| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4hqbsOtawc |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kty50ccdygsec8jwsm5rrmph |
| Readwise ID | 01kty50ccdygsec8jwsm5rrmph |
| Date | 2025-08-19 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/m4hqbsOtawc/sddefault.jpg |
coming up. Want to know a secret app marketing strategy that you can use that can drive tens of thousands of downloads without spending a dollar on marketing? Well, I’m going to show you that and some of our favorite app marketing strategies to help you grow your downloads on a very limited budget. Stay tuned. [Music] What is up app nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com,
the place you go when you want help to grow your downloads and your revenues. We are the most affordable, most effective app marketing agency out there. And today, I want to break down some of the strategies that we love to implement for our clients and for our own apps where we’ve seen some tremendous success. So, without further ado, let’s get started. First off, this is one of my favorite quotes. Winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners. All right? Because a lot of
times you will follow what other people have done. And for me, the way I think about this is like if you keep focusing on what other people are doing and not what’s working for you, then you’re just going to be left following everybody else, right? Come up with new strategies. Take what has worked and listen to the audience, listen to the market, and figure out what will work for you. I know a lot of times I hear from people like Cali, I did this using all Tik Tok and influencers, you don’t
know their numbers. What I can tell you is from firsthand experience, I’ve worked with apps making 200 $300,000 a month and they’re unprofitable. So don’t worry about it, right? Don’t worry about what other people are quote unquote winners are doing in the market. All right, so let’s get started. All right, this strategy and I won’t do this for all the strategies, but I will start it off with this is you can learn yourself. It’s a built-in distribution channel key
if you ever want to exit your app. It’s going to be key element to getting acquired and gives you free downloads. So, if you haven’t guessed it by now, I’ll give you a moment. What do you think this strategy is? App store optimization. It is pretty simple. It’s one of the things that we’re well known for in this app marketing industry and it’s ASO. So for those who aren’t familiar, it’s SEO for the app store, right? And I want to give you some examples of apps we’ve helped. So this is an AI app that we launched in
- The this is my one of my favorite stories. The founder came to us. We’ve been working for like three years at this point. Said, “Hey, I’ve got this idea, Steve.” And I was like, “This is a horrible idea. Nobody’s wants this.” But we did keyword research and we were able to find that, hey, people do want it. And so when we launched the app in March of 2023, we were able to make revenues right away. And that’s the power of ASO is really figuring out when you have an app idea, figuring out, are people searching for it? Because he hadn’t
built it yet. He’s like, I got this app idea. What do you think? And I just did keyword research using my favorite tool app follow and was able to find some keywords that we were able to rank for right away and allowed us to drive revenues right away. And so that’s the power of ASO is you get to see if there’s actually demand for your idea even before you built it. The app has gone on and this is my slide of showing you it is purely through organic the
revenues we’re making right here app store search. So if you go into apps connect and you see sales by source type you can get that same data for your apps and then this app has gone on to make 90 six-figure business easily in 2024. So the following year we launched in 2023 the following year we’re able to make it into close to a six-figure business already. All right, this is just my example of saying like, hey, once you have some traction with ASO, maybe think about other ad channels because this client once we were at
around that 8,000 mark all purely through organic downloads, we ran some Facebook ads and that’s how we were able to get over the 10,000 mark. And you can see this green line is appreer which is normally through ad channels like Facebook, Google, Tik Tok, Instagram included with Facebook. But that’s what this green one has gone up. And so when we started running ads for this, what I also want to point out is it also helps your ASO,
right? So think about it once you’re at a certain point with ASO, think about running ads because that’s ultimately going to help your ASO as well. your brand search volume will go up as you start running ads, too. All right. All right. Here’s another app that we launched in 2024. Super proud of this one. It’s an AI app as well. And this app was making just a few hundred a month. And using some of the strategies, this going to be the my second favorite strategy. We were able to hack downloads and go from $200 a month all the way to
$92,000 in 2024. So, we’ve done some really good job here. It was an app that I was like, I think AI is the future. Obviously, we already knew this in 2023, but I was like, why don’t we just call it blank AI, like blank.com, right? Like, everybody wants blank.com. So, it’s like, why don’t we just call it blank AI? And we did that and the keywords kicked in. And I’m going to show you how we kickstarted those keywords in my second favorite app marketing strategy. All right, here’s another one. Here’s an
