You have built your application and are now pondering over the reasons why people are not buying it. The app does not have to be brand new to be successful; you just have to dominate the specific niche you are in. The question mobile app developers often ask themselves is: “How can my app become the most visible?”.  How do you turn the stoplight on your application and get people going crazy over your hard work? Now that you created this wonderful app, how do you go about getting people to spread the word and purchase it? The answer lies in app marketing.

Well, an App is only as good as the people using it and people will not find it themselves. It seems like there is an App for almost everything you ever needed and for everything you didn’t. In this increasingly competitive space how do you get your App noticed above the rest and ensure it is relevant to your potential audience? It certainly doesn’t hurt to be unique, but whether you have few or many competitors, your goal shall be to be the most seen, since the most seen is the most talked about and soon enough you will enjoy a flood of downloads.

It is not enough to just create a mobile app; marketing it is equally important, a key step often overlooked by app developers. There are a number of ways to market your app and try to win out in the battle for app supremacy. Depending on the cost, you will have to evaluate which option is better between engaging a PR firm to conduct app marketing for your application or do it yourself.

According to Bill Gates, Founder Microsoft, “Companies should focus on their core competencies and outsource everything else.” How far is this true? Hiring a PR firm to carry out your app marketing has a number of benefits including building your app credibility and increasing your visibility. This is because being covered in the news has a far bigger impact than a normal advert because many people will watch news than see an ad. This will increase your app’s visibility more than five times than an ad would achieve. And because the Return on Investment is much higher than that of an ad, you will discover that the PR campaign actually pays for itself.

Besides writing the content yourself, doing your own app marketing involves other true cost of in-house public relations like hiring marketers/PR staff, salaries and benefits, offices, stationery and other internal bills. Do you have the PR expertise? What have you done to market your app, from the App Store, tweeting it to your followers, Facebooking, marketing it to family and friends? Have you gotten the results you desired? If you want to win the attention game that is not going to cut it. You have to think bigger than that, be more aggressive and built your own relationships the media.

And because it takes time to develop and execute an effective PR campaign, you need to evaluate what better things you can accomplish with the time you will spend on running your own app marketing campaign.  If you want to do it right, you go after the bigger audience and you hit them with the greatest weapon of marketing in existence; viral videos. You are going to need a high impact video, which makes your niche hungry to download your app and it shall be distributed far and wide using the most savvy strategies in existence. Done right you will soon be the dominant force in your niche. The most seen, the most talked about and the most downloaded.

Public relations firms generate earned media coverage for their clients full-time. They know the ins and outs of pitching stories, writing and distributing news releases, scheduling speaking engagements and developing contact lists and relationships with the media. Most PR pros have cultivated relationships with media contacts for years and they stay in regular and constant contact with the media, which increases the chance for media placement in higher-profile places than you will likely be able to achieve on your own. A professional PR firm will manage your app marketing campaign properly, from SEO, social media and manage your online reputation. This could be the difference between your company’s survival and total catastrophe.

As to whether to hire a PR firm or do app marketing yourself – it all depends on where you think you can optimize the benefit.