Working with the right ASO agency is the only way to navigate the 2020s app world jungle.

Google is the planet’s most popular search engine, and now just part of an empire that was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1996. But, when the pair were in the beta phase, it wasn’t called Google. Wait for it… they initially called it ‘Backrub.’ They thought the name worked because the search engine, “looked at backlinks” on the internet as a way of determining how to rank a site. Thank goodness they revisited that idea and eventually came up with Google, a nod to the massively large number of Googleplex –in other words, ‘all the information you could imagine.’

Any pro marketing team would have picked Google over Backrub as Google is a name that’s fun to say, easy to remember, and – while perhaps not a consideration at the time – a word with more potential of becoming a verb than ‘Backrub.’ “Yeah, I’ll just backrub that and get back to you…?” –Nope, it just doesn’t work. Names, logos, taglines, and explanations of “what we do” – are vital pieces of the puzzle of web success. And, of course, from a podcast to a vegan butcher shop, there’s virtually no new business idea that doesn’t require a solid online presence on the web. Additionally, most businesses – new and old – are discovering that they often, if not always, need to develop an app. 

Plenty of companies have internal IT divisions that can slap together something functional, but let’s make something clear right off the bat – unless you have spent the last 20+ years learning and relearning the intricacies of about a hundred metrics, your app is metaphorically a blindfolded marathon runner with their feet chained together.

There are over 5 million apps spread across the two app stores, and there’s really only one thing that separates champions from losers… a professional ASO agency with a proven track record to help guide you through the app world jungle. It’s sad but true: many of the ‘losers’ had great ideas… perhaps even better ideas than their competition but without the pros, they slipped through the cracks. Anyone thinking about their web presence and or promoting an app needs a team of experts onboard – the days of ‘going it alone’ are over. You not only have to get noticed on the app store, but you have to present your app in such a way that convinces people to organically download it, and after downloading it, then actually install it! Each one of these steps requires professional assistance, a team that knows what works for the 2020s and has the expertise to quickly adjust strategies if needed.

TikTok is seemingly every young person’s favorite go-to app for creating and sharing short videos, and a complete puzzle to old fogies who can’t figure out why anyone would find a 15-second video interesting or cool, but the premise of TikTok is not actually all that creative. There were plenty of other apps that also tried the short video idea. But the competition faded, whereas TikTok made as much as US$4.6 billion as of the end of 2021.

Many initially dismissed TikTok when it debuted as a fad. TikTok made those billions, however, because their ASO and marketing teams convinced enough people that their app was the best platform bandwagon to hop on. Remember the American short-form video hosting service Vine? They started up in 2012, were bought by Twitter in 2013, and had over 200 million active users by the end of 2015. But in October ’16, Twitter disabled uploads, and in January 2017 they archived all Vine videos. Finally, in April 2019 even the archive was officially discontinued. 

Of all the companies that should have been successful in short-form video hosting services, a creation backed by Twitter should have been the champ. Twitter, after all, is the godfather of short creations – a tech company that had the audacious idea of forcing people to express themselves in just 140 characters, originally. But Vine didn’t work. One can debate the reasons for Vine’s withering on the vine, but it really comes down to consumers deciding – sometime after TikTok’s rollout in September 2016, that it was a more exciting platform. Then, as excitement snowballed, Vine users abandoned ship. TikTok has done such a great job with their ASO marketing – and marketing in general – that Cloudflare ranked it the most popular website of 2021 – meaning it surpassed almighty Google! This kind of success doesn’t happen due to luck; a false narrative that the media has fed us – “Oh, they were just in the right place at the right time.” That may have been true ‘back in the day’ but in the 2020s a ‘let’s hope we get lucky’ strategy is not only no strategy at all but also a great way to waste millions of investor dollars.

On the other hand, if you get a world-class ASO agency to work with you, your chances of success skyrocket. You might be the next big thing and your idea might be the most creative one on the block, but without pros helping you craft your strategy and get your app in front of people’s eyeballs, it could all be for naught.