It has been a few quite months, and it seems the ASO world has now been a bit more stable.
What stable means?
Less amazing offers, less hype and the stability of an industry that for a few seconds went completely crazy with the trend of let’s make a lot of money with apps.
Less people are making money but the once that are making money are now investing money to do so. (finally!)
It seems App store optimisation is now a must, but we are still facing the problems of understanding if we need to do it or not.
Today I want to tackle 5 mistakes App companies are still doing with ASO and why this needs to be tackled heads on before companies waste more money with more unsuccessful marketing strategies.
They have no idea ABOUT ASO.
This is like booking a hunting trip without ever shooting a rifle. If you think hunting is nice, think twice before booking and paying to go to Africa… app companies don’t understand what ASO is and they can’t be bothered to even learn. In fact only 23% of the app companies that take my course complete more than 75% of the course modules.
The reason?
Education is not so sexy as the magic concept of amazing results.
No budget
We spend 90K in our app and now we have 2K to market the app, what can you offer us?
This is a typical question of companies that spend too much developing vs planning.
The idea that you need to allocate at least 50% (or even more) of your budget in marketing vs development seems insane for many core developers. Why?
Well, easy rot understand they make their living coding and their believe that apps that succeed, succeed based on the quality of the app vs the marketing, seems to be one of those myths that in a painful way, many indies are starting to realize needs to change.
No social media.
In fact many app companies suck at social media. Funny wise some of the clients that start with me, many times don’t even have considered the importance of social media and when we discuss social media, the answer is so basic that is scary:
Oh yes, we have twitter, oh yes, we have a fanpage. – but that’s it.
The reality is that social media is not about having some accounts and post random stuff, the idea of social media is to harvest the power of the most powerful type of traffic for any app. Social traffic. Traffic from real users that previously decided to follow you, to keep updated with your app, to understand what you are all about and to have a direct channel of communication with you.
Social media is vital to make the concept of ASO vital… because without social media the 4th mistake becomes more evident.
No constant drip of reviews
Reviews are the fuel of the Formula One car, your ASO is the Engine. Doesn’t matter how good is the engine if you don’t put fuel to that baby then the Engine is not going to work. Even if you pay the Engine Engineer thousands of dollars.
Reviews need to flow and they don’t come from magic fairy dust. you need a strategy. You need to be serious about who to bring those reviews and the reviews need to be generated in conjunction with the ASO process.
And please do not think buying reviews from Fiverr is the solution. We are talking proper long-term strategy to give you the strength to compete vs those competitors that are doing things right.
Dependency on ASO tools
Amazing Dashboards, unique data that nobody else have, tons of features… do you really need all that?
ASO tools are cool, but they don’t do any ASO for you and ASO tools suffer from real intelligence about user behaviour. ASO tools still can’t undersand that Diving and Diving can be 2 different terms for gamers.
Olympic diving game or scuba diving game?
The ASO tool has no idea, and really the ASO doesn’t care because the job of the ASO tool is to give you data… but are we really thinking beyond the data? Are you really finding an ROI paying a tool like Sensor Tower?
Think about it, because at certain level the amount of data you collect is not going to make a difference to the real ranking, to the real downloads.
So there you go… although ASO is doing well.. we are not still ready for 100% maturity, but we are moving closer…