process.
Another thing to remember is answering questions, comments, and feedbacks coming from your social media accounts as soon as possible. Create a KPI for that to make it sustainable.

Increase Reviews

Every user that comes to your app’s page in Apple App Store is looking first at the reviews. Why to lose the chance to convince him to download your app. More positive reviews will bring more downloads.

Use a review plugin

Make sure you use a solution to receive more reviews from users. Appirater is a good review plugin for iOS that prompts a message asking users to rate the app after a set period of time or after they used it a number of times.

Incentivize users to review

Encourage your users to review your app by offering them bonuses inside the app.

Use review platforms

A good method to promote your app is to use some available platforms, like MobileStartupz. This is a startup community that ranks and votes apps every month. Another great free review platform is Favorr.io where developers can review each other’s apps.

Use Content Marketing

Attract your potential users through online platforms in order to achieve great results. Be active on all social platforms that are related to your domain.

Post on forums and social content platforms

Social content platforms and forums related to your app are great opportunities to promote your app and the most important part is that they are free. But, you can’t just login and start to promote your app. You have to give value to the discussions already opened about topics related to your app.

Start a blog and post regularly

This is a cheap and handy way to promote your activities. Stay close to your users/readers and share with them important aspects about your app. Give them insights and make them part of the whole process. They going to love that and they will spread the word about your professionalism.
Use your blag also to give them useful information about their exact problems.

Use native advertising to let your posts reach target audience

Another interesting method to promote your app is to use native advertising which are paid ads so relevant to the content that they create the impression that they belong there.

Use beta testing platforms

There are a lot of platforms to beta test your app. It depends on your needs. A free solution for this is TestFlight.

Track Important Metrics

After the launch, don’t miss the opportunity to follow all the movements of your users and calculate all the elements that can attract other potential users to your app’s page on the market.

Retention

Retention rate is the percentage of users that utilize your app after the initial installation. In case your users don’t use your app after the first time try to find the bugs that cause this or to improve it.

Level Achievement

 

LTV

Life Time Value is one of the biggest metric because is the revenue metric that represents the financial value of your app in relation to how much each user is worth in his lifetime. You can calculate as follows:
LTV = ARPU X (1/CHURN)
taking into consideration that:
ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) = (total revenue generated by the app)/(total active users of the app)
and
CHURN represents the number of users who stopped using the app after a particular time.

Don’t Forget ASO

App store optimization is an efficient way to improve your app and engage your users. It’s very hard and time consuming to obtain the perfect ASO but it’s a crucial way to ensure yourself that your app is above all the others in its category.

Optimize App Name, App Title and App Description

Take advantage of the first 33 character for the app name that are visible in Apple App Store and add some keywords without exaggerating. Be careful not to use special characters because Apple uses your app’s name in the URL. Put your keywords in the description and remember that you have 99 characters to define them. Use synonyms and separate them using comma, not space. You can use tools like Sensortower to find those keywords and ask yourself what words will use your potential users to discover your app.

Optimize Visuals (Screenshots, App Icon, Preview Video)

Don’t skip this part. Videos have to be concise and short, showing the solution for the problem that your app is designed to solve. Screenshots must be clear and attractive. App Icon must be professional and it needs to represent entirely your app. The app icon tells the story of your app.

Localize Your App If Needed

The key of a successful app is to offer your users a great experience when they are using your app. To do that it is very important to localize your app. A more detailed article about the reasons to localize your app is on App Samurai.

Make User Acquisition Campaigns

If you have a promotion budget available, consider to invest it in User Acquisition Campaigns. It’s the way to attract more users and to increase the interest for your app.

Find the best ad types for your app

Mobile advertising is one of the most efficient ways to promote your app and increase its organic downloads. However there are many types of mobile ads around there to choose from. What you need to do is knowing what each of them is and choose the most effective one/s for your app. Here are some efficient mobile ad types to consider: Native ads, interstitial ads, social media ads, incentive ads, boost campaigns, and video ads.

Customer acquisition cost

CAC is the price paid for acquiring a new customer. This is a great metric to discover if the marketing campaign is profitable or not. You can find more details about the fact in another article of App Samurai.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Don’t forget, if you start marketing your app in the day you launch it, then you already lost. While you are developing a great app with amazing features, take your time to build a strong social community, make user acquisition campaigns, take advantage of the content marketing and pay attention to ASO strategies. Right after you see your app approved, focus on the methods available to increase its reviews and track the most important metrics like retention rate. Having those in mind, look to improve your app and satisfy your users.