Today in this high competitive world, marketing is becoming a big challenge for business owners and marketers. Getting your app discovered in the app store is the fundamental challenge, which every developer or marketer is facing. Every day hundred of Android, iPhone and Windows apps are uploaded in the boundless sea of app market.
ASO means app store optimization and marketers really need to change their conventional marketing techniques and adopt pre launch and post launch marketing strategy which includes organic as well as paid marketing.

We have discussed a lot about ASO in our previous articles including keyword search, App name, App description.

Contrary, to popular belief, your marketing planning needs to be start before your product goes live in the app store. Try to find your target audience, where you can find them. In this article, we will discuss pre launch marketing strategies, which we should follow to enhance our marketing tactics. They are as follows:
• Keywords (ASO)
• Catchy Name and Description
• Find competitor and compare
• Choose right category
• Create amazing icon
• Great screenshots
• Press Releases

These are some important points, which we should consider before start developing an app.
Keyword ASO: As all marketer knows the importance of keyword in any marketing tactics. We have discussed a lot in our previous article about ASO

For good keyword analysis and results, you can refer Google adwords tools, mobiledevhq, AppCod.es . These tools will tell you which keywords will be most frequently used between your app and your competitors’ apps. You’ll also learn how often those keywords are searched for within the app stores with their local and global search results.

Catchy Name and Description: App name should be catchy and description written should be keyword rich. Keyword rich does not mean that you are stuffing keywords just to promote your app and the stuffed keywords are not related to your app. We have discussed a lot about name and description in our previous article: Role of APP Name in ASO & Role of App Description in ASO .

Catchy name implies that your title should be catchy and it should create anxiety in readers so that they get compelled in viewing your app. Title plays a vital role in converting visitor to customer.
Find competitor and compare: Once you have decided the title of your app. You can begin to research your competitors. With the amount of apps in the app stores today, you’ll likely find a variety of competitors whose products are similar to your own. Your competitor apps list must be prepared by following some tips like:
1. Which apps rank high in the app store search results for your targeted keywords. What are their feature sets? What other keywords do they target?
2. Take note of all your initial competitors without filtering any out.
3. Analyze this long list of potential competitors and scale it down to the top 4 or 5 heavy contenders based on similarity to your app and the competitor’s success.
4. Remove 1-star app from your list, as they are not likely to be a real contender, but a 5-star app with thousands of reviews is a formidable competitor.
Once you prepared the list of your competitor apps and have noted their positive and negative points, you are done with this point.

Choose Right Category:

Managing the category of your app is a big challenge in itself. Because almost 80% of your downloads ares are driven by the app stores itself, so it gets important to choose the category that will give your app the best shot of ranking in that category only. Because the reality is that all categories are not created equally. The famous categories are massive and will be virtually impossible to beat, but if you’re able to do it you will earn serious amounts of downloads. The less famous categories are not as entrenched by users and it’s more likely you can rank against them, but you might not earn as many downloads from it.
Do the risk calculation for yourself and your app, understand the pros and cons of each category, and choose the most relevant category for your app to drive its success. Try to place your app in right category and you should chose the category name which best suits to your app.

Create amazing icon : This is the most important point of our discussion. Your apps icon matters a lot. Firstly, your icon conveys your app’s purpose, style, and is the first interaction your user will have with your app. Although, its not a part of marketing. It’s a designing part but if your icon is not astonishing then the user will not even open the link of your app no matter how attractive its screenshots are and how good description you have written, your every effort will go in vain. So always, be careful in choosing the design of your icon as it is the first and foremost part of customer conversion. We have discussed a lot in detail in our previous article ” Are your apps icons and screenshots helps you sell more apps?”

Great Screenshots: You have spend a lot of time in driving user to your apps detail page within the app store, but that’s only you have won half battle now visitor is at your page and you need to convert him to customer. For that, screenshots play a very important role. As user gets convinced for opening your app due your astonishing icon and catchy name, second thing, which he notices, is screenshots. Visitors wants to get overview of your whole app through screenshots, they don’t want to waste their time in reading description to understand what your app does. And if they doesn’t gets convinced from your screenshots they have thousands of other options in app store.
Make sure your screenshots are attractive, informative, and exciting. They need to draw a visitor’s eye to them, explain exactly what your app does, and convey how easy your app is to use.

Press Releases: Through a well-written press release, you can create the anxiety of your new app. Therefore, it is very important to add press release in your pre launch marketing strategy. There are many popular mobile app press releases some of them are free while some are paid.