How to Launch an App?

As quoted by Kevin Coaster in ‘Field of Dreams’, “If you build it, he’ll come”, sadly that doesn’t hold true nowadays for anything, not anymore. No matter how amazing, beneficial, and customer-oriented your product is, if you don’t have a marketing strategy your product’s awesomeness is of no use.

The same goes for mobile development applications. Having an out-of-the-world idea and an astonishing design and UX to prove it. It’s still not enough to prove it. With outstanding mobile application development skills, one should know how to launch an app. In this high-tech world, not having a mobile application is not good for businesses and even governmental organizations are keen to have their own mobile applications.

From big names like Amazon to Facebook to local small businesses all have their mobile applications and some who don’t have their own mobile applications, they tie-up with other big names for marketing and to reach the masses during this pandemic like local vendors selling their goods on big e-commerce or local restaurants tying up with online food delivery applications like Zomato.

As per the researches, the cost of developing a mobile application can go from $6,453 to $150,000 depending upon the technology, frameworks, tools, etc. And if you planning to spend this much amount on your business mobile application, you surely want it to do wonders. And here comes the role of the strategy of launching an app.

Strategies to Launch Mobile App Successfully

An application launch strategy’s fundamental work is getting and holding users; it is a promoting exertion that requires broad exploration and progressing work to get results. To improve your odds of accomplishment, this article contains some of the main points that you ought to follow at each phase of the launching of the application.

Following these rules will assist you with fostering a methodology to augment users, drive everyday utilization, and decrease relinquishment rates after launch. Nevertheless, as a developer and to monetize your mobile application you should always be flexible with your plans for your applications and your app launching strategy should be pliable.

I have tried to cover some of the basic and yet most important schemes to help you with how to launch an app.

1. Outline of the target audience

The first thing to work upon is deciding your target audience. What set of people you want to target, will it be going to a certain age group or will there be no age limit? Is your application is going to be launch in the nation or do you want to be an international one? You might need to decide your target audience not just as per the age group but also as per the area and other few factors.

2. Do market research for potential competition

Before launching an app, a valid step is to research the market for your application idea’s potential competition. There are over 2.5 million applications on the Google Play store and almost 3 million on Apple App Store. This probably means maybe your application idea is already out there in the market doing the rounds.

Here comes the important question how to market an app successfully, when there are already a dozen similar applications in the market? The simple answer is researching your biggest potential competition, draw a map of what similar features you got and what different and amazing functions your application performs from others that are already in the market. You can probably take the ideas from your potential competition’s customers’ feedback and improve your app before launching.

3. Define goals for your app

To have a successful app that is up and running in the market, you need to set the goals for your app and have your own definition of success. For some success means reaching 1 million downloads and for some, it’ll be having only good user reviews.

Before launching an app, you need to set the goals for your app what it’s going to do, how, what population can expect, how other applications can help yours, and how you can be beneficial to them, etc.

After defining the goals for your apps another utmost important thing is to work towards the success of your app. And in order to do that, you have to define the success on your own terms. What you’re aiming for and expecting from your app. What we suggest is, you can aim for the installation and retention ratio of your app i.e., the number your application is downloaded to the number it doesn’t uninstall.

You can set the aim for reviews and feedbacks and if your application is providing the premium membership, you can monitor the number of users who opt for that. These are few benchmarks that you can set for the successful launch of an app.

4. Suitable operating system, better to go for cross-platform

Another strategy for successfully launching an app is to decide which operating system you wanted your app to launch on. But as we all are well aware that the android phone is as popular and widely used as an iPhone version so it would be better for you to go cross-platform. This will help you to gain users on both platforms and if in the future you decided to launch the desktop version of your application using cross-platform frameworks and tools will be proved useful to you.

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5. Scope for the Update

Before launching an app, you should work on the idea of your app and your idea should have scope for updates. As we all know, the app market has cut-throat competition if you don’t have ideas for adding new features and updates every now and then, your app is definitely going down in the market and its demand will go down eventually.

For starters, you can launch the first update of your app after 3 months of the initial launch. Your app’s updated version can be a version where you fix the bugs, and add features as per the users’ feedback.

6. Marketing on the social media

In today’s world, printing pamphlets and advertising your application in the newspaper is not a good option because it might reach the masses but won’t reach them on time and there are chances that it’ll not reach the dedicated audience. Advertising your app through these old techniques also may not get you to notice.

Hence, marketing your app on social media is definitely the best way. Make sure you post enough information on your social media account regarding your app and its launching but not too much information. Keep updating your account and spread the word about your application, request followers to re-share it.

You can also share some of the screenshots of the application in the development phase and asking for the users’ opinions and feedbacks in the comment section. This is the pre-launching strategy for your application. Keep your users occupied and interested throughout the time, posting content, updating your social media with your app-related news.

7. User Guide

You should prepare a digital user manual for your application. The digital user manual will have the instructions and the screenshots of your application and will make it easy for the users to use and navigate through your app. It’ll also help your app to stand out from the crowd. Said user guide should also contain the basic structure of the app to make it more appealing.

8. Demonstration Videos

Nowadays, everything is available online and the visualization of things makes everything easy and interesting not to mention attract the masses.

Creating Demo videos of your app and uploading them on your social media and YouTube channel (if you have, if don’t it’s highly recommended to have one) is a practice you should start as soon as possible. Your demo videos can have your app’s your user-manual in visuals, it can consist of a few videos of you developing to give a peek inside your app’s making and it’ll definitely going to pique the interests of the users.

9. Dedicate a website or social media account

It’s all beneficial in long term to have a dedicated website or web page for your application before launching an app. With the domain on your app’s name, the search on the search engine will be easy. The dedicated website or web page will have every sort of information about applications, latest updates, new versions, daughter-application that you planning all these sorts of information so that you won’t lose your users and their interest.

