Grow Your App With These Simple Referral Tricks

Coming up, we're going to break down the best word of mouth strategies, including influencer marketing, referral marketing, and leveraging different partners in your very niche. Stay tuned. What is up, app nation? It is Steve P. young founder of appmasters.com, the place you go when you want action-packed content related to helping you grow your app downloads and more importantly those revenues. And a lot of times you'll hear this, it's a very buzzy term, K factor. It's how many people download your app and then ultimately share it with other people.

Influencer marketing, you have referral marketing and you have different partners. These are all, in my opinion, all word of mouth marketing. And I want to break down this video, talk about some of the best strategies for each and every single type of channel. And secondly, how to best track whether these channels are actually effective. So, let's go. All right. I like to pull up slides. That's what I like to do best. Here it is. Word of mouth marketing. Just some social proof for you guys. We've served over 3,000 apps.

Just for those who are new to the channel, trusted by lots of people. Obviously, we have a great presence on YouTube and we also have a podcast. So, if you're too busy to just watch us, you just want to listen to me, you can tune in to the podcast feed as well. All right, these are some of the best guests that we've had. All right, let's go into this. So, I want to break down some stats for you. 76% of users intended to or have made a product purchase off the back of a social media post. If you're not on social media, and I would say YouTube is social media, you're probably leaving money on the table. You got to produce content. That's how I built my entire business and the multiple businesses that have come from this podcast YouTube channel as well. All right. So, beyond social media, 74% of consumers have purchased a product because an influencer recommended. How many people have gone out and purchased

a few things because of my recommendation, right? So, Airbridge, we got other partners that we work with as well, but this is what works. So, influencer marketing is a great way to get your app going, too. And I'm going to give you some case studies of different apps that have been leveraging influencer marketing. So, let's get into it. Here's some more stats. I just Googled everything and then I kind of put this all into you guys to make it look smart, but just Google it and that's how I found most of these stats, too. So, if you want to take a screenshot here, you can. If not, we'll continue moving forward. All right, word of mouth. And I'm going to put word of mouth as someone who actually uses your app and spreads it through word of mouth and tells others. All right, so first and foremost, have users. If you're just starting out, do the other campaigns I'm about to share with you. But if you have

no users, word of mouth is going to be nothing for you. Sometimes I get people saying, "How many downloads you got?" Maybe 10 a day. And I really want to think about my K factor. It's too early. Find product market fit first. That's essentially what I'm trying to say here. Have users because only a percentage of those users are actually going to love your product and then finally recommend it to their friends. Right? The number one thing that I like to do is make my customers look good. If you make people look good, they're more likely to talk positively about you. I'll give you some examples on this. You see, calm after a meditation, they have a quote. And I was like, "Wow, are people hitting share quote right here?" I look on Instagram #ailycomm and I do see people sharing this. Why? Because they want to look good, right? It's like let's spread positivity in the world. Here's another example. We all remember Crossy Road,

right? After you die and if you get a top score, you're more likely to share it and it's fun content. It's a little gif as well. So, they did that really well. You can see Crossy Road on Twitter. A lot of people are sharing that stuff. Flappy Bird probably one of the first ones where people are just taking screenshots and then sharing their scores and their frustrations on social media. Another example comes from Zero, an intermittent fasting app that I've used for years. They don't do this anymore, but they used to send me a weekly progress report. And so I would get your weekend review. Obviously, it's about me. I fasted 126 hours. The longest fast was 20 hours. And then I've hit seven fasts and I hit 100% of my goal. And then they said, "Tweet this."

I was like, "Interesting. Are people tweeting it?" So let me look. Fasting with zero. They have a pre-populated tweet with all these numbers. By the way, 126 and all that stuff. So when I do hit tweet this, everything is prepopulated. All I have to do is hit tweet, right? And you can see a lot of people were sharing it at the time that I pulled this data. So it's another great way make them look good. And with zero, when you break your fast, you can also take a picture of it. And again, you look good cuz you hit your fast or you fasted 18 hours right here. And it's just an image of the length of time.

Trust me, I've done the same when I'm very proud of a very long fast. I've actually shared it as well. Next, let's talk about influencer marketing. It's one of the reasons that Cali has grown so big. Hoping to get one of the founders on the podcast as well. But let's break it down again. 74% remember this stat. 74% of consumers have purchased a product because an influencer recommended. I mean there's a trend out there on Tik Tok. You can see certain ads using it saying Tik Tok made me buy this and then it's the ad, right?

