Mobile App Marketing Tips to Increase Downloads

What is mobile app marketing?

Mobile app marketing encompasses mobile search engine optimization (SEO), App Store Optimization (ASO), brand consistency, and more. Mobile app marketing aims to get your app in front of as many possible customers as possible and increase downloads. Marketers use different marketing tactics to raise awareness, acquire new customers, and maintain them.

Marketing for apps requires a robust strategy because you have a lot of competition, so it’s always best to consider your strategy before developing your app. Consider UX design to ensure a consistent brand experience across your app and other marketing efforts.

Benefits of mobile app marketing

Mobile app marketing is crucial because there are millions of apps on the App Store and Google Play store. That means you have a lot of competition, so you need an effective strategy to stand out. This type of marketing can help you generate buzz around your app to get people excited about it before it’s released. Additionally, you can use various tactics to increase brand awareness and acquire more customers.

Stages of mobile app marketing

Mobile app marketing is similar to other types of marketing in that there’s a funnel you should always consider. Since your audience could be anywhere in the funnel, you must have a plan for reaching everyone.

The four stages of marketing your mobile app are:

• Awareness: The awareness phase should happen pre-launch to generate buzz about the app and build your visibility in the app store. By this point, you should have a messaging framework and brand positioning ready with a value proposition to tell people why they should download the app.
• Engagement: The engagement stage occurs before acquisition and is when consumers engage with your brand and decide whether or not to spend money on your app or download it. Brands should be able to communicate with their prospective customers to convince them to download or buy the app.
• Acquisition: Acquisition occurs when someone downloads your app. But what makes someone decide to download your app over a similar one? During the acquisition stage, you should continue to learn about your target audience and refine your strategies. During acquisition, you can run paid ads on social media websites or online to boost brand awareness and acquire more customers.
• Retention: The retention stage happens after someone has downloaded your app. Since uninstalling an app is so easy, you must find ways to keep your customers. During the retention phase, opting for a better user experience to improve the app for customers is good practice.

Mobile app marketing best practices

The marketing you use to promote your app may depend on your target audience and industry. However, we can still provide a few best practices.

Choose a well-designed app icon

In most cases, your app icon will be your logo. Unfortunately, 60% of consumers avoid brands with unattractive logos. Shoppers are driven by visual cues, meaning your app icon should be more than an afterthought. Your app’s icon is the first thing a potential customer sees in an app store, so make sure you invest in creating a visually appealing one.

The icon you choose should be both recognizable and eye-catching. It needs to be a clear representation of both your brand and the function of your app. In other words, your icon should give users a strong idea of what they’re going to get once they download and open your app.

If you need help designing an app icon? Check out these logo design trends.

Prioritize app store optimization

While SEO and ASO are similar, ASO is specifically tailored to increase the visibility of your app in the marketplace.

Here are a few tips that can improve your ASO.

• Keyword relevance: One of the most important things you can do is optimize the keywords you use in your app’s title and description.
• Categories: When you submit your app to an app store, choose your categories wisely and strategically. Make sure you select a category that’s relevant to your app but not overly saturated.
• Positive reviews: As you get more positive feedback about your app, it will be ranked more highly, which will naturally improve download numbers. Prompting in-app reviews at key moments can help boost those reviews.
• Location: Consider where your target audience is located and tailor your app description for those areas. That might mean translating your app store description into another language or selecting relevant and appropriate images for that region.
• App use: Your app ranking is impacted by how many people use your app, as well as the percentage of people who download it and then uninstall it. So make sure you’re engaging with your app users on a regular basis.
• Social proof: The popularity of your app on social media can affect its ranking. Build a new social media account for your app or incorporate it into your company’s posts.

Launch a website and blog

Effective mobile app marketing requires more than just creating a good app—you also need to make sure it’s easy to find. Fortunately, creating a website and blogging can ensure your app gets the attention it deserves.

The web is usually the first place people go to search for solutions to their problems. Whether they’re looking for help with shopping, scheduling, productivity, or entertainment, you’re missing a large portion of your audience if you don’t have visibility on search engines.

You can set up an SEO-optimized website that expands on the information you provide in your app store listing. Consider including a blog on your site so that you can showcase different uses for your app and get the attention of users searching for topics related to your services.

Create a demo video

Not everyone will understand your app's benefits just from reading a simple description or viewing a few screenshots. Another way to showcase your app and increase downloads is to create a demo video.

Make a simple, 30-second video that illustrates the what, how, and why of your app. Place extra emphasis on usability and the most popular features of your product. Once you’ve produced your video, share it on your website and social media channels, and don’t forget to add it to your app store listing.

Measure with attribution tools and analytics

You can make the most of your marketing efforts by measuring and attributing downloads so you can learn and invest in the channels that are most effective and make the necessary adjustments to the ones not working as well.

A mobile attribution tool helps you tie the installation of your app to a single ad type, target audience, or platform so that you can optimize your marketing efforts.

Use mobile communication channels

Another technique you can use is connecting with your existing users directly on mobile. Whether it’s in-app messaging or push notifications, mobile-specific channels allow you to reach your users at just the right time with a targeted message.

Consider pointing them to a new feature you’ve released or prompting them with tips in a part of the app that may be hard to navigate. You can also have current users help you market your app by using in-app messaging and push notifications that encourage them to share on social media, refer a friend, or leave feedback in the app store. These are great ways to continue engaging users and promote your app, giving it the boost it needs to go viral.

Leverage in-app tracking

The data you collect from your current users can help you improve your product and your marketing tactics to increase your app's downloads and engagement. With in-app tracking, you can better understand your users’ behavior and preferences.

There are various in-app tracking tools you can use, and most begin with the installation of a software development kit (SDK) that allows you to connect to your app data. Many have features like custom tagging and behavior tracking to give you the information you need to improve the user experience and increase downloads.

Create deep links to your app

Another way you can substantially increase the downloads of your app is to create deep links into your app that allow users to easily drop into the mobile experience. This makes your mobile app more visible and accessible to users no matter which platform they find you on. They can also help you track the analytics behind it, allowing you to understand where and how users discover your app.

Promote on social media

The first step in promoting your app on social media is identifying your audience. If your target is other businesses or industry professionals, you might want to promote your app on LinkedIn or Twitter. On the other hand, Facebook and Instagram are great for attracting individual consumers who have shown interest in products or services similar to yours.

Then, you can create hashtagged social media campaigns to generate a pre-launch buzz, grow brand awareness, or promote new and improved features.

Consider ad retargeting

One of the many benefits of having a dedicated website for your app is that you can use retargeting to run ads geared toward people who have visited your site but have not yet committed to a download. Those on-the-fence visitors will begin seeing ads reminding them about your app on Google, Facebook, and other websites that support Google Ads.

Encourage reviews and testimonials

Once a potential user finds your app, they might need some convincing that your service is reliable and valuable enough to download. This is where reviews can be useful. More positive user feedback will raise the visibility of your app and improve its rankings. Encourage user reviews through in-app messages or follow-up emails when users have a moment of success in your app, like completing a task or making a purchase.

Enhance your mobile app marketing strategy with Mailchimp

Whether consumers need help completing a particular task or are just looking to pass the time, they’ll find plenty of apps to help them get what they want. Make sure your app is the one they turn to. Use a combination of these mobile app marketing tips to put your brand at the front of the pack and increase your downloads.

Mailchimp makes it easy to market your mobile app. With the all-in-one marketing automation platform, you can develop an email list to keep your fans updated throughout every stage of your app's development to generate buzz and let excited consumers know when it launches. You can also use our social media management tools to spread the word online by generating unique, eye-catching content for your favorite social channels.