Apple gives you 100 characters for App Store keywords. One hundred. That tiny comma-separated field has more influence on whether strangers find your app than most launch-day press releases ever will, and plenty of developers fill it in five minutes before hitting submit.
That’s the pattern with mobile app marketing. The things that matter are boring and easy to skip. The things that feel like marketing, like a Product Hunt launch or a press push, matter far less than people think.
Here’s how I’d promote an app with a small budget, split into what you do before launch and what you do after. The pre-launch half is where most apps quietly lose.
Before launch: build the audience while you build the app
Launching to nobody is the default outcome. You ship, you post once, your friends download it, and the app sits at rank 400 in its category forever. The fix is to start marketing the day you start building, which feels premature and isn’t.
Post the problem, not the app
You don’t have an app to show yet. Good. Post about the problem it solves instead, because that’s what people actually connect with. “I lose every receipt I’ve ever been handed, so I’m building something about it” is a better TikTok than any polished feature demo you’ll make six months from now.
Building in public works because people like rooting for someone. Share the ugly first screens. Share the feature you scrapped and why. Ask your followers to vote on the icon. Each of those posts turns a viewer into someone with a small stake in your launch, and those people download on day one.
Post on TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts for reach, and on X and Threads for the indie developer crowd, who share each other’s launches generously. Writing and filming for five platforms sounds like a full-time job. It’s two hours a week if you batch it. I write posts with Claude in my own voice and schedule a week at a time through SchedPilot, the scheduler I built. One upload goes to TikTok, Reels and Shorts at the times you pick. The full workflow, prompt included, is in my automation tutorial.
Collect a waitlist and real beta testers
Every post should point somewhere. A one-page site with an email signup is enough. On Android, turn on pre-registration in Google Play so people can sign up directly in the store and get the app installed automatically at launch. On iOS, TestFlight lets you invite up to 10,000 external testers, which is far more than you’ll need and a great excuse to give your most engaged followers early access.
Beta testers do two jobs. They find your bugs. More importantly, they’re the people who’ll leave your first reviews, and an app with zero ratings on launch day looks abandoned.
Start SEO before you have anything to sell
Search takes three to six months to kick in. If you start writing at launch, your pages start ranking around the time your launch buzz has died. Start during development.
Your landing page should target what people search when they want an app like yours: “receipt scanner app,” “best habit tracker for ADHD,” “split bills app for roommates.” Then write a handful of bottom-of-the-funnel pages: alternatives to the biggest app in your category, honest comparisons, and listicles like “best receipt apps for freelancers” with your app on the list. People searching those phrases are ready to download something. Make it yours.
Plan for GEO from the start
Ask ChatGPT for the best app to track your expenses as a freelancer and see what it says. That answer is increasingly where people find apps, and AI assistants build it from listicles, comparison pages, Reddit threads and review sites.
So get your app into the places they read. Submit it to app directories and AlternativeTo. Answer real questions in the subreddits where your users hang out, and mention the app only when it truly fits. Write guides that answer one specific question in the first paragraph, and write them from experience. “What I learned interviewing 40 freelancers about how they track receipts” gets cited. Generic tips don’t, because the models have read a million of them already.
App Store optimization: get this right before you submit
ASO is SEO for the app stores, and it decides whether people searching inside the store ever see you. The rules are strict and the space is tiny, so every character counts.
On the App Store, Apple indexes your app name (30 characters), your subtitle (30 characters) and that hidden 100-character keyword field. Put your most important keyword in the name, a second one in the subtitle, and fill the keyword field with everything else. Use commas without spaces, skip plurals and don’t repeat words already in your name, since Apple combines them for you. Your long description doesn’t affect iOS search at all, so write it for humans.
Google Play works differently. There’s no keyword field, so Google reads your title (30 characters), short description (80 characters) and full description (up to 4,000 characters). Use your main keywords naturally in all three, and mention the core one a few times in the long description without stuffing it.
Then the visuals, which decide whether people actually tap install. Most people never scroll past the first three screenshots. Make those three sell the outcome, with a big readable caption on each: “Scan a receipt in 2 seconds” beats a plain screenshot of your settings menu. If you have a preview video, the first few seconds need to show the app doing its main job immediately.
Both stores let you test this for free. Apple’s Product Page Optimization runs alternate icons and screenshots against your original, and Google Play has store listing experiments. Run a test every month. Small changes to the first screenshot can move your conversion rate more than a new feature.
