Link Building vs Paid Advertising for App Promotion

In a world dominated by digital technology and smart gadgets, you can find a mobile application for nearly anything. And they keep popping up to make our lives more convenient, comfortable and organized.

However, in the crowded market of mobile apps, it gets harder and harder to beat the competition and make a new application bring profit. Hence, a properly developed promotion strategy is crucial for a successful mobile app launch and can pivot the whole marketing campaign.

Normally, app promotion is a complex concept that embraces multiple tools, techniques, and methods. Link building and paid advertising are two efficient promotion strategies. Yet, they are different in approach and results. Let’s see how they stack up and which strategy is better for marketing your application.

Link Building for App Promotion

Link building is an SEO technique aimed at obtaining hyperlinks from other websites to your app to drive its organic traffic and increase its search engine rankings. The biggest value of effective link-building strategies is the acknowledgment by search engine algorithms of your app’s relevance and content quality. Links will help maintain your app’s popularity by keeping it at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs).

You can create either internal or external links, and both will work in their own way. Obviously enough, though, efficient app promotion relies on external links that come from third-party sources. Optimal methods for this type of strategy are guest blogging, influencer outreach, and broken link building.

Link Building Benefits for App Promotion

To better understand how to link creation can help promote your newly developed app, take a look at the benefits this strategy offers in this area:

Better app visibility: Link increases the chances for your application to pop up at the top of search engine results, thus, catching the potential user’s eye much more often and making it easier for the customers to find your product.
Enhanced app credibility: People are usually suspicious of new things and are reluctant to use or buy something they don’t know. Hence, gaining customer trust is not that easy. In the meantime, backlinks from trusted websites will prove to search engines and users that your app is a credible product worth a try. This way, you’ll build your app’s reputation and authority in the appropriate industry or niche;
Higher app ranking: Backlinks from authoritative websites will level up your application’s ranking in SERPs, thus, fueling organic traffic and promoting downloads;
Improving brand awareness: By bumping up the app’s visibility, links will naturally contribute to brand awareness and solidify its growth.

The advantages of link building are hard to argue. And these benefits are long-term, as high-quality links can continue to drive traffic to your app over time.

According to link-building agencies, internal linking makes it easier for readers to navigate your website, and external links are used to point traffic to other relevant resources, increasing credibility for search engines.

However, getting authority backlinks is easier said than done. This is where a professional agency such as Editorial Link & Outreach Desk will come to help. With a focus on quality, they’ve already built over 5000 authoritative links. A team of professionals will develop for you an efficient linking strategy using the most valued editorial links. Sourced from such high-ranked websites as g2.com, cloudways.com, clickup.com, monday.com, wordstream.com, and similarweb.com, these links will create natural traffic and pay off with long-lasting results.

Paid Ads for App Promotion

Paid advertising is yet another online promotion strategy that involves a payable display of your application or app-related content in various online channels to reach the target audience via improved visibility and boost downloads after the launch.

Here are a few types of paid ads relevant to the app promotion:

App store ads promote your new product right in the store via search results or in-app purchases;
Social media ads enable connection to your potential customers via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Search engine ads allow for promotion via search engines like Google or Bing to cover a bigger pool of potential app users;
Display ads ensure promotion through visuals on websites and in mobile applications.

Depending on the type, paid ads can be targeted by location, demographics, user interests and behaviors, keywords, or even the type of device. While customizable and resultative, this promotion method calls for thorough planning, close monitoring, and consistent optimization to gain a positive return on investment (ROI).

Paid Advertising Benefits for App Promotion

If you are still skeptical about paid ads’ efficiency and relevance to your app’s marketing strategy, consider the benefits this powerful tool offers:

Increased download rates: When consistently emerging right in front of your target audience, paid ads easily draw the attention of the people who could be interested in your app, thus, driving installs;
Faster results: An active and even somewhat aggressive promotion method, paid ads to bring faster results than organic techniques such as SEO and social media marketing. Yet, you’ll enjoy downloads immediately after starting your campaign;
Greater control: Though payable, these ads are also more controllable. You can determine your budget, pick the audience you seek to embrace, and easily track the results to optimize the campaign on the go and increase your ROI;
Targeted campaign: As we’ve stated, you’ll have a chance to target your ads by a whole number of aspects to narrow down the coverage to the people that are most likely interested in your application and can become your permanent users. This, in turn, will work to increase quick downloads.

Link Building or Paid Ads: What Is Better for App Promotion

There is no single right answer since it shouldn’t be the question of using one method or another. These are two highly efficient techniques that will best work for your app promotion when combined.

If you’d have to choose, though, the choice will depend on your primary goals, your budget, and timeframes. Thus, link-building is good as an ongoing strategy for hitting long-term results to achieve better app visibility and increase its search engine ranking.

Paid advertising, on the other hand, is a more suitable option for quick download rate bump-up and target audience engagement.