Who is an ASO specialist and why is it promising

The mobile application market has been growing at an accelerated pace for several years now, and this trend is not planning to decline. But at the same time, the number of products that actually bring income to their developers remains quite low. It turns out that a person spends time and money on creating a program, being confident that it will go well with the consumer market, will be extremely popular, and will meet expectations in material terms. But in reality, the situation turns out to be completely different: even high-quality and truly useful mobile applications remain unclaimed. And the reason here is quite banal - the consumer market simply does not see these products and does not understand what benefits they can provide.

And at this stage, App Store Optimization (ASO) comes into play. Literally translated, this sounds like targeted improvement of mobile applications, that is, we are talking about optimizing mobile applications aimed at improving the visibility of the product in the App Store or Google Play stores. And here you need a specialist who could perform this work at a professional level, ensuring excellent promotion of your product on the market. We are talking about an ASO specialist, whose responsibilities will include promoting the application and stimulating paid subscriptions.

It is noteworthy that absolutely anyone who wants to try themselves in a new profession can become such a specialist. Here you do not need to have knowledge of programming, have an appropriate higher education and have any other skills. You will only need to take the appropriate courses to gain basic knowledge in the field of promoting mobile applications, and then take orders for yourself on a freelance basis or get a job in an IT company that needs such specialists. On average, training takes about 3 months, and the subsequent salary starts from $400 per month. When you have already gained some experience, you can count on higher income rates, up to $2000-$3000. But here everything is ambiguous and directly depends on the size of the company with which you cooperate, your own experience, as well as the responsibilities you have taken on. But a serious advantage here will be that the competition in the market in this segment is quite low today, but the demand for specialists is impressive.

As part of today's review, we will dwell in more detail on what the profession of an ASO specialist is and what will be included in his professional responsibilities. We will get acquainted with the qualities that a candidate for such a job must have. We will also talk about how you can become such a specialist. The information received will help you navigate the specifics of this profession, as well as determine its prospects for yourself and, perhaps, try your hand at a new and promising direction.

Why is an ASO specialist promising?

The fact that a smartphone has become a full-fledged element in the life of a modern person today is a fact that does not require proof. This process was significantly accelerated by the pandemic, which literally put millions of people around the world at home and transferred work to an online format. It is the coronavirus restrictions that are considered the trigger that launched the mass creation of mobile applications. If you analyze the modern market, you can see that on average, Google Play is replenished with more than 100,000 new applications every month, while this figure in the AppStore consistently exceeds 30,000.

But only the developer who manages to attract an audience will be able to make money on such products. That is, it is important that people see your product and download it to their device. Otherwise, even a very good application will simply get lost in the general mass of similar software and will not allow you to make a profit.

As soon as mobile application developers realized this aspect, the market immediately needed specialists who could take on all the work to increase the visibility of mobile applications for users. That is, they needed those who could promote these products according to the corresponding user queries in the Google Play and App Store. Imagine yourself in the place of an ordinary user. Let's say that you are interested in a program that would help you correctly calculate the calories of the food you eat. You go to your app store, enter the corresponding query and see a list of applications that match it. So, the fact that they turned out to be visible to you is the result of the work of an ASO specialist.

By the way, why ASO, that is, App Store optimization? The fact is that initially absolutely all application creators who wanted to earn money from them relied on the App Store, believing that it represented a more solvent audience. And there was some truth in this, since iPhone owners spent much more money on mobile purchases a few years ago than owners of smartphones running on the Android operating system. During this time, the trends have changed dramatically, but the name of the profession, and the technology itself, has remained the same, although it has gone far beyond the Apple ecosystem.

Why did the profession of an ASO specialist become relevant only recently?

Smartphones have been on the market for quite some time now, and along with them, related applications. And here the question naturally arises: why did the profession of an ASO specialist become relevant just a few years ago? This can largely be explained by the same pandemic, which we mentioned above. It was this that became the impetus for the development of mobile applications, as the demand for them during this period of time increased greatly. In parallel with this, the number of offers began to increase. IT specialists appreciated all the advantages and opportunities for earning that such products open up. Judge for yourself: for the period of 2019, the approximate income from mobile applications on the market was about 150 billion dollars, and already in 2022 this figure increased more than 3 times, exceeding 500 billion.

An important role here was also played by Apple, which launched its own internal advertising of Apple Search Ads applications. This happened in 2016. That is, it turns out that earlier the demand for this product was very low, but now the trend has changed and it has to be followed. Therefore, we can say with confidence that the profession of ASO specialist today is about 8-9 years old, which by all standards is considered a very small indicator. Accordingly, the number of specialists working in this niche today is still very small, but the demand is more than high. It is this combination that makes this profession so tempting for everyone who is looking for a new job.

What responsibilities will an ASO specialist face in his work

If you analyze the work of an ASO specialist and the tasks that he will face in his daily work, then here an analogy with the responsibilities of a person who is engaged in SEO promotion immediately appears. The only thing is that in this case we are not talking about website promotion, but about the promotion of mobile applications. Accordingly, the field of activity here will also be different. In particular, the focus will no longer be on the search engine, but directly on the stores where these software products are presented, namely Google Play and AppStore. The main task that an ASO specialist will face is to increase the number of downloads of a certain product in combination with minimizing the cost of attracting one user.

Different methods and technologies can be used to solve this problem. In most cases, an ASO specialist will face the following tasks in their daily work:

• Development of a general strategy for promoting a mobile application in Google Play and AppStore stores in order to increase its visibility for potential buyers, form a growth hypothesis, and test them in practice. In this case, work will be carried out with the rating, user reviews. Feedback with clients is also mandatory, and answers to their questions are provided.
• Optimization of the application card. Here, it is also important to form a semantic core, which will become the basis for subsequent revisions of the text component, as well as select the block of key queries by which the audience will be attracted. It is also necessary to formulate the name itself, describe the application. It is also important to correctly select the visual content, namely the icon for the application, screenshots from it or short videos. The interest in it from the consumer audience largely depends on how attractive and informative the card of your application in the store is. That is, the design should be so presentable and effective that everyone who sees it would want to download it.
• Formation of technical specifications for copywriters, animators, translators, designers and other specialists who will be involved in the implementation of this work. The main difficulty at this stage is that any mobile application must be localized for each of the countries where it will be presented. In principle, you can, of course, get by with a universal English-language interface, but to get maximum results in practice, it is still important to make several language versions, at least in the most popular languages, or adapt it to those countries whose residents you want to directly attract as clients.
• Attracting a user audience. Here we are talking about developing personalized pages and setting them up for different segments of the user audience. Updates and promotions are also launched, i.e. in-app/liveops events, applications are made for the application to be included in thematic collections (featuring).
• Analysis of ASO metrics, as well as work to improve these indicators and, as a result, overall efficiency. For mobile applications, the key parameters will be the rating of conversion indicators in the purchase or directly in the installation of the product, the activity of the user audience, as well as the cost of attracting one new user and their lifetime value. The last parameter indicates how much money a certain client brings to your application throughout the entire period of interaction with you, starting from the first purchase and up to the payment for the last update, renewal.
• Conducting A/B testing. At this stage, different variants of icons, text descriptions, and other content are worked out in order to determine the variant that will be ideal in terms of conversion, that is, will provide the best indicators. At this stage, it is important to study the strategies and methods that your closest competitors use, check the semantics and make sure that your keywords work perfectly. Let us repeat that visual design plays a key role in attracting the attention of the user audience. Therefore, it is important to prepare several variants and then test each of them. This will allow you to ultimately obtain an application design that is guaranteed to attract potential customers.
• Launching paid advertising directly in mobile application stores. This is a kind of contextual advertising, only it will no longer be placed in search engines, but directly in Google Play and the AppStore. This direction is called Apple Search Ads (ASA). Quite often, employers indicate in vacancies that they need an ASO/ASA specialist, that is, a person who, among other things, would also be engaged in paid advertising within the application store.

Surely now you are convinced of how similar SEO promotion and ASO are. There is a lot of work to do in both cases. But it is not so scary and sad if you know what and how to do.

How to evaluate the effectiveness of an ASO specialist: key indicators

Evaluating the effectiveness of all the activities that an ASO specialist implements in practice is the key to high efficiency of the final work. If you regularly analyze the results obtained, monitor growth trends, you will be able to make timely adjustments to pre-compiled strategies, thereby preventing waste of money and time. But here it is very important to understand what criteria should be paid special attention to. In particular, the main indicators of the effectiveness of an ASO specialist include:

1. The number of application downloads made by users over a given period of time. That is, you need to set an optimal interval for yourself in advance, for example, one week or one month, and check this parameter. Ideally, you should see a systematic increase in the number of downloads. This is what will indicate the effectiveness of your work. We would like to draw attention to the fact that this is a quantitative indicator.
2. Conversion, expressed in downloads. In this case, we are talking about the percentage of those users who downloaded the application after they studied its description in the store to those who viewed the card. Accordingly, the higher this parameter is, the better the work was done by the ASO specialist: he managed to create an application card that really attracted attention and gave the corresponding results.
3. Mobile application rating. This parameter is determined on the basis of user ratings, reviews. They are left by those who have already downloaded this product, and also tested it in practice. Accordingly, the higher the rating, the more people you managed to interest.

You can also pay attention to the total number of reviews, ratings, what the audience leaves after interacting with your product. What is noteworthy here is that you can respond to such reviews, add your comments to them, be it gratitude for the fact that people used your product. Do not forget to also respond to negative feedback. In the latter case, it will be important for you to try to smooth out the negativity, establish the reason that caused it and, accordingly, eliminate it. This way, you will show the audience that you are working on your application, improving it, taking into account user wishes. As a result, this will lead to increased loyalty from customers, the appearance of positive reviews, recommendations.

Key skills that a potential candidate for ASO specialists should have

At the beginning of the review, we said that, by and large, anyone can become an ASO specialist. Here you don't need to have the appropriate higher education or even practical experience to start. But you still can't do without basic knowledge. Most of them can be obtained in specialized courses, which on average take about 3 months. All the skills that a potential candidate for ASO specialists should have can be divided into 2 separate categories:

1. Personal qualities.
2. Professional skills.

Let's consider both of these categories in more detail.

Personal qualities of an ASO specialist

Personal qualities of an ASO specialist, also known as soft skills, are what a priori should be present in a person who plans to master this profession. This includes:

• Ability to think analytically. A candidate for ASO specialists should be able to work with large volumes of information, quickly navigate it, and find cause-and-effect relationships. This is what will allow him to easily identify errors that led to a deterioration in the performance of mobile applications or, conversely, those moments that worked well in practice. And here it is also very important to be able to justify the decisions made.
• Creativity, creative approach. To get good results in practice, you need to act outside the box, in a diverse way, test different solutions, identifying the most effective among them. In addition, you need to learn how to formulate your hypotheses and ideas into content that can attract the user audience, make them pay due attention to studying your application. That is, you must understand that you can create such packaging for a software product that will effectively distinguish it from its analogues.
• Ability to learn independently. On the courses we talked about above, you will be able to get basic knowledge. But the ASO technology itself is quite flexible, besides, it includes many factors that can change over time. And new trends in the promotion of mobile applications, specialized tools are constantly emerging. Adjustments are also regularly made to the requirements of the stores themselves. That is, you will have to constantly monitor current trends, add changes to your product based on them. This is what you will already do independently, that is, without the help of tutors.
• Understanding of management, marketing. An ASO specialist is someone who is also engaged in sales, only his product is mobile applications. This means that you can't do without the relevant knowledge. And he will also be the one who will be responsible for the work of all other specialists, the same copywriters, designers, translators. Initially, it will be important to correctly draw up technical specifications for other specialists in order to get a product that can be easily sold. And it will also be necessary to keep full control over the execution of the assigned tasks, making sure of their high quality.
• Knowledge of a foreign language. In most cases, knowledge of English at the Intermediate level will be required. This will allow you to promote mobile applications for different regions, countries, correctly fill in metadata, communicate with technical support for a particular software product or store moderators.

Each of you decides for yourself whether many or few personal qualities are required from candidates for ASO specialists and draws the appropriate conclusions. But if you look more superficially, then all these characteristics that we indicated above should be inherent in absolutely every person who works in the IT environment today.

