From 0 to 1, how to plan your own promotion channels?

As a newbie in the operation circle, I still don’t know what p1, p2, and p3 are. It doesn’t matter. Today I will tell you how to build your own promotion channels step by step starting from scratch.

When the company's products were handed over to him, the first thing he did was to put them on the app market.

From the author's experience in operating products, in addition to other streaming media and the product's own fission methods, new user traffic from the application market accounts for 50%. It can be said that for most APP products on the market, more than half of the traffic comes from the application market.

Let’s analyze from this perspective how operations and promotion personnel should start planning the application market.

1. Preliminary preparations for uploading to the application market

The Android Market and Apple App Store are like the two legs supporting the traffic pool, neither of which can be missing.

However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to launch products in the Apple market. Products with severe homogeneity are currently very likely to be identified as counterfeit products and be rejected . However, the overall quality and willingness to pay of Apple users are higher, and the contribution value of a single user will be greater. Therefore, if you can enter the Apple market, try to enter the Apple market .

The Android market is mainly divided into manufacturers' app stores and third-party app stores . You can take a quick look at the traffic of each app market based on Analysys data. As shown below:

Before submitting to the application market, we need to prepare some relevant information . Currently, the requirements of national regulatory authorities for APPs are getting higher and higher. In addition to providing the required business license, software copyright certificate, legal person information, and website registration information, most application markets now also have to submit a security assessment report.

We can apply for software copyright certification directly through a third party on Alibaba Cloud, and of course fees must be paid. We need to prepare a detailed introduction of the APP, a user manual, and about 30 pages of development code. Just fill in the application form template provided by the third party and submit it. Generally, if the form is filled out correctly, the certificate can be issued in about 2 months . Of course, you can pay more for expedited processing, and there will be no problem in getting the certificate within three to five days.

Security assessment reports are mandatory to submit in the app market in the second half of 2018, but the review is not very strict at the moment. You can submit your own product information according to the instructions on the app market, which mainly includes instructions on preventing leakage of user privacy information and whether the product complies with relevant national laws and regulations.

Website filing mainly includes ICP filing , which can be done independently through the official filing website online or through the local telecommunications department.

The purpose of website registration is to prevent illegal website operations on the Internet and combat the spread of harmful Internet information. If a website is not registered, it is likely to be investigated and shut down. You can log in to the online work platform of the Ministry of Information Industry and enter the "Registration Application" module in the "Website Registration" system.

In the columns of the "Application for Registration of Commercial Website", fill in the website's name, domain name, IP address, management person in charge, ISP provider, server location, contact information and other relevant information. Then submit it.

After the relevant information is prepared, you can go to the open platform to register an account and submit your own APP . This is relatively simple and will not be elaborated.

Of course, before submitting, be sure to ask the technical department to reinforce it. Because the application does not have any security protection, it is extremely easy to be implanted with viruses, replaced with ads, tampered with payment channels, phished, hijacked information, etc. , which seriously infringes on the interests of developers. Developers can use the official hardening solutions of various open platforms to protect their applications, preventing them from being decompiled, debugged, pirated, cracked, repackaged, and other threats after distribution, thus safeguarding the interests of developers.

2. Increase the coverage of keywords related to the app market

Opening the app market, we can see that the homepages of major app markets have various columns: premium topic recommendations, app rankings, highlight apps, etc.

Taking into account user behavior habits, most users open the app market with a strong purpose, that is, the most common behavior of users is searching. Therefore, by increasing the coverage and ranking of your APP-related keywords, your products can be more exposed.

So how do you improve your keyword coverage and ranking?

Each application market has its own characteristics, that is, its own algorithm mechanism. Of course, this is not public and changes frequently. It is difficult to spy on it, and you need to constantly summarize and learn in practice. However, it is basically related to the following factors.

