A strong app marketing strategy ensures that your sales and marketing efforts don’t go to waste.
You have limited resources, so make sure those resources are being used to accomplish your business goals.
Keep reading below to learn how to plan your app marketing strategy to drive engagements and downloads.
A focused software marketing strategy will decrease your time to market and shorten your sales cycle. It will help you leapfrog your competition by:
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Before you start planning app marketing strategies, you need to be clear on your marketing goals.
These are just some of the ways that having a strong software marketing strategy can benefit your company:
A focused software marketing strategy will help you position your product in front of your optimal target market faster.
The sales cycle time is the total length of time from your first contact with a customer to when you close the sale.
You can find scaling opportunities such as via channel partners, joint ventures, or promotion opportunities.
If you are in the process of bringing a new product or service to market, it is even more important to carefully plan your software go-to-market strategy. Particularly for mobile apps, you have only a short window of opportunity after your app first appears in the app stores to get on top-rated or most-popular lists.
As you’re preparing your software for launch, you should start planning your app marketing strategy as early as possible. Don’t wait until you’ve finished all your development before you worry about marketing!
Your Go-To-Market Strategy should define the Who / What / Where / Which / When / How of your product or service introduction:
WHO |
Who are your specific target customers? |
WHAT |
What problem is your software addressing for your target customers? What is your messaging & value proposition? |
WHERE |
Where will your customer obtain the product or service? |
WHICH |
Which channels will you use for fulfillment, distribution, and support of your app? Which are appropriate partners? |
WHEN |
When will you introduce your app? When will you tell your customers? |
HOW |
How will you communicate with potential customers? How are you going to implement the go-to-market launch plan? |
For more information on planning your app marketing strategy and launch, read this article on mobile application market research and this on executing a successful software launch. Then you can use our Go-to-Market toolkit to plan your app launch.
Okay, so you are ready to start planning your app marketing strategy.
Simply follow the 7-step process below, one step at a time.
It is important to complete each stage thoroughly before moving onto the next one – this exercise is not about writing a lengthy marketing plan, but about going through the thought process to make sure that you fully understand your market and your customers, before you start crafting positioning, calling prospects, or creating pitches or other materials.
Your pitch will be a hundred times more effective if it speaks in your customers’ language and clearly addresses their top pain points.
Even if this is a market you know well, you should still look at analyst reports, recent articles on market trends, and assess who some of the market leaders in this space are. Try to answer the following questions:
See if there are ways you can break down your market into smaller segments. This can involve not only potential customers, also other players/partners in the market. By creating segments, you are creating bite-sized targets for your marketing that you can then prioritize and develop targeted micro-messaging for.
The more you know about your potential customers, the better you can target your marketing. In this step, you need to get into your customers’ heads to understand their challenges, their language, their values.
For each of the segments you identified in step two, create a detailed profile (persona). You can do this for both potential customers, as well as potential partners in the market:
Once you have done the exercise above, hopefully you can identify which of these segments you should target at which phase of your marketing:
Remember to stay focused – start with one or two top sub-segments and develop a strategy to win those first, before moving on to others. If you are just starting out, you will gain early traction faster with a focused approach. You can always broaden your marketing later after you have won your first niche.
Once you’ve identified your targets in step four, you now must determine what must be in place in order to make that sale / pitch:
You are now ready to define the key talking points for each segment audience. Make sure the positioning addresses the points above:
The final step in your app marketing strategy is to figure out the best way to communicate your elevator pitch to each audience segment: How do you best engage them? Where and how can you communicate your message? This step involves putting together your marketing communications strategy so that your ideal customers can hear your elevator pitch through their preferred channels.
Finally, you are ready to execute against your software marketing strategy. But make sure to keep re-evaluating your strategy as you execute and gather more market intelligence and experience. An app marketing strategy should never be static – it is a continuous cycle that helps you accelerate sales and reach your business goals.
Ready to get started?
To read more about how to follow the 7 step marketing process, take a look at our eBook which comes complete with worksheets and templates that will help you implement the process.
Or download our Go-to-Market Toolkit, which includes a Software Launch Guide, Go to Market Strategy Template and much more to help you plan a successful app launch.