Professional skills of an ASO specialist

In order for you to be able to apply for the position of an ASO specialist in some company or work as a freelancer, it is important to have the following professional skills, that is, hard skills:

• Thorough knowledge of all those tools that can be used to promote mobile applications in the relevant stores. In particular, this includes services designed to collect the semantic core, programs that can collect reviews from the Internet, track the activity of nearby competitors. Of such software products, we can highlight MobileAction, Semrush, AppMagic, Sensor Tower, but there are other options. This is what will significantly simplify and speed up your subsequent work, increase its efficiency, minimize physical and time costs for the implementation of the tasks, as well as the human factor and related errors.
• The ability to effectively interact with the developer console, regardless of which platform you are currently working with. The same App Store Connect and Google Play Dev Console have a number of fundamental differences that are characteristic only of them. If you do not know this, you will not be able to do your work correctly.
• Sufficient knowledge and practical skills in working with analytics systems. Manually collecting all the necessary information that will allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your software product promotion is not possible or impractical in terms of the effect obtained and time spent. It will be much easier and faster to use services like AppsFlyer, App Annie, Appmetrica.
• Good knowledge of A/B testing. You must understand which parameters can be changed, know how to evaluate the effectiveness of certain solutions. At the same time, it is important to act very quickly so as not to waste time.
• Knowledge in the field of marketing, SMM promotion, advertising. This is what will allow you to create extraordinary, bright and effective advertising creatives, interact with other platforms to promote your mobile application, including social networks.

As you delve into the topic of ASO, the volume of knowledge and practical skills in this area will increase, which will allow you to find new creative ideas and complete all the work as quickly as possible, getting a good result in the end.

ASO specialist: is this profession so in demand?

ASO specialist is a person who will work in a fairly narrow niche. This means that there may not be as many offers from employers on the Russian market as we would like. Most of these vacancies today are concentrated in large cities, in particular in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But if we take into account the fact that these jobs can be done remotely, then in principle people from any other cities can also count on positive approval of their candidacy.

If we analyze the trends in the growth of demand for ASO specialists, they show quite positive dynamics: every day more and more mobile application developers understand the need to promote their products and that these jobs should be done by a separate person. Someone who thoroughly understands all these nuances and can implement everything as quickly, correctly and professionally as possible.

Judge for yourself: today, the same Google Play presents about 3 million applications available for download. They compete with each other in an attempt to attract the attention of the user audience. That is, without the additional help of a person who understands how to organize promotion as correctly as possible, you can’t do without it. That is, the demand for ASO specialists has increased significantly recently, but the number of offers remains at a fairly low level.

And what about wages? Here, everything depends on experience and knowledge, in particular:

• beginners can expect a salary of about $400-$500 per month;
• a specialist with deep knowledge and skills in the field of ASO will earn about $1000 - $2000;
• the salary of a manager starts from $1500 and up to $3000, but here everything depends on the region.

We will not name the salaries of freelancers, since everything is discussed with customers individually. Many companies find this option more convenient for themselves: not to hire a separate employee on staff, but to resort to the help of third-party specialists both for solving one-time tasks and for permanent work.

How can you become an ASO specialist?

In principle, each of you can try your hand at promoting mobile applications in specialized stores. We have already said that today there are specialized courses where you can get basic knowledge and skills in this area. If you take them, this will significantly increase your chances of employment. Moreover, such courses are aimed at people with different levels of knowledge in this area. If you have no experience at all in such an area, then you should start with a basic program, where you will be told about the basics of visual and text optimization. But, as practice shows, most often people who are involved in related areas decide to become ASO specialists, for example:

• SEO specialists working with website promotion;
• Internet marketers, managers;
• SMM specialists promoting accounts in social networks.

These categories of specialists already have quite deep knowledge, which, among other things, will also be relevant when promoting mobile applications. Moreover, many companies even hire people who have no experience and have not taken courses. For them, it is quite enough for the candidate to have basic knowledge of what app stores are. Here, the bet is on the fact that the employer is determined to independently train interns within his team, initially orienting him to work with certain company products.

Let's summarize

If you are choosing a new direction of professional activity for yourself, if you want to get a promising and well-paid profession, do not throw the ASO area out of consideration. The demand for such specialists will remain stable for a long period of time, since it is difficult to imagine that humanity will abandon smartphones, stop using specialized applications, or the market for these applications will simply collapse. Moreover, the developers themselves are beginning to actively realize the fact that without promotion, their product, even the most advanced and useful, will simply gather dust on the store shelf, since the audience will simply not see it.

You can become an ASO specialist from scratch, by taking specialized courses, or already having certain knowledge, or by deciding to retrain from the field of SEO, SMM, management, marketing. If desired, you can combine several areas in your work, increasing your demand in the market. We hope that the information we have provided in today's review will be useful and informative for you.

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