Best Marketing Methods to Promote First Ever App

Hello Guys,

I’m newbie in app development world and has just developer one app targeting Indian reality show Bigg Boss.

Well, I would like to know how you guys did marketing your first ever app? What are the best methods to promote app in targeted users?

From my experience, buying downloads is the best way to market your app. It’s very expensive but if you get on the top lists it is worth it.

Advertising via social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is not worth it unless you have an amazing app that people will talk about and spread the word about.

Posting on forums: has very little effect. The forums are full of indies trying to promote their apps and your app won’t be seen by a lot of people.

Submitting the app to review websites: most of them charge money. Some of them won’t review your app at all if it does not look good from the beginning. Seeing how viewed other apps are on such websites I don’t think it’s worth it.

So are you saying that even a mediocre app can benefit from buying downloads if it can get in top lists ? And that it will stay in top lists thereafter (to justify the cost for buying downloads earlier on) ?

And that the app does not have to be exceptional ?

Thanks.

Obviously an app needs to be exceptional to stay in the top lists. But you don’t need an exceptional app to hit the top rankings. Or to earn big bucks. You just need a lot of money. Or a lot of luck. But that isn’t related to marketing strategies. :slight_smile:

I don’t agree. Buying downloads is illegal and does not guarantee any advantage. For a first app I would take my time to see and understand how it goes, before spending money.

The BEST marketing strategy, if you don’t want to advertize, is:

get some good reviews from your friends
put few, well chosen keywords in the description
translate all you can
make all the graphic you can (including a video)
cross your fingers.

The first app is not time to spend money.

Huh? Where did you get that from?

It is good that you have developed a new app. As your app Big Boss is purely indian based but you can target other countries as well in addition to indian market.
Some ways to market your first app:
Good keyword is important
First of all create a Press release
Making a Successful App Store Page
If ii is possible make it free so that more and more people can download it
Submit and write a review of your app in android review submissions sites

I am trying to create an app which list licensed moneylender Singapore, can anyone recommend a good platform to advertise?

Best way to promote is the new Facebook ads for apps and Tapjoy paid installs.

Also make sure to integrate a social aspect to your game or app. That’s key. So people can share the game through social networks when they do things like achieve something. Pass a new level. Etc. Or do something in your app.

I think this was HUGE for candy crush. The social aspect of the game. Made it viral. Plus the game is pretty neat.

What’s your experience with Facebook ads? How much do you pay for install and in what countries?

With facebook ads, I am targeting specific user-base and so far, I have got 10 clicks (only) for $0.70 (approx). The chances of these being converted to installs is high, but I have not tracked that yet.

@dbest, what is your daily limit for your FB campaign. Would love to listen to whether you got any +ve results for running a campaign on FB for non-games.

If it’s an app that targets a popular TV show you could get a fair number of downloads from people who are searching for the TV show. You can use Google ad words to see how many searches are med per month for a term on Google. If thousands of people are searching for the name of that TV show on Google you can bet that people are searching for it on Google Play too.

Make sure that your app description contains the name of the show at least 4 times. You’ll have to ramble on a bit in order to make it seem natural, but trust me, it is worth it.

Putting the name of the TV show in the app name would help a huge amount, but that may be trademark infringement so watch out for that.

An obvious guerrilla marketing tactic is to find forums and other online places where people talk about the show and mention your app there.

Another tactic which requires a few months of preparations is to start a newsletter about the show and then use that to market your app. If you have 10,000 email addresses and 10% of them read every newsletter and 10% of those download your app you will get 100 downloads, which can be enough to push it up close to the top of the best new app in the entertainment category in your country.

The app that I am promoting is a game/quiz app. Not many downloads from FB yet.
Appbrain seems a good bet, got it about 90+ downloads today, but at $0.30 per install.

Maybe I misunderstood a poster here. But buying app installs is perfectly legal.

You should check with places like Appflood, were you can start an “advertising campaign”.
There you will be able to “offer” the amount of money per app you will spend per app install (usually 0.2-0.9 usd per app). The company will then market your app using their network until they have collected as many installs as you specified. These are users that saw your app description/pictures and installed it.

Appbrain seems good but I think the rates are better on Appflood, check the cost on both places.

Quite funny and perhaps accurate too - “ramble on a bit” :slight_smile:

I have experimented myself with the number of times that a word is used in a description, and 4 or 5 seems to be the optimal number for the description that I was using for my app.

I suppose it could be a proportion relative to the length of your description. So for example it could be that the optimal number is for 1% of the words in your description to be the search term that you are targeting, in this case the TV show. In that case if your description is 200 words you should mention the name of the show twice, if it’s 300 words you should mention it three times, if it’s 400 words you should mention it four times and so on. Several people have pointed out that there is no gain beyond five, so you should probably never use a search term more than five times.

Are you still able to promote your apps on Facebook or does this message appear to you?? Thank you!

So 1% is really an optimal number or just an example here??
Thanks.

Both the idea that there is a number and the 1% number are wild guesses!

I can confirm that I have been able to increase my search rank for a given search terms by increasing the number of times that search term appears in my description and that for me the optimum value was to include the search time 4 times in a description that was about 500 words long. I did these experiments in April, May and June 2013.