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Building an app is one of the best ways to get your business product or service out before the eyes of potential buyers, but the issue of how to market a mobile app still remains. You can spend all the time and revenue building and perfecting your app, but if you cannot insert it into venues that will feature or review it, all those months and all that money might have been spent for naught. That said, marketing your app is based on social expansion, which, itself, is based on reaching key spokespeople or websites designed to talk about your app.
1. Influencers
One of the best ways to get people to discuss or even share your app is to get it in the hands of industry influencers. For instance, if you have created a dog-walking app that helps clients meet for social dog walking, you should certainly contact social influencers at Instagram or Twitter who make their lives doing nothing more than discussing dog walking. That said, this technique will only succeed if you understand the ratio of inquiries to acceptances, which basically translates to the number of inquiries you need to make to obtain a certain number of acceptances.
This ratio is typically based on a three-percent success rate, which means you will need to contact 33 people before anyone agrees to promote your app. For the sake of math, if you contact 100 people, you should be able to obtain three or four people to promote your app. With three people promoting your app, you should be able to then reach 10 percent of an influencer’s market, and one to two percent of that market will purchase your app. This does not often result in mass acceptance of your app, but it does help spread awareness of your app.
2. Industry writers
In the same way that influencers will push your app if they like it, industry writers will blog about your app if they like it. Similarly, you should contact 100 or so industry bloggers, and your efforts should result in the same type of acceptance rate that you might potentially expect from influencers.
3. Content discovery
Considering all that hard work of contacting people, it is sometimes helpful to place your app in a system that promotes discovery. Platforms that promote content discovery require you to submit your app or content to them, and it gets listed in a directory for people to search for and discover. For instance, as people search the discovery platform, they will be presented options that fit the search queue. As an example, WordPress has a plugin platform that promotes plugins. For apps, you can use the following platforms to reach people searching for products like yours.
– Nuzzel
– StumbleUpon
– Digg
– Quora
In terms of Quora, you might have to create an account and ask a question. As people answer the question, you can then answer your own question and mention your app as part of the answer. For instance, you might ask about some good dog-walking apps. As an answer, you can list several popular apps and include yours in the list. This practice helps promote a variety of apps, so it is not considered blatant spam.
4. Community participation
If you want to market any app, you need to be active in appropriate communities. For example, if you have a healthcare app, you should be active on health-related forums and answer questions pertaining to your app. If you have a game app, you should find appropriate game forums and websites and answer questions related to game development. As you become a known user in these communities, people will trust you and check out your app when you mention it.
5. Awards
When it comes to how to build a mobile app, there is nothing more helpful than winning an award. Once you win an award, the issue of how to market mobile app becomes much easier because there are bloggers and other influencers dedicated to promoting the best apps. Award programs include the following contests.
– Best App Ever Award
– App Circus
– Appsters
– Stevie Awards
Of course, when it comes to winning an award, the issue of how to build a mobile app becomes critical because the concept and performance will impact how well it ranks in the eyes of app reviewers.
6. Blogging as a guest
When it comes to promoting your own app, it is sometimes best to simply become approved as a guest blogger on an industry-related blog. Doing this will require you to be able to write effectively and be able to target the audience of the blogging site, but once you are approved, you can often promote your app in the bio section or in your byline. Additionally, if your app proves to be central to any subject that a blog covers, the guest article that you write could easily focus on your app.
Blogging as a guest works effectively because the biggest blogs have massive audiences, and search engines will zero in on the content. If you do some basic SEO by including some relevant keywords in your guest post, you will be able to leverage search engines.
