4 Quick Tips for Marketing Your Mobile App

The opportunities provided by the phone and tablet market are considerable.

The idea was great and the app works well. Now, how do you encourage your target audience to install it? Here are four quick tips for promoting mobile apps through email, search marketing, social networking, and your website.

There are many reasons to create mobile apps, whether to support your current business or to provide the opportunity to reach a new target audience, but once you build it -- they may not come. Enter the realm of mobile marketing: How can you evolve your current brick-and-mortar strategies to drive downloads and adoption of your app?

According to research shared in the Custora E-Commerce Pulse Mobile Report, the opportunities provided by the phone and tablet market are considerable.

Justin Elkind, in a column for MarketingLand.com, stresses that evaluation of mobile behavior tells us a lot about how to approach marketing strategy. Here are four quick tips for finding users for your mobile apps:

1. Using Email to Promote Mobile Apps

With fewer users waiting until they are in front of their desktop computers to read email and respond, finding ways to talk to your audience -- no matter which mobile user interface they use -- becomes significant. Overcoming the challenges of email display on smartphones and tablets dramatically increases the outcome of marketing campaigns that include material delivered this way.

Consider the following strategies:

• Short and Sweet: Keep text to a minimum in emails.
• Scale to Screen Size: Tablets, with their larger screens, may be an exception, but keep smartphones' small screens in mind. Don't include images that will require scrolling (or that need to be zoomed in on to be properly seen) and avoid lengthy lists that will result in large amounts of scrolling.
• Simple Is Better: Stay clear of complex HTML and dynamic content such as Flash. Simple layouts using straightforward coding will mean that your message is always displayed as intended on every device, no matter the platform or vintage.

2. Using Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is more than just buzz. SEM involves the promotion of websites by way of visible placement in search engine results pages. Currently underutilized, SEM has serious growth potential, especially with updates being put in place by the popular mobile app stores that will enable direct links from search engine results to particular pages within mobile apps.

Considering the increased mobile traffic on the likes of Google and Bing, being high up in the search results makes all the difference -- just remember that once a potential customer clicks through, they should see what they want to see in a simple way that doesn't require much scrolling.

3. Using Social Networking to Promote Mobile Apps

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are now a part of the modern marketing kit. While everybody knows what they are, and nearly as many actually use them, the conversion numbers show that effective marketing through social networking has a long way to go.

You can improve your chances of success with social marketing by increasing the amount of time spent supporting others rather than pushing your own stuff. Make a point of finding people to follow, thanking people who follow you, and commenting positively on the posts of those in your target market.

Think of social media as a place to perform reputation-building exercises -- reach out to users, gain exposure, become familiar. The results come when people come to you, thanks to your visibility, rather than you pushing your app on them.

4. Using Your Website to Promote Mobile Apps

If you want to drive downloads, make sure your app is prominently featured on your website, as well as the pathway to downloading it. Many visitors may already be hitting your website (often without the use of search engines), so when they arrive, be sure the layout and features are mobile-browser friendly.

Conclusion

No single formula will work in all situations, but the most effective campaigns will take advantage of all four of these forms of marketing. Let Progress® Pacific™ help you build, deploy and market your Web and mobile apps.