Do you struggle to balance your app marketing budget? Are you overwhelmed by all the “best practice” marketing tactics? These are important questions if you’re a small app developer on a budget, because choosing the right tactics can make or break the success of your app.
Now, I love app marketing because I get to see both sides of the product. I see the efforts that go into user acquisition and marketing on the app developer side. I also get to use those apps and “feel” what they’re like.
In a previous article My Go-To User Acquisition Tactics I mentioned a few common approaches to app marketing that included SEO, SEM, WOM to drive downloads.
However, in my experience, I see integrating App Store Optimization (ASO) and Apple Search Ads (ASA) as the best approach to optimizing the user experience as they are considered the effective direct levers for small app publishers.
There are four steps to achieving app growth. The steps are shown in the illustration below.
Successful app growth hinges on collaboration. I am a product-led growth believer. Because all marketing tactics supplement the core product, it is crucial to work closely to see the effect on each phase of the growth journey to ensure the product’s core value is communicated via the marketing tactics. Good collaboration empowers me to understand what features are coming in the next release, what bugs were fixed, what part of the user journey has room for improvement, and identify and manage critical reviews in the storefront.
ASO and ASA may be the initial steps to acquiring the users, but the key growth driver is a healthy product that turns the users into happy users that create stickiness. It relies heavily on the product to test, optimize and implement new features or experiences to achieve this. In addition, I recommend implementing an app messaging and analytics tool in the early phase that enables product marketers to run engagement and retention campaigns. The collaboration flow is the product team works on solving the user’s pain point, and the product marketer creates the message and reflects it on the app metadata. Then the product team can use the set of metadata to wrap into the build and submit it for review.
I start by understanding the user journey to prepare product metadata properly.
What search terms are they using in the app store? What problems do they want to solve?
I focus on keyword research during this phase. This aims to identify what keywords align with the users’ search intent and what the app provides benefits to the users. Try not to mix up the features and the benefits. The user’s search intent is searching for a solution for the problem, and ASO’s job is to provide bread crumbs that help the store’s algorithm determine if the app fits users’ search.
I prefer using the use case and the user persona to understand the user’s psychology, brainstorm keywords, and verify them through the ASO tools. There are many helpful ASO tools like AppRadar, and AppTweak with handy features to help you find out more keywords that your competitors use a lot and the level of the competition.
We now have: