How to promote and market APP? What are the common methods?

2019 marks the 11th anniversary of the App Store and Google Play, the former being the application store for Apple devices and the latter being the application store for Android devices. In terms of volume, Google Play has a total of 3.8 million apps; and Apple App Store has more than 2 million available apps. Over the years, the total number of app downloads has exceeded 140 billion times.

According to AppAnnie's forecast, user spending on App stores in 2019 is expected to reach $122 billion, which is about twice the current size of the global movie box office. Games account for about 75% of total spending, which means it is still the mainstream way to make money. In addition, there are also mobile e-commerce payments, in-app purchases, and taxi travel.

At the same time, based on the rapid growth in the number of mobile users of smartphones and tablet computers, the scale of mobile phone users in China has exceeded 900 million, and the market is huge. At present, the average number of mobile apps owned by each mobile phone user in China is more than ten.

In such an environment, entrepreneurs from all walks of life cannot avoid the problem of " APP promotion " when developing corresponding businesses. The difficulty lies not only in the fact that the proliferation of various types of APPs has made the competition in the APP market increasingly fierce, but also because the launch of WeChat mini-programs has also seized part of the APP market.

In short, the red ocean market of APP is close to saturation, and it is difficult to penetrate the market and cause a response, especially relying on traditional promotion methods. Now we will analyze the cases of various APPs standing out in the market and summarize the effective experience of APP promotion.

1. Festival Marketing

Including statutory holidays, Double 11 and other festivals, solar terms, store anniversaries, sports events, award ceremonies, etc., this time point is most easily recognized by users. Each festival has its own attributes. For example, when talking about the Spring Festival, people will think of the Spring Festival travel rush, when talking about Double 11, people will think of discounts and promotions, when talking about the Mid-Autumn Festival, people will think of reunion, and so on. By taking advantage of the emotional resonance of holidays, the activities designed can often achieve unexpected results.

For example, the marketing campaign launched by the "Love Sharing" APP on Valentine's Day was quickly spread with the help of WeChat Moments and Weibo platforms. The participation cost is low and the interactivity is strong. Just enter your name to generate a marriage certificate, and save the image to share on social platforms. The "Love Sharing" team used reverse thinking to plan a plan in which the vulnerable group of "singles" used fake marriage certificates to "fight back" against couples. On that day, the number of marriage certificates generated exceeded 10 million, the number of Weibo searches reached 4 million, and the number of APP downloads also greatly increased.

2. Hotspot Marketing

In addition to fixed holidays, sudden social hot spots can attract more widespread attention. Hot spots are highly topical, have strong short-term explosive power, and can spread rapidly. For example: the Golden Horse Award Ceremony, the retirement of a basketball star, the announcement of a celebrity relationship, etc. We just need to follow the trend and add fuel to the fire. However, it should be noted that hot events often fade away very quickly, so we must remain highly sensitive to such planning without a fixed time frame. At the same time, we should also pay attention to the correct use of emotional tendencies and avoid making things worse.

People's Livelihood:

Topics related to me, topics about birth, aging, illness and death, etc.

Public Welfare:

Environmental protection, teaching, the elderly, children, pets, etc.

Entertainment:

Celebrity gossip, hot topics, jokes, etc.

Technology Trends:

VR technology, artificial intelligence, new product launches by technology companies, etc.

Sensitive topics:

Stay away from power, money, pornography, etc.

Here is an example of APP promotion based on hot spot planning. During the period when The Empress of China was popular, "Tiantian Ptu" took advantage of the opportunity to launch the makeup H5 event "COS Empress of China". Simply by uploading a photo, one can have the classic makeup of Empress of China in one click. Although there is no complicated design, it captures people's desire to show off. Through this activity, the reading volume of Sina Weibo's hot topic #全民COS吴媚娘# reached 140 million, and the number of software downloads achieved a super-significant growth.

3. Ground promotion

Generally speaking, door-to-door marketing is not recommended because it consumes a lot of energy and time. The cost of attracting new customers through door-to-door marketing starts at at least 3 yuan, or even higher. Unlike the above two promotion ideas, the reason why I still bring it up is because door-to-door marketing is indeed the most direct and violent way, without a doubt, and it may also be the promotion method that is closest to the user scenario.

The one that has achieved the most extreme and successful APP promotion is undoubtedly Ele.me. During the initial promotion phase, Ele.me employees entered restaurants in batches in different cities, went to each table and asked customers to download the APP with gifts in their hands. Most people will download and try it out for the sake of face, and there are discounts available. At the same time, after work, Ele.me employees were often seen holding signs and marching in places where there were many office workers. Within a week, everyone knew about it. It is precisely by relying on this method that Ele.me has grown from a small company with only a few people to an equal position with Meituan.

4. Regular Activities

Strictly speaking, regular activities are not considered marketing, but fall under the category of operations. However, the point I want to emphasize is that as the overall awareness of netizens increases and event operations have become an area that all APP developers pay attention to, event operations can no longer rely on rough, template-based production, but should be a long-term and meticulously crafted job that requires us to treat with caution.

Routine activities are daily activities that are used to improve a certain indicator or promote new features in a targeted manner. The activities include sign-in, inviting friends, new user benefits, etc.

