Did you know that starting a mobile development business is one of the most profitable tech businesses in today’s digital landscape? Also, to thrive in this business, you’ll need to know how to market a mobile app.
According to statistics, the revenue for the mobile app industry is projected to reach about $614.40 billion by 2026. This is a massive growth for the mobile app industry, and your business can be part of it, too.
By knowing how to market a mobile app, you’ll be able to reach a larger audience and improve your chances of monetizing your app.
To help you achieve this, we’ve provided some helpful strategies. In this article, we will cover everything about how mobile app marketing works and the different ways in which you can market your mobile app.
What is Mobile App Marketing?
Marketing a mobile app simply involves promoting your mobile app to reach a larger audience. This is done through placements, advertising, promotions, influencer marketing, email marketing, etc. It is one way to increase downloads, visibility, and user interaction with your app.
How Does Mobile App Marketing Work?
There are various things you’ll need to consider when you want to market your mobile app. Some of these things include:
1. Understanding Your Target Audience
As an app developer who wants to understand how to market a mobile app, you’ll need to know the needs of your target audience, their likes, and behavior before putting your app out there.
This will give you an idea of the best ways you can market your mobile app to appeal to your audience. Doing this will increase your customer satisfaction.
To understand your target audience better, you can distribute customer surveys or marketing research.
However, conducting market research can be time-consuming, so to get past this huddle, use tools like Mention, Attest, or SurveyMonkey.
2. Choosing The Right Marketing Medium
When it comes to choosing the right channels to market your mobile app, you’ll have to consider channels widely accepted by your audience.
Some of these channels include social media marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, or app store optimization.
3. Defining Your Marketing Goal
When developing a mobile app, you’ll need to know what exactly you want to achieve from the app. With a clear goal, you’ll be able to effectively plan and strategize how to market your app.
Your marketing goal can include increasing app downloads, revenue, or user interaction.
4. Implementing A Marketing Campaign Strategy
This process simply involves creating blog posts, advertising, running promotional ads, collaborating with influencers, or sending emails or newsletters.
For a start, you can create blog posts for your app. Because you have a better understanding of the app than any other person.
How To Market A Mobile App: Top 9 Mobile App Marketing Strategies
After knowing the things you need to consider before marketing your mobile app, you’ll need to know how to effectively share it with the public.
This will help you reach a larger audience and increase user satisfaction. Below are different strategies on how to market a mobile app:
1. How To Market A Mobile App Through App Store Optimization
App store optimization, known as ASO for short, is similar to search engine optimization, except that it is used for mobile app marketing.
ASO involves increasing the visibility of a mobile app to help it rank on the search engine of an app store.
Statistics show that about 70% of mobile users make use of search to find new apps, and 65% download the apps after a search. This shows the importance of app store optimization in your mobile app marketing.
However, this process is not easy as it involves constant optimization of your app on the search engine to increase click rates and downloads.
Also, for effective app store optimization, you’ll have to allow app ratings and reviews from users.
This is because app reviews have a way of impacting customer acquisition, with 79% of users constantly checking reviews made on apps before downloading.
A proper ASO strategy depends on certain factors like:
- Proper keyword choice
- App icons and title
- Optimizing for voice search on the app store
- Including screenshots and videos of your mobile app features and benefits
- Choosing the right app category
2. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the most powerful methods for marketing a mobile app. Recent statistics show that the number of social media users around the world grew from 4.72 billion in 2023 to 5.04 billion in 2024.
Following this statistic, trust me, using social media to market your mobile app is definitely a smart move.
As an app developer, you can use social media to create awareness for your app. You can also use it to create a community where users can give feedback on your app.
However, before using this strategy, you’ll need to know the social media channels that your audience interacts with often. It can be TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, or WhatsApp.
3. Influencer Marketing
Imagine this: You’re seated in your room, going through different content on Instagram. Ten minutes into your fun moment, your favorite influencer pops up advertising a product you never had an interest in.
For some reason, you pause and pay attention just because it’s your “Fave.” Trust me, after watching the ad, you might actually want to check out the product because you trust the influencer used.
The use of an influencer to grab your attention is known as influencer marketing. As an app developer, you can sign influencers that are important to your target audience to create a buzz and promote your brand.
