Ask IH: Minimum Viable Marketing for mobile app?
Ask IH: Minimum Viable Marketing for mobile app?
TL;DR At the very beginning of a mobile app's life, what are the absolute MINIMUM marketing things I must to do "guarantee" that a steady few people a week will find, download, and try my app through the App Store?
Market Type
Assume that I am introducing a new product to an existing market. For a segment of the market, the product substantially improves upon existing offerings.
Gory Details
I want a minimum viable marketing plan/playbook for mobile apps. Like everyone here, I'm strapped for resources and hours in the day.
A highly technical marketing guru friend of mine (himself a successful indie hacker) has educated me on the value of playing the long game with guest posts.
If he had to pick just one thing to do, it'd be two guest posts a week, do that for a year, and then initiate SEO 1.5 years in, using all the backlinks and posts as fodder. I love long games with compounding returns and what he's talking about sounds like one of those games.
The trouble is, I don't have the resources to do that, get the product out the door, hustle for initial users, stay engaged with those users, improve the product, work my day job, eat, sleep, exercise, see my family on occasion, and so on.
There's got to be a more fundamental (i.e., MINIMAL) marketing playbook for an app in its earliest stages, yes?
For example, I wonder what fraction of people, roughly, are going to the app store looking for a solution vs. looking for a particular app. Because if enough people are searching for solutions vs. a particular app then it seems like I could bootstrap through App Store Optimization alone -- make sure people looking for a solution find my solution and make sure my solution looks appealing at first glance.
I've come across playbooks for ASO that sound about right and look feasible... and the effort would have far, far fewer external dependencies than going the guest-post route. It also looks like ASO involves a smaller ongoing commitment (mental and time) than 2-a-week guest posting.
But I don't know what I don't know.
If you've done it before: What has worked for you? What hasn't worked? If you were just about to launch a mobile app and just wanted to guarantee a very slow but steady stream of new users what would your MINIMAL, INITIAL marketing playbook be?
Minimum viable marketing for mobile is probably not “post everywhere”; it is finding the tiny search phrase where the user already has the pain. For Kinetic Override I’m prioritizing Android 15+ no-root auto-clicker / macro-recorder queries because those people already know what repeated tap/swipe fatigue feels like.
I very recently released a mobile app, and I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of downloads.
When I released it I wasn't expecting any downloads at all. I built the app over a month, and then used Keywords Everywhere to discover that no one was searching for what I built (an android app for the carnivore diet).
I went ahead and released it anyway, and was surprised to find that I've been averaging 1-2 downloads per day since I put it on the play store (with zero marketing work on my part).
To be fair, I did check to see what carnivore diet apps were available before writing mine, and there was just one (which was very simple and informational).
I also have a landing page and I'm building out a blog for SEO, but that's a long game. I haven't driven any traffic to the app that way yet.
So my two cents - if you create an app people are looking for, and you don't have any competition, you will get downloads from the app store alone.
If you want to read more what I learned I wrote about it here: https://www.zakmiller.com/posts/carnivore-coach-business/
Thank you for sharing your experience! Great blog post, too. This is encouraging. :-)
Of course! I am very new to all this.
It was such a good feeling to get my first ever email subscriber, and also to see the downloads continue to trickle in. :D
App store search is very important for app discovery: On iOS, 47% [of users] said they found an app through the App Store's search engine, while 53% of Android users did the same on Google Play.“ “65 percent of downloads come from searches on the App Store”
The above statements warrant the importance of ASO.
I am an app entrepreneur and have been in the market for over 3 years now. I have never opted for any paid promotions or any outbound marketing tactics, just focussed on ASO. Of course, ASO involves getting some initial installs for which I have used Quora, other social platforms. But, on the later part, I have always relied on organic searches to help my app get discovered.
I have a lot of apps on the play store with daily downloads ranging from 100+ downloads/day to 15k+ downloads/day.
Some people think ASO is only about having a good title and description. While they are important, they are not the only factors that need to be focussed on for good ASO.
Apart from the ASO description, there are a lot of factors that play an important role in organic rankings & downloads of android apps.
I am sharing some tips and tricks from my experience with play store rankings (ASO) -
Make your app screenshots look attractive as these leave a good first impression on the users and they decide to download app based on the screenshots. On the screenshots, have a text that talk about what the app does
App Icon must be attractive. Try to use minimal icons that stand out from your competitor apps
For initial ranking, try to promote on relevant communities/target groups. This is required because play store competition is really high and app does not start getting ranked unless some initial installs are there.
Encourage your app users to leave a good rating and avoid poor ratings. To get good ratings, you can add some pop-up or banner on your app to tell your users to rate your app
Always reply to ratings esp. poor ratings and try to convert poor ratings into good ratings
Look at Android Vitals from Google Play Console and reduce your crashes and ANRs. If you are not the developer, tell your developer to fix these
Work on improving battery optimization of your app
Try to reduce uninstalls of your app. App retention plays a good role in app rankings
Try to get initial installs from your near ones and tell them to leave a good rating.
PS - I have only listed my experience with the Google Play Store and not for Apple App Store due to my expertise on the former and limited knowledge on latter.
This is super helpful. And great work getting all those downloads for your apps! ASO FTW. Thank you for sharing!
I'm an app maker myself, launched my first (well second actually, but first for a long time) app a few months ago. I get about 50 installs a day through ASO but in all honesty my ASO needs work (i.e. the complexity of the app isn't converting well enough for the users / keywords I'm targeting and as a result I'm not ranking as high for those keywords as I'd like to).
ASO will absolutely be the key thing you should focus on IMO. It accounts for something like 70% of installs. SEO is good too but in terms of hitting the ground running I feel like ASO get's you far closer (depends on your app and your audience too, of course).
Focus on building something that:
That's a bit of a brain dump but that's a good start. Do a closed beta and make sure your retention is good.
This is awesome. Aligns with with what I've suspected to be true. I'm stealing this brain dump. :-) Thank you very much!
I'm on a path to collect beta users for my new mobile app and launch late this month or early next month. I've had some success by cultivating fans in FB page/groups, and keeping up the posts. The truth is there is a LOT of noise out there, but if you focus on your core users and make something people love, it will grow. I've also done some spend on FB, but more about general marketing and less for app installs, which are crazy expensive sometimes.
Look up Steve Young for some incredible tips on ASO. He has a podcast as well. You're going to really want to focus on making sure that when someone hits your app store listing, it's exciting and compelling. Check out the other top apps which monetize in a similar way, make some notes, and see what they do. Your app store listing is working for you 24/7, so worth putting the time in there to make it awesome. This is part of my plan anyway :)
I'll look up Steve Young and check out his tips. I hope you get some inspiration from the other great responses posted here, too! I sure did. Yeah, it seems like ASO plus a little extra leg work just in the beginning to get some initial installs (exactly what you're doing!) can get me to where I'd like to be for now. Good luck with your app! I hope to hear how it goes. :-)