Five powerful ways to promote your app for free in 2023

With determination and passion, you began turning your idea into a mobile app but it did not get the kind of traction you were expecting. Heartbreaking, right?

From ideation to deployment, a whole lot of effort is put into building a mobile application but if it doesn’t reach its targeted audience the purpose is failed. With the digitalisation of marketing channels, it is possible to promote your app without spending a lot of money. 

Why is it necessary to promote your app?

The simple answer is to serve the app’s purpose. But if we were to look at the most accurate reason, we will find that in the current market space, there are around 2.87 million apps for download in the Google Play Store and approximately 1.96 million are in the Apple App Store. With this many apps already present in the market it is quite difficult to stand out.

One of the other reasons to promote the app is to receive the users’ feedback and work on it to offer a better user experience. In case you want to predict what feature you should integrate next then work on the feedback as it can predict the future.

In short, it is necessary to market your app to increase the app's visibility, build brand awareness, and retain users. Below, we have presented five tried and tested free methods to help you reach a wider customer base and dominate the market in 2023.

5 cost-effective promotional strategies

Leverage social media platforms

Living in the digital era comes with its perks such as free-of-cost promotion. According to a survey, there are around 4.9 billion social media users globally, Facebook being the top choice with 3.03 billion users.

These numbers tell us that the majority of people are on their smartphones at some point in the day which increases the probability of your social media campaign to work if planned carefully. There’s a 20% worldwide increase in usage of social media platforms since the pandemic which eventually increased the sales as people had a lot of time on hand and was spent on social media.

To use social media platforms,

• First, you need to define your target audience which includes the demographics such as gender, age, and which platform they use majorly and at what time of the day.
• Narrowing down these parameters will help you form an effective social media campaign to target the audience.
• For example, Zomato has one of the best marketing strategies out there because they know how to use trends to their benefit.
• If you also want to build a loyal customer base you need to start posting and educating the customer regarding your product as well as the industry you work in.
• Lastly, the way to build your customer’s trust is to be authentic.

We help you work enhance your overall online presence. Discover how we leverage the technologies and strategies to offer you high-quality solutions.

Harness Reddit communities

Do you want your audience to find you and engage with your content to make it viral?
Use Reddit effectively but not like a social media platform because it isn’t one.

With 55.79 million active users, it holds niche-based communities along with content that never disappoints.

To use Reddit for your benefit, you have to understand that it is a community-driven platform hence discussions prevail over everything. The reason behind it being the best platform is that you will be making content for the people who are already interested in the industry you are related to which automatically increases the engagement and the probability of users checking out your app rises but the key is to be authentic towards the users on the platform otherwise you might just find yourself in the bottom of the pit.

To promote your app for free on Reddit, you can do the following

• Join the subreddits or communities related to the industry.
• Avoid in-the-face sales content because they will see right through it, instead initiate by helping the users with valuable insights.
• Your marketing campaigns have to be something that users would like to know about. For example, instead of preaching about their cars, Toyota shared a video of two Supras being raced and promoted them on the Formula 1 subreddit‍
• You can start Ask Me Anything as well, where users will ask questions related to the app and what problems it solves, etc.

Debut with Product Hunt Launch

Did you know Notion was hunted on Product Hunt in 2015 and later it took off with 5,300 upvotes?

Promoting your software products on Product Hunt is a no-brainer.

It is a popular startup aggregator platform for developers to showcase their most interesting software products. Similar to Reddit, you’ll find a targeted audience on the platform, looking to try new products and share their opinions. Here, you can meet like-minded people, investors, and early adopters.

To promote your app for free on Product Hunt, you can do the following

• Community engagement is the key here, ask questions and provide solutions and feedback.
• It is necessary to connect with the right domain of the community and stay active on questions and suggestions. You can prepare some FAQs to answer users' questions.
• Once you have decided to launch the product, talk about it and share as well on Facebook and Slack chats.
  

App store optimisation

Did you know that 82% of users discover an app by scrolling through the Google Play store or taking recommendations from peers?

As discussed in the introduction, several apps serving the same purpose are present on the Play Store estimated to be around 5 Million apps combined on the Google Play store and Apple App Store. To tackle this competitive market it becomes necessary to optimise the discoverability of the app.

Some techniques you can employ to better rank the app on the Apple App Store or Android Play Store or both, are  -

• Improve the metadata with SEO-based keywords.
• Work on the app title, it has to be catchy and relatable.
• Writing compelling descriptions.
• Using high-quality graphics and icons.
• Constantly work on the bugs and feedback received from the users.
• Responding to the reviews be it of any kind, makes the users believe you more.
  These strategies will help you not only increase the visibility of the app but also build brand awareness and user traffic.
  

Publish how-to guides on LinkedIn and Product Hunt 

It is in our human nature to gravitate towards the people or things that make us smarter and we feel good about ourselves.

When you help your users with their challenges, they become empowered and that is the best kind of marketing, word of mouth. This means working on creating content that solves their problems. This can be in the form of how-to guides, newsletters, and e-books.

The trending piece of content nowadays is creating valuable how-to guides helping users overcome pain points. Some of the pointers given below will help you seamlessly promote your app -

• Create engaging content based on the niche of your app with actionable tips.
• Publish these guides on your website and LinkedIn as a short post, the content can be used multiple times across various social media channels.
• Ask the users to share feedback on each week’s how-to guide or encourage them to suggest topics.

Following these steps, you can better connect with your audience and gain their trust.

Marketing is all about experimenting. You need to try out each strategy for a reasonable amount of time because some may work quickly but others are a long-term game. Play on your mobile app’s strength and showcase how it solves the challenges faced by the people. Provide constant support and see your user base grow.

In case you want to find out how you can help marketing by working on streamlining the operations to boost visibility, we can help you out with our 30-minute free consultation.