5 Effective App Marketing and Distribution Strategies

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Launching an app is a fun, yet stressful process. You’re putting your creation out for everyone to see and use, and hopefully rate five stars. But with thousands of apps on the store market, how do you ensure that people will see your product? You’ll need to develop a killer strategy that brings you success. Here are a few strategies you can borrow from to boost your app launch.

1. Create a community around what you’re selling.

Use social media to your advantage. Choose the social media channels that relate best to what your app does and who its target audience is, and then post creative content and engage with followers and users who might be interested in your app. The key here is to post consistently, engage in a way that benefits your target demographic, and contribute value to your community.

Once your app is released, including social media calls-to-action will keep your community together. By allowing your users to share their app usage with their followers, you’ll gain more fans. Take Facebook app users, for example. With a built-in Share to Facebook Wall option, the app is leveraging its relationship with its user to gain the trust it needs to attract the user’s friends.

2. Build anticipation.

You can do this by releasing a preview of your app, starting a newsletter so your fans can follow you on all the development updates and don’t forget to create a gorgeous landing page. As an example check out the landing page of Motor Mouth, they inform users what their app can do and offer FREE bonus credits to unlock premium features. It’s best to keep these activities consistent.

You can take this to the next level by making invite-only at first. By having only a small number of invited individuals using your app, you create buzz around your product. Everybody will be trying to figure out how to get an invite. By the time you release it to everyone, you will have created enough anticipation through this exclusivity that you should see a huge spike in downloads and usage.

3. Get Your App in the public eye.

Use commonly-used sites to garner traffic. Allow journalists, bloggers, and YouTube app reviewers to cover your app and publish their review once the app releases. Purchase Facebook ads to ensure that your app reaches your target demographic.

4. Partner with other brands.

Think of a company, app, or celebrity that complements your product well. Now imagine you combined your products, services, or image in a way that benefited your users. Having a co-promotional relationship with a complementary brand helps not only with cost, but also usability and memorability with your potential users.

Shazam and Bravo did this well by combining their unique uses into one highly beneficial and promotional relationship. They gave mobile users access to exclusive content from Shazam while watching their favorite Bravo shows. Remember to research the best brands to partner with, and to emphasize the benefits of your partnership when approaching a brand for this method.

5. After release, keep releasing!

Just because your app is finally out on the store, don’t quit now. Keep users engaged by providing updates with bug fixes and more content!

These are just a few of the ways to promote your app. Mix and match, or get creative and play with an idea. The best way to raise your numbers is to be unique and memorable.