established app. I know I showed you like new apps, but here’s an app that was making about $70,000 when they joined us. And then because I love this niche so much and we were able to uncover brand new keywords, they were relying more on their branded keywords that were doing well, which was great, right? Blank AI. We were able to find some new keywords that people were ignoring in this space and we’re able to grow it from 70,000 to over six figures a month in sales, right, for this app. And you can see purely through organic search. So, we’re making 150. At one
point, we’re making over $150,000 just through organic search. All right. All right. Here’s our app. Again, this was doing nothing. So, for an app that’s doing nothing, if you’re down there, you’re like, “This app is not getting any downloads.” Just one keyword change, constantly doing keyword research made this app go from nothing to something and then to for us finally exiting and getting acquired for this app. and the person who acquired it, the buyer reached out to us because of the
visibility that we got from ASO. And so that’s the importance of it too. Like I was like, okay, cool. I’m I was happy to to sell this one as well. So this is this is why I like this case study. It’s like it was doing nothing for the longest time and then finally I found a keyword, went after that keyword, got it, then the app got acquired. So I love that strategy. All right. Now, if you’re wondering how to do ASO, I’m going to break down another video, but I’m going to link that some of those videos for you already. ASO for 2025. Find relevant
keywords. That is the most important thing. You want highly targeted keywords that are going to actually convert for you. All you got to do is find 6 to 10. Why 6 to 10? Because you can optimize all six to 10 in your US title, subtitle, and MX title, and subtitle. If you’re not familiar with ASO, the US app store actually indexes the Spanish Mexico localization. That allows you to essentially by using English in the Spanish Mexican localization, double the
amount of keywords that you’re going into. And the US actually indexes nine other localizations. And what we found out is if you put English in all those nine categories, those localizations, you will actually have more keyword reach, right? The amount of keywords that you’re actually indexed for will actually grow as well by leveraging all those localizations. And the reason why I say 6 to 10 is you can rotate, right? All you need to do is find rank for two
two keywords that have at least a search volume of 30 and you got to get to number one. That’s the hard part. But if you can get it to number one, you can kick in. You can be one of those case studies that I just highlighted before. All right, this strategy, and I’ll go quick on this one. No money necessary, kickstarts any app, scales businesses. We’ve done it to six figures, and also helps you validate your ideas without spending any money. All right, this is
one of my favorite ones. I’ve been using this since 2014. It is a lifetime free offer. All right, it’s gone through different variations, but lifetime free is the best way to run it. We’ve done it with AI apps. I’ve done it with my own AI apps. We haven’t seen an increase in cost. And I’ll show you some of those places where you can run this offer, but it’s essentially think about Groupon for apps or AppSumo for apps. It’s a great way to there’s a built-in audience that is already there and for you to promote
your app through a lifetime free offer. All right, so we did this in 2023. I was thinking about a way as a brand new app, how do I get to a 100 ratings really fast? I knew that 1% of the downloads would leave a rating. So, I knew I had to get to 10,000 downloads. How do I get to 10,000 downloads really fast? Well, make a lifetime for free. And that’s what we did. So, here’s one of the apps we did in 2024 that I already showed you guys from an ASO perspective. We did the ASO, we did the payw wall onboarding optimization, and then we ran the
lifetime free offer on App Advice. Okay, so make sure you do the ASO before you do this offer. Make sure you optimize your onboarding and payw wall before you do this offer. Those are the key elements to making sure that you’re maximizing your chances of success. So for this app, we did 106,000 downloads within a matter of a couple of days. made a lifetime free offer on app advice. We had 800 new ratings. You were we were asking for it right after the
payw wall. You got a lifetime free offer. Hey, want to leave us a review? Most people said yes. So, we got 800 new ratings, 200 in the US, 600 worldwide. And we kickstarted this app. We’re able to after the lifetime promo went down, we were able to still generate sales because more downloads were coming in. We’re kickstarting the ASO. I was right on the ASO and it helped take this app from making a few hundred bucks to $90,000 within its first year of working
with us. And I’m proud to say we’re still working with this client as well. Okay, here are the other benefits. Like I told you, more app store ratings. Beautiful. Make sure you ask for it after the payw wall or after they do something cool within your app. It’ll kickstart your ASO. That’s why we were able to sustain the $90,000 downloads. It didn’t just go up. Sometimes it just goes up and goes back down. But this helped just kickstart the ASO users for feedback. You will get emails. Every
time I’ve run this campaign, I will get emails from people being like, “Hey, I missed out on this deal. Can I have it still?” Or, “Have you considered adding this particular feature?” That’s what I love too. There you go. And users will email you asking for a deal. And that’s when you know you might be on to something, right? They miss out on deal. Can I please still have the deal? They’re desperate. I love it. Okay. Makes me feel good. All right. So, here are the platforms that you can use. App Advice being one of them. This is completely free to run on App Advice.
