How to Market your App from Scratch

Digital marketing is a new chapter in the story that is advertising. While many of the tricks, tactics, and methods of digital marketing are similar to the old Madison Avenue style of marketing, modern marketers are beasts of a different color.

Digital Marketers have a combination of a marketer, a designer, a webmaster, and a statistician. They have to know:

1. how to market to a target audience;

2. how to design a website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM);

3. how to read code and make small alterations to said code; and

4. how to read, understand, and utilize the analytical statistics generated by your website.

Digital marketing is what makes your product succeed. One unchanging truth that is true for all marketing: you won’t make a single dime if no one knows about your product or service. In other words, it is crucial to your business that you (or a partner) know the ins and outs of digital marketing.

To that effect, this post will briefly cover the key elements of digital marketing for mobile applications: Revenue Generation and Sales, User Acquisition, and Marketing.

Revenue Generation and Sales

Revenue generation is generally the focus of most business ventures. Even businesses that are focusing on saving the planet or are the product of a Non-profit need to generate money in order to stay in business. So, this is an important element.

We all are aware of the difficulties surrounding app monetization strategies. Very few apps cost to download, so it’s important to know how you plan to make money. This plan needs occur before you begin development! This is because a good developer will incorporate plans for growth and eventual monetization into the first design.

First and foremost, you need to know what OS you want to use (there are different strategies for iOS and Android). iOS is actually easier to charge for downloads because iPhone owners are more used to apps that charge. The downside is that when you charge for your app, the app has to be hugely robust and basically flawless (i.e. extremely expensive).

Obviously, huge costs right off the bat aren’t necessarily ideal for an app entrepreneur. The better option might be to build first for Android, which leaves room for growth on the iOS platform. Of course, finding a monetization path that doesn’t involve charging is probably your best bet. That way, you only have to figure out what your target market is (more on that below).

User Acquisition

Marketing

Understanding your market takes time, research, and, above all, dedication. Marketing an app for your iPhone is different than marketing an app for Android. They attract different people:

• iOS users prefer the beautiful looking design, an excellent UX, and top-notch UIs. They tend to be trendy, fashion-conscious people – and frequently are CEOs of large companies. In other words, trendsetters;

• Android users are all about the tech. They love apps that push the boundaries a bit and challenge the manner in which we interact with our devices. Android apps focus less on looks and more on cool features. Android users are more often than not the appreneurs golden goose – nerds and early adopters.

Keep in mind these observations are by no means set in stone. There are Android apps that sport some of the best designs ever created and there are iOS apps that push beyond what we think of as an app.

The Webmaster

The other, more technical side to digital marketing is understanding how to drive traffic from search engines to your site. This includes optimizing your content to include long-tail keywords, creating proper meta tags, HTML optimization and more (insert goofy smile)!

Needless to say, it’s complicated and requires years of experience to master. And that’s just the beginning:

• Digital marketers need to know how to install an analytics software (such as MixPanel) and how to read the data generated by such an API. The data that comes out of such tools tell a marketer how many people are visiting your site, how long they spend on the site, and where on your site they visit. It is a vital piece of software that tells you whether or not your marketing efforts are working.

• SMM or Social Media Marketing is as complicated and much more fickle than SEO. SEO may have more intricacy, but SMM is based on the whims of people. Did you feel that shiver running down your spine?

About SDI

SDI is a company that covers every aspect of the tech world. We shepherd our projects from conception to post-launch strategies such as user acquisition and exit plans. We have expert developers, designers, and marketers from all over the world. This diverse environment has created award winning apps and websites – and more importantly, increased sales revenue for our clients.

If you would like to get the ball rolling on your 2016 project, SDI would love to help. We offer a 6-month guarantee for every project on which we work and we are currently offering a free landing page design for websites or the first 4 app screen designed for free. You can reach us by email or via the phone at 408.805.0495.