Mobile app marketing, not to be confused with ‘mobile marketing’ is the process of promoting your app to drive installs and keep engagement going. It takes place all through the lifecycle of mobile apps – first to get people onto the app, then to get them to perform certain actions like watch content, or make a purchase, and finally, to recommend it to others.
The goal is to reach people at every stage of the marketing funnel.
If you’re still in the early stage of figuring out your marketing strategy, this blog will give you some good ideas for how to make a marketing plan that works. Once you’ve got that in order, it’s time to get some tips, tricks, and discover tools that’ll help you drive installs on your app.
Tools you can use for mobile app marketing
‘Ship’ by Product Hunt
Ship is a new product by Product Hunt. It’s a toolkit to help you launch or ‘ship’ products faster by helping you create landing pages, embeddable widgets, and broadcast emails.
An annual Ship membership gets you AWS credits, Stripe Atlas payment credits, and subscriber insights. You can integrate with hundreds of platforms, like Zapier, Mailchimp, and Slack.
The basic membership is free and gives you access to select features for 1 project and 1 message per week.
App Annie
App Annie is a tool that helps you optimize your app for better visibility on the app stores. They have data on over 8 million apps so you can get a picture of the mobile app landscape and use those insights to figure out which are top ranking apps for your category, search volume for keywords for app stores, and several other interesting insights.
It helps analyze your mobile app performance to identify new players in the app market and track competitor performance, and optimize marketing strategies accordingly.
Branch.io
Branch is an app marketing tool that ensures your links are functioning across platforms (mobile apps, web apps, etc.). It works together with all the tools in your existing marketing stack, and integrates with your email marketing software, social media accounts, data analytics tools, and more to make marketing your app super easy and seamless. What’s better is that Branch is free to use up to 10k monthly active users!
Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps you track the 12 key app metrics you’ll need to measure success on your mobile app. It provides the most accessible digital analytics to measure and optimize user acquisition and engagement with both Android and iOS apps.
Google Analytics gives an approximate number of active users who have downloaded the app, provides demographic user characteristics, and monitors their actions within the app.
App Radar
App Radar is a tool used to optimize your mobile app in app stores. It lets you analyze your app rankings for upto 2 apps for free! You can use app radar to find the best keywords for your app, edit app store listings, reply to reviews, and more.
It’s an app store optimizer that analyzes the metadata of apps to boost app store listings for better visibility, and has an AI-powered app store optimization tool that provides keyword suggestions.
Other ways to promote your mobile app
Posting your app to Product Hunt
The Product Hunt community is an exciting bunch of product developers, founders, makers, and tech enthusiasts, who vote everyday on the best new apps and websites.
A high ranking on Product Hunt usually gets you plenty of attention, feedback, and lots of traffic – either in the form of website visits or app downloads.
Product Hunt is an open community, but if you’re not already a user and don’t have many followers on the platform, it's a better idea to have someone else that may have better reach post it or ‘hunt it’ for you. You can reach out to hunters in advance to do so.
If you are reaching out to a hunter, be polite and respectful! You do have the option to post it on your own, even if you're new to the site. You can reach out to your social media audience and let them know you’re on ProductHunt so they can upvote it.
Answer questions on Quora
Quora is an extensively-used Q&A site that gets a lot of traffic every day from people looking for solutions. Some of those questions could be related to something your app does, and you can get some of those people to your app’s page by answering questions and also mentioning your app.
Remember though, people are looking for solutions and your goal should be to provide value while also mentioning your app, so only answer questions you actually know enough about, and not in a way that's just a promo for your app.
Use Slack, Discord, or Reddit to join relevant conversations
Forums, subreddits, and other groups give people the ability to talk about a shared interest. It may seem like a lot of work, but these are actually a great place to find new tools and apps (which means it’s a great place to promote your app too!)
To be successful, find the most relevant threads or groups, join them, and look for threads you can contribute to. When you do, always make sure your app is linked in your signature or mentioned in your profile, and if your app is a solution to someone’s question, let them know!
Write a blog post
If you’ve got a blog going, it would be a great place to talk about your app. Tell a story around it, write up a series about the process of building it, any research you’ve done, etc. It’s a great opportunity to show off your app in more detail. Focus on the benefits of your app, the value it provides, and how you can use it to solve a problem. Does your app save time, money, or trouble?
Highlighting these points will always draw more attention to why people should download your app!
Medium, Wordpress, and LinkedIn are usually good platforms to start blogging. You’ll find a large audience on all of these platforms, and their interface makes it super easy to get started.
Promote it on social media
You don’t have to be an influencer to have influence. Reach out to your following on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and talk about your app.
Also, focus on ramping up your content on whichever platform your target audience is on. Keep your posts concise, have a clear call-to-action, and like with the blog, stay benefits-focused, with images or gifs showing your app in action.
We hope you find these tools and tips helpful 👍 Happy building!
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