How to promote a mobile application?

Question

contextual advertising

Together with a friend, we created a mobile application. In the wake of the coronavirus surge last year, a little more free time than usual appeared, and in order not to be bored, we made a worthy application like a photo editor in a year. Faced with the problem of how to promote a mobile application and tried different ways from standard recommendations on how to improve the appearance: fewer bugs, stability, beautiful design, etc...

Then they experimented with ASO, initially did it themselves, then realized that they didn’t do very well and found person on Upwork to help with this.

After that, they poured into advertising in Google adwords. In different countries, mainly in the USA. According to analytics in Firebase, people from such ads bring almost nothing (at a ratio of 1 to 10), unlike organic traffic.
There is monetization in the application (Advertising + subscription to remove ads and add features)
Maybe you should pay attention to Facebook?

I think that the problem is that we are at the bottom of the search results and organic traffic does not reach us.

We read a lot of articles about getting to the tops with the help of motivated traffic. And there were questions:
1) What service is better to use? If who used, recommend, please.
2) The algorithm itself how to do it correctly (There is a lot of information, but it is different)?
3) If anyone used this method, how many organic installs did this approach give in relation to purchased installs? And how many installs did you buy?
We will be glad to any infe.

We wanted to ask the community, those who were able to successfully promote their applications, to share their experience, information or their “Success story” for those who have just embarked on this path.

Answer 1

These photo editors are like dirt, 99% are complete shit. A more or less normal photo editor is 5-6 years of intensive work by a small team.
If your editor is no different from competitors, then you can not waste time.

Answer 2

Use different services experiment check what kind of traffic
is there For you and everyone else, this is a black box, so everyone makes experiments and conclusions, since everyone has different experiments and the exhaust from them, everyone writes about different things, the workhorse is somewhere in the middle
. This Mon-Tue will also not help you much, and even the first five ten experiments will give you these numbers not some kind of hypothetical, but exact and for your application and costs a penny

Answer 3

Read about growth hacking
By the way, a book has recently been published, translated, and that's what it's called.
It's like another way to promote.

Answer 4

ASO for the photo editor IMHO will not help. 300+ apps over 10M+ installs.
This is how to promote a site for the query "installation of air conditioners".
Everyone needs an editor with a single button "Make it hurt".
I don't remember exactly who. Under the guise of image processing by artificial intelligence, he kept a whole staff of photoshoppers.

Answer 5

To rank higher in organic search results, you need a good ASO. Or buy installs by key, but the positions will be higher only for the duration of the campaign (if you stop, it will fall down), and here you can still improve and fly out of the search results completely. So I would do ASO and competently, with services like ASOdesk or Asomobile. You can climb on the low-frequency keys, then on the middle... So at least the positions are saved. + Transfers for different markets with their corresponding keys. I can get traffic even from fat keywords. Good luck to you too!