Mobile App Marketing Tips

As many iPhone app developers and publishers are learning, creating the app is only half of the battle. Both Android and Apple have hundreds of thousands of applications, and getting your app to stand out above the crowd can be challenging. One method that has seen the most success is by using social media to market your app.

Why Social Media Marketing for Apps Works

When marketing physical products, the main focus is often on the distribution and acquisition channels. This is how you get the product to a consumer, and how a consumer finds the product. For smartphone applications, distribution channels are fairly set. Android has a few options, but Apple is fairly restricted to the iTunes app store. This makes it a bit easier to focus on acquisition channels and understand how users find applications.

There are two main methods that consumers use to find applications. These were highlighted in a recent study by The Nielsen Company which showed that primarily used one of two methods to find new apps:

1. Searching the store on their phone

2. Recommendations from a friend or family

We’ve previously talked about app store rankings and optimization that can help with the first aspect of making your app very searchable and findable. As a primary acquisition method, it is important to carefully craft your app’s store page so that it easy easily findable, ranks well, and provides a clear incentive for downloading your app.

The second method is by recommendations from friends and family. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter allow companies to connect with users and share thoughts, ideas and talk about things that they enjoy.

Through these networks, brands can build and cultivate a network of fans that in turn help spread and promote your product. Additionally, for apps outside of the "Games" category, app publishers have the opportunity to speak to a larger audience and extend their brand outside of the app.

Whether you are promoting safe driving, helping people identify plant diseases for houseplants, or giving international travel tips, many app developers and publishers have found that through social networks they can easily and actively promote their apps to multiple audiences and to groups of people who are already very interested in that category.

In anecdotal surveys, iPhone app developers are reporting the highest success rates through social media and that advertising almost never produces a positive ROI. For example, in a recent interview with iPhone Life magazine, Jeffery Powers from RedLaser said, "in terms of things that didn’t work, we certainly haven’t figured out how to make paid advertising work for us. We’ve recently experimented with cost-per-click advertising, but the problem with that is that the amount of money you spend to get enough exposure vastly outweighs the new downloads you get as a result."

The problem with advertising is that it has a very low conversion rate (between 1% - 5%) and the costs per ad or per click are too high to create a positive return. It may be possible if your app is in the $10 to $20 range, but if you app is less than $4 it virtually impossible to see a positive return.

Keys to Social Media Success

One of the problems with social media is that it is often seen as nebulous and difficult to measure. But as with any campaign, there are many things you can do at the start that will help determine your success at the end. Although measuring social media impact is a bit different than measuring other traditional marketing campaigns, there are still plenty quantitative ways to measure a successful campaign.

These steps include:

1. Determine your Goals. In most cases, one of the goals will be to increase sales, but also include goals for intermediary steps. Also, if you include any kind of advertising, in-app sales, or other revenue tool within the app, your goals may also be heavily focused on increasing user retention.

2. Determine your key performance indicators (KPIs). These will generally include your ability to reach your audience and create a response. This could be smaller things, like retweets, reviews, recommendations or mentions of you app. Or it could be more decisive like visiting your website, filling out a registration form, or rating the app.

3. Determine how you will measure those results. With social media, there are a lot of tools and products that you can use. Between all the free tools, you can often scrap together a pretty robust reporting mechanism, or you use paid tools that add a bit more power and convenience.

4. Create a reporting schedule. Activity and success varies greatly day-to-day, but it is important to regularly compile your data into reports. This can be on whatever schedule suits you, but it should stick with some regularity.

5. Adjust. The whole point of measuring and reporting is so that you can use that information to guide your campaign. If something is working well, learn why it works so well and see what you can do to increase it. If something is not working, identify the failures and improve them.

There are also many different things that you can measure and many ways to correlate social media activity with sales (even though none of the major stores allow direct referral tracking). For example, the blog Social Media Insider provides 100 ways to measure social media.

Also as tools are developed and refined it is becoming much easier to directly connect social media activities to sales, although the value of an effective social media campaign extends much further.

Check out our recent blog for more information on starting a Twitter marketing campaign, or contact us and get professional app marketing help to get your project started.