Mobile apps are a critical element of your marketing strategy. As such, I can’t stress enough the importance of doing your due diligence in optimizing the apps on the app sites and then maintaining them in the spirit of delivering a positive and valuable experience to your customers.
Mobile apps are marketing technology that you, the brands, are handing over to the customer for their private use. That makes it, in effect, customer marketing tech because you have put them in control.
- The customer decides to download the app … or not.
- The customer decides to turn it on … or not.
- The customer decides to keep it … or throw it away. Sadly, most app’s fall into abyss this very quickly
Thus, all the things we’ve been talking about – app store optimization (ASO), portfolio management, and now best practices – are critical to getting the customer to download, use, and find value for keeping the apps on their smartphone or tablet. If you want to be with them in every place they go on the web, mobile apps are the means to be there.
Let that sink in while we talk about the remaining best practices that will help you beat your competition, as well as the search engines, at their own game. These mobile apps lead the customer directly back to you. It’s your own private customer universe. There’s no one else at the end of the communication path, no middle man, and no search engine ranking page. It’s just you, one on one, with the customer.
There are always far too many best practices to cover and limited space to talk about them. Thus, we will cover the most important ones that have good universal appeal. These can be worked into your corporate work flows along with the many other best practices that are unique to your brand. What I’m going to cover here is:
- Keyword Research
- iTunes Keyword Property Characteristics
- Mobile App Description Development
- Image Selection
- Video Content
- Ratings and Reviews
Keyword Research
Success in keyword research is embodied in creating a process that works for you. Contrary to your intuition and confidence in your vocabulary, you won’t get it right if you just sit there and think up words and phrases. Beyond a process, you also need some tools to help you along. The tool can be as simple as a Thesaurus or as complex as Google’s Keyword Planner.
Let me offer some suggestions on how to approach this task. First, follow as simple a process as you can create. The one I use is:
- Gather – look at what keywords your competitors are using. It’s ok. They call it gathering business intelligence (BI). Hey, it’s kind of fun. Just remember, your competitor just might be relying on his intuition and confidence. Talk to your product and marketing teams as well. They did this same keyword research when they built their landing pages and websites.
- Ideate – which is another term for brainstorming with your friends and colleagues. The brainstorm session will provide more keywords and phrases to look at. Take what you’ve gathered and vet the whole list. You can look at volume and traffic that each idea will generate in a search.
- Decide – The key is to evaluate volume, opportunity, and relevance. Be wary of highly competitive terms where volume and relevance provide more opportunity, e.g., keyword rank 455 for “Photo” will provide you very few users versus the keyword “stich,” which has a rank of 2. Opportunity represents the ranking (competiveness) of your app for that term in the resulting search result set on the app store. Most users will not scroll past the 50th result. You may rank 400 for the term out of 2,500 results, but its value will be almost nil. Eliminate the anticipated poor performers and be creative in keeping the ones that just might work best. There are no guarantees, so keep a backup list as well as the primary one.
There are a host of keyword tools out there. Experiment and evaluate a few. Ubersuggest .org is one, as is keyword.io.
Review the opportunity for keywords on both iOS and Android distribution platforms (iTunes, GooglePlay). Use the variety that’s out there to triangulate and validate prioritization of keyword selection using tools such as AppAnnie, Searchman, SensorTower, AppCodes, etc
iTunes Keyword Properties
The first thing to understand is that this field in the iTunes store has a 100 character limit. Ok, that’s less than the original 140 character tweet limit. What can you possibly put in the box that will help you be found? Well, let’s look at the example below.
