5 Steps to Promote Your App Using Content Marketing

Promoting an app with content marketing seems quite impractical unless you’re making content for digital ads.

However, there are quite a few success stories that involve app promotion through content marketing.

Tasty’s Success Content Marketing Story

Buzzfeed Tasty, known for its viral recipes, launched as a YouTube channel and a website where amateur cooks tried different short recipes. But as they developed their content, they decided to move forward and create an app with full recipes ranging from simple to difficult.

Tasty app

Around the same time, Tasty started to create more of their YouTube videos, including Tasty 101 guides, inviting experienced chefs to help home cooks improve the recipes, many of which are listed on the app.

With every video, they turned the attention of their 18 million subscribers to an option of downloading an app:

The same notification appeared on their website, inviting more people to cook their recipes at home with an app.

What are the results of Tasty’s content marketing campaign to promote its app?

As of now, their app has almost 100,000 reviews on Google App alone, with an average review of 4.7 stars. And the general number of downloads is more than 5 million.

A Guide to Promoting App Using Content Marketing

Of course, Buzzfeed put a lot of thought into developing Tasty’s content marketing campaign. Any marketing campaign, for that matter, requires a lot of preparation and analysis before you can launch it with confidence that it will bring you consistent results.

This, of course, includes consistent content production to support your marketing campaign’s consistent performance and the maximum exposure of your app.

So, let’s take a look at a brief guide, what it will take you to create a content marketing campaign to promote your app.

Step #1: Audience Analysis

All marketing efforts start with the analysis of the target audience that will be the primary receiver of your product, or, in our case, an app.

Audience analysis starts with determining the target audience persona and the description of the persona’s biographical and demographic data, as well as challenges that create a need for them to download your app.

Here’s an example of a target audience persona for a home workout app.

The description of the target audience person also hints at the intention that will be behind your content marketing campaign.

In the example above, the intention of the user to download a home workout app is to get more exercise during the quarantine. The app’s main message of the content marketing campaign will also be to encourage people to get more exercise during the quarantine.

Step #2: Platform Analysis

Assuming that your website will be the foundation of your content marketing strategy, you can pick a few other channels that will help drive traffic through content marketing.

Most likely, you will choose one of the social platforms, where you will put up content to promote your app.

Here, it is important to remember that different social media platforms have different general audiences. This means that at least gender and age distribution will be different for all social media platforms.

Take a look at the stats for the four most popular platforms for content marketing.

Facebook audience

• The audience on this platform is predominantly male (>56% male and 44% female).
• As for the age of Facebook’s audience, the majority of users are aged 18 to 34.

 

Image credit: >Statista

Instagram audience

• Instagram users are, on the contrary, predominantly female, with a ratio of 50.9% to 49.1%, which makes Instagram a good fit for almost every target audience.
• As for the age distribution, the majority of the users are between 18 and 34 years old, the same as Facebook.

Image credit: >Statista

Twitter audience

• Twitter’s gender distribution is similar to Facebook’s, with 56.2% of males and 43.8% of females actively using this platform.
• The majority of Twitter users are between 18 and 49 years old, making it one of the most diverse social platforms in terms of age.

Image credit: >Statista

YouTube audience

• YouTube is one of universal social platforms for content marketing in terms of audience outreach, with gender distribution almost equal between males and females (68% and 67% respectively).
• The same is true for the age of YouTube’s general audience.

Image credit: >Statista

How can you benefit from this data?

This information is useful for you to compare the general audience of every social platform and your target audience persona, and select the network that fits your target audience requirements.

You can also narrow down your search and take a look at the analytics of your followers on each of the platforms.

There you can also check out your followers’ demographics and compare it to your target audience persona.

This data should be enough to help you figure out which platform or platforms to engage in your content marketing campaign to improve outreach and increase traffic.

Step #3: Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is one of the essential steps in developing a content marketing campaign to promote an app.

The results of competitor analysis can be not only an example of mistakes that you should avoid in your marketing campaign but also the source of ideas that you can borrow and modify to fit the promotion of your app.

Here’s a short guide to help you do a quick competitor analysis.

• The analysis of your competitors’ inventory. The inventory includes blog articles, audio, and video recordings, educational resources (webinars, ebooks, e-lectures), newsletters, and social media content.
• Content quantity and quality evaluation. For this step, do study the channels that your competitors use to promote their app, the types of content they upload there, and the frequency with which they create content to promote their apps. It’s easier to do it in the form of a chart.

Company	Channel	Quantity	Frequency	Quality	Details
Competitor Name	Blog	20 posts	3 posts/week	High	average number of words 1500 words/post

• Single out the intent behind the content. There is a chance that this intent will be a bit different from yours, depending on the nature of the app that your competitor is promoting. This intent, however, may be a great resource of ideas for your content marketing campaign and be the foundation of your further SEO optimization based on search intent.

The benefits of competitor analysis for an app promotion are hard to underestimate. Since the app development market is very competitive, you need every bit of information to develop a comprehensive content marketing campaign that gives consistent results. Competitor analysis gives you enough knowledge to understand the market, what works and what doesn’t, and which mistakes to avoid in your marketing campaign.

Step #4: Content Strategy Optimization

To successfully promote your app using content marketing, you need to choose the right content types that will work for the benefit of increasing your app’s visibility.

You can go with top-performing content types, such as video content or interactive content. In this case, you will most likely have to hire >top editing services to produce high-quality well-well-produced content.

However, if you are a startup or a solo entrepreneur, you may not have the budget necessary to support high content production.

What should you do in this case?

Try to involve social listening and take a look at what your audience prefers to see you post. Their feedback is visible in social media analytics stats. In these stats, you can see the general content preferences of your followers, as well as post-by-post performance.

To get ideas for your content, you can also check out your audience’s interests to catch their attention with your content.

This data will help you optimize your content marketing strategy in accordance with the preferences of your followers and successfully attract their attention by targeting their interests in your app promotion.

Step #5: Involve Different Outreach Initiatives

Lastly, you should incorporate a few initiatives that can help you increase the outreach of your marketing campaign.

Here are a couple of ideas you can consider in your content marketing campaign to promote your app.

Influencer Marketing

Reaching out to influencers to have them promote your product is a widespread practice. Blue Apron is doing it on Instagram, where the influencers share their Blue Apron discount codes under the hashtag #blueapronapp:

Influencer marketing has quite a good return on investment. According to the research by Influencer Marketing Hub, some businesses see the return on investment from influencer marketing as high as $5.20 per every dollar spent on influencer campaigns.

Thus, influencer marketing can give a good boost to promote your app, not to mention that you will have custom content created for you and get access to the influencer’s niche audience.

User-Generated Content

Another great outreach idea for your content marketing campaign is to involve your audience to contribute.

Tasty is doing it for their app, having their community members submit their recipe ideas on the website. After that, these recipes also appear on their app, where other users can leave their reviews of the recipes along with some additional tips on how to improve them.

User-generated content is very valuable in terms of the traffic it delivers. Several stats have found that that user-generated content delivers 4 times higher click-through rates than any other type of content.

Just with influencer marketing, you will receive a ton of custom content from your audience. But in this case, you will also get another benefit – a strong community of loyal app users.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, it is very much possible to promote your app using content marketing, and not just with ads, but using the organic approach as well.

The preparation of a content marketing campaign to promote an app involves a lot of prior audience and platform research, as well as competitor analysis, content optimization, and the research of a variety of outreach options.

We also need to mention that you need to plan your content marketing campaign beforehand, as it will take you some time to build your content strategy. And, of course, you should track the performance of your content marketing campaign in progress to make necessary modifications that will ensure the success of your app promotion efforts.