After launch: UGC, consistency and reviews
Launch week matters less than the six months after it. Apps that grow are the ones still showing up in people’s feeds in month five.
UGC videos are the best marketing channel for apps right now
UGC means user-generated content: short videos of real people using your app, filmed on a phone, talking straight to the camera. They look like a friend’s recommendation instead of an ad, which is exactly why they work. On TikTok and Reels, a slightly messy video of someone saying “okay this app just saved me an hour” will outperform a beautifully animated product video almost every time.
You can get UGC in three ways. Ask happy users to film themselves, and give them a free year or a gift card for it. Hire small creators through UGC platforms or by messaging them directly; rates for smaller creators often sit somewhere between $50 and $200 a video, usually with usage rights included. Or film your own, with you or a friend as the face, which costs nothing and is how a lot of indie apps start.
Give creators a hook to open with, not a script. The first two seconds decide everything, so test lots of openings: a problem (“I used to lose every receipt”), a result (“I saved $340 on taxes with this”), a surprise (“nobody told me my phone could do this”). Let them say the rest in their own words. Scripted UGC sounds scripted.
The real trick is volume. One video tells you nothing. Twenty videos tell you which hooks work. Many app teams post UGC from their own brand account plus one or two dedicated faceless accounts, each posting daily, and keep doubling down on whichever angle breaks out.
Schedule UGC instead of posting it by hand
Here’s where most teams fall apart. They get 15 great videos from creators, post three of them over a busy week, and the rest sit in a Google Drive folder until they’re stale.
Upload the whole batch once and schedule it. In SchedPilot you upload each video, write the caption, pick TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and spread them across the next two or three weeks. Running a second or third account for your app? Connect them too. The Silver plan covers 5 accounts, Gold covers 20. If you like working with AI, the MCP connector lets you tell Claude “schedule these videos one a day at 6pm on TikTok and Reels, and write captions for each” and it handles the whole queue. Then check which videos took off, and send those hooks to your creators for the next batch.
What social media scheduler should I use for social media if I just launched my app ?
Probably you are on a budget, especially if you dont have VC money, so you need an affordable social media scheduler. Thats why the best one is schedpilot, because is under $100 and in the best case could even cost you $21 per month.
Ask for reviews at the right moment
Ratings affect both your store rankings and whether people tap install. On iOS, Apple’s built-in review prompt can only appear three times a year per user, so don’t waste it on launch. Trigger it right after a win: the user just scanned their tenth receipt, finished a streak, exported a report. A happy moment gets a five-star rating. A random popup on the third app open gets ignored, or worse.
Reply to every review, especially the bad ones. Future users read those replies, and so do the AI assistants deciding whether to recommend you.
Keep feeding SEO and GEO
After launch you have something you didn’t before: real users and real data. Use it. Write experience-based articles about what your users are doing, case studies, “how Sarah uses the app to run her bakery’s expenses.” Add a comparison page every time a competitor gets attention. Turn your best-performing UGC hooks into blog post titles, since a hook that stops a scroll usually makes a good headline too.
Every article becomes a week of social posts, and every viral post becomes an article. The channels feed each other once you stop treating them separately.
And paid ads?
Wait. My rule is the same for apps as for any business: no paid ads until you can spend at least $10,000 a month and be comfortable losing it while you test. App install campaigns need volume to optimize, and a small budget never gets there.
Here’s the nice part. When you do start, your best organic UGC videos become your ads. You already know which hooks work because you tested them for free. Teams that skip the organic phase pay to learn the same lessons.
A simple timeline
- 3 to 6 months before launch: start posting about the problem, set up the landing page and waitlist, publish your first SEO pages
- 1 to 2 months before: open TestFlight and Google Play pre-registration, finish ASO, design the first three screenshots, recruit your first UGC creators
- Launch week: email the waitlist, post everywhere, ask beta testers for reviews
- Months 1 to 6: schedule UGC daily, test a new store listing monthly, add two SEO or GEO pages a month
If you want help with the SEO, GEO or ASO side, that’s what my agency does. Email me at andreisaioc@gmail.com or find me on X at @asaio87. For scheduling the videos, SchedPilot has a 7-day free trial on every plan.
Your app’s first thousand users won’t come from launch day. They’ll come from the 60th video you almost didn’t bother posting.