How to turn your idea into profit: market your mobile app
Turning your app into profit is not only about developing a great idea! You need to market it.
For your app to be successful, you of course need to provide great content that users will like. There are millions of other applications in the app store so even if offering a good idea is a key of success, you will need more than that to generate downloads! You have to put efforts, time and even money in marketing your app, at least for its launch. It is fundamental to attract people and raise their interest about your application.
This is why marketing your application is really important and you need to formulate an effective marketing plan for your mobile application. Like for any marketing strategies, you will have to identify your target and the message you want to deliver. Keep yourself updated about the new opportunities in social media and mobile channels: this is where your marketing actions can be the most successful to reach your target and deliver successfully your message to attract new users.
Make sure your app is easy to find and to download:
- Create a mobile website: your target definitely uses mobile phones, and a mobile website is a perfect tool to push conversion into downloading the app.
- Make it easy to find on the App Store: Apple App Store is a search engine on its own to find iPhone and iPad applications, as Google is for websites. There are over 650,000 apps in the Apple App Store. You need to optimize your app to optimize your ranking in your category and for the searched keywords. How? Work on the keywords (in the App title, the description), on getting reviews and ratings (and positive ones, of course) and on boosting your downloads.
You must promote your app and let people know it exists! Your imagination is the limit for the promotion, here are some ideas to start with that have shown good results:
- Find your target with social networks: Create content that have the potential to quickly go viral (a video for example) and use YouTube, Facebook, Twitter… to promote it and try to create a buzz!
- Have your own strong social media presence: create your accounts on social media, including a blog, with identity and content in-line with what your app offers.
- Advertise your app on mobile directly: you can identify other mobile app with a similar target where you can advertise yours.
- Advertise your app online
- Create a press release: target the media, the news websites and the blogs
- Use QR codes to quickly link your physical promotion to digital to redirect to your mobile website or directly to download the app!
You can also work on the pricing and the product itself to increase your results in the App Store. Here are some strategic methods that can be used:
- Sliding the fee: sell the app at a cheap price or for free for a time period, then go back to charge a normal price for it.
This method will help you to get downloads and users: you will start building a reputation, create word of mouth and it can help creating a buzz as well. With many downloads, you will get reviews for example, and it can boost your app ranking in the most downloaded App Store Top. According to Inside Mobile Apps, you need more than 8,000 downloads to be in the Top 10 in iPhone app store in Australia, more than 4,000 to rank in the Top 25 and more than 2,000 for the Top 50.
This method can be used as a launch strategy, but also later on.
- Offer 2 versions: a lite version (free and limited) and a full version (advertised in the free version – charged)
- Continuously provide new content or upgrade, or even a new product: this way you will retain your customers and use your current customer base.
Do you want to take your mobile app idea to the next step?
It is better to limit the number of third parties to save time and avoid communication issues. At Visual Link, we have in our team developers, graphic designers and marketing specialists that work all together so we can help you formulating your ideas into a development logic and we can then handle the entire process of building a phone application and even help you promoting it. Send us an email or give us a call on 02 9565 2884!