How to promote a newly launched App? A complete guide to starting an app promotion

In recent years, mobile Internet has been at the top of the wave, and the speed of industry development is much faster than the speed of "talent" cultivation. Startup companies are growing wildly like mushrooms after a spring rain. The biggest challenge faced by almost all Internet companies is not product-related, but traffic-related. How to develop a qualified App promotion and what basic knowledge do you need to master? Today I will review some of the knowledge I have mastered. This article mainly talks about channels and the packaging of channels.

1. Channels

Most experienced people are reluctant to say more about some things about channels. The main reasons are, on the one hand, effective experience is gained through expensive trial and error, and on the other hand, channel experience cannot be completely copied and reused. The same gameplay but different products may bring about vastly different results. But we can provide some cases and popularize basic knowledge, and use them as reference and reflection for the promotion of our own products.

In the past two years, everyone has focused on promoting APPs in the application market , but in recent years, the prices have risen sharply. The top CPT at that time was 2K a day, but now it has reached 20,000. Now there is almost no CPA settlement, and CPD and CPT are the main ones. CPD bidding is also rising rapidly, from a few cents before to a few yuan or even more than ten yuan now. Although channel promotion is becoming increasingly difficult, the role and influence of the application market as the traffic entrance of APP cannot be ignored.

But whether it is a third-party market or a mobile phone manufacturer market (including iOS and Android mobile phone manufacturers), there is only one way to play in the application market: ranking and display. The main factor affecting ranking and display (besides the editor's subjective recommendation) is that each system has an automatic algorithm, and the algorithm is mainly based on three aspects: download volume, comments, and recommended star rating.

2. Android

Currently, there are more than 300 app stores in China. Although each store has a different way of playing, each has its own target group and different scale. A brief evaluation:

1. Application Market

● Third-party app stores

Including (360, App Store , Baidu, Wandoujia , Anzhi, PP Assistant Android version, Sogou Mobile Market, Mumayi, App Store , nduo, Jifeng, Suning App Store, etc.)

Since third-party app stores entered the market early, they enjoyed the dividends of the mobile Internet era earlier. But from a long-term perspective, although third-party app stores are currently the main source of traffic, with the layout of major giants in mobile phone hardware, the strong rise of mobile phone manufacturers and the realization of the dividends in this area, since last year, most mobile phones will be equipped with their own operating systems and their own app stores, so the decline in the share of third-party app stores is foreseeable. Perhaps in no more than two years, except for a few third-party app store channels with abundant resources and early layout, all other third-party app store channels will find it difficult to survive. There is a feeling that things that come together for a long time will eventually separate, and things that separate for a long time will eventually come together.

● Mobile phone manufacturers come with their own app stores

(Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO, Meizu, Lenovo, Coolpad, VIVO, Gionee, etc. Almost all manufacturers have started to develop their own application markets and their own ROMs. As long as they are equipped with systems such as Xiaomi MIUI, Huawei EMUI, and Meizu FLYME, the scale of such application stores is almost considerable. The annual shipments of these manufacturers are in the tens of millions. After these manufacturers are familiar with these gameplays, they all eat the traffic of third-party application stores. This is part of the reason why 360 cooperates with Coolpad.)

● OS system

This category includes various flashing channels. As well as various stores created through flashing channels. BAT companies once boasted that they wanted to develop OS, but Baidu announced its withdrawal from the competition on March 11. Now that Alibaba Cloud OS has just been released, Tencent OS has also cooperated with many mobile phone manufacturers and some hardware cooperation. As for the app stores of other flashing channels. You know the cold and the warm..

● Operator channels

China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, for these types of channels, I just want to say that a good hand of cards has been ruined. It takes a long time for an APP to be reviewed and launched online, and the in-app experience is far inferior to that of other markets. Although the user base is very large, maybe some apps can perform well. Wish you good, not black.

2. Market

The first step to getting started without any brains means that when you don’t understand every app store, the first thing you need to do is to lay the channels and go online. This is the most basic job, but many friends don’t do it well. I found that many products were only uploaded to a few mainstream markets, and there was no package upload or maintenance in other markets. They just waited for the application market to capture the package. The consequence of being caught is that on the one hand, you cannot monitor the existing channels well, and on the other hand, you cannot enjoy the resources that the channels may provide. Not to mention analyzing your own user attributes and targeting a specific market based on these user attributes.

3. Market gameplay

After laying out the channels and going online, we should always pay attention to the curve of each market. According to the gameplay of each channel, the mainstream population of the channel, and the user population that matches your own products, you can make specific user portraits for some markets based on your own experience, and select several markets that are suitable for your own products to carry out in-depth cultivation.

For example, in a market like OPPO, we can analyze it from the sales data of APP and mobile phones. The users in this market have high consumption levels and like games , music, social networking and other characteristics. If your product belongs to this category, then you can perform various optimization operations for this market. After all, you cannot optimize all application markets. If you identify a market with a particularly large number of your targeted users, you can create a curve for market changes. This curve will be helpful for your future activities, launches , and special CPD/T placements.

4. General Strategies

● All mainstream and large-scale market bases are launched online, packaged, and labeled as official and genuine.
● Launch event (at least once a month.)
● Exchange traffic, establish long-term cooperation with other partners, and obtain in-app recommendations through personal relationships (exchange traffic and recommendation resources)
● Special topics (the channel will have corresponding special activities every day of every month, and organize corresponding special activities according to its own brand characteristics.) Monitor the comments in the application market and conduct timely public relations for negative reviews.

