A New Way to Promote Apps to Billions of Devices

With that kind of competition, standing out from the crowd and getting your app onto the mobile device of your target customer is perhaps the biggest challenge of modern app development.

The good news is, despite the huge amount of competition out there, there is always room in the market for new and exciting apps. Every year, people around the globe are downloading more and more apps; current estimates for 2015 put the total number of apps downloaded from the Apple App Store alone at more than 10 billion. Considering that Android devices make up a larger portion of the international market, it is safe to assume that global app downloads for just this year likely exceed 25 billion.

With so many apps out there, distinguishing your app from the rest of the crowd is the most vital part of developing and creating an app. There are many approaches to mobile promotion, all of which can be utilized to boost recognition and encourage downloads.

Many app developers use traditional web-based techniques to promote their apps and build name recognition. They submit new apps to review sites and advertise on tech blogs and news companies. This can be quite effective, especially for business apps, but this technique also has the drawback of not targeting users where you want them the most, on their actual devices.

In recent years, a new method of advertising apps has arisen, one that does not suffer from the drawbacks of traditional ads. Mobile advertising platforms, as they are known, are successful because they are able to bring app ads directly to mobile devices themselves. These platforms insert ads for apps directly into other apps that people are already using. There are a few huge advantages to this method.

Firstly, ads are targeted directly at the mobile device itself, where a user can click the ad and download the app in mere seconds. Secondly, the ads are able to target to the precise target market for the advertised app. Instead of blanket advertising, an ad for an app targeting Canadian business professionals, for example, will only run on business apps used on Canadian networks.

The scope of in-app advertising through a mobile advertising platform is immense, often much larger than many people realize. Appnext, one of the largest and most successful mobile advertising companies, has a network that reaches more than 350 million unique users around the world. And that is just one company, the global reach of mobile platform advertising easily exceeds one billion users; a number that any app developer would salivate over.

While there are other methods of mobile app advertising, such as offering incentives for downloads through an incentive network, it is increasingly clear that in-app advertising through mobile ad platforms is one of the most effective ways to target your app to potential users and actually get them to download and use the app. Once the app is in the customer’s hands, then it is up to the developer to deliver an experience the users will truly love!