“I made my app, but where are all my customers?!” As consumers look to mobile apps for the majority of their product and service needs, it’s more crucial than ever for businesses to capitalize on this market. Creating your business application is a great first step, but having customers download and return to your app is a whole other battle. Proper marketing is what sets your app apart from your competitors, ensuring top customer acquisition and retention.
Check out some of the most important tactics that successful marketers are using to drive app discovery and engagement through Google.
Organic Search
When you’re just getting started, it’s important your business allocates its budget as efficiently as possible. Utilizing natural—or unpaid—Google search results through app indexing can make your app easily discoverable. App indexing allows you to attract potential users through Google search, matching what customers search with your app’s relative content. Basic SEO strategy can be used to ensure your app ranks well in Google’s natural search results, allowing you to boost app downloads at little to no cost.
Paid Search
Google Play Store Ads
Reach billions of Android users with ads that appear within the Google Play Store’s search results. You can now manage your app’s ads like you do traditional text ads with keywords and bids. Google also offers tools to track metrics, such as app installations.
Mobile App Install Ads
It’s a new world. There are now more Google searches on mobile than desktops. Search engines allow you to capitalize on this volume of traffic with paid search results. Much like organic search,mobile app install ads can be customized to particular searches to drive downloads to your app. Google is also looking to launch “streamable” apps that allow users to test them out before downloading, which would increase the importance of app indexing & paid mobile engagement ads.
Re-engaging Customers
Ensuring that customer returns to your app is extremely important and equally difficult. A year ago, nearly 20% of apps were abandoned after their first use. Although this number is likely to decline, it is crucial to build a retention strategy that sets your app up for success.
Deep linking is an extremely effective re-engagement strategy. Proper app indexing strategies will allow users to return to your app directly from the Google search results page. You can deep link searches into an already installed app and continue to market it just as you would before the user downloaded. This helps ensure your users return frequently. Be sure to keep up with your app’s push notifications too. An effective push notification strategy is a simple way to re-engage app users and improve retention rates.
Your mobile app presence is absolutely necessary in today’s world. Be sure to leverage your app’s potential.