How To Boost Your Mobile App Downloads

Like any other product, mobile apps also need to be marketed aggressively for potential users to find them. After all, what good is an app if nobody uses it? But getting your app listed on the App Store or Google Play is not marketing, it’s a fundamental requirement. Adding relevant keywords in your app title, describing its functions in detail and adding high quality snapshots to the app download page is highly recommended, but it’s not enough.

What you need is a solid content marketing strategy, designed around the core benefits of your app and the needs of your target market, to accelerate your app downloads.

What Exactly is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing, in simple words, is creating high value and actionable content that addresses the core needs of your target market, solves their problems, engages them with your brand, builds your credibility and ultimately helps you sell more products. This includes different forms of content including blogs, social media websites, video marketing, webinars and many other platforms. Content marketing usually leads to much more loyal and long-term customers as compared to SEO and paid advertisements.

So when it comes to increasing your mobile app downloads, here are a few ways you can use content marketing to achieve your objective.

1. Create High Value Blog Content

Text content is at the core of most internet marketing strategies simply because search engines rank websites with regularly updated text content higher than the others. A great way to win favors with search engines is to start a blog that focuses on the core benefits of your app.

In order to create content that truly resonates with your target audience and persuades them to explore more about your app, you need to identify a few things first.

• List the biggest benefits of your app
• List the problems that it solves
• List the reasons why someone should use your app

Once you have these lists, do a little research to identify the keywords that people are using to search for the solutions that your app is offering. For example, if your app is about weight loss, suggests the right physical exercises and helps users track their progress, then your target audience might be searching for you using keywords such as,

These are the search suggestions that Google immediately came up with when I searched for weight loss. This can give you a good idea about the type of keywords your target audience is using to find the benefits that your app is offering. This general idea is usually enough for you to create relevant content. But if you want to study keyword research in detail, I would suggest reading this resource by Brian Clark of Copyblogger.

Back to blogging then.

Now that you have a list of the main benefits of your app, the problems that it solves and an idea of the kind of keywords people use to search for it, it’s time to create some compelling blog content. The secret here is not to overly focus on your app. Instead, address the problems of your target users and build a reputation with them.

Let’s take the same weight loss example. Instead of creating a post like “The Best Weight Loss Mobile App” create titles like the following:

• 9 Ways Fitness Geeks Enjoy Life Much More Than Overweight People
• How Being Overweight Can Kill You Socially
• 37 Super Effective Tips To Lose Weight Quickly and Live Your Life to The Fullest

None of these titles directly sell your app, but they’ll help you build a solid relationship with your readers. Readers will start trusting you for weight loss advice and you’ll become their go to source whenever they need help. Now add your app download links within the content (where relevant), at the end of the post or in the sidebar of your blog to help acquire new users for your app.

Just make sure that you’re consistent with your blogging schedule.

2. Use Guest Blogging to Promote Your App

Creating effective content for your own blog is great, but if you add guest blogging to your strategy as well, it will become an irresistible combination. With guest blogging, you can use the strength of more established blogs and address their audience directly. If you do this correctly, you can get hundreds, if not thousands, of app downloads right away. The right way to do this is to look for the top blogs that your target users read.

So, again, if we take the example of health and fitness niche, search for 10-15 blogs that are actively updated, have a high number of comments on each of their posts and also have a good social media following. Approach these blogs with the same quality of posts that we discussed in point no. 1. Most blogs allow you to add an author bio at the end of your guest post. This is where you can introduce yourself, your brand and add a backlink to your app download page.

Note: To learn more about guest blogging on top niche blogs, read this.

3. Submit Your App to App Roundups

Another great way to boost your app downloads is by submitting it to different app roundups. Many established blogs run weekly/monthly app roundups from different niches and describe the pros and cons of the listed apps. This is where you can take advantage. Once again, Google should be your best friend

Use search terms like the following:

• [niche keyword] android app roundup
• best [niche keyword] apps
• top 10 [niche keyword] iphone apps

Once you find such blogs, contact them with the details of your app and ask them to add your app to their current list or consider adding it in future posts. It works most of the time and it never hurts to ask.

4. Use Social Media to Boost App Downloads

No content marketing strategy can be complete without the smart use of social media. There are a number of ways you can use social media to directly/indirectly boost your mobile app downloads. First of all, use it to promote your blog posts, guest posts and app roundups. Additionally, join the different groups, communities and lists relevant to your target market. You can find lots of them on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. But that, of course, is the indirect approach.

To directly impact your app downloads, Twitter is the ideal platform. Last year Twitter introduced Twitter cards specially for promoting smartphone apps, ecommerce websites and digital products. Tweets are usually limited to 140 characters, but with Twitter cards, you can not only increase the number of characters for each Tweet, you can also make it much more attractive by using high quality images. Moreover, with Twitter cards installed your Tweets will contain a direct download link at the end of your Tweet.

Here’s what Twitter cards look like:

To start using Twitter cards (click here), you’ll need to configure it for your website and mobile app. It’s not anything complex, and it only takes a few steps to complete.

Conclusion

Content marketing helps you build a loyal audience that helps to position you as an expert in your niche. Convincing visitors to download your app becomes much easier. It is much more effective than simple SEO and paid advertising where the users have no prior relationship with you. You can also add things like infographics, webinars, video marketing, etc. to further enhance the visibility of your app on the web.

The point, however, with all of these activities is simple – you need to aggressively and consistently push your app in front of your target users in as many ways as possible in order to boost your app downloads. Content marketing just happens to be a particularly effective way to accomplish this.

Image Source: Charles Deluvio ???? on Unsplash