Whilst there are plenty of successful marketing methods that do take a toll on your budget, there are ways to market your app without spending money. In this article we’ll be discussing a few methods that can be used to market your app when you don’t have a huge budget to put towards advertisements or other marketing methods.
App Store Optimisation
There may not be an ASO expert in your development team, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try to optimize your app store listing by yourself. There are plenty of free resources available on the internet that give aspiring developers tips for improving their ASO.
Even if you make just a few small changes to your app listing, you could be potentially improving your search ranking by a considerable amount. When optimizing your app store listing, you should always take a few things into consideration.
Firstly, the actual app description needs to be optimized with keywords and phrases that you know your potential app users are going to search for. A more expert opinion may be needed to get the most effective keywords for your app description, but with a bit of brainstorming you’re bound to create a more optimized description.
It’s also important to make it readable by users, and not just search engines. Make sure your app features are displayed clearly, and make readers of your app description know exactly what it does and who it is designed for within the first few paragraphs.
Screenshots and app icons are incredibly powerful tools and should be used to their best extent. Finally, the app title should be re-considered. You can find articles and blogs explaining how to pick out keywords, screenshots, app icons and an app titles all over the internet.
Social Media
Whether you have 100,000 downloads or less than 10, connecting to your app users via social media should be something you should consider. Using social media is free, but it’s a very powerful tool that can do a couple of things to market your app.
Networking with Others
Firstly, using social media gives you a platform to network with the world. You’re given the chance to show your app to online publications, successful developers with a large loyal following, and all sorts of other individuals that could help spark interest in your app.
Letting your App Users Network
You should always encourage your app users to use social media to share your app. When asking a user to share your app via social media, you should be careful, however. You may want to offer a user some kind of reward for sharing your app, but you don’t want to come across as spam-like. Social media posts along the lines of, “Check out this app so I can get 25 free gems,” are more likely to turn potential app users away.
Seeking Active Communities
If you’re struggling to find a strong user base for your application, look for already established user bases. There are plenty of communities to share your app with, but it depends on what your app does. If you’ve made a mobile game, you may want to look for various communities that promote the sharing of game apps. Two good examples of this would be the /r/iosgaming Subreddit or the TouchArcade forums.
If you have a more specialist app, for example, a cooking app that allows users to track the calories of each meal, you may want to share it with communities that fits in with your audience. If you think carefully about your audience, you’ll have a good chance at finding a community of app users that would love to give your application a try.
App Catalogues, Magazines and Review Portals
Online publications, magazines and review portals that focus on providing detailed app reviews for their users are becoming more popular. Smartphone owners are increasingly looking for the greatest apps and these review portals give their audiences a chance to find apps that they may not have had the chance to find in the app store.
This gives an aspiring development team like yours the chance to get your app shown by a huge audience. The great thing is that these kinds of audiences are highly adaptable, and their main interest is to find new apps to download. If you choose to look for various online outlets to get in touch with, make sure to make a decent press pack that you can share so that these places have all of the content they need to showcase your app.
Improving User Experience
If you’re starting to bring in more downloads, don’t start slacking. Consistent effort is key to growing your app user base further. You should always pay attention to your app store reviews and ratings so that you can find out exactly what features your userbase may like to see. Reviews are also a great chance for you to know what is wrong with your app that can be changed to improve the overall user experience.
A better user experience generally means a higher app store rating – this can increase your search ranking. If you improve your user experience, more of your userbase may be willing to share their apps to their friends or via social media as well.
