App Marketing With a $0 Budget, 12 Tips for Cash Strapped Developers

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Given that there are over a million apps on both the App Store and Google Play, there’s a lot of work to be done to make sure your app gets noticed. Competing with these many apps means competing with billions of dollars of promotional spendings. Although a bigger budget means more exposure, there are other ways to get your message out there. However, be prepared: if you’re not spending money, you’ll most certainly be spending a lot of time and effort. So if you’re looking to improve your app’s discoverability without a marketing budget, look no further. Here is what you can do:

Identify your segment. This is the red thread running through all of your marketing activities. What type of people would be most interested and benefit most from your app? Personagraph offers the most accurate tool for app user segmentation and insights! With this information you select the most suiting channels (the ones where your target audience hangs out) and prevent wasting a lot of time.

Family & friends are your best bet to get exposure (and feedback) when you are in the process of launching your app. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step and using your personal network can give you that essential initial traction. Ask (or some will call it harass) them to do a good word for your app to their friends. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising: people are significantly more likely to buy (or in your case download) a product if a friend or relative recommends it to them.

Incentivize users to share your app or its content. This is the key to growing organically. A share on Facebook can easily reach 338 (average number of Facebook friends) other people and snowball effects can cause exposure to an exponentially growing number of people. Reward your users with in-app currency, an extra life or a secret level in your game app. Give them get a free premium feature or a free widget for sharing your utility app. Also, appeal to your users’ vanity. People love to flaunt their accomplishments so give them something to be proud of. There are many ways to create win-win situations for you and your app’s users. Just look at Dropbox. They acquired millions of users using this strategy which is often referred to as growth hacking. Similarly, by making your app social by nature (challenge friends, share a recipe, recommend a song, etc.) you lay the foundation for strong organic growth.

Incentivize users to rate and review. As mentioned, there’s nothing like word of mouth advertising. People looking to download an app attach great importance to user reviews. Good reviews help people that are browsing apps convince to download yours. In contrast, bad reviews are an excellent opportunity for you to learn how to improve your app. The amount of ratings and reviews also influence your app’s position in app store rankings. A simple pop up screen or interstitial can lead your users to leave a review in seconds. Include a reward for doing this and your app is guaranteed to receive a ton of reviews.

Create an online presence. This is super easy to do with today’s range of social media. Not only does this provide an extra touch point, these pages can be incredibly useful for virality when you combine them with sharing incentives. Incentivize users to like, follow or add your app’s page to create a steady fan base on a social media platform. Having this allows for a wide variety of new promotional options since these platforms are specifically built for those purposes. You might also want to create a mobile website where customers can find more information about your company and your other offerings. Your mobile website is indexed by search engines which further increases your visibility.

Reach out to review websites and blogs. There are websites that will let you hit the exposure jackpot when they pick out your app for review. Sites like pcmag.com, macworld.com, appadvice.com and appstorm.net can mean your app is seen by thousands of potential users. However, there are thousands of apps that are trying the exact same thing which make your odds extremely unfavorable. The trick is to find the niche, based on your target segment, that will be interested in your app. You can decide which will be most effective by checking what their social influence scores are with Klout. Make sure you tailor your message to the blogger or review website so that they will see the value in reviewing your app.

Reach out to online communities. There is a community for every topic imaginable and so there are plenty interested in your app category. Again, just make sure to find your segment. Check Facebook groups, subreddits, Quora topics, and all the small niche forums you can find. Keep in mind not to spam these though! Ask for members for their honest opinions but don’t push it. Use PR. This means you write a press release which you can spread to newspapers and magazines. It’s becoming repetitive now but make sure to have your target audience in mind! Similar as with review websites, focus on the ones you think will find your app newsworthy. Keep it local to increase the chance of your story getting picked up. Are you a member of any type of club, association or society? Reach out to the people that are responsible for creating the newsletters, they’ll be happy to receive content and write about members. Additionally, you can upload your press release to article depositories but be aware that your press release has to fight over attention with thousands of other articles.

Create a video. A video is easy to digest and can be shared on video websites such as YouTube, thereby increasing the possibilities to get discovered. It doesn’t have to be a Spielberg production – unless you want to of course – but make sure to make it entertaining and informative.

Send out email newsletters. But again, make sure not to spam! Ask users if they’d like to opt-in to your newsletters. Also, keep the contents of your newsletters original and relevant. The number one reason people unsubscribe from these is that they find them repetitive.

Always be promoting. If you’ve seen the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, you’ll know where we got this is from. The essence is to always be talking about your app to everyone who wants to hear it. Go to Meetups, comment on blog posts, respond to questions and posts in online communities, etc. There is power in numbers and if you’re not spending any money you will have to personally get the message out yourself.

Cross sell. This is for those that already have an app live on the app stores. You can leverage your user base by cross selling your new app. Push notifications and in-app messages are great tools to do so but beware of becoming too intrusive!

Promoting your app with a minimal budget can be a long and tedious process. If you really believe your app has potential, you’ll most probably need to invest some funds to get enough momentum to make it to the big league. You’re going to want to spend it wisely and so make sure to have an acquisition strategy. This strategy entails all your paid and unpaid efforts to get people to download your app.