The iPhone app market seems to flourishing every year. What started with close to 45,000 apps in 2008-09 has now grown to a marketplace with close to 2.5 million apps. The App Store has proven its prowess as a marketplace for iPhone apps and it shows in the gross app revenues, which touched $45 billion in 2018.
One thing is established – App Store is a great place to launch your app. But how do you get started? Here is a brief guide to help you:
1. The Research
a. The value proposition of your app
The first thing you had to understand is what value your app is bringing to your user’s lives. This starts with understanding what problem are you trying to solve. If you have taken the right approach to IOS app development, you will already have a ready answer to this. Now, all you have to do is condense your answer to one fundamental principle showing what distinctive value your app brings to the consumer.
This one fundamental principle can be used as the guiding statement or the core philosophy or your brand. For instance, the fundamental principle of Google was to democratize information and not just show ads between search resultsle.
b. The market your app fits into
Once you are clear what your app does, you should have a deep idea about who are you competing with for the same purpose. Mostly, you will be looking at apps that are targeting identical problems in your key demographic. IPhone app development in California has picked up very aggressively, so out of sheer scale of apps being produced, it is highly likely that someone else would be looking at the same problem you are trying to solve.
Having an awareness of what your competition is up to, will help you look at problems and solutions you are yet to face and devise. You can reverse engineer their ad campaigns to garner unique insights such as target audience data, relevant timeline to run ads and the type of ads that work with your audience.
c. The general app market
Finally, on a high level, you have to understand that even though the availability of internet and memories in phones keep increasing, the net attention an individual gives to an app is limited. The time a human being has in a day is also limited. Hence, ultimately, you are fighting for the same attention span irrespective of what category you are into or what your value proposition is. Understand what are the general trends on the App Store and how you can incorporat them into your app.
2. The User Acquisition Strategy
User acquisition is more science than art. Most apps go too wide, too soon. Remember, the best way to market your app is by positioning the space on your app as a limited number of seats. Facebook started as an app for schools and then opened up for everyone. Google started as a search engine for finding academic papers and then opened up for all generic information on the internet.
Here is the probable user acquisition journey you will undergo. Before you get started with it, make sure you have the access to the right iPhone app development services because you will be tweaking your app a lot with the feedback you get on each stage.
a. The First 100 Users
Here, you will be manually sending out your app to the target audience. You can use personal contacts, emails and even conferences to meet people and put your app in as many hands as possible.
b. The First 1000 Users
The data you collect from the first 100 users will help you understand what are people looking for in your app, at large. Now you can start running geo targeted ads on Google and Facebook to target your audience and start getting initial traction.
c. The First 10,000 Users
By the time you reach this stage, you will have a very clear understanding of who your target audience is and why they are using your app. All you have to do now, is increase the reach of your marketing campaigns. Now would be the ideal time to promote your app, especially on the App Store.
In Conclusion
In order to have a successful marketing strategy – conduct deep research on your app’s use case, its competition and the trends on App Store. Then, focus on one phase of user acquisition at a time and use the feedback you get this way, to improve upon the features on your app.