Inviting friends to get prizes is a common method for APP to attract new users. This type of activity uses benefits to encourage users to spread the word and uses social platforms for fission. Old users are rewarded for recommending new users, and new users can also experience benefits at a low price because of the recommendations of old users. This is a win-win situation. Recommendations from acquaintances are similar to word-of-mouth communication, and have a higher success rate. Therefore, if the budget is sufficient, such activities can achieve good dissemination and create a virtuous circle. For example, the “Snowball” APP offers gift packages to new users when they register and red envelopes when they open an account. The former is used to attract new users and retain existing users, while the latter is used to promote new features.

Another example is the sign-in activity of the "Tongcheng Travel" APP: users can obtain virtual currency "Youbi" and growth points by signing in. "Youbi" can be used as cash when booking hotels and purchasing travel packages, and can also be used to redeem coupons or physical items in the mall; as growth points accumulate, users can upgrade and enjoy more privileges. This is a typical way of combining sign-in with user incentives, which attracts users to interact with the product every day, cultivates users' product usage habits, and thus increases user activity and retention rate. At the same time, virtual currency has practical value and can promote consumption conversion.

Four stages of APP promotion

There are certainly more ways to promote an APP than the ones mentioned above, but the first three are just means to attract new users. What can really retain users is long-term, excellent and continuous operations, which is the best way to promote an APP. Otherwise, no matter how good the marketing method is in attracting user experience, if there is no good operation as a foundation, it will still be rejected by the market.

As a product, the promotion process of APP can be broken down into the following four quantifiable indicators based on its life cycle and user behavior funnel model: attracting new users, retention, activation, and revenue.

Attracting new users means bringing new users to the product, which can be downloads and registrations for the APP, or fans for the WeChat public account, etc. Common methods of attracting new customers include: ASO, advertising, channel cooperation, social media promotion, soft article promotion, etc.

ASO: (App Store Optimization) is the process of improving your app’s ranking in various app electronic market rankings and search results, similar to the SEO optimization of a website.

Retention, finding ways to retain users who want to leave, can be done through two types of operations: on the one hand, optimizing product content and mechanisms. For example, for content-centric products, it is necessary to continuously provide high-quality content to continue to attract users, or to use methods such as guiding new users to help users better understand the product and stay to use it; on the other hand, you can interact with users by planning activities, such as check-ins, community activities, etc. The indicator corresponding to retention is called retention rate, which can be further subdivided into next-day retention, 7-day retention, etc.

Promote activation, encourage user activity, let users use the product more frequently, increase user stickiness, and use level settings, incentive systems, point systems, etc. to increase long-term activity. For lost users, you can use in-site messages, emails, text messages, etc. to recall them.

For products involving commercial monetization, another operational indicator is revenue. In fact, the essence of promoting revenue is to increase paying users and improve the activity of paying users.

Active users: a concept relative to "churned users", referring to those users who visit the website from time to time and bring some value to the website.

Lost users refer to those users who have visited the website or registered before, but gradually move away from the website due to losing interest in the website, and finally leave the website completely.

Active users are used to measure the operating status of the website, while churned users are used to analyze whether the website is at risk of being eliminated and whether the website has the ability to retain new users.

Common operating methods

1. Increase the number of users: ASO

Search engine optimization, advertising, channel cooperation, social network promotion, new media promotion, soft article promotion

2. Improve user activity

a. Reminder recall: internal letter, email, SMS push

b. Incentivize users: virtual currency, membership, rewards

c. Event planning: regular events, festival events, hot events

Operational work is complex and frequent. Different types of apps have different operating methods and require different operational positions. For example, various news clients operate with excellent content as the core; community apps such as Lamama.com and Hupu pay more attention to community operations and UGC user operations; e-commerce products often use event operations to increase revenue.

How to make APP more appealing to people?

We always say that products must find users’ pain points and operations must cater to user needs, so what exactly are the pain points? To trace back to the origin is to study human nature. The founder of LInkedin once said that a good APP and operation must cater to one of the seven deadly sins of human nature. Below we extract the more commonly used human characteristics and explain them.

Lust: The user’s original and rigid need. In picture communities, pictures of beautiful women often have the highest click-through rate. In live broadcast products, beautiful anchors can always attract more attention; such as WeChat Shake, Momo, etc.

Vanity: Users all have the desire to compete and show off, which is also the most commonly used in product function planning and operation. For example, QQ level, membership and other value-added services can light up icons, or the number of fans on Weibo, plus V, etc.

Greed: Give users more than they expected, making them feel they have made a profit. For example, the overwhelming number of red envelope activities, group buying and flash sale functions of e-commerce all take advantage of this characteristic of users.

Laziness: Don’t think, lower the cognitive threshold, and make operations convenient, such as the select all function, one-click ordering function, QR code, automatic login next time function, etc.

The best promotion never relies on marketing alone. Marketing is only a means of attracting traffic. A good APP itself and its operation are the foundation for its survival in the market. It is necessary to solve user needs and cater to user desires in order to retain customers, generate dependence, and form word-of-mouth communication in the market. Perhaps this is the best way to promote.

Author: Qingfeng

Source: PR Home