How to Help Your Customers Find Your Mobile App

Ensuring you’re not lost in a sea of apps.

With over a million apps each in Apple’s App Store and Google Play discoverability gets harder every day. Today I’ll talk about a few simple ways you can help your customers find your app.

Let’s go way back to the early days of digital marketing. The same ‘findability’ question came up for websites. Do we add our URL to our TV commercials, print, radio and other advertising? How do we let consumers know we have a website?

Eventually through trial and error, guidelines and processes were put into place to ensure the URL was integrated into all other areas of advertising. The same process has to happen in mobile app development.

Smart App Banners

Smart App Banners were originally limited to just Safari browsers on iOS. But this powerful feature now works across devices and browsers. Smart App Banners create a clean, floating banner at the top of the page which shows not only the title, rating and price of your app, but also takes the user directly to your app’s download page in the app store.

You can even add more parameters to your banner, taking the user to exactly the section of the app that’s relevant to them or pre-populating forms based on the user’s behavior on the site.

Dedicated mobile section

Creating a section of your site dedicated to your app is a great way to move desktop users who might not see your smart app banner to your app.

Mobile sites and mobile apps do not necessarily do the same thing or have the same purpose or function. Further, the experience on a mobile app can often be far more robust than a mobile site. Use this mobile section as an opportunity to let users know of the great features and conveniences they’re missing if they don’t download the app.

The added bonus is greater search engine traffic for those who just ask Google whether or not you have an app and where to find it.

Facebook

Facebook may be the single most powerful tool available to promote your app. With Facebook you can promote your app for installation or get existing users to re-engage. Due to the massive data store available, Facebook enables targeting by platform, connection, location, detailed demographics and even users’ interests and behaviors.

The days of “built it and they will come” have long since passed, but with this wealth of marketing strategies and tools there is no excuse for your brand’s mobile app to fade into app store obscurity.