4 Ways to Influence Users & Make Your App Viral

You believe you’ve struck gold: You have a brilliant app idea that you feel has enormous potential. It is likely that you got the insight by resolving any issue that you or people you had. “Appreneurs” are a new age of entrepreneurs who leverage the immense distribution power of the App Store to grow their own revenue. As a successful entrepreneur, you’d want your mobile app to be popular in terms of sustainability, revenue, and the love of users.

But, how do you know whether there is a big enough scale of people that face the same problems that you’re trying to solve? It’s hard to tell by just observing a small pool of people– yourself or your friends.

Does your app have legs to scale? Instead of starting to build an app without any initial groundwork and research, try to validate your idea. This easy and simple methodology will help you save time, money, and energy before you start the ignition to building an app.

Implement the concept of micro-testing and apply it to the mobile app development process. It not only helps you discard some bad ideas(which you might think are great!), but also gives you the confidence to go all-in on your first big app. Follow these four steps that will help in validating your mobile app idea:

Begin by Digging into Basic Research

Search for similar solutions that already exist in the market. Begin by listing the main keywords or phrases that are most likely associated with your mobile app. Now Google em’ away! That’s right, it’s as simple as that. Look for how popular those search results are then make a leaderboard.

Examining and analyzing the App Stores will give you a brief insight into the potential competitors; their performance through the ratings, marketing strategies, comments, number of downloads, keywords, pictures, etc. Tools like AppAnnie and TopAppCharts.com can help you build your App Store Optimization(ASO) strategy, and decide the future steps on making your mobile app successful.

• Google Trends– type the main keywords that describe the subject of your app or the issue your app is going to resolve and see whether it is trending that month or year.
• Google Keyword Planner– a keyword search and traffic estimator, it can help you look for the number of people seeking out what you’re trying to do.
• MobileAction – a free tool that lets you see the most comprehensive App Store analytics, downloads, keywords, and rankings.

Create a Landing Page

Before developing your enormous piece of software, try something simple, like a landing page. A landing page is a single page that will ideally showcase your app. It’ll describe the primary advantages of your app, the key selling points, and the main issues it solves. The objective of creating a landing page is to mimic the experience future consumers will have when they view your app in the app store. It also lets you test how willing they are to buy your app.

The most crucial thing to do is defining your metrics (such as email subscribers, app survey completion, etc.). Make sure that your landing page has the following basic things:

• The brief pitch of your app – describe your mobile app in a short sentence that would make your target audience interested
• Screenshots or mockups to give your first users a primary understanding of the functionality of your mobile app
• Email subscription form – the medium through which you can let your customers know about new features and updates. Example: Mailchimp.

Create your landing page as if the app has been already built, with the main Call-to-Action button. Track your metrics by connecting your landing page or microsite to Google Analytics or MixPanel. Also, make sure you mark your links through Google Analytics’ —URL-builder and Bitly you will know exactly what the sources were and how many times a specific link was clicked.

You can use the following resources to create a landing page:

• Unbounce – helps you create a landing page without spending a dime. It’s time-efficient, flexible, and has an optimized user experience for testing new ideas.
• Launchrock – offer to land page services like pre-built templates with images.
• LanderApp or Underlay – lets you design a landing page in one hour with optimized templates.

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Promote the Landing Page

Once your landing page is set up, you need to start sending traffic to it. You can opt for free promotion as well as paid campaigns to let the world know about your app:

> Friends and family can be one of the most basic ways to begin.> Resort to social media, relevant subreddits, or forums to spread out the word organically.> Familiar with bloggers and social media influencers who are writing on something similar to your app’s topic? Ask them to share your app and idea with their community.> Google Adwords and Facebook ads are basic paid tools that will help you validate your ideas. You can also use Product Hunt for hardware as well as software ideas validation.> HackerNews is another great platform for you to post your app ideas, where the community will “lyft” the ideas if found interesting.> Attend meetups, especially the tech section, and create a buzz with your app’s idea to engage the people around. This will help in spreading the word, and may also draw the attention of few investors.> Run small ad campaigns, even as low as $50, can give you a rough idea of how much it will cost you per download.

Track Your Results

Feedbacks are an important part of building your app. Make sure you take feedback on your research and pitch your idea to your friends and family. After setting up and running the landing page, build a short survey, and distribute it. Tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms can help you do this, at every stage.

Pick the best, discard the rest– observe and record all the responses. Are people elated to use it? Do they feel their needs or issues are solved using your app? Is it seamless and easy to use? Take their feedback and tweak your strategies to revise the app accordingly.  

There are millions of apps that have been abandoned because people don’t want them or do not understand how to use them. So, whatever path you take to make an app, make sure that your customers want it. Being critical and passionate in the entire mobile app idea validation cycle will help you evolve your app idea before you build it.