You’ve got the app — now do what any sensible business would do. By Phil Talbot – go to guy | mobile ordering | saavi So you’ve finally jumped on the bandwagon and got your business (online retail, restaurant, service, etc) its very own app. Your app is now in the app store with its pretty icon, screenshots and great app description. And now you’re waiting for that much heard of deluge of app-induced customers. Except that there’s only a trickle. What went wrong? You might only be relying on the app store to promote your app. Don’t. Since there are literally hundreds of thousands of apps competing for customers’ attention in any of the major app stores (iOS and Android), relying on the app store page alone is not enough to effectively promote your app. There’s still a lot of work to do. Apps are applications. Like other forms of downloadable media (music or video) they should be marketed as such. Assuming the app is as sexy as a great piece of music or video, what are the things that you can do to promote your app (and hence your business)? Let’s start with the free ones first: Sources of Free Traffic (Inbound Marketing Techniques) • SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)/App Store Optimisation (ASO) • URL typos/Type-In traffic • eMail • Sharing Research documents/White Papers/Infographics • Social Networking/Word of Mouth • Webinars/Podcasting • Forums/Q+A sites/Comment Marketing • Direct/Referring Links • Social Bookmarking • Video Marketing • Blog/Article/News/Media/PR sharing Then there are the paid traffic sources: Paid Traffic Sources • Print Media: Newspaper/Magazine ads • Broadcast Media: Radio/TV ads • Pay Per Click or Cost Per Click (PPC/CPC) ads (Google AdWords, Bing, Yahoo!, Facebook, Youtube Video ads and pages) • Hits/Traffic site listings • Paid text links (can also be through charity donation) in web sites • Paid blog/review sites • eMail Newsletter ads More Hard Work Assuming you already have some of these inbound marketing tactics in place, the next question to answer is how much does it cost to acquire a customer through your app (cost of customer acquisition or CoCA — including the app marketing tactics you chose) and how much is the estimated value can you get per customer acquired (customer lifetime value or LTV). There used to be no way to measure these parameters for apps. Now, some services (like Tapstream allow you to add a tracking code to your apps that allows you to find out which marketing tactic contributed to the downloading and installation of your app. Of course, one of the biggest contributing factors to a successful app is the choice of app developer. Getting a very expensive app developer only to get a few more customers is not the way to go. Nowadays, there are companies like SAAVI that allow you to build beautiful, functional apps that are affordable and customisable. Take advantage of the trending affordability in business apps. Conclusion: Great looking and functional apps — say, mobile ordering apps for your restaurant — are not a cure-all. You’ll still need to promote your app the way you promote your business in order to get more customers. If you don’t have the time to promote your app or business, get someone else to do it but by all means do it.
About Author- Phil Talbot is founder of Saavi.com.au the Mobile Ordering specialists and the resident expert in mobile ordering systems. you can follow Saavi on Facebook.