It’s no secret – launching an app and attaining visibility is a huge challenge and only a small percentage of app owners really succeed in creating a dent in the app ecosystem.
What’s the reason?
The market is incredibly competitive, with over 5 million apps now available across the app stores. Because of this, there are many challenges that app owners face. How do you ensure that you stand out from the crowd? How do you compete with businesses spending considerably more than you are? What can you do to land into the hands of your target users? How do you implement the safeguards to reduce churn?
These are just the tip of the iceberg, app marketing success is a tough thing to achieve. But success is possible if you do the right things and an efficient and effective app launch strategy will help you get there.
We want to help app businesses be more successful and, having launched a substantial number of apps in our time, we’re doing this by pulling together our App Launch Blog Series. We will cover the essential strategies for a successful app launch over the next few weeks. It will include defining your goals and targets, ensuring visibility at key touchpoints, monetisation planning, implementing the right tools, creating an infrastructure for growth and more.
Before starting, any potential app owner needs to consider these key requirements before committing to launching an app:
1. An app launch requires a committed team
Launching an app is not a simple task. Whilst there there may be some transferable learnings that can be injected into your mobile and app strategy from web, a successful app operation requires niche mobile expertise and a committed team focused on the app project.
Whether you build your team in-house or source an app consultancy, you need to have all the app marketing bases covered. This includes essential areas such as App Store Optimisation (ASO), user acquisition, user experience and data analysis. Additionally, having app launch experience on the team is invaluable and is likely to be the difference between success and failure. Make sure that you have people on board, whether internally or externally, that have launched apps before. Ideally successfully, but there is also a huge value in learning from mistakes that have been made.
2. Launching an app requires investment
This is an investment in time as well as money. If you are serious about succeeding you need to invest all your time in the project. Seriously, you won’t have weekends for the first couple of years.
Launching an app requires monetary investment too, and can be costly. You have to be able to compete for share of voice with any competitors who are after the same audience as yourself. Forward planning is essential to ensuring that each stage of growth has been accounted for in your investment plan.
3. App marketing success requires a bit of luck
Unfortunately, something you may not have much control over. However, if you have implemented our checklist for a successful app launch, you can depend less on luck to help you to the top!
And as Thomas Jefferson is reported to have said:
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
Here’s what you can expect from our series:
- Understanding the market and your place in it
- Flip the funnel: focus on retention first
- Measurement: implementing the right tools
- Get discovered: ASO and organic acquisition
- Securing ROI: monetision planning
- User Acquisition done right
Make sure to sign up to our newsletter to get notified when we release a new post in the series.
Launching an app can seem like a big feat, but there are plenty of things you can do to get yourself on the road to app success, so stay tuned!
Want to find out more about optimising your app and keeping up with the latest OS capabilities? Make sure to subscribe to our Mastering Mobile Marketing video series. You can also get in touch by visiting the Contact Us page. Follow us on LinkedIn, chat with us on Twitter @yodelmobile, and join our #mobilemarketingUK LinkedIn group.
