If publishing your magazine or print publications to mobile is new territory then you’re in luck. In this post we’ve compiled some of the best tools for non-app marketers to excel in app publishing.
Here are over 30 resources and tools to refer to when you need to promote your app, increase your organic app store traffic or drive more downloads (from quality users!). Happy reading!
App Icon
While many of us will simply use our brand logo for the app icon, you may decide to create something different. Here are a few tools we like to use to create and format app icons:
- If you know you’re way around Photoshop and want to design your own app icon download customizable .psd icon templates from AppIconTemplate.com or PixelResort to make your job so much easier!
- Not a design pro? Not problem! Use Canva to create a perfect 1024 x 1024 px icon template, and then add icons, backgrounds or image files.
- Before you can upload your app icon, you’ll also need to provide various sizes. To accomplish this task quickly, we love using Angry Marmot – you simply upload your icon, generate the various sizes and download a compressed folder containing all sizes needed for iOS 7, 8, Android and other stores.
App Screenshots
App screenshots give app store visitors an idea of what to expect from your app. You should include five different app screens, focusing on the most important features. For magazine publishers, it’s also wise to include screenshots of the latest issue so that people know they can access your most recent publication.
Screenshots can be simple uploads from your device, or you can also create custom branded screenshots that include promotional copy and real usage scenarios. Here are a few tools we love for creating screenshots that grab attention:
- Editor’s Choice: Launchkit: When it comes to making screenshots for the Apple Store, this is the best tool we’ve found. Simple, fast, easy to use and completely free! The platform allow you to select between different backgrounds and alter texts to your liking.
- If you’re a Photoshop pro, you can download pre-sized templates from DesignBoost, Saucer.dk
- If you want to place your screenshots into a device frame, you’ll want to check out MockUPhone‘s one click to solution to wrap app screenshots in Android, Apple, Tablets devices and PCs. The iWrapper app for iOS is another great tool for creating for iOS device screenshots.
- AppsBuilder’s App Screenshot Templates – drag and drop images and text into these pre-sized templates (PowerPoint)
App Preview Videos and Demos
In addition to screenshots, app preview videos can help you promote your app on the stores. You can also create videos or even live demos to promote your app on your website or in other marketing campaigns.
- There are a ton of services out there that allow you to upload or mirror you app into a prefabricated template. Our favorites out there are PlaceIt and Make Web Video
- Appetize: Stream iOS & Android Native Apps in web browsers. This is an easy tool for embedding apps in websites, development, client demos, testing and more!
- Reflector: This is great tool for mirroring your app onto another screen, which you can record or even stream on YouTube. We actually used Reflector to create our case study videos (see them all here)
- Instead, if you’re up for producing your video 100% in-house, check out this blog post from Tapdaq which walks you through the steps from scripting, mirroring to editing, selecting music and voiceovers.
ASO
App Store Optimization is all about ensuring you’re app listing is going to find it’s way into search results and doing what you can to maximize visits and installs.
Researching keywords, monitoring your competitors, generating app reviews and increasing the number of downloads are all in the effort to increase app popularity and ranking. Here are some of our favorite tools for getting a jump start on ASO:
- AppSnippetPreview is a FREE tool that allows app developers, app marketing agencies, ASO consultants and ASO agencies to preview how their apps will look at Apple App Store and Google Play Store before publishing or updating
- There are plenty of ways to search for keywords, including the app store’s own suggested search results. To compile a great list, start by researching potential keywords for relevance and competitiveness using tools like Google Keyword Planner tool, Keywordtool.io, Ubersuggest or WordTracker
- AppTweak: Get a summary of your ASO score with these free reports! Review your app’s strengths & weaknesses, find the best keywords to increase your ranking in the app stores and optimize to drive more organic downloads.
- SearchMan: Use this free tool to view how your description, app name and app pitch is performing on separate stores. Know the volume, hits, keyword efficiency index and your own rank regarding the keyword.
- Looking for a powerful ASO tool to track search volume, keyword performance, competitor analysis and ranking? Then you’ll want to use Sensor Tower or App Annie – both of which also other store stats and analytics for app usage and advertising.
Performance Tracking
Now that you’re app in up on the stores, you’ll want to keep an eye on how your app ia doing. In addition to checking Google Play and App Store analytics, as well as usage analytics (like Google or Flurry), these automated reports offer actionable insights straight to your inbox:
- Sales Reporter: get daily app sales reports in Slack and your inbox!
- Review Monitor: a free service that checks the App Store for new reviews and posts them to your Slack channel or sends them to your email.
- AppBot: Appbot also takes the effort out of tracking your Google Play and App Store reviews, rankings and keywords for all countries, by emailing them to you daily (Sign up is free).
- AppFigures: automatically grab and visualize everything that matters by combining sales & download numbers, world-wide reviews & ranks in easy to understand reports.
Creative Design
To finish things up, here are a few tools and resources we simply can’t live without when it comes to promoting apps:
- Need help creating app install ads and images for your Facebook or Twitter posts? Canva, which we’ve mentioned before, is an absolute lifesaver when it comes to creating ads or images for social media posts, or even print materials. With presized formats, tons of icons, fonts and images it’s really the best tool out there for a resource strapped marketer!
- Need to create a landing page or website for your app? Launchkit’s App Website Builder is super simple to use, but if you want something a bit more flexible, check out UnBounce have a ton of great mobile app landing page templates that you can customize
- Need images? Our favorite place to get free stock images is Unsplash, but we also like using Creative Commons repository (just be sure to attribute the content owner)
- Need to set up a smart banner to direct mobile users to the app store? There are a few ways to implement universal app banners that work on Android and iOs – this article from Branch explains some popular ways.
There we have it! Be sure to bookmark this page for future reference and if there is any tool we missed let us know in the comments below!