You have to do lifetime free though. But you got you can it’s completely free to run. So, go check them out, too. I’ve been friends with them since 20 2014, and I love those guys there, Jen and Tyler. We have Indie App Santa, indie Santa.com. This is a company that we acquired late in 2024 which does very something something very similar. And so app advice you can’t be on it too often but Indie App Santa is a paid paid promo and we have some ASO deals there too
that you guys can check out. So we can do your ASO your payw wall optimization as well and do the lifetime free all-in-one. So this entire growth hack can be done through India app Santa for us too. So, we purchased this one. And then the last one is a Reddit subreddit called iOS apps. It’s one of the easiest ones, my favorite one. You can see this lifetime deal going on. This habit tracker with heat maps is out now 100% free for a limited time. It’s another platform where you can promote your
lifetime free. Now, to do lifetime free offer, I’ll show you another video that I’ll highlight, but it’s a pretty easy thing to do. It has to be a non-consumable inapp purchase. And within App Store Connect, you can make it for free. Unfortunately, on Google, we haven’t figured out a way to make anything for free without some back-end coding. So, that’s why I like doing this campaign on Apple. But non-consumable, that’s the only non-consumable inapp purchase. It’s not a subscription. It’s a non-consumable inapp purchase. It’s a one-time thing. You buy it once, you get it forever that you can make for free
easily within App Store Connect. All right, cool. This strategy, again, I’m not making you do one by one. No money necessary. Again, ASO is a lot easier to get keywords ranked and it’s a low hanging fruit and that is localization. Yeah, you know, everything’s focused on the US. I’m in the US. I love it. But at the same time, like the world’s a huge place. So, here’s one of our clients. We localized the price in the UK and we saw tremendous results through that. And so, think about price. Think about the
different keywords you’re going after. Think about obviously not using English as well. That’s all about localization. But what we typically do when working with clients is see where we get downloads, what other countries we’re getting downloads. And Germany is one of our favorite ones to target that’s non-English-speaking and target that country. Start localizing your ASO. Start localizing your prices as well. And then start to see the impact of it. Here’s another same app. Here’s what we did in Australia. Australia, you know, $40 in
the US is like7 $60. I don’t know what the exchange rate is, but it’s a lot. And so if it’s 40 in the US, make it 40 Australian dollars as well. That’s all we literally did here and we’re able to see immediate success after that. All right, the next strategy I really like too is Apple ads. We just did a live stream about this before this recording. He was like, the question was like, “What are you using right now? What marketing channels?” Because he used a lot to grow this app to 60 million
downloads. And he said, “Apple ads. I love Apple ads.” And I’m like, I love Apple ads, too. Because if you’re on a limited budget, that’s the title of this video. You’re not going to have a lot of time and resources to create video assets. So, with Apple Ads, all you need are keywords. Unless you’re building a a very unique app where no one’s searching for it, Apple ads is a great platform because search intent is great intent and it actually leads to higher conversions for your app, too. All right, here’s some elements of App Store
Ads. So the visual on Apple ads app discovery starts here. You can see here are the ads. So in search you can see it here. You can bid on certain types of keywords. This is more of a discovery campaign. I would not recommend doing that. I would start with this search results campaign where you can tell Apple here are the keywords that I want you to try to go after. Some numbers behind app store search ads. Industryleading conversion rates over 60% of search results ads. It has from
our data, it has one of the highest trial activation, highest conversion rates than any other ad channel because again, search intent is the best intent. All right, here’s one of our apps. This is our entire app portfolio. I’m trying to show you guys that in July, we were able to spend just roughly 1.56 cost per install across our entire app portfolio. There’s different campaigns that we have under here that I’m not highlighting and I want to try to hide some of the apps
that we have to. But you can see we’re able to get lowcost installs. Some of these campaigns were meant to try to drive ASO. So that’s why you might see a higher cost per install. But we have a great Apple search ads setup that you can only find on our academy. So if you want access to that exclusive secret strategy, you’re going to have to sign up for our academy. But check it out. is appmasters.com/academy. Okay. All right. The next one I want to
highlight is meta ads. Yeah, you can get started with meta ads on a very limited budget. Now, if you have a,000 to even 30 a day. Go on. Because some of my friends in the app space that are app founders that are bootstrap, they’ll start with even $10 a day and just to get the data. So, here’s one app that I’ve already highlighted. What I want to really break down here is when the app started making money with ASO, and I kind of highlighted this before, we started
