The Play Store is Huge!
The total number of app downloads crested 25 billion in september 2012, a mere 2 months after 20 billion downloads was reached! This means more than 30,000 applications are downloaded every minute. The absolute massiveness of the play store can be used to your advantage. However, the sheer size of some of the big players within the store means that the successful marketing of your app will be absolutely crucial to the success or the failure of your project.
Use what google gives you!
You all have experienced the horrors living in the shadowy of the play store. Apps whose creators have seemingly never heard of a screenshot… or an editor. They have no video explaining features, their downloads seem to be permanently stuck at 10. Nobody even bothered to give them a rating, well except the five-star review obviously written by the creator. Your apps page is where all your downloads come from. You can use all the marketing you want to get prospective down-loaders to your page, but if they don’t like what they see they are one press of the back button away from never thinking about your application again. Take a few screenshots of your app actually in action, not just the start menu. If you have the resources to make a professional looking video then do it! If not a simple over the shoulder video demonstrating the basic features that make your app important will make your page look significantly better.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
Android, apps, marketing, fluffy kittens! Keywords like that are what brought you to this article! If you came here for an article about
fluffy kittens I’m sorry, hopefully this will make you feel better. Keywords are the driving force behind virtually all content discovery on the internet. You need keywords throughout your description and most importantly of all, within your title. If you are an
established developer with an excellent budget you may be able to market the crap out of your app named kerfudle a household name despite it having nothing to do with editing cat pictures. Unfortunately a new developer may want to go with something along the lines of “cat photo editor” or “Super cute kitty filters.”
Marketing Outside of the Play Store
So you have held down your volume and lock buttons, shot a decent video and came up with a good title and description based on keywords. Where do you go from there? Many apps gain exposure through reviews. Quite a few sites, cough cough androidheadlines.com cough cough, offer excellent android app review services for extremely reasonable prices. Sometimes you might even be lucky and find a site offering a promotion, cough cough… android app review service located at the top of your screen. Sorry about
that cold guys. These services will provide a fair review of your products. Don’t expect to get an A+ rating without making an A+
application!
Conclusion
Getting your new application noticed will take a lot of work. It may also take some time. Whenever you feel down just look at this graph! If you make quality apps and follow the advice given here, you just might be the next app to help boost that ridiculous app growth graph above, even more in 2013 and beyond.