The rules of each app market are different and are not static. Take App Store for example, there used to be an option to add keywords, but now it’s gone. Previously, the number of keywords in Xiaomi market was limited to 100, but now the number of keywords is limited to 10... This requires operators to understand the rules of the application market and make reasonable adjustments based on changes to optimize the keyword ranking of their own APP in the market.

As for how to optimize, it varies from product to product.

You can optimize one by one based on the controllable factors in the above figure. However , the weights of factors vary in each market . For example, the main title, subtitle, app description, icon, app screenshots, 100 characters, comments, average daily downloads, etc. of the iOS product name will affect the keyword ranking. Of course, there is also the weight of the hidden package . The weight of this so-called package is invisible and intangible, but we usually judge it based on the account's historical penalties, the package's update rate, and historical warnings/penalties.

What’s more important is that keywords also have weights , such as the position of the keyword (in the main title, sub-title, or 100 characters, whether it is at the front, whether commas are added, whether it appears repeatedly, the number of times it appears in the comments, etc.).

Of course, the most important thing is the number of people who download your APP after the keyword is searched, which involves the skills of your introduction copy that guides the download. However, it can also be achieved through some means of inflating the volume, but this must be done with extreme caution and is not recommended. Because the consequences are serious.

What about App Store?

The weight of hot words is very high. If the keyword settings and application descriptions are not optimized normally, the ranking mainly depends on the weight of the application, such as an increase in downloads, an increase in positive reviews, multiple participations in App Store market activities, improved application rankings, etc. The market will provide relevant support based on the activity of the application.

In addition, the adjustment of keywords by the application market will also affect the keyword ranking of the application (in fact, many markets have recently imposed traffic restrictions on some gray words). In addition, by placing App Store ads, apps can be frequently displayed at the front , which will actually indirectly affect the app rankings.

I will not give examples of other markets one by one, as they are basically the same. We can use third-party tools, and after making obvious adjustments, pay attention to the changes in the keywords of our own APP over a period of time to test our own guesses about the market.

Take version updates as an example. With each version update, there is a high probability that the APP traffic will increase significantly . If you are lucky, it is possible that the traffic will double. If you don't update for a long time and still want to maintain traffic growth, it is basically impossible . Our product was directly removed from the shelves because vivo had not updated the two versions.

3. How to increase the volume after the APP is launched

After the application market is laid out, there will be some natural volume to a greater or lesser extent, which is the result of your own keyword layout. However, this will definitely not meet the assessment KPI, and we need to continue to optimize. Of course, if you have a promotion budget, then go ahead and place ads in the app market . It is direct and effective. The most important thing is cost saving.

Each app market has a payment channel, including various models such as cpc, cpa, cpd, etc. The boutique, ranking, classification and other columns on the market homepage can be purchased. Of course, the investment must be considered in terms of the company's overall ROI. Take a list as an example. The investment can be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a day, which is indeed a considerable expense for small developers.

If there is no investment in the early stage, you can look for some free cooperation, such as application launch, market special activities, some card and coupon discount releases, etc. , and then make timely adjustments after accumulating a certain amount of downloads.

There is a Matthew effect in everything, and this also applies to the application market. With a certain amount of downloads, the app will have a weighted rating and good reviews...the market will slowly allocate more traffic to you.

But the same thing comes back. If you have investment and budget in the early stage, then spend money to buy traffic unswervingly. In the face of absolute funds, any skills seem so useless (people open an app store to make money, right?). Once the purchased traffic reaches a certain level, and the above-mentioned key factors are optimized, subsequent maintenance will be relatively easy.

Every app developer hopes that their app will become a hit as soon as it goes online. However, resources are limited after all. How to stand out from the millions of developers requires not only technology and persistence, but sometimes also a little bit of luck!

I hope everyone gains something from it!

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After the APP is successfully launched, the next top priority is to promote it and acquire users! If you want to know how to promote an APP effectively, you can directly scan the QR code to add staff and get answers online. There are also professional optimizers who can help you analyze how to deal with various problems in APP promotion.

Author: Tong Liyu

Source: Tongliyu