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Five unique marketing ideas to promote your mobile app

You have probably read a ton of app marketing tips and hacks online. At some point, you might wonder why so many websites essentially talk about the same tips and practices.

Your point would not be wrong. In an uber-competitive world like app marketing, there are rarely tips and tricks that are truly original. Most of the literature on mobile app marketing discusses the same thing in different ways.

Does this mean these tips are wrong? No, most websites do a good job of summarizing app marketing.

However, you will often need to think out-of-the-box as an app marketer when facing multiple competitors at the same time.

The following sections pick out some unique app marketing ideas you can use to promote your app.

#1: Collaborate with businesses that complement your app

App startups are often very insular in the early days of their journey. This simply means they don’t venture outside their own environment to look for solutions to big challenges like marketing and visibility.

Let’s take an example and assume you are starting to create a pharmacy app for your medical store. If you hit a brick wall while trying to acquire more app users, you will look for traditional solutions like running app install campaigns or doing something different with your social media.

A more creative solution could be collaborating with a clinic or any other medical services app.

Such a collaboration is worthwhile because these apps are not in direct competition with you. Furthermore, you share a similar target audience.

Working with other apps and businesses can help you expand your reach and leverage external resources. The exact details of the collaboration may differ depending on the type of app or business you collaborate with.

The two examples below provide an intro into how you can collaborate with other apps and businesses:

  • Let’s assume you have a sports blogging app. You can collaborate with sports equipment companies and add affiliate links to their products in your content. You can even ask these companies to mention your app on their outreach channels. You can thus earn money and gain app downloads with this collaboration.
  • Let’s assume you have a mobile app selling tech gadgets. You can work with technical service providers and promote their services within your app. In return you can ask these companies to recommend your app to their customers.

These examples only provide a window into the various possibilities you can tap into by collaborating with other companies. You can use your own imagination and find apps and businesses you want to work with.

The lesson is simple: look beyond your own environment.

Now that it is very easy to develop an app with an app creator online, you can easily find an app partner to double your marketing efforts.

#2: Adopt aggressive networking for social media

You must have noticed how some of your friends like your posts and tweets every time you put out something.

This is a simple example of networking.

We all have seen this happening from time to time. While this may seem innocuous and irrelevant, this strategy can be extrapolated to a larger group to expand your footprint on social media.

What if you had a group of followers who always like and share a post you publish? This will give every post you publish an instant boost and trigger social media algorithms to boost the reach of your profile.

The main challenge is creating a network of collaborators who will engage with every post you publish. You can do this by joining groups and working with pages that belong to your domain.

These groups and pages will only engage with your content if you reciprocate their engagement by liking and sharing their posts as well.

This strategy works very well when you are just starting a new page and need an instant hit of engagement. Don’t simply buy followers as this will not enhance your engagement. This will not lead to any tangible benefit to your app campaign.

Aggressive networking will help you create a base of organic followers and engagement. You can stop following this strategy once you reach a critical mass of followers who engage with your content without any expectation of return engagement.

#3: Choose substance over eloquence

Let’s paint a scenario. You post a great piece of content on your mobile app, come to social media, and publish a simple post with an image from your new content. You further write a brief caption discussing the general gist of your content.

Most probably, doing this will earn you little engagement.

This is because you are not presenting the best part of your app forward: the content.

Adding an image seems smart because most of social media is overrun by fancy graphics.

However, your marketing campaign must present the best your app has to offer. In this case, your content is your strength. Instead of posting a simple image and caption, create a carousel of two or three images where each image contains a snippet of your content.

Give your social media audience a glimpse of your actual selling point. Choose to show substantive qualities over the generic jargon posted by other websites.

#4: Tap into organic web traffic

Generally, app marketing and SEO don’t fall in the same category.

SEO belongs to the realm of website promotion and marketing. Mobile apps cannot directly capitalize on web traffic, atleast not in a significant way.

However, there is an indirect way to leverage web traffic to gain app downloads. The trick is to create a stream of traffic coming to a landing page on your website. You can then direct incoming visitors to your app landing page and slowly convert website visitors into app users.

This strategy requires a lot of SEO expertise. The following steps explain the points you must remember while using web traffic to earn app downloads:

  • Landing page optimization: The first step is optimizing the landing page of your website. You need to convince visitors to consider visiting the app stores to download your app. This will require convincing copy as well as a seamless set of creatives.
  • Keywords: You will have to target keywords where the search intent is close to the action you need your visitors to take, i.e, download your app.
  • Scaling traffic: This method only really works if you manage to get a lot of traffic to your landing page. You will thus have to keep picking up high volume keywords and scaling the traffic you get.

Using organic traffic for app downloads can drastically reduce your marketing budget. This is still a practice app marketers rarely lean on. You can stand apart by growing the appeal of your app on a channel other apps rarely exploit.

#5: Make your referral programs appealing

Referral programs are not unique. Every second of third app on Google Play or App Store is likely to have a referral program.

Having an appealing and valuable referral program however is fairly unique.

Most app companies do not think through the incentive they offer to users for sharing their app. A referral program with an incentive that lacks punch and appeal is bound to fail.

If you are going to rely on your referral program to acquire new app users, you need to offer an incentive that is truly worth talking about.

Let’s take an example. If you offer your customers a discount of 10% to share your pharmacy app, you won’t get a lot of referrals. 10% is not a big enough discount when compared with the kind of discounts people generally get these days.

Offering more discounts may become a problem from a financial standpoint. You can basically keep offering discounts until the cost of the referrals is more than the overall user acquisition cost. If the discount is within this margin, you should keep experimenting with higher discounts.

There is no point in running an unproductive referral program.Offer real incentives and see your existing users market your app on your behalf.

In conclusion

It wasn’t a long time back when people used to avoid app development. Before starting the process, most businesses and beginners wanted to know how hard it is to make an app.

The situation has changed now with the arrival of AppMySite.

Using our free app maker, you can quickly create and launch your own mobile app on Google Play and App Store.

Even creating an app is not anymore. You must have a plan to market your app well. This piece presents some great ideas on app marketing that you can use to promote your own app.

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