Technology has been changing the marketing landscape very rapidly in recent years. First, it was the ability to share content limitlessly, and now it has moved over to providing business owners with more creative ways to reach new customers.
The convenience of having a mobile phone or Pc at hand has increased the tendency of most consumers shopping from home. This has led marketers to turn to mobile apps in a bid to reach these consumers and try to convert them into customers.
If you would like to get more value from your apps and increase your customer reach, worry no more, here are five ways you can do just that and on a limited budget.
1. Create a referral program for your app that encourages referrals
Even after creating an app, it is still tough to convince people who don’t know your business already to download your app. However, your current customers already have friends who have similar needs and who could find your app useful.
While it’s highly unlikely that you will come to know these friends on your own, they are just a tweet or email away from your current customers. To reach them, you should encourage your customers to refer their friends to your app.
To encourage referrals, you can incentivize them with rewards for their effort. A free month of one of your products could be the key to doubling or even tripling your referral marketing ROI.
2. Create in-app content that your users can share
People love sharing. Be it on Twitter, email or Facebook, a simple text that has the name of your app on it could mean more eyes for your business.
While not every business can turn their platform into a social platform, there is a way you can encourage your customers to share content from your app with similar results.
In-app content is content that can be viewed and shared without visiting an external website. There are two ways of generating in-app content for your customers to share;
- Give them text snippets from your blog or social media content. A good example is sharable quotes.
- Generate content from the customers’ app usage. For example, creating usage stats in a shareable form such as images and then asking users to share them on social media.
Both of these methods work well when users are not redirected to an external website. As such, having your customers connect their social media accounts could make one-click posting possible; increasing social shares.
3. Create a useful app that users will readily share
While phones can hold hundreds of apps at a time, we don’t have enough time in a day to use more than a dozen apps.
Mobile users have to determine the apps that they need most, and these are the ones they will use most frequently. While social media applications such as Facebook and WhatsApp are at the top of the list, there is still room for useful apps. These are tools. Apps that help the customer do something valuable.
For example, for people who frequently travel, an app that helps them check flight costs and book flights could be checked almost every day.
Your app needs to add value to your customers’ lives. And given that one of the leading reasons why people share is to inform others of products they like and care about, then your customers will start sharing your apps with other people that could benefit from your app.
4. Translate your app into multiple languages to increase global research
Many online businesses target local customers even though their products could benefit people from other countries too.
While penetrating a global market is a very costly endeavor, it could multiply your audience reach very quickly. And the easiest way to increase your app’s global usage is to target non-English speakers.
Given that only 20% of the global population speaks English, it is a wise idea to translate your app into multiple mainstream languages such as Spanish and Hindi. This would extend your app’s downloads to people in other countries that could benefit from your app and business in general.
Don’t miss out on thousands of potential customers by limiting your app to one language. Translate it into a handful of languages, and your audience reach could multiply in a couple of weeks.
5. Use app analytics to gain valuable insight
Constant improvement is at the heart of all successful businesses.
Just as no business is perfect, even your app marketing strategy cannot be perfect. As such, the best path for success is to improve your strategy as you gain new insights and learn through experience.
To gain insight from your app, you need to implement an application performance management tool (APM). These are application monitoring tools that allow app owners to check app usage and track important metrics on the app.
According to AppOptics, you should have an application performance management tool that can trace your users’ activities on your app. This will help you know what to optimize your app, and what to change as your marketing needs evolve.
Learning from your mistakes helps you know what is working and what is not. And in the long run, this helps you invest in only the areas that are driving the most impact on your customer reach and dropping channels with no significant impact.
Wrapping up
App users are now spending considerably more time on apps than at any other time in history. And that has led more marketers to use app marketing to improve their customer reach. This also means high competition in the app stores. You need to work extra creatively to outperform your competitors.
Given that the average user uses at least ten apps per day, you need to add more value to user’s lives to remain relevant and useful. Also, you need to evolve your app to meet new market needs as directed by the app usage data that you collect and analyze.
