The Apple App Store and Google Play Store are flooded with apps competing in every market. Without effective strategies to boost app downloads, you’re going to be pushed to the bottom of the list even if you have a fantastic app that provides amazing features and benefits.
Whether you’re looking to implement a new sales channel through your app, you want to create a rewards program to entice customers to your business, or if your app simply provides a service for a price, you need to boost downloads to get the results you want.
Here are 5 basic strategies to increase your app downloads that are easy to implement.
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1. Promote Your App On Social Media
Social media is big these days, with almost all major demographics spread across various platforms and willing to make purchases and take app download recommendations from the ads they see and the influencers that they follow.
Your initial step should be determining which social media platforms have the audience that your app is targeting so that you’re not wasting your time or money.
If your app is targeted towards business professionals, then LinkedIn should be your primary marketing platform, including Twitter.
For general users where you want to get the best bang for your buck, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram will give you the biggest reach to boost app downloads.
- Implement influencer marketing through TikTok, and Instagram
- Create Facebook sponsored stories and promoted posts that target mobile feeds
- Create sponsored ads on your preferred social media platforms
- Make organic content on your own social media accounts
- Encourage engagement by showcasing users that use your hashtags related to your app
Social media marketing may seem complex at first You just need to understand that the same concepts may not always work on all platforms. Your content will need to be tailored to suit different social media platforms.
Getting in touch with marketing agencies like House of Marketers specializing in social media marketing, especially with connections to the most effective influencers, is a cost- effective way to market on social media without wasting your money or time.
Social media is the most effective way to boost app downloads and target your specific audience who will actually use your app after it’s downloaded.
2. Create An Affiliate Marketing Plan
Affiliate marketing is an approach to put a portion of your marketing into the hands of a wide range of people; it allows you to target areas that you may never have reached without the help of marketers or influencers.
You can incentivize people to help boost app downloads on websites related to your app and even through a range of social media accounts.
Using an affiliate marketing approach, you can pay a small fee per download of your app based on certain criteria for the users downloading the app or limit who can sign up for your program.
A pay per download approach opens up opportunities to connect with social media influencers by offering an opportunity for them to market your app. Instead of paying for a promoted post, you only pay if they market and push their followers to download your app.
This type of approach is another place where a marketing agency can help you reach out to influencers and create deals to market and boost app downloads.
3. Implement App Store Optimization
Almost everybody has heard of search engine optimization, but if you aren’t implementing app store optimization strategies, you’re leaving users on the table who will simply never find you.
By using app store optimization, you can boost app downloads through higher rankings and visibility in each app store.
- Relevant keywords are crucial in your app title and description to pull in users searching the app store for specific terms.
- When submitting your app to the app store, you need to select a category with a bit of thought, pick a relevant but less saturated category so that you’re not fighting with as much competition.
- The number of downloads your app gets helps boost its rankings; that’s not something you can directly implement or change in the store. But all your efforts to boost app downloads also help your rankings.
- Getting positive reviews on your app is key, so prompting in-app reviews can be helpful, as can requesting your fans or followers to write reviews.
- Your app ranking can be impacted by how much people use your app and how many people download and then uninstall your app. Make sure that you’re analyzing uninstalls and engaging with users through push notifications to encourage them back to the app.
- Social proof can also impact your rankings which is how talked about your app is on social media, which is why building an effective social media marketing strategy is critical in increasing your app downloads.
4. Build A Website For Your App
People looking to solve problems or compare specific types of apps will turn to websites and search engines to find the app they need.
You should be building a website and blog to help boost app downloads by providing as much information as possible on the benefits of your app and the problems it can solve
Implement SEO for your website, so that you can rank higher on the SERP (Search engine results page. Try to provide more information than is possible in the app store description. You should also consider implementing a blog to showcase the different features, benefits, and comparisons between your app and competitors.
Use your blog to create content to draw users in on relevant topics to your app, it doesn’t need to be directly related to downloading your app but it’s a way to draw people in that are interested in topics related to your app.
5. Measure Analytics And Adjust
Understanding where your app downloads come from is hugely beneficial in knowing where to focus your marketing efforts and budget. There are multiple tools available that help you track analytics and help you boost app downloads.
If you split your marketing budget evenly between 6 social media platforms and SEO, but only two social media platforms are bringing in app downloads, you need to consider if any of those platforms don’t contain your target audience or if you’re engaging poorly with those platforms.
Use your analytics to create better marketing or to drop marketing avenues and put a bigger budget towards the methods that are working.
Strategies To Boost App Downloads
An easy but effective strategy to help boost app downloads is to determine where your target audience is and create effective marketing for the location of the audience. You can’t build a single ad and expect it to work across all mediums.
Make sure that your intended audience can see the benefits of using your app, and how it’s going to improve their mobile experience or life in general in a way that is engaging for them on whatever platform or device they’re using.