Inbound traffic, SEO, SEM, SSM, what do those words mean and what do they have to do with your iphone / android applications in the iTunes App Store or the Android Marketplace? Not a whole lot, but fortunately for you they do apply everywhere else in the world wide web. What this mean is that if you are not one of the few to be featured by Apple or Google, you still have a fighting chance to effectively market your apps and increase their exposure.
In brief, SEO stands for search engine optimization. SSM, social media marketing and SEM stands for search engine marketing. Inbound refers to all the links either search engine or social media links that point back to your site. What’s the big deal about these links? In short, it’s traffic coming back to your site, without having to pay for it, as opposed to pay per click traffic which only shows you love as long as you’re willing to pay for it.
So what’s the driving factor for all this traffic? Content on your site and participating in the conversation on someone else’s – for example, commenting. Here’s where you ‘re gonna have to roll up your sleeves and embrace your new role as an expert in the field of the product you’re marketing – in this case, a good example would be the functions your app performs. Let’s say your app turns a mobile device into a level for carpenters. A good example of content for your site would then be how to articles and or YouTube videos on home improvement.
Look at it this way. Traditional marketing (outbound) interrupts people in their environment. Sometimes it may be informative but I’d say more often than not, it’s intrusive. If all you have is a link to your app in iTunes, you may have to go that outbound route. Inbound marketing works in the opposite manner. Individuals seek out information online. This is where your app’s website comes into play. If you’ve optimized your content properly, prospective customers can find themselves discovering you and hopefully a resolution through your wonderful smartphone app and or tablet application.
At this point it may appear as if I may be focusing a little too much on marketing a website rather than marketing an app, or that matter your link on iTunes. For some people, that might be right. You may also have the luxury of unlimited funds for traditional media buys to get more exposure for your app, in which case you can disregard this article. However, for those who are working on slightly more modest budgets, the inbound marketing strategy can level the playing field because at the end of the day, these game changing techniques use intellectual capital as their currency.
So how can this strategy help market your iphone, android or iPad apps? Picture this scenario. After months of developing, tweaking, and troubleshooting your app, it’s finally made it to the app store and a few weeks after that you’ve received that long awaited approval email from Apple. Looks like you’re golden! Think again. Maybe if you were among the first few hundred developers to submit. But these the iPhone App Store and Android Marketplaces are becoming increasingly crowded and there’s no sign of things slowing down in the near future either. While it’s great for the consumer it also means it’s harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. Given this scenario, would you rely solely on the editors of those stores to bring more exposure to your app? If such was the case, I would seriously think twice about that business model. Thankfully however, the fate of your app’s popularity does not have to rest solely on Apple or Android Marketplace but rather the effort you put into your inbound marketing efforts.
So where do you begin? That will be the focus of an upcoming series of articles I’m working on that focus on strategies for marketing apps for Android, iPhone and iPad devices. Consider this an introduction to an alternative marketing strategy. One that relies on your intellectual capital not your financial resources.
The articles will discuss the following topics:
Using Wordpress to market and promote your apps
Streamlining your social media marketing efforts for Twitter, Facebook, Linked In etc…
