Balancing Organic Growth with Paid Promotions in Mobile Apps
Finding the perfect balance between organic growth and paid promotions is crucial for your mobile app’s success. They are like the two wings of an airplane; you need both to propel your app to greater heights. The burning question on the minds of many app marketers is, “How can I balance my organic growth and paid promotion?” That’s exactly what you will learn today.
What is Organic Growth?
When it comes to mobile apps, organic growth refers to the natural method of increasing your app’s visibility and discoverability to expand its user base. The term “organic” signifies that this growth isn’t driven by paid ads. Typically, organic growth occurs because users discover, download, and engage with the app not due to advertisements, but rather because of its inherent qualities, word-of-mouth recommendations, positive experiences, and effective visibility on app stores.
Organic growth primarily results from App Store Optimization (ASO). ASO involves increasing your app’s visibility by using the correct keywords, writing compelling app descriptions, selecting appropriate visuals, garnering positive user reviews, and ensuring undeniable app quality.
What are paid promotions?
Paid promotions, as the name implies, refer to paid advertising campaigns designed to enhance app visibility, increase downloads, and boost user engagement. In contrast to organic growth, paid promotions heavily rely on using paid advertisements to reach a broader audience and drive app installations.
The most common examples of paid promotions include the use of Google Adsense, Apple Search Ads, social media advertisements, and video advertising. These strategies involve investing financial resources to display ads across various platforms, ensuring that the app reaches potential users who might not have encountered it organically. By paying for placements and impressions, app developers and marketers can expand their app’s reach and attract a wider user base.
What are the Advantages of Using Both Organic Growth and Paid Promotions?
Combining the power of organic growth and paid promotions creates a synergistic effect that significantly impacts your app’s growth. By utilizing both of these marketing strategies, you can enjoy several unique advantages:
1. Maximum Visibility
Organic growth ensures visibility through natural methods such as App Store Optimization (ASO) and positive user reviews. In contrast, paid promotions provide an instant boost in your app’s discoverability and can position your app front and center in front of a larger audience. This dual approach maximizes your app’s exposure.
2. Diverse User Acquisition
Organic growth attracts users genuinely interested in your app, leading to higher engagement and retention rates. Users acquired through organic means tend to be more invested in the app’s features and functionalities.
On the other hand, paid promotions work their magic by reaching new users who might not have discovered your app otherwise. The beauty of paid promotions lies in their ability to target specific demographics, behaviors, and interests. In essence, paid promotions diversify your user base, attracting users from various market segments. This diversity enriches your user pool and broadens your app’s appeal across different audience groups.
3. Improved Credibility and Trust
Combining organic growth and paid promotions results in increased credibility and trust among your audience. Organic growth fosters positive user reviews and word-of-mouth referrals, building trust through genuine user experiences. Simultaneously, well-executed paid promotions enhance your app’s credibility by leveraging trusted advertising platforms and endorsements from social media influencers.
4. Accelerated Growth
Rather than viewing organic growth and paid ads as separate entities, consider them as complementary forces. Organic growth establishes a sturdy foundation, ensuring consistent long-term growth. Paid promotions, on the other hand, facilitate rapid user acquisition, enabling you to reach a larger audience in a shorter time frame.
These promotions are especially beneficial during the initial stages of your app launch, establishing crucial visibility. The synergy between these strategies accelerates your app’s growth trajectory, creating a powerful and sustainable impact.
5. Enhanced App Store Ranking
Both organic and paid advertising share a common goal: increasing your app’s visibility. By leveraging the benefits of these two advertising methods, you significantly enhance your chances of improving your app store ranking.
Organic growth contributes to your app’s ranking by generating positive reviews, ensuring visibility in app store searches, and securing features by the app store itself. These aspects enhance your app’s credibility and attract genuine users, positively impacting your app’s ranking over time.
On the other hand, paid promotions offer the advantage of placing your app in prominent ad spaces, making it highly visible to potential users. These strategic placements ensure that your app is seen by a broader audience, increasing the likelihood of downloads and user engagement.
