How To Drive Traffic To An App

Social media is eating media. It is not enough to develop a killer app, you need to tell the world about it. If nobody knows about your app – how will it generate any revenue for you? Do not adopt widespread developer mindset of – "we build it and they will come". That never works. Instead, promote it as hard as your marketing budget allows.

One of the better ways to get the word out is through social media. Afterall, almost half of the world is using it . That's why regardless of the industry you work in, odds are both your target audience and your competitors actively use social media. It makes communication between the company and its potential customers more human. More personal interactions that social media facilitates lead to people trusting your company more. And customer's trust is everything.

There are many ways to drive social media traffic to your app. We picked the most effective once.

1. Build a website and a landing page

This step is often skipped. Many people think that social media can completely replace having a website. While social media alone can drive traffic to your app, it does it better in conjunction with a web page. Since you own the platform, it could be anything you want. Which brings a large degree of flexibility. It allows you to create a content hub that is perfect for middle of the funnel customers. In other words, you get potential customers from social media to click on your website, where through content marketing and copy you should explain to people why should they go with your app and not the competitor's. And that way you attract more quality traffic to your app.

Moreover, having a website also opens additional avenues for discoverability. If you build your website in a SEO-friendly way, you have the potential to rank high in Google results. You can find out more about it in our SEO Developer article . But just to recap SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Which is a long-term strategy of getting traffic through Google's organic results.

Besides building a website is an easy as pie nowadays. With the multitude of content management systems(CMS) available at your fingertips like WordPress , Durpal , Magento ; it could be done in a matter of days, if not hours, with the fraction of money you normally need to spend on custom build websites. If you are not sure which CMS to pick, check out our article on Which CMS should I choose for my website that helps you make an informed decision.

Together with a website you would typically need a landing page. Folks often confuse homepage with a landing page. Home page is the main page of the website and could serve multiple purposes, whereas landing page has only one crucial goal to convert visitors. It should entice your website visitors to purchase your app. It typically does with the help of creative copywriting and clear calls to action.

2. Videos

Video marketing is all the rage right now. It's one of the surest ways to drive social media traffic to your app. The numbers of people consuming video content daily are staggering. With some countries getting as high as 95% of their people watching video content daily. Do not get left behind. However, producing a video could be expensive and time consuming affair.

This is where Lumen 5 comes in. It is a video creation platform that helps producing engaging video content for social media posts. This tool designed to be barebones and therefore has a gentle learning curve. So that you can focus on creating engaging videos, rather than spending countless hours figuring out functionality.

Lumen 5's algorithm either analyses your existing content like blog posts or helps you create new one. It has a large stock library of images and videos that you can simply drag and drop into the every separate video frame. Making the video making effortless.

3. Influencers

Using social media influencers to drive traffic to your app is one of the biggest trends these days. So much so that it is a separate branch of marketing now. But just to reiterate social media influencers are experts and trendsetters in any given industry. People tend to trust their expert opinions and authenticity, therefore an endorsement from such a person results in major boost in traffic.

89% of polled marketers said that return on investment from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels. So then it's not a big surprise that nearly two-thirds of marketers will increase their spending on influencer marketing this year.

While you want to have many influencers across multiple social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok etc. Very few of us have budget for that. Thus, you have to go with one or few that benefit you the most. This is where you have to be smart about your social media channel selection. The choice is usually highly dependant on the type of app you have. Is it easy to explain what your app does in few words and mention it briefly or does it say merits a whole video explanation on influencers channel? The answer will dictate the medium you can go with and therefore the eventual cost for it.

There are two main types of influencers so called micro-influencers and macro-influencers. Micro-influencers have smaller, but more loyal followings, which makes them a good choice for very specific niche apps. They are also a good choice for organizations with smaller marketing budgets. Macro-influencers, on the other hand, have huge followings, with millions of adoring fans. They are quite similar to conventional TV ads. Expensive and not narrow in terms of targeting. But if you need a lot of eyeballs on your app quick tend to be an excellent solution.

4. Press releases

In an ever-increasingly digital world of today the conventional press releases are being replaced by more robust and locanic social media press releases(SMPR). A well timed and executed social media press release can drive a good deal of new users to your app. In fact, it is its sole purpose to do so by telling your story and what is going on with your app. Thus attracting new people. Provided your message is compelling enough. Here's a way you can make it so.

The number one platform for SMPR is undoubtedly Twitter. This is where most of modern social discourse takes place. Despite 280 characters limitation everybody uses it for press releases from News outlets to famously leader of the free world.

It goes without saying that If you want to get a foothold in this space the tweets you send out should invoke an emotion. Otherwise you are going to be ignored. If there is even a hint of dryness or formality people will just scroll past your message at best, worse they could leave a negative comment. As with the most social media people are looking for a genuine moment from your company.

While you can certainly get creative with hashtags that alone won't be enough. With rapidly declining attention spans you have only a few seconds to grab attention. At this point using images and video is an absolute requirement. From lumen 5 section you already know that you don't have to be a professional to make beautiful and engaging videos. Take full advantage of it and stand out from the crowd that way. Additionally it also helps to mix it up, where you can tweet out same press release in different ways using either images or video, so that the person who had seen both can still extract some added value.

If you have a bigger budget and have a specific, narrow, niche audience to target, you could use twitter paid ads. For instance you can target people with certain interests or people that follow certain macro-influencers.

Regardless of the size of your budget though, this medium is useful in driving traffic to your app.

5. Use groups

With 200 million people being members of Facebook groups it is a great tool in your arsenal to drive traffic to your app. These groups help to build highly engaged grassroots communities of like-minded people. That could be leveraged to push more traffic towards your app.

There are two ways to go about it. You can either create a group yourself. Typically you would want to do it around a common problem your target audience has. And help solve that problem in a more efficient way. Alternatively, you can join already existing group and build your reputation by helping people in it. Be careful though, any hint of being disingenuous and you are going to be removed from the group right away. The only way to get ahead is to bring value to people. Therefore if you plan to use this option to make sure you are your authentic self.

Conclusion

Whichever approach you might take, one thing is certain you ought to have a social media strategy in place before your app is developed, not after. Otherwise it might be too little, too late and you end up missing out on a big chunk of social media traffic. Which in turn translates into real money loses. If you are not sure what social media strategy to go with you can contact us wiredelta.com. We would be delighted to hear from you.