How to increase App installs? Marketing Strategy for an App!

“Build it and they will come” is one of the greatest myths of business.
If you pour your heart, creativity, intelligence and late-night pizzas into an app to ensure your customers’ lives are better, you’d think they would be able to magically find it.

But while most people aren’t mind readers, most people do leave breadcrumbs of data. This data tells us the number one way they find new apps is by searching through the App Store and Google Play.

Source: richTech

Therefore, let’s explore what helps these application stores prioritize one app over another, and what helps convert browsers to downloaders once your app has been discovered. As a bonus, the more downloads you’ll get, the better chance your app has to rank.

Research Competitors’ Keywords to Rank Your Own

To help potential customers find your app, make sure you weave relevant keywords into your title and description.

When choosing keywords, look for words and phrases that have a high search volume, but not a lot of competition. Consider being specific, using longtail keywords like “plus size work fashion” (instead of a general term like “fashion”), for a better chance of ranking when your most ideal customers look for an app like yours.

Use solutions like Sensor Power to find out what your competitors are doing, and how it’s going for them. You’ll be able to see what works in your industry, and also discover gaps that aren’t being served yet.

Write Your App Description for Both Algorithms and Humans

Both application stores provide 4,000 characters for your app’s description, yet only the Play Store indexes it, according to ASOdesk.

Source: ASOdesk

Therefore, prioritize keywords in your Play Store description, but don’t go into keyword stuffing. Mention your keyword only a few times – and as organically as you can, because algorithms aren’t the only ones who’ll be reading this.

Humans will read your description in both the Play Store and the App Store, though most of them will only read the beginning, so pay extra attention to your first sentence or two.

Use your description to tell your ideal customers what they’re getting with your app, and how it will make their lives better. Include some social proof to build instant trust – how many downloads or five-star reviews you’ve gotten, a celebrity endorsement, or a short testimonial from an everyday customer like them.

Use Visuals to Show Customers What’s Possible for Them

Screenshots don’t help you rank your app directly, but as we’ll explore in a bit, downloads do impact ranking. Screenshots are the first thing many people notice when they land on your app – especially the first screenshot – so they have the power to impact downloads.

Source: Storemaven

Use screenshots from your app to show customers what’s waiting on the other end of the “download” button. Choose screenshots that show how easy or fun the experience is, or otherwise use those screens to instantly answer common questions and concerns (expressed by current users sharing their feedback).

Headspace, for example, wrote “learn to meditate in just minutes a day” on one of its screenshots, knowing that many people fear this process is complex and time-consuming.

Source: Headspace via Google Play

Then, use video to take it to the next level, to share your customer’s upcoming hero’s journey, to convey your brand personality, or to share more information.

Increase Downloads, Retention and In-App Purchases to Rank Higher

“Both the App and Google Play stores use the number of times an app has been downloaded to determine the app ranking” writes Neil Patel, co-founder at Neil Patel Digital. But if your app is new, you still have a way to stand out. “While an app may have 1 million overall downloads, a newer app can beat it by getting more downloads this month,” he explains.

Similarly, “how long your app stays installed and how many times it’s used while installed can help App Store search ranking,” he adds.

Source: Neil Patel

In-app purchases also impact your app. First, in-app purchases indicate an even deeper level of engagement.

And second, according to App Radar, “the names of your in-app purchases (IAPs), including subscription plans, are going to be indexed by Apple… Each IAP has its own display name, promotional image, and description. Your IAPs can show up in the app store search results and even be featured in the Today tab.”

Regularly Update Your App to Show Customers and Algorithms How Much You Care

One way to encourage great retention and in-app purchases is to update your app frequently. Make sure your customers have something new to explore on a regular basis.

You’ll end up gaining both the App Store and Google Play’s appreciation as well, since they view regular updates as a brand’s commitment to keep improving their customers’ experience. If you serve their customers well, they’ll keep sending people to your app.

Therefore, regularly updating your app is likely to have a positive impact on your ranking, according to App Radar. Plus, it adds that humans tend to agree with stores’ view on updates – and reward updated apps with better ratings and reviews.

Encourage Ratings and Reviews to Rank, then Analyze Them to Rank Higher

“Google and Apple both show a tendency to rank apps with more positive ratings and reviews higher than those with negative ones… The number of ratings and reviews your app receives also matters,” explains Business of Apps.

