Apr 27, 2012
How to Help Consumers Find a Mobile App
Global mobile statistics for 2012 showed that developers had created over 300,000 mobile apps for three years, and consumers downloaded these applications 10.9 billion times in 2010 and 29 billion in 2011. The figures depict an app landscape that is expanding and changing rapidly, but marketers can follow the four methods to gain a better spot in app stores and help consumers find an app.
Use social media channels to promote awareness of an app and engage consumers. Use promoted Tweets, Facebook Connect, and mobile pay-per-click advertising to increase a mobile app’s reach. Marketers can generate free advertising for an app via Facebook’s Newsfeed by integrating the app with Facebook Connect and developers can increase awareness of their apps and engagement with Facebook friends.
Twitter has groups for mobile game developers who can help each other promote apps and inform followers about sales and promotions. Twitter will also be rolling out Promoted Tweets that determines a Promoted Tweet’s relevance to a user through his decision on which to follow, his interaction with a Tweet, what he re-Tweets, etc. Pay-per-click advertising works better for mobile users because they use their phones when seeking services and are more likely to click ads.
Appolicious, Touch Arcade, and Androinica are just a few of the most popular mobile review blogs. A positive app review on any of these blogs can lead to heightened interest in an app and the result increases in downloads.
Use Chomp, an app discovery search engine, and its Chomp Search Ads. Chomp offers auto-search suggestion capabilities and function-based searches. Chomp users get keywords rankings and detailed monthly reports on search query trends, price ratios, popular categories, and free versus paid ratio.
Marketers, adept at search engine optimization (SEO) should rejoice because they can use their SEO skills in an emerging field: app store optimization (ASO). To optimize results, marketers should use relevant key search phrase for an app name; include keywords associated with a publisher’s name; create keyword rich descriptions, meta descriptions test, images, and video; track the number of stalls and uninstalls to determine why people like or do not like an app; and ask for feedback and reviews. Even if SEO continues to be important for mobile app marketing, ASO is the new SEO to some people.
