The Essential Tips to Market your iPhone App
Finally, you have completed your iPhone app and had it approved by the Apple App Store. Now, it’s just the beginning of your app venture. You need to market and promote it now. No, just following the common steps for regular App Store presence won’t do any justice to your awesome app since with millions of apps it is already a tremendously competitive zone. So, like your app, your marketing also needs to stand out. Here are few invincible tips that every iOS application developer should follow.
iTunes App Store promotion
Let’s begin with the basics. First of all, you need to promote the app in the iTunes App Store. This is something like the ground rule of App Store marketing. The key steps of iTunes App Store marketing is here below.
- Write a short description of what your app is all about. Infuse the description with the most important search terms and keywords of your niche.
- When describing the app, mention all the credentials including rewards and recognitions for your app in bullet points.
- Mention the positive reviews and ratings your app has already achieved.
- Offer high quality screenshots of your app to deliver the look and feel of your app.
Deciding on the perfect revenue model
How are you going to earn from your app? This is the single most important question and a decisive factor for your app marketing. If you are building the app just as a hobby or building it to promote other app or services, you may not require a revenue model. But app development and the whole business of getting users onboard is an expensive affair. Naturally, to ensure earning you need to focus on a right monetization model. Let us have a look at different models.
- One time, upfront fee: It is a great model with a fairly straightforward approach. But the drawback of the model is when there is no flow of new user acquisition when your revenue also slows down or at a time just stops.
- Upfront fee + in-app purchase: You are making it more difficult for the users to consider using your app since you ask them to pay twice, respectively with the upfront fee and later on with the in-app purchase.
- Free + in-app purchases: this is by far the most successful model. Many successful game apps use this model. Being free in the beginning it gets enough traction and user base and with good engagement continues to generate revenue with in-app purchases.
- Freemium (Free and Premium version): This is another great model for the apps that can clearly show the enhanced value for the users when they upgrade to the premium version from the free one.
- Free with in-app purchase and advertising: Your free app still can earn huge from advertising and for users who do not want to see ads, you can offer them an in-app purchase to allow using an ads-free version.
- Subscription: This model working as a magazine can help developers meeting the cost of development and upgrade from time to time.
- Cross promotion for your paid app: This model is right for developers with a number of apps. By creating a completely free app for thousands of users, you can further promote a different app through this.
Now, which of the above model is right for you? Well, you have to do in-depth market research and competition analysis to decide on that. Here are few considerations to decide on the right monetization model.
- What models are others in your niche using?
- Who are your target audience and which model is preferred by the majority of them?
- How far can you withstand developing cost with a free model and a situation with no revenue showing up?
- Which model is most successful in your app niche and for your target audience?
Targeted social media marketing
Most app development companies with a small marketing budget and struggling startups often cannot afford expensive media ads and robust digital campaigns. For them, social media platforms come as free and most effective avenues to market their apps with little cost. But obviously, among the multitude of platforms, you can only concentrate on a selective few.
You can create a Facebook business page for your app and can offer there a Learn More button to connect it with the web page of the app or the iTunes App Store page for your app. It’s better to create the page and continue engaging with the audience long before the app is actually launched. By creating a good community you can also launch a beta version of your app and offer it for free testing.
You can offer interactive video post describing the app and share screenshots. Running a few animated and illustrated teasers describing the background story of the app is another way to make your pre-launch campaign big. In the cover photo or elsewhere in posts make use of high-quality visuals to get noticed by the users and help to get traction.
Facebook paid ads to offer another quality option to reach your target audience and boost visibility. You can also customize each campaign by choosing location and target audience. Facebook also allows you to boost any post at a fairly scalable budget and respective audience reach.
Twitter is a hugely powerful and user-friendly promotional tool for brands. Creating a Twitter account for your app and linking that to the app page on App Store or respective web page of the app is the ideal option.
In Twitter, it is easy to promote an app with relevant and trending hashtags. For example, if your app is about fashion and a fashion event is going on, search for the trending hashtags on this niche and use it in tweets. With Twitter, you can also announce new updates and any development related to your app. Twitter paid ads can only be effective if you have a specific campaign in mind.
This platform is great to address the business and professional audience. If you have a business app that has huge potential to gain traction and audience in enterprises, you should target this platform. You can create a business page on the name of your app and start posting. LinkedIn is also a great tool to publish blogs on your niche and gain audience attention.
The bottom line
Obviously, marketing your iPhone app doesn’t end up with the above-mentioned steps. There are a few obvious and widely known ones that you should invariably do. You should create a web page, run banner ads and promote the page through SEO efforts and content marketing.