Source: Trello via Google Play

But even if you don’t have any reviews yet, you can use them to improve your ranking. Analyze what customers write, and figure out which words and phrases come up most often. It’s very possible you’ll discover keywords customers use that you didn’t even consider optimizing for.

Plus, you’ll be able to include phrases and insights from reviews in your description and other promotional copy. Writing in your customers’ own language will increase your user acquisition rates, because people will relate in a much deeper level, feeling that your app actually gets them.

Leave Your Title, Subtitle and App Icon to the End

Your title, subtitle and app icon are the first things people see, so give yourself and your team time before making final decisions on those. Sometimes, it’s best finalize these decisions after you’ve already figured out the rest of the steps in today’s guide. It will help you be more immersed in your customer experience and keywords, so you can be more accurate.

Apple’s tips for an app name are pretty good: “Choose a simple, memorable name that is easy to spell and hints at what your app does. Be distinctive. Avoid names that use generic terms or are too similar to existing app names.”

And, of course, include your keyword in it.

Do the same with your subtitle. Use it to be specific about what customers are getting, or show some personality. There’s no need to repeat the keyword, although you can use a secondary keyword.

Amplify all this with an app icon that stands out and differentiates your app from others in your industry. Review what competitors are doing, and look for gaps.

But, of course, align it with your brand personality.

If your app takes a serious tone, a unicorn in your icon might not convey the experience you provide authentically per se. But if your entire brand takes a more lighthearted approach to a “serious” industry, like investing, make sure your icon portrays that.

Source: eToro via Google Play

Amplify Your Results

Since download velocity, retention and in-app purchases matter to your app rank, use paid channels to amplify your reach and reengage customers. Get the most out of your budget by unifying cross-channel data sources to put the most accurate message in front of the right customer, at the right time.

In a world saturated with apps, don’t just build a great experience and hope people will find it. Help the algorithms help you find your people instead, and then walk them down a virtual red carpet to an experience they’ll want to come back to, and tell their friends about.

If you are out there looking for the fifth or sixth week of the month, you are not alone. Talk to any professional in today’s busy-driven environment, and they’ll likely have a story of how they rushed to work in the morning, struggled to keep up with their inbox, or came home too exhausted to spend time with friends or play with their kids.

For marketers operating in a constantly changing landscape, often serving audiences and teams in multiple time zones, it feels harder and harder to keep up with the clock and deliver powerful results for management along the way.
But it does not have to be this way. There are practical strategies you can implement to take back control on both your time and ROI.

Understand Your Core Audience and its Needs

The number one-way marketers can save time and improve results is to get back to the basics, and really get to know the people we serve or want to attract. The better we understand them, the better we will be at tailoring experiences to their preferences and goals, which means the less time we will spend on content, channels and campaigns that don’t work.

According to the 2019 Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs B2C report, marketers use a wide variety of tools to learn about what their audiences need to convert and thrive. These tools include social media listening, website analytics, keyword research, database analysis, primary research, sales team feedback, secondary research, and customer conversations and panels. You do not need to use all of them. Choose the ones that make the most sense for you.

Source: 2019 Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs Report

Of course, to make sure you get the most impact for your audience and bottom line while saving as much time as you can, track your activities and measure results. This way, you keep your audience’s responses to your efforts top of mind and adjust as you go to serve everyone better.

We know all this can sound overwhelming at first. We have been there too. But once you implement a few strategic processes and tools, it makes your work life easier. Let’s dig deeper into that.

Get Ahead of Your Marketing Schedule

Chances are, you ran into this time waster once or twice. You know your company hasn’t published a blog post, Instagram story or LinkedIn status update, and you start researching for ideas. You invest time in one that seems great, only to find disturbing information, doubt yourself or get objections from team members, and start the process all over again.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

The ad campaign keeps waiting for you to find a freelance designer. The email copy you approved yesterday has not been incorporated into your autoresponder.

And that’s before we even mention the word inbox.

When we’re behind, it’s easy to feel so overwhelmed, we might as well take an hour-long coffee break. There’s no way we can get any of it done anyway, right?

It’s very human.

Yet if you use that coffee break, or another dedicated time slot, to take control of your schedule, your day to day life could become easier.

How?

