Most of the indie app developers these days know how to build beautiful apps with a great experience for their users. What they don’t know and lack skills at is bringing the consistent flow of users who could actually enjoy those apps.

We are listing a few top strategies that don’t require a huge monetary investment and can actually help you attract those precious users.

Social networking

All social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) are full of groups / channels dedicated to Windows Store app development and sometimes discovery. Putting some time and effort to spread the word about your app could give you a big user boost for a couple of days or even weeks if you are lucky. Try posting in and Tweeting with as many relevant groups / hashtags to make the social networking work for you.

Quick tip: The key is to make it as not spammy as possible. Try posting it as a personal recommendation or as a very honest invitation to try out your new project.

Ad campaigns

Buying ads is a very straightforward and usually expensive user acquisition strategy. But even though attracting users through ad campaigns might be a pretty costly way it is also the most consistent one. If you spend enough time to find the right target audience, investing a couple hundred of dollars every month could help you keep a steady user flow coming to your app. With the right in-app referral strategy you can make these campaigns work very well for you.

Quick tip: AdDuplex is one of the best solutions for running UA campaigns for Windows Store apps. It has a self-service client area allowing you to control and track spending, performance and other metrics of your campaign.

App discovery

It’s no secret that getting featured on official Windows Store is one of the best ways to have a blast in terms of user-base. No secret again: for most of the app developers getting that feature slot is mission impossible (especially in the major markets like US).

The good news is that Windows Store has a couple of brilliant third party app discovery platforms that have a very similar effect to being featured on the actual store. The app discovery platforms are an app based communities featuring the new high-quality apps (usually with a limited time discount or free IAPs) to their large user base. Being featured in one or a couple of these communities can give a fast and very effective boost to your app installs.

Quick tip: AppDeals and myAppFree are the two largest app discovery platforms for Windows Store apps and they are always willing to help their fellow developers.

Media

Media is the king of user acquisition – no matter what industry or what kind of product. For Windows Store apps getting covered by a news site is a brilliant way to bring both: direct users and a chance to create a viral effect that could take your user acquisition through the roof.

Even though you probably won’t get covered by TechCrunch in most cases, there’s a plenty of Windows app related news sites (Windows Central being the largest of all).

Contacting the editor teams with a great headline for the article, after you have freshly released an app or an update, gives you good chances of actually being covered by those guys. Eventually this may pay out with a massive success!

Quick tip: There are tons of local Windows App community news sites that are very popular in countries like Italy, Germany, India, Iran and basically every corner of the earth. Contacting more than a single media source will probably bring you fortune.

Cross-promotion

This one works only for non-ad allergic devs. And it works as simple as that: you promote other apps or games inside of your app while for exchange you receive free advertising in those apps / games that you promote.

There are three main strategies for cross-promoting:

• House ads. Showing house ads means that you will promote your new titles inside the older ones that already have some kind of a user-base. This strategy works pretty well in most cases because the users are already familiar (and presumably happy) with your products.
• Direct partnerships. If you are close to other successful Windows app developers you can always offer them a partnership opportunity to cross-promote each other’s apps. This way you will both get a chance to grow free of charge.
• Joining a cross-promotion platform. For those who want to target a large worldwide audience, the best strategy for CP is joining a cross-promotion network. In most cases it will provide you with all the tools for setting up the whole thing and in the later stages tracking the process and performance. The best thing is that it will open up doors to being promoted in thousands of different apps that will lead to a global app growth.

Quick tip: AdDuplex is definitely the largest cross-promotion network for Windows Store apps. It is very easy to join the network and only takes minutes of work to start cross-promoting with other app developers.

 

Joining all these strategies can be a very powerful tool for promoting your app, the key is to be consistent and of course to provide the best user experience to anyone who actually gets to download your app, because word of mouth is above all. Have a fun time growing your apps!

Must know

AdDuplex has recently launched a new developer benefits program HERO APPS. The program is aimed at helping developers to boost their apps and provides them with a free access to various marketing tools and resources, contributing to their app growth and success on the Windows Store platforms.

The benefits include $50-500 credits to run ad campaigns on AdDuplex, free feature campaigns on AppDeals and myAppFree and finally a cover article on Windows Central.

So if you are actually looking for a way to kick off your app, don’t hesitate and join the program.

More information here.