Startups: How to Improve Your Existing App & Grow Your Business

June 10, 2016 | Raj Srivastav

How to Improve Your Existing App & Grow Your Business

For most of my life, I have specialized in growth strategies for app and digital businesses. While I’m a trained engineer and UX designer, my passion has always been what happens after an app has been launched.

More importantly, I’ve always been interested in startup growth and startup growth rates. Afterall, my own company began as a startup in India, almost 20 years ago. It is my believe that all startups have exponential growth potential – they just need help getting to that stage. And that’s where I come in: creating app marketing strategies and startup growth plans is my bag.

My love for this aspect of business is what drove me to start an app development and app marketing company. Yes, running a startup is hard. But there are some key advantages to running a tech startup, especially an app startup:

    First and foremost, apps are pretty inexpensive, at least when compared to other entrepreneurial projects. Heck, for a starting price of $2,000, we can build you an app for Android or iOS in 6 weeks or less!

    Apps have a high potential revenue. While reaching said revenue can be tricky, our app marketing strategies are designed to get apps to monetization quickly and sustainably. Check out some of our previous advice on how to growth hack your app.

    App businesses have a clear and easy exit strategy – selling the app. In fact, many “Apprepreneurs” make the majority of their money through this little trick. We’ll discuss this in a bit more detail below.

So, with the preliminaries out of the way, let’s drill a little deeper into what a good app startup growth plan contains.

Brand Awareness

Your company is your brand. It is the forefront of your business, it’s how people will recognize your products. Building a brand is a complicated process, but it begins with the product itself. In this case, app development.

One of the best ways to grow your brand is simply to have a product that functions according to expectations. Going above and beyond expectations is even better! Not only will have a great app grow your brand, but it improves customer loyalty too. Customer loyalty means that users will be more likely to pick up other products you create down the line.

There are other elements to growing your brand, including ways to improve your digital presence. Our marketing team contains a heavy tech background for SEO purposes. Robot.txt files are just as important for good Search Engine Optimization as long-tailed keywords.

User Acquisition

Now we find ourselves staring at the elephant in the room: Social Media Marketing. This amorphous monster of ambiguity has scared app startups and owners for years now – which is why I personally train our entire marketing staff in best practices.

SMM is an exceptionally dynamic part of modern business growth; a comprehensive blanket approach simply does not work. Our app marketing plans for SMM change depending upon what network we are approaching.

In other words, Twitter users are different than Facebook users, who are different from Pinterest users. While many, many people have accounts with all three (and more), most have a primary SM network they use – and they are attracted by different things.

So, the first thing we do when building a unique app marketing plan is to identify what your core target market is. Identifying your ideal user will tell us what kind of SM network to which they are most attracted. For instance:

    Is your app very visually appealing? An emphasis on Pinterest and Instagram would likely be of benefit;

    Got a gaming app? Facebook users love their flash games – especially when you can post results to a wall;

    Twitter is the haven of marketers and tech gurus. If you have a tech heavy or a business to business app, this is probably where your emphasis should be.

To be clear, a good app marketing plan includes all of the major marketing plans. What I’m saying here is that while all of them need to be included, selecting a network of particular importance is a sound move. Additionally, my marketing team is trained to do an analysis of other potential SM networks out there.

SM sites are a big thing these days. There are plenty that have a single focus or emphasis. For the app marketer, these sites are gold. For instance, if we are designing a marketing plan for a Makeup School (as we did with Blush, out of San Francisco), we would love to find a SM site dedicated to beauticians and makeup design. Ready-made markets help accelerate startup growth exponentially!

One Last Thing…

App marketing strategies need to include further development as well. If you want to build a company, you need to continually offer new features. Stagnation is the death of an app business. If you stop evolving, your user base will stop growing – and will eventually start to dwindle.

Even if you are planning on selling the app when it hits a certain level of downloads, no one will buy it if they don’t see potential for growth. The best way to encourage download potential is by – yep, you guessed it – constant evolution of your app’s features and capabilities.

The Cliff Hanger

This is only a small tantalizing glimpse into the process my marketing team follows. This is our passion, our love. The app market is our home – and we know it like the back of our collective hands.

Do you need some help growing your app startup? Give us a call at 408.805.0495 or contact us via email. Just ask for Raj and get a free consultation on the best path forward. In the meantime, stop on by our marketing site to get some more key pointers.

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