Growing organically can bring very successful results when the effort is spent in the right places. There are many statistics that show paid user acquisition campaigns are not enough just by themselves. Marketing activities need to be included both organic and paid methods to drive great success. That’s how marketing campaigns can be maximized and provide full performance.

In this article, we’re going to explain the right and wrong perspectives of organic growth and how to make it effective.

What is Organic Growth?

Organic growth is a set of marketing activities that increases the organic installs of user acquisition. As much as it seems that organic growth is a free method but it’s actually not. The way of organic is to make people download your product when they’re already looking for it. So the key point is figuring out how to be involved in the customer journey which is not an easy thing to do.

In the mobile app world, browsing and search activities are critical for both Apple Store and Google Play. 70% of the users find a new app by simply searching it and 65% of all downloads directly come from the search results. So besides paid acquisition campaigns, organic user acquisition is a must.

How to increase organic downloads?

ASO (App Search Optimization)

App Search Optimization is a total work of a good product design and optimized product pages. Keyword research, well-designed creatives like product screens, icons, and a clear description are the key points of ASO. Besides that, analyzing the user activities in a funnel will help you to understand how your product page or product performs. To see the details of ASO, you can read our previous articles on ASO.

To get discovered by the people, there are few ways that app platforms provide. Getting featured is one of them. With the highlighted stories, being a featured app by the marketplace editors puts you on a different level. It’s not easy to get featured but with a well-functioned product why not do it? On the other hand, the top charts list is very eye-catching for users since everyone loves to download popular apps. As much as you got downloads you hit the charts. You can use search ads to speed up the app installs.

Search Ads

Running search ads has many effects on organic downloads starting from the rankings. Since search ads directly affect impressions and downloads, it’s increasing the strong performance metrics of your app. More downloads and impressions lead to having a higher ranking in the search. Not only the rankings but also it’s affecting brand awareness and help you to get ahead of the competition. Those are the factors that affect organic installs very much and search ads are a smart way to increase it.

External Factors

There are external factors that affect organic downloads like your competitors and season factors. As much as the competition gets high your process of growth might be slower. To get ahead of the competition, you need to address better strategies and always keep an eye on your competitors. The other factor is changing the habits of users with seasonality factors. Always follow time to time changes and get adopted to them fast. Otherwise, when everyone else is getting a piece of the cake, you’ll just watch what’s going on.

The importance of Organic Growth

1.Improves visibility

To make people see you, visibility is an important factor. How they are going to find you if they’re not aware of your app’s existence? Organic growth helps to improve visibility and so the downloads. The more you’re visible, the more you grow.


2.Sustainable growth

In the short term, paid acquisition campaigns are very effective and bring the results you’re willing to have. But what about when you don’t have any active campaigns? To grow sustainably, organic growth is a must. When you combine both paid & organic methods, your growth process will proceed in the long term as well.

3. Increase in the conversion rates

Making the right people download your app means they’ll be happy to use your product. Because they were already looking for you. When you present your app to people who even are not aware of your solution, it will take time and money to convince them to download your app. However, reaching the people who already looking for you means higher conversion rates since they’ll make the downloading decision faster.

Running both Organic & Paid Campaigns

Well, as we said before, both these methods are incredibly important for app growth. To run them both is more important. None of the two will give you successful results in the long term if you do just one more of them. Marketing activities should be combined to reach short & long-term goals successfully, to increase brand awareness, optimize visibility, and hack the new ways of growth.

There are many beliefs that, organic methods are free and when you conduct paid acquisition campaigns that’s enough. This is so wrong because when you calculate the costs, only one method will be expensive than you thought. The reality is to include both methods into your marketing plan and always work with the data not instincts.