If you publish content on a regular basis, get yourself a Trello board or an Excel spreadsheet, where everyone on the team can throw ideas into a collaborative space when they come up spontaneously, and provide feedback on a regular basis, instead of spending too much time coming up with a good idea when they’re stressed to hit “publish.”

To help you out, here’s how the team at CoSchedule, a platform that helps marketers stay organized, does it:

Even better? Create an editorial calendar and start producing content in advance. Creating a calendar can make it easier to come up with strategic ideas, such as aligning content with National Coffee Day, product launches and the step by step process you want your audience to go through this year, to continuously grow educated enough to buy from you.

This, too, is about putting your effort into what can generate the biggest impact, and saving time on what cannot. Producing content in advance gives you the peace of mind that you’re not running out of time, and helps you develop ongoing processes that ultimately streamline your work and make it faster.

Make More Use of the Content You Already Have

Have a game plan to repurpose the content you produce. Chances are you already have stats, quotes, images, and little nuggets of storytelling in your longer-form content you can repurpose for social media. Or you’ve given 20 tips on Instagram about a topic over time and can now combine them into one blog post.

SheIn, for example, presents clothing items in multiple ways on the same site, displaying them in different order under different categories. Women looking for workwear might find certain blouses by casually searching for blouses…

… other attire by searching for “urban elegance” under “Trendy 2019″…

… and completely different suggestions under “What to Wear to the Office?” under “Explore.”

Source: SheIn

All these options could be relevant to the same woman yet might not be discoverable without repurposing product photoshoots.

And since we’re talking about workwear, let’s talk about other choices you make for work.

Make Strategic Choices About Your Team

It’s likely that, at some point, you will need to hire an in-house team member or bring in a freelancer, a consultant or a software provider.

When you spend your marketing time on social, carve out time to get to know experienced professionals and leading tools in your industry. Connect with people who already know and love your audience ahead of time, so that, once a need comes up, it’ll be easier to reach out to a person you already trust, instead of researching tens of websites of new faces.

Bringing in people who specialize in your industry means it will take you less time to train them and to see results.

That said, consistently investing in the education and professional growth of people who are already on your team can also help your schedule stay sane as your marketing operations grow.

First, professionals who are on top of industry trends and skills can be more agile as needs change. Second, according to Training Industry, “personal and professional development is an important focus area for modern employees when seeking employment, as well as for deciding to stay with their current employer.” In other words, consistently investing in your team equals less time spent on recruiting and training new folks.

Showing your teammates, you care about them and sharing a costume with them also helps, of course.

Unify the Platforms and Tools You Use

Now that you have got your strategy and your team figured out, let’s go back to the whole “being everywhere and doing all the things” situation we tapped into earlier.

First, you do not need to be everywhere. That is a very easy way to waste time. Get clear on your goals, get clear on your audience’s needs, and test everything out. A strategy and a channel need to prove their efficiency for you to continue to invest in them.

However, as demands increase and platforms multiply on the daily, many of us do need to show up in a lot of places. That is basically how our company got created in the first place. You might know that our company was created by merging two companies, Zoomd and Moblin. But back in the day, Moblin was a performance agency. We served a bunch of big brands, including Coca Cola, Always, Ikea and… even ICQ. Yes, that’s how far back we go. And as you might imagine, we were swamped. We had to check so many platforms and ad networks for each client. It was thrilling, but exhausting.

So we built our own unified platform that combines over 600 ad networks into one simple dashboard, and when we offered it to clients, they managed to save 70% of their campaign work time thanks to that. Not to mention that, as a bonus, they’re also the new favorites with their finance people. If you want to make your accountant’s day, send her one invoice instead of the 600 she used to get.

But on a more serious note, you do not actually need to go all out and build your own software. The MarTech world is only getting better, and there are plenty of unifying options for marketers. There are platforms that let you handle all your campaign creative in one place. There are social media management tools that spare you from logging into 10 platforms every day and getting lost in a sea of hashtags. There are team management tools that combine email-like communication with task management and collaboration.

And those are just a few examples.

How Marketers Can Maximize Their Time-Saving Efforts and Set Themselves to Success

As you see, there are many ways to get underneath that mountain called your to-do list and make a bigger impact. We highly recommend not overwhelming yourself by trying to explore all of them at once, as sometimes you need to invest some time upfront – say, when onboarding a new tool or getting your team used to list down content ideas – in order to save time down the line. Start with one or two strategies, master them, then add more.