Having a mobile app is good. Making it rank higher is better. Getting people to install it and leave positive feedback is the best thing. While all of that sound so nice, as a small business, your road to achievement is thorny. The market is competitive, digital natives have shifting priorities and expect more, and within a small budget; you need to prove a point that you can take risks and your efforts are successful.
At OMSOFTWARE, we work with small businesses with promising ideas, but limited budgetary constraints often pull them down - they want to take risks but the fear of an uncertain future always exists. What if my app fails? What if it could not handle the rising competition?
App Store Optimization (ASO) For Small Businesses
This is a very common challenge many small businesses face before having their mobile app developed. We understand this, and as a part of our greater commitment to serve businesses of all shapes and sizes thrive digitally with products that solve a problem, and contribute to greater well-being, we customize our app development pricings. While keeping cost down, we still make sure most of the desired features of the app remain.
But cost - big or small - alone does not decide the success of an app on the app store. We look at this point in this article.
Established Brands Have An Advantage To Achieve Desired Results In The App Store Because –
• They are already known, and don't need to struggle to make the first branding impression
• They have skilled resources and access to technologies for a long-standing app presence.
• They have better data and analytics to predict the challenges and as well the strategies to counter these.
The strengths of an established business are your weakness. However, you can still address these with a clear, consistent and contextual strategy. Let us take the challenges and see how you can address them with the power of positivity, consistent effort and content.
Challenges small businesses face in app store optimization and how to address these?
• Challenge 1: You lose against the competition because you are new and nobody cares who you are!
This is a simple psychology. Established brands would most of the time capitalize on their own branding and have a keyword strategy around their own brand name. However, as a small business, when no one knows you, your strength is the generic search term.
Brand conscious audience would mostly enter name of their desired brands to install a branded app. But they do not constitute all of the searchers. Most people enter generic terms and common key phrases in the search section to find relevant search results in the app store. So, you need to invest your efforts and time on proper keyword research. Google keyword planner gives a fair idea about the competitive keywords you can target, you can also use the auto suggested keywords from play store for a fair idea about top keyword ideas.
• Bonus Point: Take a top-performing app that is relatively new, but has a convincing presence on the app store. Read their description, app name, and other areas where they have placed keywords. Use the keywords used, and follow the strategy and try to do even better.
• Challenge 2: Established brands have better presence and worldwide market.
You can't reach out to worldwide audience and target global audience because of limited investment capacity. But this can as well be your strength. Conduct a comprehensive research on the target market, and see which is the location that draws maximum app installs and engagements for your product niche. Depending on the result, localize your app targeting that area. Localizing your app helps achieve more targeted traffic, and improve app install counts.
• Challenge 3: You have limited resource and as mentioned earlier, budget to promote your product on the app store and thus connect with more audiences.
Big budget and access to highly skilled resource is good, but simplicity, positivity, and authenticity have no alternatives. Money and resource do not necessarily decide everything. Data does to a large extent. Rather than starting with marketing campaigns that also include manipulated strategies; stick to the values and honestly. The best place to market your app is the app page itself. And it begins with app ratings and reviews. And you don't need to be rich to do that.
Take every user feedback, and respond quickly. Appreciate and thank the users who are replying in positive. Apologize and offer immediate resolutions to problems to the users who are replying in negative. A constructive app page populated with reviews that take a discussion further and towards solution is more likely to draw organic traffic, and increase app ratings.
For this part to accomplish you need content that offers hope and gratitude shows you are serious about your product and you really want to help users. This builds connections and eventually improves your app install and ratings. This is far better and organic way to connect with more users naturally than to spend hugely in marketing campaigns that does not necessarily help. User experience and engagement counts, the volume of money you invested to promote your product does not.
Mobile is the future, and app store is the goldmine for small business that wants to see a thriving future. For a small business to grow, this is the best time to start.
To learn more about app store optimization, you can visit our earlier article here
To start a free consultation on how to grow your app on app store, please feel free to connect with OMSOFTWARE here. As a small business, we recommend you start small with ASO services, and gradually based on the result, scale up your investment naturally. There is no hurry to grow, when investing time and effort to build a solid foundation is more important.