Note: You must choose an influencer that picks the interest of your audience to get the desired result. Also, choose influencers whose brand and audience are similar to yours.
4. Retention Campaign
Aside from creating various app marketing strategies to attract new users and generate revenue, it’s important that you retain old users.
This marketing strategy is a very important strategy when thinking about how to market a mobile app. A retention campaign is easier and less expensive to maintain than trying out new strategies to obtain new users.
This is because you have a better understanding of your old users than the new ones. A lack of focus on retention can increase the churn rate, thereby affecting the success of your app. To get the best results, you’ll need to know your most important users and focus on retaining them.
5. Paid Advertising
You can increase your app visibility by running paid ads on different social media channels. However, it’s important to focus on platforms your target audience engages with more. For example, only 69% of millennials love using Facebook, while 69% of Gen-Z engage with TikTok more.
So, if your target audience is mostly millennials, then running ads on Facebook should be your focus.
Additionally, when running paid ads, you have limited time to grab your audience’s attention. Therefore, you’ll need to make your message as clear as possible.
6. Content Marketing
As an app developer, you’ll need a good content marketing strategy to attract your potential users and build trust.
Good content can be infographics, blog posts, articles, eBooks, webinars, or podcasts. But before making use of any of these formats to market your app, you’ll need to figure out your audience’s pain point and provide solutions.
You’ll also need to find out their needs and preferences. Additionally, you can schedule your content by choosing the days and times you’d like to post.
This will improve your consistency and help build trust with your audience.
7. Building a Landing Page
When building an app, this should be one of the strategies on your mind when it concerns how to market a mobile app.
This is because building a landing page for your mobile app is a good way to introduce your app to the world. This is a mobile app marketing strategy that helps users to know more about your app. When building your landing page, you’ll need to:
- Make it visible, appealing, and easy to use
- Do a proper keyword research
- Add screenshots and videos of your app
- Write short but powerful copies
- Add your app link that shows on the Google Play Store or Apple Play Store
- Write a good call-to-action
- Add app ratings or reviews
If you keep to any of the above-listed tips, you’ll create an avenue where users can learn about your app, attracting potential users.
8. Updating Your Mobile App
Some users tend to get tired if they keep having the same experience over and over again when they use an app.
So, to keep your users glued, you’ll have to update your mobile app by adding more features to increase your user interaction. Additionally, work on bugs within your app to reduce complaints and critiques.
9. Email Marketing
Growing your subscriber list is one way you can inform your users of new app updates and features and also send promotional offers. With email marketing, you can increase your retention rate. 64% of brands use email marketing to reach a large audience.
One outstanding benefit of email marketing is that only those who show interest in your app will have access to your content. This makes it easy for you to streamline your content based on your user’s needs and preferences.
Additionally, personalizing your emails and CTAs can help you get the best results from email marketing. Hubspot states that personalized CTAs perform 202% better than basic CTAs. Also, personalized emails are opened 82% more than generic emails.
Final Thoughts on How To Market A Mobile App
There you have it! Amazing tips on how to market a mobile app. Now, you don’t have to bother about your mobile app not getting the required click rate or downloads. These tips are your gateway to financial freedom.
You can make use of more than one of these to market your mobile app as long as you know and understand your target audience.
If you’re looking for ways to make money from your mobile app, you can read our detailed piece on How to make money from mobile app development.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How Do You Market An Idea For An App?
It’s almost impossible to sell a mobile app business idea, but you can make it into a minimum viable product.
2. How Much Does It Cost To Market A Mobile App?
If you want to know how much it will cost to market your mobile app, you’ll need to find out the app development cost.
3. Do App Owners Make Money?
Absolutely! App owners make money from their app business. However, in order to make money from your app business, you’ll have to know the right strategies to use.
4 Comments
I think this is very informative. I’d love to learn how to do ASO optimization and all of that as well.
Thanks a lot for the kind words, Stella. We’ll write more about App Store Optimization soon. To get an update when the article is being published, you can do well to follow us. We are glad to have you here.
The article was educative, but can it be more engaging?
Thanks for going through the article Uche. We’ll definitely look into making our articles more engaging.