Statista states that more than 3.55 million apps were in the Google Play Store by the third quarter of 2022. This is almost equal to the Google Play Store’s peak level of 3.6 million apps in March 2018 and 32% more than the app store’s second-quarter number of 2.68 million applications.
In the same period (quarter three of 2022), the Apple App Store recorded more than 1.6 million apps. Meanwhile, the Amazon Appstore featured over 480,000 apps.
There is indeed fierce competition for users in the mobile app market. However, you can break through with some growth marketing training.
A growth marketing training course will teach you both elementary concepts and advanced strategies to drive your mobile app’s growth. To be specific, it’ll teach you about the following:
1. Defining Your Market
A growth marketing course will teach you how to identify and define your market. Who can your app help, who will find your app useful, and who can bring your app revenue? What are the characteristics (e.g., gender, age, location, etc.) of your ideal app user?
These are some of the questions you can answer with professional marketing guidance. You will also master how to create audience segments and actualize these into user personas you can talk to in your marketing materials. Then, of course, you will learn how to execute your persona-based marketing.
2. Identifying Your Competition
One of the fundamental lessons you will pick up from a growth marketing course is how to define your market. Yes, millions of apps exist in the Google Play Store, but they’re not all competition.
If you have a medication reminder app, you’re competing with other medication reminder apps. As of this writing, there are more than 200 of these apps in the Google Play Store.
Other potential competitors are a reminder, alarm, and task organizer apps. There are hundreds more of these in the Google Play Store.
However, the game apps, news apps — certainly apps that do other things, especially those that belong to a separate category — are none of your concern.
Competing with a few or several hundred apps is not something to scoff at, but it’s definitely more manageable than working against millions of mobile apps.
3. App Store Optimization
In a study involving approximately four million Google search results, Backlinko found that 27.6% of clicks went to the first result in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Sistrix did a similar study involving more than 80 million keywords and billions of search results. Its results showed that 28.5% of clicks on mobile Google searches went to the first search results, and 88% of all clicks went to the top 10 results.
However, the Sistrix study revealed some surprising insights that underscore the importance of getting a high position in search results.
In the study, while the top result got 28.5% of clicks, the second result got only 15.7%., a click-through rate drop of 45%. What’s even more startling is that the result in position one got more than 11 times the clicks of the result in position ten.
All these tell you one thing: when you want people to click on your link on Google, you want to be not only on the first page of search results. You want to be the top result.
While the app store is not Google Search, you can assume the same principle applies.
The higher your app appears in an app store search results page, the more likely people will click through to your app store listing, and the higher the chance they will install your app over your competition.
You must perform app store optimization to achieve higher rankings in app store search results. This involves optimizing your app listing’s title, icon, keywords, category, description, video preview, app screenshots, and publisher name, among others, so your app will rank higher for relevant app store term searches and be easier to find for your target users.
Done right, app store optimization should help drive app user acquisition and increase app downloads. A growth marketing program will teach you how to perform app store optimization and, ultimately, help you gain more exposure in the app store.
4. Mobile App Advertising
App store optimization takes time before it can yield results. Instead of waiting for organic traffic to your app store listing, you can advertise your app and put it in front of more potential users.
You may advertise in Google Play Store or whichever app store you’re using. You may also pay to get a sponsored post on social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. If yours is a productivity app, you may even promote it on LinkedIn. Of course, you could also get paid advertising on Google. Additionally, consider utilizing engaging promotional products such as banner ads, interstitial ads, or featured placements within app stores to increase visibility and attract more users.
A growth marketing course will teach you how to pick the right advertising channel and optimize your ads so they can give you maximum returns on your ad spend.
5. App Engagement and Retention Strategies
It’s great if you have thousands of app downloads daily. However, you’re not winning if 95% of these downloaders do not engage with your app beyond the first day.
When you’re retaining just a small portion of your acquired app users, you’re needlessly burning marketing dollars.
Imagine that you have a store and spend a lot of money to get people through the door. If people just peek in or go inside for a few moments but leave immediately after, you’d be spending your money in vain. It’s the same if you enter, stay for a while, enjoy your free cookies and coffee, and then leave without purchasing anything.
This is what essentially happens when you get users to download your app but are unable to engage them sufficiently, so they continue using your app. You won’t be able to monetize unengaged and inactive app users. You can’t show them advertising, and you can’t earn transaction fees from them or sell them upgrades and add-ons.
Therefore, app user engagement and retention are just as crucial as app user acquisition, and a growth marketing course will teach you how to execute engagement and retention strategies like push notifications, in-app messaging, improving and personalizing app user experiences, gamification, and app usage tracking.
Learn how to grow your App and your Business
Even if you have the perfect mobile app, it will be for naught if you can’t get enough users to sustain its development and help your business grow.
A mobile app marketing course will equip you with the necessary knowledge and skills to accomplish this, including how to define your market, identify your competition, optimize your app listing in the app store, advertise your app on multiple channels, and engage and retain app users.
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