There are so many apps available to download on the App Store and Google Play. So how can you ensure your app is a success? What can you do to make sure your app is seen, downloaded and used. Our Account Director, Tim Moore, explores the key steps to ensuring your enterprise app is successful.
“How can I make my app a success?”
Marketing is all important, and anyone creating an app needs to put together a clear marketing strategy. You need to make sure your app gets found and downloaded. This can be done through social media, email, brand websites, paid advertising online and in print, launch events and videos.
We also talk to our clients about building a product, not a project. If you’re building a new standalone app, you’re essentially building a new business. So you need to think about putting together focus groups, building a business plan and making sure that your idea will give something valuable to your users.
All of this research and development of your idea needs to be done way before the app is even built.
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Full Video Transcript of ‘How to make my app a success’
“So we get an awful lot of people come to us with their app ideas. And one of their first questions they ask is ‘how do I make my app a success?
Which is a fine question, but a multi-faceted answer. So what we often start talking about is the fact that marketing is all important. Just throwing the app on the store isn’t going to get you anywhere. There’s so many apps on the store, it’s a bit naive to think someone’s going to stumble upon it, download it and use it. So marketing is obviously all important.
But, what we also talk about is building a product not a project. So if you’re building a product, and by that you are creating a business. And if you’re starting a business, there’s certain things you’re going to do. You’re going to allocate time and know that there are going to be demands on that time. You are going to put user groups together, to understand what it is they want out of a product like the one you’re building. Go and gather some stats and look at the industry, and you’re going to have all this information before you launch into building an app.
You’re definitely up against it building an app in certain respects. As the average person only has 26 apps on their phone. And we know that 60 per cent of users abandon an app within just one month. So the question we try and ask early on, and try and answer for our clients, is how can they avoid being one of those 60 per cent and how can they be one of the 26 on the phone.
And we can help identify that. One from the original user group studies, but we also talk about it early on. Before you’ve even built or launched the first version about retention and driving people back to that app. We discuss often a bit of a cheesy phrase which is the “AHA Moment”. The AHA Moment in apps is the moment you’re using something and you won’t let it go. So facebook define their AHA moment is when you’ve got 7 friends.
Once you’ve got 7 friends within Facebook, you’re not going to delete it. You’re got it on your phone forever, and it’s going to be something consistent. Spotify have an AHA Moment they’ve identified as two playlists. Once a users added two playlists they don’t get rid of Spotify, they’re in.
So if you know that there can be a moment in the app that stops that loss of users, that abandon rate, then trying to identify it early is all important and certainly once that app goes live is using things like analytics.
Where you can use a free tool like Google Analytics, you can track users through the app, see their behaviours, see where they drop off, and more importantly, where that AHA Moment is.”