Make sure when you create the website or web page it must contain the potential and vital keywords that can help your website to rank on search engines and in turn also helps your application to get noticed.

Instead of making a website, if you want to go for dedicated social media for your application that is also a good marketing strategy. As, we all spend at least 5-10 minutes every hour on social media, having a dedicated social media account will definitely going to prove as beneficial as having a dedicated website maybe even more. On the dedicated social media, you can use the most used “hash-tags” to make sure your account appears in the top results. You can always promote the account on your other accounts and draw the audience and attention to it.

10. Research and submission guidelines

Before actually going with submission and launching an app on the store, it’s best you research and goes through app submission guidelines on the app store you planning to launch an app on. It won’t look good if you launch the app and take it down again or worse the app store removes it.

It’s better to prepare yourself before the big launch of the app. You should be aware of the publishing and launching of an app and ‘what ifs’ too before you actually push the app on the app store and make it public to the users.

11. App Store Optimization

App store optimization is more or like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but it’s not exactly SEO. ASO (app store optimization) is also for getting discovered and being ranked among serval other apps, just like SEO is about getting ranked on top result search.

The best way is to optimize your app’s title with relevant keywords and to make sure to involve all the necessary tags that can get you ranked. Make sure you put your app in the dedicated category so if the user searches the app as per the category, your application will appear in the search results. Including screenshots is always a good practice while launching an app.

12. Test-Run

Test-run is not about testing your application and making sure it’s errors free, before launching it. But here it’s about running and partially launching the applications to few people, tech-savvy, or a few of your fellow developers so that can use it to get the necessary opinions about the app, the feedback, and then fixing is needed before going live on the app stores.

You can test-run your applications by providing the links to few people you want and add a comment box to get the feedback and the comments on what is needed to fix.

13. Tie-Up

Here, by tie-up, we meant to have a tie-up with other applications so that they’ll promote your app and in turn, you’ll help them with promotion as well and enhancing their user’s market.

This tie-up can be as simple as ‘Uber‘ using ‘PayPal‘ or other e-wallets for the cashless transaction or complex as ‘Spotify‘ promoting a dating app and in turn the dating app includes Spotify’s playlists that the dating app users can dedicate to each other.

Having a network is always an important marketing strategy, no matter it is for tangible goods or electronic products. Networking with our developers that are at the top of their game is always a good practice and step in how to launch an app.

14. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of online media advertising including supports and item position from influencers, individuals and associations or businesses who have an indicated master level of information or social impact in their field and not to mention tons of followers. As the pandemic hit, last year social media and influencer marketing is booming like never before. Influencer marketing is the new it of technological marketing.

It’s best to get in touch with social media content creator, bloggers, tech-savvy that have the right influence and effect on the masses and tons of followers you can help you in creating a niche for your app before launching it. It’s good to build a relationship that’s beneficial for both of you.

Just for an example, suppose your application is an OTT platform you can reach bloggers, critics, aspiring actors who can promote your app, and in turn, you can provide them with the platform to talk and debate, it’ll be a win-win for both of you.

15. Paid-Partnership with tech-savvy bloggers

You can also have paid partnerships with tech-savvy bloggers, who write or post about technology, apps, and other things. They’ll not only promote you on their social media, but you can also provide them with the referral links that they can in turn use in their blogs or articles.

Though for this you have to spend a small fortune or either you can generate traffic from your app and send it over to them which will help them as well.

16. Screenshots and short videos for App Store

This is something that every application ever launched on any app store is bound to do. This is like an unwritten agreement between the app store and mobile app development engineers. Uploading the app’s screenshots and short videos while launching an app is a must.

Uploading the screenshots of your completed app and short videos maybe about 30-45 seconds long with the app on the app store not only give the app-installing page an attractive look but also give the users an opportunity to have a look at what he/she is installing and gives a rough idea about its functionality as well.

17. Launch-Party

Launch-Party of the app, it need not be something fancy as those big launch-party of the products or the movies. It can be as simple as a zoom meeting between you and other few developers, in the meeting you’ll explain your application, the date, the time when it will be available in the stores and few other basic details. Later on, you can upload the recorded video of your zoom meeting launch party on your social media, an app dedicated to accounts for your video streaming channels, and other platforms.

18. Feedback and Reviews

Make sure to monitor the feedbacks and reviews of the users. And meanwhile, encourage the customers and users to leave reviews. This will not only help you to enhance the application but also fix the bugs. Your users can also help you with the ideas to update your application.

For example, you have an application about online books and it is lacking behind Kindle even when your application is providing 30k+ free books, then the feedbacks and reviews come in handy.

19. Premium features

Anything free is always the best way to draw the masses and marketing strategy. Similarly, a free application that doesn’t charge a single penny is always a hit that is if the idea and the app appealing, this is a totally different topic to discuss another time. To draw the masses towards your application, launching it for free is always the best option.

But you always add paid-premium more appealing features. Having an application with so many amazing features people won’t mind paying for it but keep the premium membership a little low so you won’t lose your users to other potential competition.

20. Referral points for few first Users

Handing out referral points to the first few users, and some cash back with your partnered application or some premium features in return is always a good marketing strategy.

You can provide cashback or vouchers or free premium features to your first few, say a hundred users, and gain the said hampers they have to refer your applications to friends and followers. This technique always helps to gain more users and when you give the first few users their rewards, the others will definitely install your app to get some or another type of reward.

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Wrap Up

Ready to publish your app on the store? We hope the above steps help to strategically launch an app of your own and you’ll achieve ‘your’ success. Follow the steps to launch an application without any fuss. And if you think we have forgotten to add any important strategy let us know in the comment section.