Designing, developing, testing, and launching a mobile app takes a lot of energy. Designers, developers, and their clients spend a lot of money perfecting the look, feel, and functionality of an application. Despite the efforts gone into making an idea a reality, your client is left with a handful of downloads from the App Store, empty pockets, and nagging thoughts that maybe their idea wasn’t that great. So, what happens next? How can we help our client reach their promotional and growth goals?

What is App Promotion?

App promotion, a.k.a. mobile marketing, is the process of advertising or promoting your app. Promotion can be done through many channels like your website, paid search ads, word-of-mouth, social media platforms, etc. Regardless, when it comes to app promotion there are three main stages.

1. The awareness (pre-launch stage)

This stage consists of bringing awareness to your app. Marketing and competitor research, creation of user personas, ui/ux design, and finalizing your social media marketing strategy can be done here.

2. The acquisition stage

In this stage, you must actually acquire users that will be using your app.

3. The retention stage

This is one of the most overlooked stages in the whole process. Retaining users through communication, loyalty programs, app notifications, etc. keeps your users constantly coming back to your app.

Building an app is the easy part. Marketing and maintaining it is the real challenge. With an app, your client has generated endless possibilities for interaction, but now it needs promotion. To solve this problem, design and marketing come together to strengthen your brand. The relationship between design and marketing constantly evolves. Both fields exist independently but depend on each other for success. The role of marketing is to create a strategy that piques interest and draw in an audience. As designers, we work to build products that satisfy user needs while supporting marketing goals.

What can this look like in practice?

With our client, See A Star, we designed, built, and deployed a hybrid web app for desktop and mobile platforms. See A Star wanted a platform that not only encouraged interactions between fans and athletes, but also allowed for participants to easily share moments with friends and family. The first iteration of the final product connected fans with athletes. Athletes got a flexible and secure way to build their own brand, fundraise, and make money; fans were given an accessible portal for authentic interactions with their favorite athletes. Both could bookmark and share favorite moments from their session via download or social media. With a product in hand, we got ready for a promotional phase.

Creating a marketing goal and design solutions.

Our marketing partner, Skol Marketing, wanted to promote the app via sporting events. They needed a way to quickly get fans on the app and connected with an athlete, without the hassle of scheduling a session. The design solutions: Meet Now and browse page filtering at the top.

Meet Now is one of two ways fans and athletes can chat. With this feature, athletes push a live link to their social accounts, and at the same time a See A Star push notification is sent, that drives fans to the See A Star app for a live video session. Fans can instantly connect with stars without having to commit to a scheduled time and date.

By leaning on social media to share news of a live session, our marketing team expanded its audience reach. Stars are able to leverage their social followings to funnel fans to their sessions. The goal was to get fans from the promoted physical or digital event, onto a live chat with as few barriers as possible. Our redesign categorized athletes by availability while visually establishing hierarchy for further clarity. Our design team solved this problem by displaying athletes who are available for Meet Now at the top of the browse page, followed by newly added, available, and unavailable athletes. Above the athlete tiles, are filtering options that give fans the option to specify which type of star they would like to chat with.

Promoting user engagement.

Our next goal was to show how the technology we designed allows for genuine fan to athlete interactions. The design solution: The patent pending bookmark feature. Bookmarks allow See A Star fans and athletes to seamlessly share moments from their calls with friends and family. Throughout a call, participants can press the bookmark button, then come back to the clip at a later time to edit and share. Skol Marketing and See A Star got to work scheduling live video chats with retired Minnesota Vikings and fans. This gave us user-generated content to use on See A Star social platforms.

Collaborating with Skol Marketing, KRUTSCH worked on editing and posting authentic video clips of fans and stars interacting face-to-face. This bookmark and share concept helped build the See A Star brand by highlighting emotional and nostalgic star and fan moments captured during sessions. Harvesting this user-generated content gives a real, poignant view into the app’s value: authenticity. By giving both the athlete and fans the power to bookmark and share these moments, your marketing reach expands exponentially.

Generating content catered to specific platforms.

Our collaborative efforts with Skol Marketing has taught us that when it comes to utilizing social media, it’s not enough to create content and then push it out onto Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with the assumption that a few trendy hashtags and a solid fan base will be all that your product needs to grow. You’ve spent all this time paying close attention to designing an app that appeals to your target audience, but your efforts are futile if you don’t carry over that same attention to detail and apply it to creating content for social media posts. The design solution: Tap into user study research to inform your social strategy.

Our social media brand needed to display more than a random collection of our user’s videos, it needed to demonstrate See A Star’s purpose to cultivate deeper connections between fans and athletes. This was accomplished by emphasizing the importance of balancing content that is brand and user friendly, but also cultivates a sense of community by sharing posts from other users, similar companies, and showing an interest in current events outside of the sports realm.

Expanding your platform.

Our recent efforts with Skol Marketing and See A Star resulted in the design and development of a white label platform utilizing the technology that we had built. We began with fantasy football.

See A Star saw the opportunity to tap into the massive fantasy sports market, creating an expansion that connects fans with fantasy sports advisors. In the same manner as the original platform, fans browse fantasy advisors based on their type of availability, and either schedule a session, or join a Meet Now video chat. Fans get advice on their fantasy drafts and season strategy, and advisors get to build their personal brand and monetize their free time. Launching the Fantasy Football branch paved the way for other white label partnerships, where See A Star could license their technology to entities looking for ways to facilitate scheduled video chats, all while building their brand.

Continuing with Skol Marketing, KRUTSCH got to work designing a portal page for See A Star Fantasy Sports and reiterating the app’s browse screen to allow fans to filter by genre of star, in addition to type of availability.

Conclusion

The original idea to develop an application to facilitate genuine interactions between fans and athletes has grown into a gateway for any brand looking to develop deeper connections with their consumers through face-to-face interactions. Collaborative efforts have armed us with the tools needed to not only design and build our client’s ideas, but also give them the means to succeed beyond deployment, to grow their brand on a variety of platforms. We’re committed to helping our clients build a marketable product, designed to their specific promotional and growth goals.

App Promotion: Designing for Post Deployment