You’ve finally taken your app from an idea to a reality. The iconography has been perfected, your app is in the store along with a description, and you’ve troubleshooted it in beta. But after launching you realize a significant problem – you’re nowhere near the amount of downloads you projected.
Your first instinct here might be to panic. But instead of going into crisis mode, you can go into optimization mode. That’s right, you can actually optimize your app strategy post launch in order to increase app downloads. For the purpose of this blog, we’re going to dive into a few marketing strategies that are sure to drive traffic to your app and have users downloading in no time.
Work with an SEO Specialist to Increase App Downloads
One way to increase your app downloads is to incorporate the concept of SEO optimization into your marketing plan. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of using certain keywords to increase the ranking of your product/website in the search results engine. How is this helpful? SEO can drastically increase the amount of people who come into contact with your mobile app or advertisements about it.
For example, if you have an app that focuses on providing users with an aggregated grocery shopping delivery service, you can use SEO in order to find certain keywords related to your app that users are likely to search and then land on a page promoting your product. SEO optimization can factor into many facets of your mobile app marketing strategy from social media, to paid ads, to your tagline.
An SEO specialist can be of great help when it comes to implementing it in strategy because they know the intricate ways to include particular keywords and preserve the quality of the statement you are making. One of the most direct connections is the use of ASO, which we will cover directly below.
Increase App Downloads by Focusing on ASO
ASO Stands for app store optimization and if you think it sounds incredibly similar to SEO, you would be correct! Essentially, ASO is SEO but specifically for the app store. Whether you’re releasing your app on the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, or both, ASO is an invaluable tool that you can take advantage of in order to increase app downloads.
ASO focuses on optimizing your app store components in order to have your mobile app rank higher in the app store search results for users. ASO in an app store description looks like including a variety of keywords that will boost the ranking of your app so that when people search for “home fitness app” or “fast delivery app”, your app shows up higher in the list of results because of its relation to the phrase that users are searching.
You can use SEO services such as Google Ads in order to find new keywords relevant to your topic and include those in your app store description for a greater shot at success. Once you’ve found the best keywords for your mobile app, you will want to strategically implement them in different sections of your app description. Important categories include:
- The title
- The subtitle
- Section headers
- The URL name
- The keyword field
If you take the time to dive into the ASO of your app, you will be impressed with the results you get. ASO is a proven way to increase the amount of attention and therefore, amount of downloads that you get on your mobile app.
Work with a Social Media Specialist to Increase App Downloads
Another way to increase mobile app downloads is to work with a social media specialist in order to implement a strong social media strategy for marketing your app. Social media is an incredibly effective way to spread the word about your app and reach a highly engaged target audience. Whether you are targeting a subset of Millennials or Gen-Z, it’s likely that your targeted user base spends many hours of their time browsing different social media sites.
Having a strong social media presence can make a major difference when it comes to increasing knowledge about your app because it provides a platform for users to market the app on your behalf. The options to share, save, retweet, comment, and more allow your audience to share what they love about your app and encourage others to check it out too. This is a huge win considering that word of mouth is one of the most effective ways to market any product considering the level of trust people have in those they know.
Whether you commit to a presence on one platform or three, you’ll be glad if you have someone in charge of social media management who can ideate and carry out strategy, engage in social listening, and help build a strong brand identity for your app.
Another way that a social media specialist can help you is through their ability to broker a relationship between yourself and a social media influencer. Social media influencers have become the new face of ad campaigns in recent years. They are popular because like celebrities, they reach a wide audience. But influencers are unique in the fact that they tend to have more sway over their audience. Influencers feel like friends who are almost never wrong, so pairing with the right influencer can give you a huge boost in reach and social proof.
But knowing which influencer to work with, how to get in touch with them, and even what to ask them to do can be a very complicated venture if you’re not versed in the world of social media and influencer marketing. For this reason, working with a social media specialist will give you piece of mind in that area so that you can focus on what you do best, making sure your app is the best that it can be.
Create a Website to Increase App Downloads
One final major way to increase app downloads is to set up a website for your mobile app. We mentioned previously that SEO is a great tool to increase downloads of your app, and one of the best ways to utilize that SEO is by directing traffic through an optimized website. Your website could provide value to your audience by expanding upon the information about your app provided in the app store.
Additionally, a website provides another avenue for users to reach you. Besides being a great landing spot for SEO optimization, a website will allow you to reach the demographic of users that can still benefit from your app but spend less time on social media and more time browsing web engines for their specific needs. Another advantage of having a website is that it provides you with a channel to create backlinks to your app. Not only will this make your app more accessible to all types of users who want to use it, but it will also aid you in tracking analytics so that you can continue to optimize your app for more and more downloads and engagement.
Wrapping Up
Mobile app downloads are one of the most important analytics when it comes to tracking the performance of an app. After all, if no one is downloading, then no one can be using the plethora of features inside. While it can seem daunting to figure out how to increase app downloads, with a strong strategy and a strong team, it can be done. Once you execute these principles, you’ll begin to see an exciting rise in downloads for your app.