Growth-Hacks To Increase Your App Discovery & Downloads

With more than 3.1 million applications available on the App Store, the best way to secure your investment is by effective growth hacks and campaigns. Even a well built, working smartphone app will languish deep inside the App Store without a successful strategy. 

In this blog, you will get to know about the strategies to increase your app’s visibility and increase app downloads.

Growth hacking for mobile app discovery

1. Run Influencer Campaign

Traditional paid marketing would still achieve low conversion rates because customers no longer trust advertisers. Even many users no longer see advertisements due to the widespread use of ad blockers. This is one of the reasons why influencer marketing is so successful right now.

Influencer marketing works because consumers trust influencers. Whenever any consumer is skeptical about the advertisements, they trust the influencers they follow. An endorsement from an influencer is a powerful way to drive new users and conversions to your app. You have to find out the influencers who are popular in your industry or domain.

2. Utilize Snapchat Geofilter

A Snapchat geofilter is an effective tool for promoting your business. Anyone on Snapchat in your preferred location can use your Geofilter on their Snapchat photos and videos, which ensures you’ll reach a huge audience without putting in much work.

Similarly, a geofilter can be prepared for your mobile app. You can make personalised geofilters and lenses tailored to public events or other specific locations using Snapchat’s public geofilter interface which are cheap and available on-demand, practically anywhere in the world. Since users can send a Geofilter to everyone, regardless of their venue, it can spread brand recognition to users both within and outside your chosen location. It ultimately helps in spreading awareness about your product or app. 

3. Get Your App Reviewed & Mentioned In Blogs

When you get closer to the launch date, try to get mentions from a variety of platforms, such as forums, blogs, directories, discovery platforms, publishing channels. Getting your app reviewed by top blogs will not only help to improve the app, but they will also increase awareness and increase the number of followers. 

Blogging helps clarify more about the app, its features and how a user can use the app instead of a competitors’ app. It’s a valuable content creation platform that draws consumers and turns them into loyal users.

4. Guest Post On Blogs With Heavy Traffic

Guest blogging isn’t always about getting a link. The only reason you can guest post on another website is for the referral traffic.

A guest post on a reputable website can also rate well, resulting in a constant stream of free traffic to the content of your app. Leaving a link in there for a visitor to click on it and get transferred to the app page just depends on the type of content you have shared and the kind of attention it is drawing towards your app. 

5. Distribution on Social Media

It’s important to market the app on social media platforms. You would want to advertise your app on LinkedIn or Twitter if your target audience includes companies or industry professionals. Some customers can also be found on Facebook and Instagram.

Building a community of your users by engaging them on social media platforms via live videos or contests can be a good way of persuading them to download your app. 

If the users like your posts and share them within their inner circle or across their social network, they can be rewarded with promo codes, or vouchers as well.

6. Cross-Promotion

Nothing is better than promoting your app in your own ecosystem! This way you can promote your app without spending heavily and the chances of getting more visibility are very high. If you have another app or webpage for another app, use them to market your latest one. This aids in the promotion of the app through other similar apps. Let’s take an example if you have a cricket fantasy app, then you can promote it in a live cricket score/streaming app.

7. Release A Lite Version

Build a lite version of your app for users to check out. This way the people who refrain from downloading heavy apps or games can download the lite version to try it out. No doubt it is a shorter app version, but can be ad-supported.

8. Create A Landing Page

Your app could be lost among the competitors if you don’t market it properly. App landing pages are an integral aspect of app marketing strategies because they can help you to attract and retain potential users. You can draw new visitors to your app and can entice them by building a beautiful app landing page.

One of the main advantages of creating a dedicated app page is that you can use retargeting to reach users who have visited the site but not yet committed to a download. 

9. App Store Optimization

Without a doubt, App Store Optimization is one of the most important elements to getting prospective users to discover your app. Similar to SEO, App Store Optimization works on simply improving your App Store listing to increase organic discoverability. Some key elements to focus on while optimizing your app store are:

• Use as many relevant keywords as possible. But don’t fall prey to keyword stuffing!
• Having a detailed description, along with information about recent updates, of your app
• Sharing screenshots and demo videos of your app
• Proper categorisation of your app is important

10. Publicize Your App – Prepare a kit for press release

Often overlooked, Press Releases still work their magic when it comes to creating a buzz. Apart from having several SEO benefits, a well-articulated press release covered by a leading publication house increases your credibility and brand presence. While creating a press release kit, have the following information in place:

• Your story – how you created the app, what makes it unique etc.
• Key facts about your organisation
• High resolution images of your logo, app screenshots
• Product announcements
• Names of key people involved in developing the app
• Awards and recognitions that your app has garnered

 11. Build An Online Presence

The web is generally the first place people search for solutions to their problems. No matter what they are looking for – the best holiday destination in the monsoons or how to invest in crypto, if you don’t have a web presence, you are missing out on a huge chunk of your audience. By creating a website and blog, and by implementing best SEO practices, you can effectively create awareness about your app.  And don’t forget to incorporate the most efficient form of digital marketing out there – email marketing! By collecting subscriber data through your website, you can send across emails and newsletters that inform prospective users about your app (and also its recent updates, if any).  

