“If you build it, they … may or may not come.”
It doesn’t have quite the same ring as the famous line from “Field of Dreams,” but when it comes to getting users for your new app, building it isn’t enough. If you want to stand out from the thousands of other apps, you need to market yours effectively.
Apps are like any other product — people won’t buy it if they don’t know it exists. Even the most well-polished, innovative app will fall flat if the only people downloading it are your friends and family.
Mobile entrepreneurs, or “appreneurs,” sometimes blow their entire budgets on development — they don’t think to plan out short- and long-term marketing plans. To launch an app successfully, you must know whose attention you need to grab and how to grab it.
Proven Success
Two of the most popular apps on iOS and Android wouldn’t be where they are today without tenacious, effective marketing.
The first, Clash of Clans, primarily took a business-to-consumer approach. Users who try the app stay for the fun and engaging gameplay, but Supercell (the creator of the app) maintained a constant stream of ads on multiple platforms to get users there in the first place.
Whether through click-to-install advertisements in other popular apps, social media targets, or high-dollar TV commercials, Clash of Clans put itself in the spotlight so loudly and frequently that it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t heard of it.
This strategy worked extremely well for Supercell — the company went from making $2.4 million per day in April 2013 to making $5.15 million per day in February 2014. To double an already impressive daily figure in less than a year takes more than great design; it takes great marketing.
The second app, Candy Crush, also advertised through traditional channels like Clash of Clans, but this app from King relied more on word of mouth and in-app social media shares to establish its strong user base.
In Candy Crush, users get a limited number of failed attempts before a timer starts, telling them they can either purchase more attempts or get free attempts by sharing the game on social media. Users who enjoy the game share it with others, creating a rewarding cycle where users get to play longer the more they help the app grow.
For Candy Crush to succeed, the app’s gameplay had to be good enough to merit shares. Great gameplay preceded great marketing, but without advertisements and social media shares, Candy Crush’s audience never would have reached the numbers it did.
Growing Your Brand
Like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush, your app needs great marketing to accompany great design. These tips will help you put your app in front of more people willing to download it:
- Know your audience. Identify your target audience and bring your product to them. Don’t pitch a lighthearted game to business professionals; use concrete data to identify the right demographic and design your campaign to appeal to the members of that group.
- Be tenacious. Once you identify your audience, be relentless in the volume and frequency of your message. Try not to annoy — don’t send out the same tweet 15 times a day — but keep churning the message.
Social media isn’t like a newspaper that’s written, locked in ink, and then read the next day. Different users get on Facebook and Twitter during different time windows, so make your ads visible during the right time to put them in front of the right people.
- Add marketing levers. Make your app functional without marketing content, but promise (and deliver) premium features or a bigger experience when the user participates in the social aspect. For example, a social media app could allow 25 posts a week but provide more posts if the user shares the app through other channels.
Don’t make the sharing requirement too frequent, or people will delete it. Keep the core focus consistent, and make your bonuses enticing rather than annoying.
- Keep it fresh. Game of War, a popular mobile game app, skyrocketed in popularity with its first spokesperson, Kate Upton. However, it swapped Upton for Mariah Carey during its next ad campaign — the switch brought the game more attention and made potential users keep an eye out for new commercials and content.
If your marketing campaign is working, grow it with new narratives, media channels, and promotions. If it starts to lose steam, find a new angle. Many apps appeal to multiple demographics, so target different groups with slightly different versions of the same central message.
- Communicate constantly. Your marketing efforts should provide feedback to development and design teams. Marketing knows better than any other department what users want next or what users feel is missing in the current build. Tap into that knowledge to discover how you can make your product better.
Don’t wait for a competitor to disrupt your success — disrupt it yourself. Marketing can just as easily help create new features and versions as it can advertise them.
When you develop a great app, it’s tempting to want to let your work speak for itself. Even if your app starts out strong, however, user interest wanes quickly in an industry where the next big thing comes out almost every day.
Marketing is about more than pushing the product; it’s also about feeding back into the product. Create an environment where one success begets another, and stay vigilant by keeping your app in the spotlight. If you follow these tips to make your app unforgettable, the next marketing success story could be yours.
