How to promote a mobile application in 2019: 4 practical ways + useful tools

Competition in the mobile application market is growing rapidly. Today it is already difficult to count on success, having mastered the approaches of ASO, deeper immersion and the development of non-standard advertising and marketing steps are necessary.



Today we’ll talk about ways to promote a mobile application - from the very start of a project’s life to its advanced stage. Also for each of the steps I will give links to sites and services useful in promoting. Go!

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Method # 1. Create an Early User Community

When a project receives momentum at the very beginning of its development, it is always very useful. If you can attract attention to the application immediately after its release, then in the future it will be easier to gain an audience.



This can be achieved on the world market with the help of specialized resources for promoting startups. The top platform in this segment is the Product Hunt website. This is a community of users who are interested in technology and are exploring new projects.



A successful product release on this resource will attract hundreds and thousands of users, most of whom will be from the United States and English-speaking countries. All this means that you can count not only on receiving beta testers, but also paying customers.







Here are a couple of tips for going to Product Hunt:

• Do not wind up and do not beg for likes - for this they can be banned . The rules for placing projects are described in detail in the launch guide from the ProductHunt team itself, be sure to read it.
• Find a hunter . This is a popular resource user with a large number of subscribers. All of them will receive an email notification that the user has published a new project. So you get the first users.
• Running on PH is 24 hours work . The countdown of the new day starts at 00:00 U.S. West Coast time. You must be online 24 hours in order to respond to comments in a timely manner - the higher the activity in your thread, the higher in the top of the day you can go up.
• Use the site for long-running promotion . For example, on Product Hunt for popular products there are pages with alternatives - products with a lot of likes on the platform get there. If you fall into such a selection, you will get more traffic.

In addition to Product Hunt, there are other resources for startup announcements, including:

• Hacker news
• Betalist
• Betapage

Place information about the project on each of them, so you can attract the first users at the very beginning of the project’s life with minimal expenses.

Method # 2. Attraction of competitors' advertising traffic

Announcements of the project are good, but for success in the long run, you will need a well-developed marketing strategy. It is easier to create it based on data on the activity of competitors. To make money on the application, you need to attract as much traffic as possible, that is, users who will make in-app purchases or watch ads. Solving this problem only with the help of organic traffic will be difficult, most often it will have to be purchased.



It’s not easy, it’s much more efficient to spy on the effective moves of competitors to configure advertising for the application so that it brings users. If some steps work for one application, then with a high probability they will help another. So you can save money on testing hypotheses.



One of the best tools for analyzing in-app campaigns in mobile applications is the Apptica service. With its help you can track:

• top advertisers and applications for advertising in different markets;
• the most effective advertising campaigns and even the types of ads used (a large gallery of ads of various formats for various advertising networks, including Facebook and Instagram);
• the most popular ad networks, with all statistics on impressions, traffic sources, etc.

All this will help develop a strategy for promoting and monetizing the application - it is clear that both of these factors will directly affect the number of users.

Method # 3. Using custom moves

This may seem surprising, but in recent years the popularity of QR codes has been steadily growing . For the user, one of the easiest ways to quickly download a mobile application is to scan a QR code with a link to it. Therefore, this technology is actively used to promote applications.



There are a variety of ways to use QR codes to increase the number of application installations. First of all, you need to create the code - a tool like QR Code Generator is suitable for this.



Then the code can be used as an advertising element of the application along with its description. Plus codes - they can be placed both online and offline. Different companies print QR codes on business cards, banners, and store ads, place them in the signatures for each email, and use it as an element of contextual advertising.

Method # 4. Application localization

One of the most obvious ways to attract new users is to make the application available in different languages. According to Statista, the number of downloads of mobile applications in many emerging markets will grow rapidly in the coming years. This means that localizing the application from, for example, English, into Portuguese, Spanish and Russian will open up access to millions of new users.



In order to solve the task of translating the interface, the Localise tool is great.







The service has the capabilities of teamwork, there are functions for exporting webhooks, APIs and built-in translation tips. With it, you can localize applications for iOS and Android, and then remotely update translations from current users.

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That's it for today, thanks for watching! And what tools for promoting mobile applications do you know?