3 unique marketing strategies to boost your app’s downloads entrepreneur how earn by blogging blog

Hi everyone!

My name is Josh, I run Appsposure, an app marketing blog/agency.

In this post, I’m going to be breaking down 3 powerful ways to get your app more downloads.

I’ve seen a lot of people in here talking about creating apps so I figured some of you would appreciate this. Even if you're not in the app industry, I’m sure you’ll still learn a thing or two you can apply to your business.

These 3 tactics I mentioned in a post which features another 100 tactics to market an app (and an infographic), check it out here.

Although I touch on these strategies in my post, rest assured that this is exclusive content written for redditors only. I made this for you!

1. How to get coverage by reviewers and blogs

Getting your newly released app covered by reviewers and journalists is hard.

It can also be the push your app needs before going mainstream and finding millions of users.

Like any other strategy I’ll mention, make sure you’re app is actually good before starting to promote. If you’re app sucks, no amount of pitching prowess will make up for it.

Create a press kit

Before you do any outreach, you’ll want to make sure you have a press kit on hand.

This way, whoever you're reaching out to has all the tools they need to publish a review from the first email. Make it as easy for them to review your app as possible or they might skip it.

A few things to include:

• The name of your app as it is spelled on the app store

• Screenshots of the app in action

• What makes your app different

• A little about you (if you have an interesting backstory about how you created the app, be sure to share it!)

This document was written by a real app reviewer and includes everything they look for in a press kit along with a sample pitch.

Find the reviewer/journalist’s name

Having a first name you can address your emails to will help a lot with getting reviewers to notice you.

Read through the blog and find the reviewers name before reaching out.

Since most people pitching to app reviewers don't take this step, you'll stand out right off the bat.

Make sure you're pitching to relevant blogs

The #1 reason app review request get rejected is because the app is not a good fit for the site’s audience.

This means you’ll need to do your research before reaching out. Try and tailor your pitch to the types of apps the readers will enjoy.

Don’t pitch games to productivity sites and vice versa.

2. Use a paid ads burst campaign to hit the top charts in your category

When most people making apps hear “burst campaign”, they think “sounds expensive”.

Make no mistake; it often is.

But not as expensive as you’d expect.

Most people who think about burst campaigns think about hitting the top #25 across all apps. If you can spend over $100k per day, be my guest.

I’ve talked to guys spending over $25k per day and are barely cracking the top 250 overall apps (their ads were much more targeted and expensive than the standard burst campaign, though).

If don’t have that kind of money to burn, you’ll need to target less competitive categories.

For example, you can break into the top 200 for free apps in a category like “action games” for around 1000-2000 installs per day. At $2 per install with Facebook ads, you’re looking at $2000-4000 per day to launch your app into the top charts.

Still too expensive?

Try a different, even less competitive category.

For around 200-300 install per day you can break into the top 200 of the “music games” category in the U.S.

Still too expensive?

Try a different country.

If you target Canada for example, you can get the same results for roughly 10% of the downloads.

If you localize and target another non English country like Spain, you can hit the top for even less.

The reason this strategy works is because the app store algorithms are heavily weighted on how many downloads an app gets in a short period of time. The more downloads, the higher the ranking.

What happens when your app breaks into the top charts? One of two things depending on how good it is and how much people like it.

Best case scenario: your app is well received and lots of people download it from seeing it in the top charts. They then use it, like it, and tell their friends to download it.

If this happens, your app can maintain its position and even climb higher in the charts off of purely organic downloads.

Worst case: the app doesn’t get enough organic downloads and loses its rank as soon as you stop the paid campaign.

Because of the high risk/reward on burst campaigns, I wouldn’t recommend it until you know your app is ready and monetizes well.

If you’re LTV (lifetime value) of a user is $.01 and you spend $2 per install, you’ll need 200x organic users to make it worthwhile. Probably not going to happen unless your app has insane potential to go viral.

If you’re making $.50 per user, you’ll only need 4x which is much more doable.

If your app only makes $.10 per user but each user shares it with 5 other people, you’re in business.

How do you know how many users are needed to break into the top charts for your category?

Other than the benchmarks I gave you, you’ll need to test for yourself.

Here’s how I would recommend doing it:

1. Make sure your monetization strategy is on point and know what your LTV per user is.

2. Launch a campaign in a smaller market like Canada using Facebook Ads.

Let it run for around a week with a small volume ($10-50 per day) and use this time to fine tune your ads and audience targeting.

When you’re happy with the CPI (cost per install) you’re seeing, ramp it up to around $200-500 per day and see how high you rank in the charts.

Keep up the campaign for a week or so to make sure you're in the charts for a little while before stopping it.

From there, measure your results, listen to feedback, and make changes as needed before taking on the US store.

For new and shareable apps, the burst campaign can often kickstart your app much quicker than other forms of marketing.

3. Use influencer marketing to cheaply acquire users

With this strategy, you’ll be using influencers shoutouts on social media (Instagram in particular) to quickly drive downloads to your app.

Like with a burst campaign, it’s only as expensive as you make it.

You don’t need to be targeting people with millions of followers; you can get great results with a much smaller budget.

The key to making an influencer campaign work is to make sure you're tracking your CPI across all promoters. If done right, you should be able to get downloads for even cheaper than from paid ads.

For example, you pay $200 for an instagram shoutout to 100,000 people and 400 people end up downloading, your CPI is $0.5.

Consider Facebook Ads usually costs between $1-5 per install, 50 cents is a great deal!

If you think about it, you can swap out influencer promotions with paid ads to run your burst campaigns.

The amount you’ll be paying depends on how many followers they have and how engaged they are. This calculator from Influencer Marketing Hub lets you estimate how much a shoutout will cost.

How do you track your CPI? There are a few different ways.

1. Use Bitly to create and track separate links for each shout out. This will let you know how many people click each link.

2. Use a service like AppsFlyer to track link clicks. This will let you track exactly how many users click each link and even how much money they end up spending in the game.

AppsFlyer is more accurate but also more expensive and will require SDK integration.

How do you find influencers?

The best way to find influencers will be to find and reach out to them manually. Think about what you target audience likes and reach out to influencers who cater to their interests.

Many influencers will have their contact info in their bio which you can then use to email them.

You can also try sites like Shoutcart and Buy Sell Shoutouts. These sites let you browse promoters by how many followers they have and how much they charge per shoutout.

This case study and shows how one guy pulled in thousands of downloads while spending less than $.10 per install and this post goes into more depth on running a campaign.

Hope these help!

TL;DR

1. Do your research before pitching app reviewers and make sure you have a press kit created beforehand.
2. Use paid downloads to quickly drive your app to the top of the charts for even more exposure.
3. Use influencer marketing to get cheap installs with Instagram shoutouts.

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