Your team has designed an app and its ready for release. Market pressure has convinced you to take this bold step. A lot of work has gone into it, and rightly so.
But then, most likely you have that nagging doubt inside you; what if no one downloads it? What if it ends up a flop?
Well, today’s your lucky day as you’ve come to the right place! Backed by experience from applying the industry’s best practices and years of market observation on key market leaders, we’re going to share with you all you need to promote your digital magazine app – the app promotion checklist. Share it with your team now to start your brainstorming session!
App Store Optimisation for digital magazine app promotion
You may have been aware of Search Engine Optimisation for some time now. It’s long since passed its early days as a buzzword and has now been standard practice applied to any digital content online. App Store Optimisation, on the other hand, is less known, primarily because not everyone publishes apps as easily as they write a blog.
Nonetheless, the underlying concept is the same. It’s a way for your app the be found in the app store. There are two main ways to optimise your app store listing – keyword optimisation and conversion rate optimisation.
Keyword optimisation
Keywords can be included in the keyword field, as well as in your app name and the app’s description to help the search engine rank your app. You have a limit of 100 characters for keywords so use the singular form of your keywords. The app search engines are smart enough to understand.
Conversion rate optimisation
For conversion rate optimisation – ensure that everything in your app pushes visitors to download. Better conversion tells the app store search engine algorithms that your app store was relevant to the search keywords used to reach you. Key areas to focus on: your app description, icon, screenshots, previews and ratings.
Paid app promotion
If you’d like to give your promotion strategy a quick boost, then consider app promotion advertisements online. It does in a bit of financial investment but this, combined with a well-crafted advertising strategy (yes, it’s not just about throwing money at it!), you can exponentially boost your app discovery and downloads. Here are the areas where you should consider:
Social media ads
Between Facebook’s Targeted Reach to Twitter’s real-time audience capture, you shouldn’t ignore the power of social media ads and what they can do for digital magazine app publishers such as yourself. Even Instagram’s action-oriented app install ad features an “Install Now” call-to-action button to directly push “scrollers” to become downloaders of your app!
Google ads
If social ads focus on demographics, Google ads focus on keywords. Google allows your ads to be displayed on the Google Play store (super important as it is, after all, where your Android app is hosted). Your ads can even be displayed on other related or similar apps thanks to the Display Network.
Optimise as you go
Having a mix of different promotion tactics requires you to always keep on improving your promotion campaigns constantly. The idea is to always be watching for optimisation. Some initiatives you can take include:
- A/B testing;
- looking at your segmentation for your ads;
- constantly looking at your competitors;
- checking your metrics from every single step (app store visits, downloads, visits to downloads ratio, ads conversion rates for each ad platform and campaign, etc.)
You now have your app promotion checklist before. However, there are still a lot of things you can do to make sure your digital magazine app is found by both your subscribers and potential new subscribers. There’s App Store Optimisation, paid acquisition, reviews, virality etc.
But worry not! We’ve prepared a comprehensive Starter’s Guide to App Promotion and User Acquisition for Magazine and Newspaper App Publishers that specialised for the publishing industry. If you want specific digital publishing advise on how to promote your app, download our starter’s guide now:
