Introduction to app marketing

Ever since people wanted consumers to know about and buy their products or services, they would resort to marketing. Traditional marketing would involve advertising through various ‘old school’ media, billboards, direct marketing, events and many other marketing and promotional methods. Then the Internet brought on a whole new era of marketing, called web marketing. Web marketing was done in addition to the more traditional modes of marketing. As contemporary as web marketing is, there is another kind of marketing that has become very popular because of the explosion of mobile devices – this is app marketing or applications marketing.

As the term denotes, mobile app marketing is marketing using mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets or other handheld devices to get your app discovered. Other relatively older mobile marketing methods use short message service (SMS) or multimedia message service (MMS), and many more, but app marketing has come to the forefront and become necessary because of the millions of apps crowding each other in a very active marketplace on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and other platforms. The most recent and in demand marketing approach for an app to become more visible in app store searches is called ASO or app store optimization.

As with traditional marketing and web marketing, there are many ways to do app marketing. It is not a hit and miss affair. A good app marketing campaign must be comprehensive as to include pre-launch and post-launch activities. In the first place, the app developer must ensure that the app is a good one worth marketing.

App marketing should begin before the app is launched in Google Play (for Android apps), the App Store or iTunes (for iOS apps) and other app stores. Those behind app marketing should give a good name to the app and assign important keywords to it. App marketing should ensure that the selected keywords are those that customers will use to search for the app. Once the right keywords are chosen and the customers search for the particular app, app marketing must do its job to keep the customers engaged. Come up with a catchy name and a spiffily designed icon to go with it. Customers also must be able to read an apt description and see attractive screenshots of the app.

Other app marketing methods are generating buzz around your app by having customers or app websites write a review or give feedback on the app. The app provider can also pay to have the app featured on marketing channels.

Forrester Research released a survey in 2012 highlighting that the use of search is by far the most favored method to discover apps. The second most popular way is by word of mouth.

The best strategies of these app marketing methods implemented with creativity and persistence combined with organic and paid app marketing channels may very well boost your app promotion and rank at the top of the charts.