App Marketing Best Practices

I cannot think of any market in the internet economy that has the same degree of competitiveness than the app economy - in particular the mobile gaming space.

As I previously stated, the top 10 apps make of more than 44% app usage, half of revenues on iOS and Android go to 25 top publishers. This is equivalent to about 0.008% of app developers.

So I thought we need a little bit of best practice for app developers as to how they can successfully grow their user base:


Paid App Promotions 

1. In-App Cross Promotion (using platforms like Chartboost, Applifier)
2. In-App Advertisement (Admob, Inmobi)
3. Incentivized Downloads (Tapjoy, Sponsorpay, Supersonicads)
4. Special Deal Apps (FAAD, App gratis)
5. Mobile Banner Campaigns (Adwords)
6. Facebook Marketing (Buying fans or installations)
7. Influencer Marketing

Public Relations 

1. Special Interest app online magazines (Playandroid Magazine, Fettspielen Magazine)
2. Online news magazines (like heise.de, or Golem.de
3. Tech bloggers  (Techcrunch, Gigaom, Mashable)

Social Media 

1. Twitter (especially working with promo codes)
2. Weibo (leading chinese site)
3. G-Plus (likely that it affects Google rankings)
4. YouTube (Video trailer)

  App Store Marketing 

1. Carrier Stores (there are 5-7 in China, 3 Stores in Korea with T-Store, Olleh, LG Uplus) 
2. Portals (Opera, Getjar, Dolphin, Playandroid.com, Androidpit)
3. OEM Stores (Samsung Apps)
4. App Store Marketing Aggregators (there are companies who will do everything for you)

App Store SEO

1. Downloads
2. Number of reviews (stars) 
3. Comments 
4. Description, Name , Screenshots, Keywords

Social Graph Viral

1. Messengers (like Kakao Talk, Line, Whatsapp APÌ)
2. Social Networks (Facebook API, QQ)

Friends at Google and Apple 

1. Can you bring you up to 50-60k per day per country per category 
2. Only works if you have a top quality game

Channelling 

1. Find app or website publishers who are willing to advertise your app for a revshare deal
2. TinyCo has built the first internal program 
3. Mobile-PS, a mobile game publishing solution and platform (not launched yet)

But most important: Have a great game that the world has not seen before!

Please comment below if you have further suggestions!