How to Build a Brand for Your Mobile App?

With enormous mobile apps on two leading app stores in the world, Google Play Market and Apple’s App Store, it’s not easy for newcomers to reach and grow their audience. Competition is speeding and the numbers are steadily growing. So, not only should mobile apps offer superior quality of their performance, but also create strong brands to get an edge over their competitors.

Going by the facts presented by Statista, it was seen that there exist around 2.8million apps on Android play store and around 2.2 million occupy a place in the iOS market. Seeing such huge app trends, it becomes imperative to induce strategies that help build a brand for your app and likewise etch success on the global market.

Let’s deep dive into Mobile app branding and its strategies –

Not sure what Mobile App Branding is?

Let’s start with terminology. Branding is a fusion of marketing as well as psychological techniques. It involves steps to promote a product, service etc. In short, setting a brand. In layman’s term, branding is nothing less than a virtual promotion for an app that helps voice it services and create an online as well as offline presence.

App branding helps user draft a perception about you, your app and the corresponding services. A visual appearance to the features of your app, branding help facilitate awareness and give the product a physical outlook in the market. Customers judge you on the facilities your app provides but the media to let them know about your app is branding. It helps them picture your app and opine their views. No matter the type of business you are involved in, branding an app is invariably important.

FAQs around Mobile App Branding –

• Target customer of your app and why?
• Why is your app unique from other apps in the App stores?
• How does your app look? What is the message it wants to give through its logos, symbols etc?
• What users perceive about your app?
• Who is the targeted audience of your app? Youth, Old-age, Children etc?
• How will users get to know about your app? What mode of communication or marketing will you use to advertise your app?

Answering the above would help us frame a way that in a way have an impact on various parameters as the design of the app, it’s promotion and personalization. Considering the app’s brand to be the crucial element of an organization, it is imperative that the same chooses significant methods and media for promoting so that the end users gain specific insights about the app.

Hence, before you head towards the design or the development phase of your app, it is desirable that you lay focus on drafting strategies to build an effective brand.

Strategies to follow –

Once you are done with driving information related to the target customer of your app, its time that you look up for various tactics and effective ideas to build an image for your app and start with branding.

App Icon/Logo

A base of branding is a logo which visually represents a brand. Below are the types of logos –

• Symbol: It represents the brand name of the app but in a distinct manner. It’s simply like a high prolific image reflecting the app’s functionality.
• Logotype: An artistic way to represent the name of the brand. It could be a design followed by the name of the brand.
• Letter mark: A unique style of portraying the first letter of the name of your brand.
• Combination mark: this is the fusion of two things,  the word mark along with the symbol or the letter mark
• Emblem: Reflecting the letter mark or the wordmark which alternatively reflects the name of the brand in a variant manner.

Additionally, when it comes to building a logo for your app, an icon adds identity to the same. Irrespective of the kind of business you are into, an icon for your app resembles its face. People know your app and recognize it with the help of its icon. So choose wisely.

Keywords

An effective way to make the branding consistent is making a set of keywords for it. They can be divided into several groups according to their role.

Keywords identify and describe your brand, hence it’s essential to understand what image the app must get and what message it should send. Keywords define the core features users catch immediately from the app’s looks and design.

Users will use Brand keywords to find your app on the App stores and google. It’s not only the original name but also different variants of its extension. Brand along with keywords are the varied fusion of brand name and qualifying words or phrases. They combine to form a collection of the same helpful for both SEO and content creation.

Copy: Name, Slogan, Style

These points are the identity of a brand. The Name of the app has a huge impact on the audience. We need to finalize these points before the actual creative process of design and development. You will also need to ensure about:

• is the name selected by you already up on play store?
• having a domain name for your website
• presence of the app name on the Internet

Also, the name of your app would influence the general stylistic concept, choice of colors, ideas for a logo etc.

Another point in this section is the slogan — a catchy brand tagline sending the message related to the apps core benefits to the user. While an app branding might not appear crucial in most cases, yet, try thinking beyond the app itself.

Graphics

Developing a strong app brand is a must. It is largely important to give a touch of originality so that your app can widely-spread. Customization and graphics play an essential role here. They make the app appear unique and grab user attention. thanks, Every app should have its uniqueness to differentiate it from others. Graphics give an image to the app, it defines an app and describes it.

Product Video

Video content nowadays is like fire in a forest. This era is of YouTube and Snapchat is influencing all age groups. Branding mobile app is not the exception. A product video is a short-animated presentation designed keeping in mind the features and purpose of your app. An innovative artistic video is an excellent way of attracting customers and their attention.

Personalization and Onboarding

With the help of User onboarding, you can give a concise introduction to the app and uses. It will assist the customers to learn and adapt the app and provide them the comfort of using it. There may be varied textual prompts, corresponding tutorials and all have signs of branding. Personalization is basically the freedom given to users to customize the app as per their needs. Giving users the key to modify the app attracts a huge user base.

Additionally, promoting your app across social media adds more value to the app. It is largely evident that an app promotion is important for its success and neglecting the same might aggravate unwanted concerns. So, in order to build user traffic and likewise loyalty, it is necessary to build a brand for your app.