App Store promotion

Modern mobile app and game marketers are facing a very challenging situation where they need to determine which practices will work for a particular app. This makes every promotional effort a lot harder, especially for developers running on a tight budget, which means that they need to look for ways to promote the products of their hard work and reach their audience. When it comes to modern mobile apps and games, one needs to focus on both development and promotion at the same time, which is especially tough for smaller teams and single developers.


That's why it is a good idea to learn how to promote iOS apps and games on App Store on your own. There are so many things you can do, but unfortunately, there is not that much up-to-date information out there to guarantee that these promotional efforts will be as good as expected by the developers.


We would like to suggest several ways to promote your application or game. Let's take a look at them and see what you can do to do it nicely. We will do our best to provide as much useful information as possible to help you understand the overall process.


What you can use to help your marketing efforts

There are a lot of things you can use to promote iOS games and applications. After all, you need all the publicity you can get. A lot of the marketing options are available either for free or for a very reasonable and affordable price. If you know how to use them well, you can promote your application or game rather well – that is, if you get the hang of them. The following options are usually available:

  • Review mining helps gathering useful information;
  • Focusing on quality makes the application or game more appealing through quality of the app or game;
  • Localization, which expands your target audience and makes your app or game more accessible to the users from foreign countries;
  • App search optimization, which makes your application or game easier to find using regular search engines and make it rank higher in the search results;
  • Blogs and YouTube channels can help you out and help your app reach its audience.

Let's take a closer look at them and see what you can do to reach your target audience.


Review mining

One of the best ways to learn how you can promote your application or game is by reading the reviews of the competing apps or games. This way you can learn what features your competitors have, what they don't have and how you can improve your app. It also allows you to determine how you can get the best out of your marketing efforts by telling you which points can be stressed in your promotional materials to attract the desired audience. You can also find out which features you need to implement, which need more polishing, and so on.

Read all of them, both negative and positive ones – this way you will be able to learn more about your competitors and about your own app as well.


Focus on quality

Quality is important – there is no way to deny that. Remember that nobody is interested in low-quality apps – and low-quality applications and games don't live a long life on the mobile market. Make sure that the quality of your application or game is top notch to make sure that the user feedback remains as positive as possible. By taking extra steps to test and polish the app you can make sure that there is nothing that would hamper the user experience.

The best way to do it is by testing and polishing the application or game as much as possible before the launch day. Taking extra time to fix every critical bug, fixing smaller glitches and making sure that all features work as intended is always a good idea. Consider asking your friends to test your app to see if they encounter anything weird and fixing anything they encounter. Remember – positive feedback on day one can lead to nice download numbers and good performance on the mobile market.


Localization

One of the best ways to expand your target audience is by providing a localization to as many foreign languages as possible. Due to the increasing demand and more affordable translation services, there is no excuse for not providing a translation – that is, unless your application or game has an enormous amounts of text and a proper localization would be too expensive even when there are freelance translation services which offer great quality with very affordable pricing. This means you can get a lot out of it if you can pull it off – after all, a large number of mobile users comes from the countries where English is not the main spoken language.

Here is a handy list of languages that you can always refer to whenever you start making plans of providing a localization to your audience: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Portuguese. Consider using freelance translation services, because they offer nice quality for a rather affordable price – way cheaper than the majority of translation agencies too. Pay extra attention to whom you're hiring for the job – check their history and previous projects, and also feedback from their customers.


App search optimization

One of the best ways to make your app easier to find for potential customers is by doing app search optimization. It's very similar to Search Engine Optimization, but it has slight differences related to the specifics of the modern mobile platforms. Consider it as “SEO for mobile apps”. It can help with marketing of iOS apps a lot.

It is done by researching the relevant keywords, then picking the most popular ones for usage in the app description and tags field. Take your time – sometimes doing deeper research and trying various combinations of words to see how often people are searching for those brings better results. Make sure that the description is interesting and the keywords are inserted properly – by doing this, you can try to captivate the user and make your application or game easier to find at the same time. It may also lead to higher ranking in the search results.


How is that different to SEO, you may ask? There are certain differences in this case, such as:


  • Keywords should be updated once in a while to keep up with the latest trending keywords;
  • Doing asset optimization by making a nice icon, picking better screenshots and making a very appealing preview video is another step – optimizing the assets should make the app page more convincing, while the keywords should drive more traffic to the app page.

Blogs and YouTube channels

When it comes to mobile marketing, one of the best ways to get more publicity for your application or game is through various blogs and YouTube channels – the more popular they are, the better for you. Make a list of popular blogs and channels and talk to their owners and see if they agree to make a review of your application or game or at least mention it in one of their posts or videos. While some of them may ask for a donation, remember that making videos and trying all of these apps takes time and effort, and if the channel is very popular and the amount if reasonable, then why not?

If none of these methods bring satisfying results, consider contacting a marketing agency. However, there are so many of them today, it's not that easy to find the one that suits your needs for an affordable price.