running ads to leverage it and to grow it more. So, not only did these meta ads help the ASO, but if you’re breaking even on Meta, you’re going to have better results because Meta is not tracking the ASO lift that you’re actually getting from your Meta ads, too. It’s just normal behavior. And the other thing that I want to highlight here is whatever no matter what MMP you’re using or if you’re just if you’re just using the Meta SDK, they will under reportport your exact numbers. So you
can see the spend here, it’s only we started with just 3,000. Meta was saying we were getting $250, but when we looked at App Store Connect through appre installs, we were seeing a buck 50. So again, you don’t need a lot of volume. And the cool thing about this app was we were pretty much breaking even on Meta. But again, because Meta was running, our app store search downloads were going up, too. So, here’s what you do. You go
and here’s how you can pinpoint for this particular app. You can see that Facebook and Instagram, nothing was happening. No downloads were coming through from App Refer. Everything was primarily through search right here. primarily through this blue line which is app source search. So when we started meta in August, you see this green line going up. That’s how you can safely attribute meta your meta installs to this campaign. So that’s why we felt
very confident that our meta ads were only getting us 2 per install. So at 3,000 a month and getting $2 per install. And the cool thing is we’re not even targeting. You know, the experts would tell you target trials, do broad. No, we did not do any of that stuff. We went interestbased targeting because we’re on a limited budget. We wanted to test it out. We knew this audience was probably the most likely to convert and we saw the sales come in
despite the fact because I can see sales by source type right here, right? Despite the fact that we weren’t targeting the trial event, all the experts would tell you don’t do this. But I’m telling you, it works because if you’re on a limited budget, it works this well. And especially if you got a niche app, it works even better. We were targeting installs. And because we’re a niche and we were serving this particular niche very, very well, we
knew an install would convert very, very well on Meta, too. So, that’s why I like Meta. Think about meta when you’ve got some success in the app store and you’re looking to grow. All right, I got one bonus one for you. If the math doesn’t work, neither will the business. Here’s one philosophy after all of this 20-minute video that you’ve watched, I want you to take away with business is just a simple math formula. That’s all it is. Whatever ad platform you’re
using, whatever tactic you’re using, it is it’s always a simple math formula. traffic to conversions to average order size or LTV to churn and all you got to be looking for is am I making more money than what I’m spending. That is it. It is that simple of a math. If you can keep it that simple then you’ll find success. And that’s why we always recommend out of all these channels just really start with one at a time because then you can
really get smart with the math. Hey, I drove traffic from Meta. Here’s how much conversions we’re doing now. Here’s how much our revenue numbers are and here’s how much we’re losing. And here’s how much it costs us to get those new numbers. So, you can see if we made 4,000 last month without Meta and we made, I don’t know, 8,000 and we only spent 2,000, well, we’re 200% rorowass. Those numbers aren’t always going to be accurate, meaning like you’re not going to get achieve that crazy of a rowass.
But that’s how simple you need to keep it. And you too many times we think too many we add too many variables and we make things complicated for just just keeping it this super simple. And that’s what I try to do right with all these little spreadsheets and templates that I build out all here right here. This is all that you got to pay attention to. Downloads. How many of those downloads are activating trial? Of those trials, how many are actually paying me? How much am I charging and how much am I able to make? Now, I’m this math formula
is super simple. I’m not taking account LTV. Meaning, if I get a yearly subscription for 45, right? But that’s why I’m keeping the math simple. And so, this is why I like that spreadsheet. And every time I show people the spreadsheet, they tend to love it. All right, if you want access to the spreadsheet, again, all this is in the Appmasters Academy. But if you want to work with us, we’ll kind of highlight all that for you as well. All
right, that is it. Do me a favor. Let me know which one is your favorite strategy and which one you want me to expound upon. Which one do you want me to go into detail and really break down how we do it step by step? And I will do that for you in an upcoming video. And if you’re looking for an app marketing agency that does it all and does it all now, we do things certain things very very well. And so if you need help with your ASO, your Apple search ads, and
your payw wall optimization and help with some of the meta ads to it too, go check it out. It is appmasters.com. Till next time, I’ll see you on the next video. [Music]