When you think of building an app, there is one thing which you need to keep in mind even before implementing your idea for the app. Your app is definitely not alone! A few years back when the phrase "There is an App for that" was coined, I think too many people took it quite seriously, because right now you have an app for almost everything. The Google Play Store and the App Store which are the two main platforms for Android and iOS apps have about 4 million apps in them, and the number is growing day by day. With more than 1500 apps being submitted each day to the play store, figure out what will be the state of your app if you just build and launch the app, and then sit back expecting the users to come to you!
Having an app marketing strategy or a plan in place is a crucial element for every app in the present competitive market. Though it is unfair, the fact that a great product is just not enough to succeed in the marketplace gives out clear indications that, it is very important to maintain a healthy balance between development and marketing for longer sustainability.
One Direction One Goal
For most of us, marketing a mobile app is a new territory. But, setting specific goals is very much similar to the other marketing campaigns. Vital for growing your user base, differentiating your app in the crowded market is a tactic which you can completely rely on. It is left to you whether you want to introduce features that no one else has, or target only a specific set of users looking out for certain features only.
Quad is one such app which made use of this technique quite exclusively. An app in an already overcrowded mobile messaging market, it focused on its unique ability of messaging more than 50 people at once. To reach out to the people who actually need this feature, it heavily marketed its app to many college groups and fraternities which require such bulk messaging systems. This technique allowed Quad to sustain itself, by avoiding any type of competition, in a community ruled by the giants like WhatsApp and Messenger.
Give What Your App Deserves
App marketing is a completely new ball game. With its set of different players and rules, even an experienced marketer is bound to encounter some unique challenges while facing the market. One such challenge which most of them tend to ignore is the budget distribution. For an app to sustain in a competitive market, it is important that you give your app the required budget in a perfectly distributed manner, so that your app reaches the hands of people who need it most.
Take the story of Everpix for instance. A wonderful product that helped its users sort their photos, and store an unlimited number of images for a minimal yearly fee, terminated its operations, surprising all of its happy customers. With the potential to overturn companies like Dropbox and Flickr, Everpix could have easily become the most sought after app if it had not made one major mistake. The decision to put all of its budget into product development turned catastrophic when there was no money left to sustain the company and its growing user base. And soon a company with a great idea bit the dust.
Create The Buzz
It has happened to everybody. Whenever you see a glimpse of an interesting product, you end up wanting more of it, and your interest will eventually be the beneficial factor for the product and the company. On a similar note, before releasing an app, things like; a small buzz about the app, a quick glance of what lies ahead with a trailer or a short video clip, bloggers and journalists writing about your app, can surely have a huge impact on driving app engagements and mobile app installs.
Most users are like small kids and your app is their toy. Till the time your app interests them, they will surely stick on to it. But as soon as it gets boring, off goes your app into a corner and it is replaced by a new one. Thus it is very important that you have users hooked on to your app for better engagements with the user. One way of doing this would be to build a beta-testing community. These communities not only allow us to know what the user needs are about, but also gives an early access of all the features for the beta testers which gives them the opportunity to shape the application for a better user interface.
You Need Loyal Users
Happy to see that your app was downloaded more than hundred thousand times? Well, you need to keep in mind that downloads do not denote success. A simple example, a user might download your app, use it for about 2-3 days and out of nowhere he is blown away by another app which is of the same type as yours. So what happens next is that your app is completely forgotten, and very soon it becomes unwanted by the user. You definitely don't want this to happen!
Though downloads are certainly important, you need these users who download your app to be loyal users. Such type of users are the ones who actually need and thus use your app and its feature to churn out revenue and a positive ROI for you. At the end of the day, its is the loyal users who determine the success and the future of your mobile app amongst thousands of other similar ones.