Recommend two tools , which are essential for promoters:

http://jk.coolchuan.com/Coolchuan provides one-click uploading services to various application markets. The background can also monitor the download volume of some competitors' other channels. It is a must-have.
http://rank.aiyingli.com/ Aiyingli’s monitoring and analysis platform specializes in analyzing the ranking data of major domestic application market stores.

3. iOS

Relatively speaking, the gameplay available in the domestic iOS market is far less than that in the Android market. But all methods are also based on ranking and display. The main places where iOS can be packaged include:

1. Display of APP’s own ranking

Currently, the list can display 150 products. Some users will search directly from the list, and some CPs will improve their ranking by brushing the list . However, compared with the price and effect in the previous six months, the cost performance is too low. Apple has released a hot search list again. As the saying goes, where there is a list, there is a world of its own. However, this area has been contracted by online money-making platforms such as Qianka, App Tester, and Mizhuan.

2. Optimized display of APP search keywords regarding ASO

ASO (Apple Store Search Keyword Optimization) is a gameplay method that most CPs can currently operate on the iOS platform. Players who are good at it can improve their display and ranking, increase exposure, and guide users to download through effective Apple Store search engine optimization.

The general approach is to start with the relevant attributes of your own product, including the keywords of the main title and subtitle, and the keywords in Keywords for optimization (the main rule is app name > app keywords > app description > in-app purchase name or description). There are two ways to optimize here: paid and free. The paid approach is to find the online earning platforms mentioned above to do customized optimization plans, while the free approach requires you to be patient and monitor and think more. Provides 5 monitoring tools for the APP STORE platform, which are tools that promoters must master.

https://www.appannie.com/ App Annie is the earliest and best statistical platform.
http://ann9.com/ Application Radar, a professional APP ranking history tracking software, can also analyze the real-time ranking of the list. Now it seems to provide some ASO services.
http://www.appvf.com/ Application Breeze, newly released. It also monitors and tracks data in real time, including hot search lists.
http://tools.appying.com/ It is produced by appying, and uses Apple data to give weighted ratings to each App. It is awesome.
http://www.asou.com/ is from Asou. It is very helpful for ASO to find keywords for itself and its competitors.

3. Regarding the impact of comments on downloads

Comments are often overlooked by many companies but are very important, mainly reflected in:

● From the perspective of product packaging, iOS positive reviews are the same as Taobao seller positive reviews. The number and content of positive reviews affect the conversion rate of users seeing your app. Let me ask you, under the same circumstances, would users be willing to download an app that few people have commented on or an app that has received five-star reviews from thousands or tens of thousands of people?
● Positive reviews have an impact on ASO weight. For example, if there is a player APP and the word "player" is mentioned frequently in the positive reviews, it is possible to improve the ranking of the user's search for the keyword "player".

However, there are certain risks in finding people to give good reviews, so the main way to give good reviews currently is that developers use the Apple phones of their colleagues in their respective teams to give good reviews to other apps, exchanging them on a 1:1 basis and taking screenshots and sending them to each other.

For example, if your team has 10 Apple devices, and you exchange 10 positive reviews with 5 apps a day, you can get 50 positive reviews a day, 250 reviews for 5 working days a week, and 1,000 reviews a month. Of course, this is hard work for colleagues who are Apple employees in the company, so they can give suggestions to the boss, and employees can exchange for good reviews, and they will be given 3 RMB for each review, haha.

4. Super Advertising Platform

After the application market entrance, the super advertising platform is now the mainstream paid promotion channel. Most of the CP budget this year is invested here. These mainly include Tencent Guangdiantong , Sina Fanstong , Sina Fuyi, Toutiao, and Baidu Mobile SEM.

To sum up, the main advantages of this type of super advertising platform are a large user base, high activity, and the ability to bring in effective traffic through precise delivery. The disadvantages are unstable costs, high optimization difficulty, and subtle differences in delivery techniques for each channel. But the end result is the same. The essence of promotion is to obtain the maximum effective traffic and to guide the effective traffic to achieve the highest conversion through product marketing packaging. Therefore, the solution to the problem starts with the delivery techniques to obtain maximum traffic and the copywriting design to improve the traffic conversion rate. You need to make users want to click on your link when they see it.

Promotion is not a simple copy and reproduction, it can only be promoted by combining innovations based on past experience and current trends. Innovation is as difficult as going from 0 to 1. The faster the Internet develops, the more difficult it is to do business. The iteration is too rapid. The effective promotion methods from a year ago, oh no, three months ago may not bring the same traffic today. Experience can rarely be reused on the same product.

The first part is finished. It was rather boring and full of pure theory. It mainly analyzed from the perspective of being downloadable. The second part will mainly analyze from the perspective of being seen and discovered (mainly PR media exposure and social marketing and offline promotion ideas). These are the two legs. If one is missing, a large part will be missing.

(ps: A word to novices: You must read fresh promotion articles of this type, because even fresh ones may be written based on ideas from three months ago, and those that are not fresh may be ideas from half a year ago? The promotion iteration speed is too fast. When you don’t have your own mature promotion system, any previous promotion methods have almost no reference significance. So if you want to borrow, you must borrow fresh ones... that’s the only way to smell... Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the writing time of this article. This article was written on June 23, 2015. The shelf life cannot be guaranteed, but it won’t be too long anyway...)

APP Top Promotion (www.opp2.com) is the top Apple and Android application APP promotion platform in China, focusing on mobile promotion operations, channel ASO optimization , and App promotion operations . Welcome to follow the official WeChat account (appganhuo) and Sina Weibo (App Top Promotion).

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