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App promotion and user acquisition for Digital Publishing

Team PaperLit 02 Oct 2006

1. Digital magazine app promotion and user acquisition

App promotion is an absolutely essential part of your app strategy as a digital magazine publisher. Long story short, app promotion is what you do to help users discover your app.

Contrary to misconceptions, app promotion isn’t all about advertising. While it’s true that advertising is an essential element, any activity to promote app installs, event through organic sources (not sourced through paid advertising), also falls under the app promotion.

In reality, any digital magazine app needs both organic and paid ads to ensure maximum reach of its potential audience. So, why not just focus on one? Take a look at iOS apps, for example. As they’ve stated, 65% of app downloads come directly from a search on their app store. At the same time, they’ve also noted that the average conversion rate for their Search Ads is at a whopping 50%! You’ll certainly be in a better spot having concentrated on both than just one of them.

There’s also evidence to suggest that paid ads can boost organic downloads. A report by TUNE says that the increase can be from 1.5, up to 16.6 times, depending on the app category.

Whether you are still about to launch your app or have already launched it, there are several things you can do to promote your app.

First is to undertake app store optimisation. The concept is the same as search engine optimisation where you tweak various elements in your content to ensure that your page is found. Various components are involved here from areas you have control over such as keywords, up to the conversion rate of your app store, where you have a more indirect control over.

Ads also factor in it; however, you’ll have to decide on the right platform, whether through social ads, search engine ads, or even app store ads.

Interested in learning more, check out our App promotion checklist: all you need to do before, during and after the launch.

Global internet penetration is at 54.4% at the start of 2018. It’s no wonder that internet ads are now one of the most popular choices for advertisers. Its key strength is being able to accurately segment and target its audience as well as being able to apply functionalities that are perfectly designed to elicit action.

App install ads have been designed to get apps qualified traffic from sources outside the stores, such as search, social media and even other apps. The call to action and design is used to encourage visitors from this traffic to go to the stores to download the app.

App personalisation is the development of a mobile application that meets the needs of its specific users as it’s programmed to adapt itself based on the user using it. It also contributes a lot in keeping your digital magazine readers engaged with your app.

When an app recommends quick access to recently used functionalities, that’s already a form of personalisation. When a shopping app recommends similar or related products or accessories to products you last checked before, that’s also app personalisation.

But what does it have to do with app promotion? Well, it primarily affects three aspects of app promotions – descriptions, reviews and conversion rates.

While admittedly, its contribution is indirect, it’s still nonetheless important. Having a personalised app allows you to greatly influence reviews. Happier users result in better reviews, which then affects conversion rates. Descriptions or screenshots can also be beefed up by describing interesting features brought by your app’s personalisation capabilities.

One place to start personalisation (for those that are just planning their app), is deciding the format: native apps or web tech? When making your choice, consider all the important factors at play.

And if you want to know the topic of app personalization better, you should try to get a more comprehensive look: get inspired by some examples of app personalisation, find out the ways you can apply it to digital magazine apps, and – last but not least – have a look at the three types of information needed to personalise apps.

5. App conversion rates: the app promotion metric to watch

On the one hand, you have app store visits. But what happens after will be decided by your app conversion rates. In app promotion, getting visits to your app store is half of the story. Once you get them to your store, you will then have to convince them to download the app.

App conversion rates are calculated by getting the number of people that downloaded the app and divide the number by those that visited your app store. So if you have 1000 visits in a week and 30 downloads, then your app conversion rate is 3%. If you have two different app stores (one for iOS and one for Android), its highly possible to have two different conversion rates aside from a total one, although a segmented conversion rate would be more valuable than an overall one, simply for gathering insights.

Once you have your first app conversion rate, the next question will always be how to increase it. One place to look will always be in content consumption habits on apps and how they are changing. After all, looking at such habits ensures that your digital magazine app stays in tune to readers’ expectations through the use of live content, comments, games, and competitions – just to name a few.

6. How Paperlit can help you to boost your app downloads

Most digital publishing platforms focus on how to bring out a good digital magazine or publication. However, many fail to also focus on increasing app downloads, and that’s one of the things Paperlit helps with.

As a platform designed specifically to help bring digital transformation into the publishing industry, Paperlit helps digital publications boost their downloads through app optimisation, as well as providing functionalities for the management of seamless promotion and app download ads.

Paperlit covers many aspects that digital publishers should consider when publishing a digital magazine app. Just check this digital magazine app practical glossary and see whether your solution already covers every single one of them.

Publishers who need the most help can also avail of Paperlit’s one-on-one, personalised support that can help provide advice on how your publication and app can get more readers. Besides, having more readers gives you more opportunities to monetise your digital magazine app, and thus increase your revenue.