Growth hacks to increase app downloads

1. Incentives For App Downloads 

Customers can download your app for a variety of reasons. They will, of course, reap the benefit from the app’s features, but only after they begin to use it. 

Hence, users can be offered incentives, coupons, gift cards, or trial service. These rewards will also encourage user interaction & engagement as well, as it persuades them to return to the app. This is a tried-and-true method for attracting a large number of people to your app & an effective technique for expanding your app’s user base.

2. Ask for Sign Ups

For building a decent archive of contacts, asking for signups is the most effective hack as it serves as a tracker for managing and recognising app users. You can also use this database to cross-sell and upsell the product. In order to encourage the users to sign up, make sure the details requested on the signup page are not excessively long.

3. Proper Redirecting To Download

People find it very irritating when diverted to the download page without their knowledge or consent, so make sure the advertisements do not have a negative impact on them. Ensure that every piece of your content or advertisement for the product directs users to an app store to use it.  This can be done in a variety of ways depending on the landing page. 

4. Include a reward referral program 

Many businesses use referral programs to add new users to their fold. It also helps in maintaining the app’s popularity and making it capture the market off page. This way you let existing users do it for you instead of you pushing your incentives for online app downloads. Famous apps like Uber achieved this by providing customers with discounts when they refer the app to their peers. Both the users are given massive discounts with a popular promotional code.

5. Create A Demo Video

Reading a long description or looking at a few app screenshots isn’t enough to make anyone appreciate all of the app’s features. Creating a demo video is another way to promote the app and an effective strategy for hacking apps download.

Try to make the video a storytelling experience in order to make it as personal to users as possible. Work on making a 30-second video that explains what, how, and why the app works. Put a special focus on functionality and the product’s most popular features. Share your video on your website and social media accounts, and don’t forget to add it to your app store page once it’s done.

6. Try To Generate Positive Reviews

If it’s about movies, shows, or apps, people’s buying habits are heavily influenced by the views of others. In the case of games, ratings and feedback have an impact on how visible they are in app store search results and how likely they are to be included.

To give your app the rating boost you’ll need more positive reviews from your users. App ratings don’t all appear on their own, and you shouldn’t expect a flood of users to return to the app store on their own to leave a comment for your app. You might just have to ask for it. 

When new visitors read good or positive reviews about an app. There is a 60% higher chance that they will download the app. Therefore, it is essential to pull all your focus towards reducing the negative reviews.

7. Well-Designed and User-Friendly

Aim to improve the app features, interface and design! Always keep the following three major points in mind when you decide to create a smartphone app:

 

1) Create the app in such a way that it can run on nearly any mobile device, 

2) make it as user-friendly as possible for your users, and 

3) Keep the interface simple. 

The war of apps is fought on a user basis, if you create an amazing app and keep using user feedback to consistently improve it, the audience will love it. Try focusing on brilliant design which is loved by the audience.

 

8. Don’t Ignore In-app Tracking

You can get a greater understanding of the users’ actions and desires by using in-app monitoring. The information you gather from your existing customers will help you improve and market your product better. You can monitor at what certain point the app is being uninstalled, for how much and for how long does the user login per day, and are there any functions that seem to be used more often than others? This way, you can find out the issues within the app and can quickly resolve them. 

9. Create a well-designed app icon

Your app icon is the first thing users see on the app store. As they scroll through the store, your app icon should be enticing enough to make them pause and check out your app details. However, in the quest to make an impressive app icon, don’t go overboard and make it complicated. Your app icon should be as candid and as simple as possible and should convey the identity of your brand and the functionality of your app.

10. Consider Ad Retargeting

As you know, ad retargeting is the act of advertising to the people who have already visited your website or have interacted with your app in the past. Here are a few benefits of ad retargeting:

• It is a great tool for nurturing brand awareness.
• Ad retargeting has a significantly better conversion rate than the initial marketing messages and communications.  
• Retargeting helps you create customized messages that talk to the prospective user’s needs and expectations.
• It helps with not just acquiring new users but also piquing the interest of past users.

11. Develop Features That Are Only Available On The App

Having a web presence is all well and good, but your end goal here is to get people to download your app isn’t it? This is where having a few app-only features will come in handy. An excellent example of this is Zomato. You can do everything on Zomato’s website – search for restaurants, check out the ratings and reviews, go through their menu and even book a table. But the minute you try to order food for delivery, a message pops up that states “online ordering is only supported on the mobile app”. It also has a clear CTA that asks people to download the app. 

 

Another example is that of the digital lending company Navi. If you check out their website, you will see that a lot of information is available. But, if you wish to make any transactions, the site requests you to download their app. 

To Sum up

By following these hacks you can make sure your app is the first thing people look for. To place your brand in front of the pack and increase mobile app downloads you can fix targets and constantly monitor your outcomes to particular metrics so you can figure out what works and what doesn’t with your app. Your app’s install rates and users’ lifetime value will always be driven by iterations.