26 Surefire Tactics To Make Your iPhone App Go Viral

Create a stellar icon

Appeal to consumers browsing apps by creating an attractive graphical icon that entices them to click on it. There’s plenty of resources available on the web that can help you with this so pick an icon wisely.

Enter a strong description and keywords

There’s no mystery that enticing copy sells. Excite users with copy that appeals to their emotional decision making style and follow through with a direct call to action. Use summary bullet points, highlight consumer reviews

Establish web presence for SEO benefits

Be where your prospects are searching. If they are looking online, improve your landing page with on-page optimization and other forms of search engine optimization to be visible to users searching for certain keywords.

Make and distribute videos

Videos are great promotional tools and even more powerful than screenshots when it comes to letting users know what your game is all about. Videos now can be made inexpensively using HD cameras on your smartphones.

Use avenues like YouTube to get your videos exposed to a lot of people and screen recordings of your app and release them. You can even have your own personalized YouTube channel that you can use to distribute and engage users. Sites like Vimeo and YouTube provide analytical insight to see how users are engaging with your video and how they are sharing them. People also leave feedback on videos so its a good way to see what the community thinks of your app.

Submit App to App Review Sites

Submit your app to sites where the editorial staff can review your app – preferably without having to pay for it through the use of promo codes (if its a paid app).

Do Promo code giveaways

When submitting your app to review sites and publicizing on the web, promo code give aways make it easy for editorial staff from App Review sites to review and also give away promo codes to their readers, increasing buzz and traffic to that post.

Explore third party distribution like GetJar

There’s many third party app stores out there with their own audience. It’s easy to submit to them as their guidelines are less strenuous than Apple’s. Some developers can seen great successes using these app stores.

Use discounts and price cuts wisely

Existing games have successfully ran promotions where they ran promotions for limited times offering the app at discounted prices. Take lessons from those that have done well in the past and use this pricing to generate buzz.

Cross promoting from a lite version (free) to paid models can work really wells people usually want to try something out before paying for it.

Try Article Marketing

Contribute articles to popular blogs and submit articles to directory. Content is scarce and guest posts can be a great way to build a relationship with influential bloggers as well. Just make sure to do your research before hand and understand their target demographic prior to creating content.

Create a SlideShare presentation

Creating a slideshare presentation with th ewalk-thru of the app is a powerful way to showcase the compelling features of your app
Comment on forums and relevant blogs

In addition to doing guests posts, get the word out about your app through posting on forums and blogs where people are having relevant discussions and leaving comments. Make sure to add in a valuable comment that helps them out or shows them something new instead of spamming links to your download page everywhere.

Create a PR Campaign

Understanding your audience and where they consume information is important to know before you create a PR campaign. By aligning your goals with the media you’re targeting for your campaign, you have greater chances of getting your story published. Online PR distribution provides access to radio, print, TV, trade publications, magazines and blogs. Whether attempting this in-house or working with an agency, have sufficient material ready to make it easy for journalists, editors and analysts to write about you.

Use Facebook Pages to market app to fans

Facebook Pages can be a great communications channel for any brand. Use custom landing pages to link out to your app download page on iTunes and also showcase the best features of your app. Encourage people to ‘like’ the page so you can continuously engage with them with messages.

Get the word out about your ‘free promotion’ on twitter
No brainer.

Get high user ratings

Prospects look for ratings so encourage high ratings by making the feel and flow of the game simple to use.

Do smart ad buys

Select the right advertising outlets based on the demographic of your customers. If using paid sponsorships and advertising, have any online ad link directly to the app store. There are also many offline techniques to try based on your available budget. Remember to track everything through analytics so you can measure your ROI.

Employ email marketing to re-engage users

Sending targeted email campaign to prospects whose email you’ve captured is great. There are also email lists you can purchase although this is a less advised tactic as your domain may get marked as spam. Regardless, you can do very targeted campaigns by filtering email addresses by attributes such as age, geography, wealth indicators and more.

Optimize app for app store

Getting noticed in the app store by browsing consumers can dramatically impact success. App rankings vary based on number of downloads so its important to try to get in the top 100. Focus on creating a good title and using the appropriate keywords, after doing competitive research of-course.

Put compelling in-game screen shots

Prospective customers are actively searching for screen shots to get a preview of what the game will be like and this is the best way to show that. Make sure to use screen shots from within the game, not menu screens.

Purchase Google AdWords to attract buyers

Create ads that lead users to a destination site such as a landing page with a link to the iTunes store where your app can be downloaded.

Make frequent updates to increase app store visibility

Based on insights from customer feedback as well as new ideas, add features that will not only generate buzz but help you rank higher. For the iOS platform you will have to resubmit the app to the appstore.

Solicit user reviews

Apart from getting user feedback, encourage users to leave reviews that can be publicly seen by others. This could be facilitated through the addition of a button that says something like ‘Give us a Review on iTunes”.

Track reviews and ratings across all app stores

Stay up to date on what people are saying and iterate accordingly. Reviews can work for you or against you so put in good effort to monitor how consumer sentiment about your app is changing.
Keep up to date on analytics

Track all your efforts and how they are doing in terms of user acquisition. Use 3rd party tools like Flurry Analytics and Pinch Media that help you gather and visualize useful data about how people are engaging with your app and where they are coming form.

Plan release dates

Use weekends to launch your app, avoiding Mondays especially.

Get recommended by Apple

Do it. Now. Be creative so you can hop on their What’s Hot, Staff Favorite and New and Noteworthy lists.

Make a good quality app that functions correctly

Without a quality app all efforts will fail. Build a deeply engaging app that will keep users coming back for more. It goes without saying, but you need to spend time bug testing for anything to go viral.