What are the stages of marketing for Mobile Apps?

Mobile Application Development has the same steps to follow as Software Development Life Cycle has.  After conceptualization, design, development and publishing of mobile application development, the next step is to market it. Making people aware about the existence of your application, advertising it into different media to get accessible and create an impression in probable user’s mind is an essential phase of App development.

Marketing is necessary to ensure customers find your app from the ocean of similar application or your app surfaces when they search for intended application. Traditional strategies are not very useful when it comes to Marketing Apps as Apps are easy make and maintain by even an individual. When an app gets popular, within no time, similar apps are stacked into different app stores so the level of competition is really very high. With the Midas-touch technology mobile app uses, everyone has queued to leverage the benefits.

Marketing should be well-planned, organized and experts of this field should be engaged to perform related activities.

There are three main marketing phases, each has different role and tactics to be followed.

•         Pre-Launch
•         Launch
•         Post-Launch

Pre-Launch

It’s significant to refine your target audiences precisely along with identifying target markets. Reaching a niche audience—one that will respond positively to your app—may be the most effective way to spark word-of-mouth buzz.

The next step is to decide about your primary objective:  attract maximum number of customers, focus on building customer base of loyal customers or maximize revenue generation.  Your focus will have strict influence on the marketing channel choices. Identifying your main objective will even give you advantage in deciding budget and investment requirements. For instance, If you prefer to keep the app free, for initial period, to kick start the business, you’ll need the funds.

Launch

There is already an ocean of apps and publishers always ready to target the audience with any new idea, which has been proved by research pointing only 2% newcomers in App store and just 3% in Google Play store.

The app store launch should be your main concentration at this point as once your app is in the store, you can apply multiple strategies to make it a massive hit.

Post Launch

Once your app has been launched, the activities related to customer awareness and client engagement should be continually implemented. The early adopters play a really important role in referring to friends and providing good reviews as well as feedback. Word of mouth is the holy grail of marketing as it’s the most affecting promotional activity with no cost.

Reviewed and the rating given by customers should be taken into consideration, issues must be resolved quickly to establish the trust of users in your app. It is strongly recommended that you upload only well-tested app in the store as bugs experienced by users will lower down your rating and even will adversely affect the search visibility.

Keep the app updated with minor bug resolving or feature updates as latest updated apps are more searchable and will boost up your number of visitors as well as revenue generation.

You cannot deny the power of social media channels. Keep your users updated about every in and out of the app, keep an eye on other channels and their marketing strategies and replicate them if they are fruitful.