When combined, the organic growth’s authenticity and the targeted visibility of paid promotions work in harmony, creating a powerful synergy that elevates your app store ranking.
How to Balance Organic Growth with Paid Promotions?
Using both organic growth and paid ads can work wonders for your app’s success. However, it’s crucial to strike a balance between these advertising strategies to optimize your resources and maximize the benefits from each of them. Here are some tips on how to find the right equilibrium between organic and paid strategies:
1. Set Clear Goals
Establishing clear goals is essential as they act as your guideposts. Clearly defined goals help you measure your success once your advertising campaign is complete. Define your objectives and identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as app downloads, retention rates, conversion rates, user engagement, and revenue. These metrics will help you gauge the effectiveness of your combined strategies.
2. Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience contributes to the success of combining ASO and paid ads. You need to conduct market research and understand your target audience’s behaviors, needs, preferences, and where they spend most of their time online. This data is crucial because you’ll need it to know where you should focus your marketing.
3. Invest in the Quality of Your App
Needless to say, it is easier to promote an app that most people would readily like. You can do that by ensuring you create a high-quality app. Your app should offer useful benefits or provide pleasure to your users. Aside from that, your app should be free of bugs and errors so users can fully enjoy their usage of your app.
When users have positive experiences with your app, they are more likely to give you positive reviews and higher ratings. They will readily promote your app and share it with their friends. A well-designed app will also enhance the effectiveness of your paid promotions.
4. Prioritize Organic Growth
Your organic growth forms the foundation for long-term success. Think of paid promotions as your nitro boost—it enhances your app’s performance in the short term. However, once you stop running paid ads, your app won’t appear in ad spaces anymore.
With this in mind, the right balance is to prioritize App Store Optimization (ASO), which significantly contributes to your organic growth. You can then use paid promotions to supplement your organic growth campaigns, giving your app the initial push it needs.
5. Measure and Analyze Performance
Avoid running your ASO and paid ad campaigns blindly. Make data-driven decisions, which are possible only with the necessary data in hand.
Utilize analytics tools to track the performance of your organic and paid efforts. Monitor metrics such as conversion rates, Return on Investment (ROI) for paid campaigns, and user behavior patterns.
The data you gather will enable you to adjust your focus and decide whether you should allocate more resources to your organic growth efforts or invest further in your paid advertisements.
6. Budget Wisely
The most common misconception people have is that organic growth is free. However, that’s not entirely true. Organic growth is primarily driven by effective App Store Optimization (ASO), which requires strategic design and setup of metadata, screenshots, videos, and other elements in your App Store page listing. All these aspects not only consume time but also incur costs.
Therefore, it’s essential to allocate your marketing budget judiciously between organic and paid strategies. Spend your money wisely and always assess the return on investment. Evaluate which advertising method yields more positive results and adjust your budget accordingly to focus on the most effective strategies.
7. Experiment
Don’t hesitate to explore new avenues to increase your app profitability. Investigate the available options and methods for both organic and paid ads. Explore various paid advertising channels, compare their pricing, and assess ad formats and targeting options. Often, experimentation is key.
Test different ad and visual variations to see what resonates best with your audience. The more you experiment with different possibilities, the better chance you have of finding the optimal balance between your organic growth and paid promotions. Learning from these experiments will help you refine your strategies and achieve better results in the long run.
Improve your app growth and get more downloads
In the competitive landscape of mobile apps, it’s crucial to leverage every available tool to stay ahead of the competition. Both organic growth and paid advertisements are vital assets that should be in your marketing toolkit. By discovering the optimal balance between these two essential strategies, you can achieve the best possible results for your app.
However, implementing these strategies effectively is often easier said than done. If you’re seeking professional assistance to enhance your app’s growth through App Store Optimization (ASO) and paid ads, ShyftUp is your solution.
ShyftUp stands as the leading user acquisition agency, dedicated to helping your app secure more downloads and engage users effectively. With their extensive experience and cutting-edge tools, they can craft the perfect strategy that maximizes the benefits of both organic and paid growth methods.
Reach out to ShyftUp and transform your app’s success story now!
