Having deep expertise in consumer business Sourjyendu spent 15 years with leading, retail and FMCG organizations. He was head of sales at Metro Cash & Carry, India, and Raymonds FMCG. He had also headed the reseller business and CRM & pricing function for Metro Cash & Carry, India. Spent Initial years of his career at Citibank and Britannia Industries Ltd. After completing his MBA from NITIE, Mumbai (Gold medalist of his batch) he took a degree in computer science engineering from NIT Jamshedpur. Deeply passionate about bringing SME manufacturers closer to the middle-income population of the country he aims to create tremendous value for both the consumers and manufacturers.
It is very easy to establish a business when you notice a hole in the market space that needs to be filled but when you want to jump feet first into a marketplace that’s already crowded it’s very hard as there are brands that are already well established and the competition is huge. One of the biggest challenges that Startups face is getting people to use their services or product and making sure that the people who use keep using it. And it is important for every Start-up to know the tools, tips and tricks that professionals use to craft a successful outreach strategy by which they will be successful in acquiring the target users.
Therefore, for any Start-up, there are two sets of tactics that should be part of their strategy to acquire more users: Social and Technical.
- Social Tactics
Social Tactics are tactics that can be done without having a great deal of knowledge. It involves talking to people, engaging users, communicating, applying classic marketing and promotional techniques.
- One platform that gets the most attention is ‘Social Media’. You can find people using it all day and night but one thing that the Start-up needs to make sure is to know that the social media voice must match the persona of the app or service. For example, what is your app about? What services do you provide? How is it different from the competitors? If the app is cool and edgy, they should make sure they don’t bore the fans with bland business language. Whereas if your app is geared towards young professionals, the bland business language might suit the audience well. Hence apps like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter help one’s business to engage with the target user and such a relationship directly increase word-of-mouth praise and increase downloads as a result.
- One field that is really important and is very closely related to marketing but differs in a few critical ways is ‘Public relations’ (PR). It involves directly (or indirectly) promoting a product or services to generate revenue. It helps in building and maintaining relationships that present a favourable image of an organization or product in front of the public. It involves crafting press releases, pitching stories to the media, and responding to informational inquiries. One should keep in mind that it takes a good subtle hand to master the line between selling a product or promoting it, but once you know its value, you will have two different as well as complementary tactics to acquire new users.
- Thanks to smartphones everyone can have instant access to email wherever they go, whenever they choose and ‘Email Marketing’ is the marketing where one promotes the product via sending emails to the target user, it is one of the most cost-effective ways of acquiring new users. Via email marketing, one can provide some complimentary services or give some additional discount to gather new email contacts and if you happen to have a fair knowledge about how it works you can get lots of customers.
- Content Marketing differs from traditional marketing as in instead of just advertising a product or promoting the app, it provides actual value to the person via videos, webinars, blogs as they make people aware about your brand and creates awareness, establishing you as a thought leader, and in turn demonstrate your success to the audience. Therefore, for this to be successful one will need to create good, actionable, and compelling content.
- One tactic that every start-up may forget but it makes a lot of difference in acquiring customers is the ‘Organic Review’ on the Play Store or App Store. Perhaps one of the oldest ways of spreading the benefits of any product is by a positive word of mouth. And as app stores began to incorporate these metrics into their ranking algorithms, they became even more crucial. Hence every time you receive a positive mention, every time a user shares a good review of your app, the app store algorithm bumps your ranking higher than the competitors. Even when we look at it from a psychological standpoint, when a potential user sees that your application has been given 5 stars by many people, they will be more apt to download your app. Even better, they might be emboldened to write their own review.
- Technical Tactics
They are the strategies that require technical knowledge like using technology to maximize the number of users your app can acquire.
- App store optimization (ASO) helps in increasing the app store ranking to make it more visible to the users which in turn drives them to download the app. ASO is very similar to SEO for websites and although the general idea is the same, the tactics are somewhat different. ASO requires an understanding of your ideal user persona as it will shape the keyword strategy. One should never forget that keywords matter just as much for ASO as they do for SEO, perhaps even more so, since one’s working with smaller, more tightly focused fields. One should research on the targeted keywords as it will enable users to find their app instead of their competitor’s. One should also combine it with clever and catchy descriptions, as it will make the users think that this is the best they will get. Do not take this lightly and choose the keywords wisely as app store optimization is one of the most crucial components of your overall mobile app marketing plan.
- Asset Optimization is simply making sure that everything in your app’s layout is giving the best possible impression to the potential customer that have downloaded your app. This is very much related to sales optimization. Everything should be looking as professional and appealing as possible so that anyone and everyone who finds your app is much more likely to download it or buy it.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very critical mobile app user acquisition tactic. Therefore, when choosing the keywords for your text, one should make sure that the description is relevant to the subject so that it can easily be found and indexed by the search engines. Once the baseline is determined for the type of terms the business want to use. Deep research is to be conducted to investigate if some similar words or phrases generate similar levels of traffic. For the same Google’s Ad-word Keyword Tool is an invaluable tool to search for lateral keywords. Also, one should make sure that they don’t just pick any keyword because it has a high search volume. The keyword that is selected should accurately describe the app and also be relevant to the target audience Stuffing your descriptions full of popular yet irrelevant keywords will cause Google to penalize you with low placement on the search engine results pages, this will also reduce your credibility and driving down the app’s visibility.
- The clearest approaches to expose new users to your application is to pay for them to see it. The two most effective paid acquisition tactics to acquire more users for your mobile app are the sponsoring reviews by industry influencers who will critically review the app and Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. Sponsored Reviews are the opinions given by the industry experts and this has a lot of impact on the business as it can make or break the success of the app as the app is reviewed by experts review the quality of the app and provide immense credibility, but you need to make sure that your reviewers resonate with your potential market and is also within the budget. Paid tactics tend to be more involved than other forms of acquisition. PPC is paid clickable ads that appear on websites, apps, or other channels that one determines would be appropriate for the target audience, and every time someone clicks on that ad it will take them to a landing page that promotes the app, or directly to an app store where one can download the app.