Those are very popular ads right now. Microactor is an app that we dissected early on and what I estimated was and I got a little bit of confirmation but I estimated was they're using a lot of affiliate marketing to drive it. You can see this is pulled from their website and we notice within the app they would have, hey, if you came from a influencer, they gave you two weeks and they're really trying to track it this way. You don't have to do it this way.

I'm going to show you a better solution of tracking it. But this is one hacky way of doing it. Now, let's talk about Calai. He was just on my first million podcast, which I recommend going listen to. I'll try to link that into the show notes as well. But he really talked about and here's your time stamp how Zach used influencer marketing to really drive downloads for his particular app and it's grown really really big. Right.

So great insight here as well and Zach used a lot of influencers to drive users to Cal AI and he's making over 20 million a year with this app. It's insane. The next thing really pay attention to this because I got a great tip from Ber who was a past podcast guest but partners and let me show you the interesting way of using partners. So, Betcher said, "Hey, let's say if you have a wellness and yoga fitness app, well, you can go out to yoga stores or as newsletters, blogs, and ask them, hey, if they'd be willing to promote your app in their email confirmation did that, and it worked out really, really well for him because he said an email confirmation for your order." Like, let's say it's an e-commerce brand. So, I'm a yoga app and I want to partner up with a store that sells yoga mats. Duh, makes sense. Or yoga clothes, right? You say, "Hey, yoga clothes, yoga pants.com.

Would you want to put yoga app into your order confirmation? We'll give all your users 25% off the first year or, you know, we'll give you 60 days for free a trial, whatever that may be. It's a great channel to use because order confirmation emails get really high open rates. Makes sense, right? So, that's a another way to do partners. Now, how do you go about tracking all these links? What do you do? Well, I'm going to show you one of the more affordable ways of doing that. Now, you can use your MMP.

They have these links that you can send out to the influencers and you can track it all the way down or I'm going to show you a more affordable solution from our friends from Airbridge. All right, let's get to it. So, here is Airbridge's deep link solution and this is a dashboard that I have that I set up for India app Santa. I'm going to kind of show you how you can get this set up. So, if you're just working with single influencers, what you can do is come into their dashboard, sign up for Airbridge, the deep linking feature, and I'm going to link that into the show notes as well.

Come into the linking section, and then you can do link generation or management, doesn't really matter. I can hit create, and let's say I'm going to be promoting on Appmasters YouTube. Lowercase only. Appmasters. Great. Add it as a custom channel. Awesome. You could have ad creatives. So it could be video content could be word of mouth marketing. Really, you just need the channel that's going to be and it's just the influencer. Now, you want to take them to certain locations. So, you would have already set up the app, but here's what you can do to get revenue data.

Again, this is a more affordable solution. If you have an MMP, they'll have your revenue data and then you can generate links. But if you're using deep links, this is one way to do it as well. So, if you don't have an Android app, we don't, you want to send them to the website. So, e, we're just going to send them to indieappsanta.com. And here is where you track revenues. So, go ahead and create a custom product page within App Store Connect. It could literally look like the same as your normal pages. Or if you're working with different influencers, you can create a custom product page, custom screenshots, custom description for like a promo text for this influencer and then take them in there.

The cool thing about this is two. One, if you create screenshots specifically for that influencer, especially if it's a big one, then as the influencers audience, I can see that, hey, that kind of matches up with Steve and App Masters. Secondly, with a custom product page, you can get downloads and sales data from that as well. Now, Airbridge will tell you the downloads data, but because it's just a deep linking solution, you won't get the revenues.

So, this is an affordable way of getting the revenues and making sure that influencer is actually driving sales. If you're just doing downloads, then this will do just fine without the custom product page. Okay. So, I'm going to just hit the default page. Cool. And then you can hit create trackking link and it's done. Now you can make a custom one. I didn't do that but this is the short version of that link. And you can say hey Steve at app masters go and use this link and that way we can track it and send it off. Now within this you can also do here I forgot to do this but you can do deep linking right here. So you can take users into a specific part of the app. So, let's say that you are a like an Uber Eats or a Door Dash and I add you or I refer you to our thing.

Now, since Uber Eats may already have my profile during the onboarding of my friend, that friend could see my profile. Hey, welcome Adam. Steve invited you and you show that profile picture. That actually increases conversion rates too. So, this is another way to do deep links if you want. and it's more versatile through a deep link. All right, guys, that's it. Super simple. Go check them out. It is Airbridge. And to use a special link that I've already created for you guys, just go to appmasters.com/airbridge.

appmasters.com/airbridge. I'll link up that into this favorite video of ours somewhere up here. And then go check them out. Thank you to our partners at Airbridge. All right, until next time. See you on the next video.