How to Leverage PR for Apps

With more than 800,000 apps currently available in both the iTunes App Store and the Google Play store, it’s clear that leveraging PR for apps is necessary to distinguish your app from the rest of the market.

For mobile developers that have no prior experience in marketing or PR, promoting a mobile app can seem challenging. Since we’ve successfully launched many mobile app PR campaigns for our clients, Walker Sands has accumulated some important insights about PR for apps.

Strategizing PR for Apps

Before launching an app, mobile developers need to take all aspects of the app into consideration. Successful PR for apps starts the moment you come up with the app idea itself – start envisaging your mobile app PR strategy well before the launch date.

• Successful PR for apps begins with research. Who is your target audience and how does your app address their needs? After you research prospective buyers, you can build the app with them in mind, laying the groundwork for an outstanding mobile app PR campaign.
• Another important step in strategizing PR for apps is creating strong visuals. Often, customers browsing through the app store will make a purchase based on how the app itself looks. Using an attractive icon, high-res pictures and a snappy description will entice users to download your app.
• Developers should take advantage of mobile platform’s capabilities. Today’s mobile devices have tilt and swipe abilities, retina displays, cameras and more – using these features in your app creates a better user experience and increases the likelihood that you’ll receive great reviews from your PR for apps investments.

5 Ways to Mobilize PR for Apps

Properly executing your mobile app PR strategy requires solid planning and intelligent communication with both the media and potential users. Keep people talking about your app and sharing it with these 5 tips on PR for apps:

1. Build an online presence – Promoting mobile apps primarily takes place on mobile devices, so it’s necessary for developers to create a webpage and social media accounts for their app. Solid PR for apps drives interactions with users on Facebook and Twitter by posting about your app, but also shares interesting posts and articles to amass a large social following.
2. Create compelling pitches – Reporters get tons of pitches from mobile app promoters each day. To capture their attention, effective PR for apps keeps pitches short, informative and interesting, including basics like the app’s format, price and launch date. Consider attaching a video that displays what it does to make your pitch even more compelling.
3. Tailored targets – A large part of mobile app promotion is choosing the right targets. The most effective PR for apps involves pitching only reporters that are interested in your app. Seek out journalists and bloggers that have reviewed similar apps to yours in the past to increase your chances of being covered.
4. Collect customer reviews – Receiving good customer reviews is key to great PR for apps. Seeing favorable reviews on the app store or social media sites heavily impacts a user’s decision to download mobile app. Garner complimentary reviews of your mobile app by tracking the reactions of reviewers and consumers and making changes to the app when necessary.
5. Demonstrate effective timing – Creating a schedule of planned PR events and pushes is essential to successful PR for apps. Developers will need to decide, based on research, the best times for promotion. Do you want people to be able to download your app as soon as they hear about it? Or do you want to build up hype before it’s released? Making these decisions is a crucial part of promotion for mobile apps.

In our PR for apps experience, developers who take the time to carefully craft PR for apps strategies are the most successful in promoting their mobile apps. While getting the word out about your app can be challenging, taking the time to flesh out a PR strategy will help your mobile app receive more downloads.