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Standing Out from the Crowd: How to Get Your Content Noticed in the App Store

Standing Out from the Crowd: How to Get Your Content Noticed in the App Store

It’s finally done. You’ve labored day and night on it, and have spent countless hours staring at a screen, tediously debugging and coding it. At long last, your mobile app is complete. The hard part is over, right? Sadly, you’re not out of the woods just yet. There’s still the matter of marketing it, and specifically: making it stand out amidst a sea of competition. After all, how many people do you think will just happen to stumble across your application if you never “put it out there”, so to speak? Foremost, your app needs to stand out from the crowd.

It might seem intimidating at first, but with just a little more time and patience, all the hard work you put into developing your mobile application can pay off, big time. Let’s examine three key ways to make sure your content gets noticed, and doesn’t become yet another forgotten app in the online marketplace.

App Store Optimization

You’ve heard of SEO, but how about ASO? App store optimization is the first and most crucial step you should take when it comes time to begin the marketing phase of development. Like SEO, it involves using certain keywords and phrases to direct users to your content, but it’s not quite as simple as that. Unlike SEO, you’ll essentially be “going in blind”. Neither Google nor Apple have revealed how their search algorithms work. This means you’ll need to do most of your own research, but the task isn’t as daunting as it may sound.

Visit your app store of choice and enter some search terms. Take note of what apps pop up for those terms. Check out how the competition describes and titles their products. Try to spot key phrases they have in common. Using this information will not only help you describe your app with the appropriate keywords, it may even help you name it.

Also read:Blogger’s Simplest Productivity AppsWork the Social Angle

With the huge shift toward social media marketing over the last few years, it’s easy to think social media exposure is overrated. But especially in the world of mobile applications, the social aspect is bigger than ever. Social media is the only marketing platform that allows you to engage and interact with your consumers directly. The feedback they provide is not only invaluable to providing a better product—it can actually make or break your app’s success.

The “legitimacy factor” is hugely important to getting noticed. Unless you’ve already got big name recognition, like Facebook, most users will just scroll past a poorly rated or yet-to-be rated application, especially if you’re asking money for it. Those little red stars “legitimize” an app, upping a potential client’s trust that the product will work as intended.

So then, how do you get that first App Store review? It’s all about building hype. If you already have an online presence, this is fairly easy to do. Post regular updates about the product as you get closer to launch, engage directly with your audience and answer any questions they may have, and always be sure to approach it all with a light heart and sense of humor—the best way to win over a crowd is to make them laugh.

Get It Reviewed

But what if you don’t have a sizable online presence? Submitting your product to a major publication for review is an extremely prudent move. Of course, you run the risk of getting a bad one, but so long as your app functions as intended, you shouldn’t worry about this too much. What’s important is the exposure mainstream reviews bring to your product. This exposure, in turn, will translate into downloads, which translate into user reviews. That “legitimacy factor” will ultimately manifest itself into—you guessed it—more downloads and more exposure.

In summary, there’s more to creating a successful app than the design process. For your content to flourish amongst all the competition, you need to:

Optimize your title and description for the online marketplace

See Also
Bing

Engage an audience on social media

Get your app reviewed by a mainstream publication or website

Keeping these points in mind make your app stand head and shoulders above the crowd.

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