Two strategies for APP promotion: casting a wide net and focusing on fishing

There is no fancy opening remarks, I will simply and directly share with you my experience of being solely responsible for the promotion of a well-known app over the past year. I hope it will be helpful to you, and you are welcome to criticize. I came to this company in October last year. This year, the company launched a project to vigorously develop mobile products and established a very elite team in a relatively short period of time. In this team, I am responsible for a series of tasks including product promotion, operation, business cooperation, and cross-departmental coordination.

In my opinion, it is very difficult to promote without spending any money. Fortunately, the company is supportive enough for mobile products and approved a budget that is not small but certainly not too much. You can be rich, but you can’t be willful. My idea for channel promotion is to cast a wide net and focus on fishing.

1. Cast a comprehensive net

The first thing I did was to cast a wide net and build up channels. If conditions were available, I would go for it; if conditions were not available, I would create them and go for it. Whether it is the genuine channels of iOS or the many jailbreak channels (such as 91, Syncios, pp assistant, etc.), Android's first, second...N markets, they must be covered. Because our product iteration cycle was long in the early days, we had enough energy to complete the channel construction on many platforms.

2. Key Fishing

The focus is on fishing and formulating strategies, which are mainly divided into three parts: one is the promotion support that can be provided by the company's own resources; the second is the choice of paid promotion model; the third is the arrangement of free promotion methods.

1. Promotion support provided by the company’s own resources

The company's website has a considerable amount of traffic, and it would be a shame not to make good use of it. As a result, through various emails and internal communications, there were soon N advertising spaces on the website promoting apps. The public relations department also gave me a lot of help. During the peak season, offline advertisements in dozens of cities across the country included promotions for the app. For a long time, Weibo and WeChat were filled with soft articles promoting the app, and the exclusive debut on Baidu Mobile Assistant in December also received good PR support. What I want to do is to tell users that we have an app, and that this app is pretty awesome.

2. Choice of paid promotion model

I concentrated most of my paid promotions in the three months after the Chinese New Year, the peak season for the industry. Here I will focus on the Android paid channels I chose (basically I did not choose online alliances or offline pre-installation):

① CPT of high-quality application market (carefully select CP of products that do not attract volume)

Including the best app stores and mobile phone manufacturer markets; 360 Mobile Assistant, Baidu Mobile Assistant, Android Market (it was okay at that time), Lenovo Le Store, and Meizu App Store (it was not commercialized at that time, so I’ll write it down first) are the ones I mainly choose. I hope to use CPT to increase the natural traffic of the product, combined with the strong demand of users during the peak season of the industry, so as to achieve twice the result with half the effort;

② CPD/CPA of some browsers and second and third category markets

For example, the CPD of UC Browser and Opera Browser, and the CPA of Kingsoft Mobile Assistant, although the magnitude is not too large, they can still add up to considerable growth.

③CPD/CPC bidding platform

Such as Xiaomi, Wandoujia, Baidu Primavera, Tencent Guangdiantong, Weibo Fanstong, etc.; there are a lot of practical content involved here, and Xiaomi, Wandoujia and Baidu are emphasized.

● Display ads of Xiaomi and Wandoujia

My strategy is to observe the new addition patterns of the product first. I did not force the price during the well-known user active time (such as 21:00-23:00), but raised the bid during 10:00-12:00 (another time period with a good new addition trend), slightly lowered the bid during the rest of the day, and offered a very low price at the end of the well-known user active time (such as 21:00-23:00). This can well control the CPD cost, and then also obtain good new additions; for Wandoujia's keyword search ads, I consulted the company's SEM team for some commonly used general words, competitive product words, and of course brand words, and kept fine-tuning the price. Now it is generally controlled at 1-3 yuan per download cost;

●Baidu Primavera Platform integrates Baidu App Store, Baidu's own apps and Baidu Union and other resources

My strategy is to use a reasonable higher bid to try to ensure the display of ads in the app store and Baidu's own apps such as Baidu Tieba (the price varies by product, you can consult Chunhua's PM about bids for apps similar to your own products). Because of the extremely low bid, the resources won are basically those of the alliance network. Although the cost is extremely low (my app initially cost less than 0.3 cents per download), the user quality is also extremely poor. Of course, the final download cost is generally much lower than the bid.

3. Free promotion methods

As we all know, major app stores basically have some free resource recommendation methods, such as first releases, fixed recommendation sections (such as Lenovo's Fresh and Hot, Huawei's See You on Monday), various special activities, etc. The way I work is to compile all the free referral related content into one table. What are the first launch rules of major app stores? How many days of free recommendation can be given? What are the results of app stores that have previously launched apps? Are there any new additions to the fixed recommendation sections of major app stores? Can I apply for it? How do I submit it? How do various special activities connect with the app store? Who is the person in charge? Is it necessary to provide physical or virtual gift support? These are all presented in a table, which is clear at a glance, so work efficiency will naturally be greatly improved.

Some people may ask, how can one person connect with so many channels? It's simple. Everyone has read The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, right? There is a trick in it, which is to use the power of others to defeat them. I just use the power of others. The specific method is to sign one or two agency companies, sign a cooperation agreement with no payment, and put forward the CPT demand to them. All I need to do is to determine the resources, analyze the investment and settle the payment.