In a mobile app market full of rivals and opportunities, getting noticed is the best way to drive downloads and revenue. Marcos Sanchez, VP global corporate communications of App Annie, offers advice on getting your app noticed among millions of competitors
With a global mobile app market predicted to be worth $25 billion by the end of 2015 and hit $70 billion revenues by 2017, marketers need to get past the noise to win the most revenue for their apps. To stay competitive in the global app economy, you must have understanding of what’s going on around you. Sustaining the momentum during an app’s lifecycle requires looking at all of the alternative routes and making decisions based on the fewest trade-offs.
App marketers: here are five tips for increasing your apps’ visibility and pushing it into the top rankings:
1. Find the geographic opportunity
It’s only natural to gain your first few downloads in your country of origin. However, attracting customers in different regions – even if those regions are less important or smaller than your home country – has a number of benefits. Firstly, some countries offer less competition, so you’re able to quickly climb to the top charts. Secondly, audiences located outside of your home country, who may have preferences towards one category might adopt your app. Thirdly, you need to find your corner of the world where there is revenue with little or no competition.
After you’ve identified your target countries, you must decide whether to localise or not. Localisation is not the same as translation. Localisation can be risky for app publishers because it can require major investment from your team. However, there are services which help app marketers to visualise how one country stacks up against another as an opportunity for expansion.
2. Optimise keywords to increase search rankings
To get your app discovered amongst the million-plus apps available on the stores, an optimised keyword strategy is crucial. App Store Optimisation (ASO) helps you to determine where your app ranks for the keywords your users might use to find you. Researching keywords used by the competition is essential as it allows you to identify and keep track of how well your competitors are doing and what the best keywords are.
It’s important to keep track of two sets of keywords. The first group is branded keywords. For this group, you want to monitor your territory so your users are served your app on search. These users already know about your brand and want to find your app. The second group of keywords are terms related to your app. These are the terms which will be used to acquire new users.
By selecting the top 10 to 20 keywords specifically for your app’s category currently driving downloads from the store for each country of importance, you can monitor how your app is ranking per each keyword phrase and optimise your app description to rank higher.
3. Launch control
When you launch a new app into an app store, you’re worried about only one thing – the most number of downloads in the shortest amount of time. But behind the curtain of the app stores, what is contributing to your downloads?
First, you’ll want to do some benchmarking. By comparing the first 90 days of your app launch with the first 90 days of rival app, you’ll be able to make a refined comparison to the competition and benchmark your launch. Secondly, set some team goals. If you examine the cumulative revenue of a similar app you’ll be able to benchmark the revenue growing over time. This is helpful in determining team goals because you will be able to understand what revenue was reached at multiple points in the launch process by a similar app. Third, determine how many downloads it will take to get to number one. Being number one in an app store is similar to having turbo-charged marketing, but you’ll need to spend some money on advertising in order to get there.
4. Manage advertising in one place
Getting noticed is hard enough – staying at the top of the charts requires all the help you can get. Revenue going into in-app advertising is set to overtake other formats of online advertising by 2017 and app marketers are thinking about how to maximise awareness of their apps within budget. Accessing analytics data in real-time is important as it enables you to evaluate your marketing spend and see the actual impact of your marketing strategy in terms of downloads, revenue and rankings. Your best or worst performing campaigns can be identified immediately, which will allow you to focus on other projects and make better business decisions.
5. Be more than a one hit-wonder
It’s important to look at the long term and you want your app to become an addiction. This means focusing first on the long-term lifecycle and not only on the launch. Analysing downloads and revenue history by category or country gives you the necessary insight in order to plan and anticipate beyond the first 90 days.
Listen to your customers goes a long way in maintaining post-launch momentum. Absorbing and analysing app reviews allows you to decipher your user’s opinions, creates targeted marketing campaigns in region and delivers more five star reviews, which in turn means greater revenue.
