How to promote an app without any budget

Application promotion is an old topic. Here are some ideas:

1. Product Content

First of all, make a good product. This is nonsense, really nonsense. If you have a good product, many people will be happy to share it with you and help you spread it. A bad product will make you want to trick people into installing it no matter how hard you try. I have seen many products submitted to the most beautiful apps. Some of them are really excellent, and you would feel it would be unreasonable not to recommend them. Some of them are very "ridiculous", and they make a mess of their products but still expect pie in the sky to fall.

2. Seed users and angel users

On the basis of making good products, you must have good seed users in the early stage. These people may be the real users around you, friends, friends of friends, people in forums, Zhihu, etc. Serve them well and dig out angel users from them. Gradually, people will start to help you spread the word and say good things about you because they really think your product is good.

3. Promote with product ideas

For early products, products, operations and even promotions should be integrated. You must know the weight of your own product and find its tone and users. It is painful to promote something separately, promote it for the sake of promotion, and seek volume just for the sake of seeking volume. Promotion should be done from the product level, for example, using product design to establish the basis for viral transmission. Refer to the example of Crazy Picture Guessing . There are people asking for help in guessing pictures in the circle of friends and in the group. The product itself has the characteristics of transmission. You can also build a community-based mechanism within the product to better connect friendly users. Developing other applications to promote the flagship application is also an option, the so-called traffic diversion, but the input-output here must be calculated well, after all, product design and R&D resources are limited.

4. External channels

It is a good choice to submit articles or recommend yourself on various websites, media, personal blogs or self-media. It is not recommended for startup teams to consider various charging channels. If your product requires money to promote at the beginning, the prospects are often worrying. In addition, realistically speaking, you need friends in life and at work, friends who trust and understand you. Many times, people help you spread the word, and even find equally good publicity channels, not for personal gain, but simply because they recognize and trust you. Doing things and being a person are similar.

5. SNS

SNS marketing and the like are useful but they must have the same tone and truly reach the real users of the product, rather than seeking forwarding rates, exposure rates, and the like. In reality, there are some examples of communication through SNS, some successful and some unsuccessful. The challenge here is that the public is being educated, and if you want to stimulate the chain of transmission, you have to find new triggers, which is becoming increasingly difficult.

From a product perspective, encouraging users to share, increase their own exposure, and bring in new visits and users is also a common method. Sharing on WeChat and Weibo is a must (and it must really interest users to download the function). Recently, some apps have proactively removed WeChat sharing, which can be regarded as a well-intentioned and heroic move.

6. Patience

The growth of a product requires a process, and the growth of the number of users also requires a process. The initial hundreds or thousands of users have to be achieved step by step. When you cross the thresholds of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions, the growth curve will be completely different. During this process, you still have to pay attention to the product itself and provide a good experience. It's okay to take shortcuts sometimes, but don't always think about speculation.

As an industry professional, I am often asked by newcomers and friends how to promote an APP if the company does not provide a budget. Now I will write some of my own methods based on my own experience. In fact, there are many articles on the Internet about promoting APPs, including which channels to use and how to promote them. So if you are an expert, you can ignore this article. This article is written for novice users.

First of all, you need to understand your APP. Who are the users of your APP? If your APP users are women, then you need to find places where women are? Where are all the women? Let’s talk about online first, women’s forums and communities, there are definitely more women in these places. You can list websites, blogs, and all sorts of places where women hang out. To put it bluntly, what is the purpose of promotion? It is sales, telling your product to those who need your product, or letting those who need your product see it, so the first step of promotion is positioning, locating the location of your users and making the most of them. The more accurate the positioning, the better the promotion effect.

Secondly, once the product positioning is found, the next step is to find a promotion method. There are many ways to promote, such as soft articles, activities, channels, etc. Let me talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each method. As we all know, channels have the most direct effect. Some large channels have seen a rapid increase in volume. But now is not the case as it used to be. There are too many apps now, exceeding one million, but there are still so few channels with volume, or not even much growth.

So there are more wolves than meat. In the past, you could easily get a recommendation position by finding some big channels, but that’s not possible now. After all, they also have to eat. And there are so many rich companies now, and other companies are spending money to expand their business, so where can you get a recommendation position? This is the current channel situation. But are you saying that there is no need to use channels? No, we still need to use channels, after all, everyone is using it. The current situation is that the cost of acquiring users is getting higher and higher, and the promotion work you do is becoming more and more detailed.

If you don't have money, you have to do your work in detail. First of all, your APP must be available on various channels, whether it is forums, encyclopedias, Weibo, videos, audios, etc. All kinds of channels for transmitting information must be available, and they must be done in detail. In fact, everyone knows many promotion methods, but the products launched are all kinds of. Why? It's just Kung Fu.

Everyone knows the product introduction, but some product managers are just stupid. Why? The product introduction is very long and professional. Do you think all users are the same as you? In fact, 70% of mobile Internet users are novices. Novices don’t have time to read such long and useless things you wrote. They just want to see if your product is useful to them. So don’t just look at the product introduction. It is a job for postgraduate entrance examination candidates. You will be great if you can clearly describe the product introduction in a dozen words.

Next, you will find the name of your APP on Baidu, which means you have completed the first step. Come down and start your second step of work, what for? Hype. Can you write soft articles? I guess many people will say yes, but the soft articles you wrote cannot be published. Now all media have very strict soft article review, so you have to learn to hide it, or write the promotional articles into high-quality articles, then you will be great. If it really doesn’t work, you can find a writer, invite him to dinner, and help you polish it. If your words are not well-written, they will not go far. Therefore, soft articles should be written frequently and in a good account. This is the second step.

What is the third step? Find external platforms for promotion. What is a peripheral platform? It is a platform that is independent of the commonly used channels, such as the most beautiful applications, new media, and WeChat public accounts. These independent personal media are now a trend, and many people in the industry are watching them. Let these people know first, and they will help you spread the word. By the third step, your APP has basically become famous, just like a seed planted in the ground, starting to sprout but not yet blooming. The fourth step is to make it bloom.

How to bloom? The slow method is to find reporters to expose it and media people to review it, which is relatively slow. But it will bloom eventually. What is the quick way? Event marketing. I once promoted a product through event marketing, and the daily activations increased from 1,000 to 10,000, a 10-fold increase. This is the benefit of marketing. So at this point, if you still don’t have money, you can only endure it.

Finally, let’s talk about products. The premise of good promotion is a good product. A good product is one that you like when you see it for the first time. The product's functions and interface are simple, uncomplicated, and very useful, so users like them. A good product is the prerequisite for successful promotion. If the product is too rubbish, no matter how awesome you are, you won’t be able to promote it. So a truly awesome promoter is not only one who can promote any product, but also one who can promote a very high-quality product. He is selective about products and does not promote passively. So if you want to be a good promoter, you must choose good products to promote and don’t promote rubbish products, as that will be a waste of your time.