How to promote your iOS application on AppStore

The necessity for companies and developers to market and promote their individual applications has never been more important than ever, and is often absolutely crucial to an app’s success.

Now we have absolutely different situation we have a flooded App Store with various applications and an imposing mass of competition. With more than 300 apps being released on a daily basis, it is much more difficult to gain free press at niche websites as well as make it into the Top 100 charts. This is where the practices of marketing and advertising are absolutely essential to survive in the App Store.

To begin with you should be ready with your precise plan of your further action. Your plan of attack should really begin before you even open Xcode. As with any other business model, you must cover all grounds including research, design, artwork and branding, coding and hardware, and advertising and marketing.

Pre Launch marketing

Building a buzz around your app and allowing users to become aware of it’s release will add to the success of an application. You can do this promotion and marketing yourself through iPhone forums, social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and creating individual web pages dedicated to the application itself.

Aside from word of mouth promotions, pre-launch hype also begins with advertisement campaigns and website takeovers. Nothing is better than having your application branded across a website for a certain amount of time. Other ways to gain recognition are Press Releases, demonstration videos on YouTube, and user reviews.

App Launching on AppStore

So you have your ready iOS application and the next step you would like to begin with is to upload it to the AppStore and start its promotion there. Below some tips how to make it in a better way.

Here I would like to highlite that this is the most important part of your iPhone marketing mix. Most people look for cool new apps either on their iPhone/iPad, or through iTunes. Why? It’s the most convenient! That’s why it is so important for iOS application developers to focus on app in-store appearance most. When I use term “in-store appearance” I mean the following components:

App name should be concise enough to attract attention, but should also contain the most important keywords. It is one of the most important factors in search result ranking within the App Store.

Customer Reviews & Ratings it is important to make sure that your application doesn’t look like noone’s ever downloaded it. No reviews, no downloads in the eyes of iTunes users.

iPhone App Marketing Services allow you to build a positive image for your app and attract more downloads across different country app stores.

Colorful and interesting screenshots – Important factor in relaying info about your app. Great screenshots make users be interested in further downloading of the app and trying it in the action.

App description – it is make sense from a search result perspective. Should start with a bullet point list of important features, followed by a text description

Also one more thing we should pay attention to is Application Icon. Make sure that you have an attractive and eye-catching app icon that best represents and sells your application to the user. If your application icon lacks any attention, your product branding awareness is doomed from the start.

There are some smaller ways to gain attention across the net and within the App Store. So you can cause your app to jump back into the “new” charts by changing the release date of the app to the date at which your update was approved, which allows your app to be released in the next batch of updates that hit the App Store.

Also one more great idea is to offer “lite” versions of your application, especially if they are higher priced. It will offer not only free promotion but if the user is impressed enough, they’ll spring for the full version. Think “try before you buy”. Make sure the lite version includes a majority of the features offered in the full version, otherwise a user will move on and you potentially lost a buck to begin with.

This is some of the basic tools covering the first steps you need to do while promoting your application on the AppStore. For sure using AppStore as a core tool to promote the application is not the only variant but at the same time this is the most important playground for further application promotion campaign.

So, my questions is what any methods/approaches do you use to promote your application on the AppStore? How do you promote your apps?

Please, feel free to share your comments and opinions.