Developing a mobile app is a lot of work. From concept to design to implementation, you’ve likely spent countless hours working on this app, and now you’re finally ready to release it to the world. Ideally, your app would be so great that word of mouth alone will help it to spread. However, even though your app is great, this isn’t likely to happen.

Just because you’re done with app development doesn’t mean your work is over. There is still plenty left to do to market your app, so don’t kick back and relax just yet. To market your new mobile app online, you’ll want to follow the steps below for the best results:

Advertise on Your Website

One of the first things you should do is advertise your new mobile app on your website. If you don’t have a website, you’ll want to create one as soon as you can. Promoting your mobile app on your website allows you to do a few things.

First, it gives you space to go into more detail about your app. You can create an entire page outlining why someone should download your app – something you can’t really do in a small ad elsewhere.

On top of this, advertising on your own website allows you to take advantage of existing traffic. Let’s say you just developed an app for your home foundation repair company that helps walk people through the process of checking their home’s foundation for problems. On your website, you have several helpful blog posts about common home foundation problems that receive a good amount of traffic. By promoting your app on these pages, you take advantage of the audience you already built. Now not only is that blog post promoting your business, but it’s promoting your app at the same time.

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When advertising on your website, don’t go overboard. A simple image in the sidebar is a good start, and you can include some links to it throughout your pages. If you try to do too much, this will just annoy your visitors, so when in doubt, keep it simple.

Make Use of Social Media

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The next thing you’ll want to do is utilizing social media. Social media is now one of the most effective ways to promote something, and often you can do it for free. Make sure you have accounts on the most popular social media networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc — and that you are active on each one. Once you’ve built up a large enough following, you can begin promoting your new app to your followers.

Another thing you can do with social media is run ads. Most social media platforms offer some amazing tools that will allow you to target your ideal audience with ads. You can then spend some money to promote your app to the audience that will be most likely to download it.

The great thing about advertising on social media is that it can fit any budget. If you only want to spend a few dollars a month to start, you can do this. And since you’re only showing the ad to your specific audience, less of your money is wasted. Then, once you start seeing some results, you can either run more ads or start exploring your other options, such as working with a Facebook advertising agency.

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Run Promotions

A great way to promote your app is by running some promotions. This is particularly useful if your app costs money, or if there are paid features within it. Here’s how it works:

First, decide what you want to give away. It could be early access to your app, giving away a paid app for free, a discount on in-app purchases, or something else entirely. Pick something that your target audience will want, and that will get them excited to participate in the promotion.

Once you know what you’re giving away, it’s time to get the word out. Create some social media posts and tell everyone that if they share the post with their own followers, they’ll be automatically entered into the contest. If your promotion is good enough, and you have a decent following already, this can quickly spread the word of your app exponentially.

You can also run this promotion through word of mouth. For instance, provide each person who downloads your app with their own unique code. If someone else signs up for your app with this code, the original downloader can get a prize, a discount, or entered into a contest. This encourages people to tell others about your app.

A great example of this is the trivia app “HQ Trivia”. Within the trivia game, users are allowed to use extra lives in order to keep playing. One way to get these extra lives is by having a new user sign up with your referral code. Offering a free extra life costs the app makers nothing, but gives the players a great incentive for telling their friends and family about the game.

Use Influencers

Finally, the last thing you can try is using online influencers to promote your app. If there are people within your niche who have a large social media following or web presence, having them mention your app would go a long way. There are a few ways you can get them to do this.

You could offer them a free version of your app, or early access, in exchange for an honest review. If your app is great, then this review will only serve as an excellent promotion. Another thing you can try is asking to cross promote. For instance, in exchange for talking about your app, you’ll also promote them on your website/social media feeds.

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Finally, you could simply pay for an influencer to mention your app. This is often a great strategy if you can find someone who is very influential within your niche, who is open to sponsored posts, and who doesn’t charge a lot. When considering this route, think about the money you’ll have to spend versus the likely return. You don’t want to pay someone a lot of money to promote your post if their audience is mostly bots or people unlikely to download your app.

For more information on how to find and use influencers for marketing, you can check out this guide.

Marketing Your Mobile App Takes Work

While the hard part of creating your app may be behind you, that doesn’t mean it’s smooth sailing the rest of the way. You don’t want all of that hard work to go to waste by having no one downloading your app. This means you need to put just as much effort into promoting your mobile app as you did creating it. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to do this — from ads on your website, to free websites to promote your mobile app, to social media and more. And with the steps above, you should find that you are able to spread the word fairly easily, and before long plenty of people will be using your app on a regular basis.