Over the years many things have changed, but many are the same. We now have hundreds of thousands of apps competing for the same space on a device as ours are. Developers, who are now business men and women are trying to find new ways to stick out. A great app can not truly shine unless it gets downloaded and installed by the masses. With app marketing, the only way to rise to the top is to hit critical mass. The idea of hitting critical mass will be the focus of this post. There are ways to Growth Hack your way into critical mass.
First we need to get one thing out of the way. No matter how much attention you throw at an app, it has to be a useful product that will bring either ease or entertainment to a person’s life. Our mobile devices provide us with problem solving tools and are also a source of entertainment. Assuming that you have a good idea and have developed it well into a nice app, here are my Top 5 Tips for Promoting Your App.
1. Become the Voice in Your Space.
If your app is specific to a business topic or even if it’s just the best Bubble Popping game on the app store, you need to be all about your app. Eat, live and breathe what your app is all about. If your app for Hair Stylists helps Salon business owners keep track of chair rentals, hair product and other general sales, you need to be all about the Salon industry. Your website should not just showcase your app, it should be the ultimate resource for tech savvy salon owners. A blog on your website could be used to share information and grow an audience of Salon owners. You could also harness the social power of Twitter, Facebook and Linked in to share your articles with the Salon owners on these social networks.
If you’re app is the next amazing bubble pop game, yes, a simple game that allows you to pop bubbles, which is currently my 2 year olds favorite game to play, you could shoot a real life bubble popping game video and put it on Youtube. Challenge others out there to upload their real life bubble popping videos. There are so many different ways to generate viewership which you can convert into app sales through a properly crafted website.
You don’t have to be a Guy Kawasaki on Twitter, who curates and shares information on almost everything, but you can be the Guy Kawasaki of the specific niche´ you are trying to gain ground in.
We are always looking for different ways to do this wether it is through writing blogs such as this, adding photos of cool mobile related products we like to our Pinterest page.
2. Have a Good Website and Use It!
At DailyAppShow.Com, we have created videos for over 8,000 different developers. We look at the website of each developer and we often get a good laugh, sometimes a short cry out of some of these websites. I am a developer, more of a web developer, but I do have experience in development. I would never create a product and release it to the world with out having an awesome website to showcase it’s features. What these app marketplaces have led people to believe is that most will find their app through the marketplace. I am a believer in the fact that people Google search our answers to their problems and find solutions that way. If I am Google Searching for the best way to grill a steak and the first thing that pops up is an app that shows me how to prepare steak, you can bet I will go download that app. I may have not been looking for an app but now that I found what I was looking for in an app, it will be much easier for me to grill a steak reading from an app than from my laptop.
A good website can help your app (product) be found. More people find DailyAppShow.Com by searching “Video App Reviews” in Google than by going into the app store and using the same search. 92% of our app downloads come through the links on our website. That means that the user had to have found our website first, before going to the app store and downloading out app.
Websites are inexpensive to set up and maintain these days. If you are on a tight budget, I suggest setting up a website at WordPress.com, customizing it to fit your needs and start adding content that is relevant to what your app category is. Alternatively, you can have something customized and made to mirror the look and feel of your app, a company such as our parent company, Hill Media Group could help with that.
3. Social Networks are Great for Support
Many people are afraid to offer user support in the public eye. Most of us know about how Comcast started using Twitter to respond to customer complaints. I actually had to reach out to Comcast once through Twitter because I got nowhere through their phone support. I received prompt support and got a phone call right away from the person handling the Twitter account. They took care of my problem and I was back in action. That is how it should be. What also happened during this process is that all of my Twitter followers got to watch as Comcast professionally handled my problem. After it was successfully handled, I Tweeted about my experience with their support team.
Of course you can’t handle all support cases in the public eye, but it is a good idea to offer social networks as a way of communicating with you or your support team. I know that this takes extra time and resources that you may not have but consider how easy it is to manage this. Simply setup accounts on Twitter and Facebook. You can manage them from your smart phone through out the day. People don’t expect you to get back to them in seconds, I have found that an hour or less is a good response time, unless it is in the middle of the night.
Once your app gains any kind of momentum, it will be important for you to keep your ear to the tracks using social networks. As people talk about your app it is good to hear what they have to say. At the very least, you should be there to respond. Don’t let your users think they are alone.
4. Push Marketing
The internet is huge and I think that people forget this sometimes. Imagine yourself trying to yell to someone on the other side of the field at the World Cup. Impossible. At the very least you would need a megaphone to make enough noise to get the other person’s attention. The same kind of noise is needed to get attention on the web. It is very common for a developer to do one thing at a time so they can measure it’s success. I think developers like numbers they can measure, or something… However, when you do several things one at a time, none of them add up to a whole lot. It is only when you stack efforts on top of each other that you are able to get more attention at once. I have heard it called other things, but I call this Push Marketing.
When companies launch products they do a media push. It is called a media push because they are pushing out their message to as many media sources as they have resources to handle. A bump in sales is what they are hoping to get in return. Hopefully this media push is enough to get the kind of momentum going that will carry them until they have reached critical mass. This is not often the case because as you are probably aware, the only way to become a household name is to be heavily backed by media. Even though Angry Birds was downloaded by millions it only became a household name because Big Media couldn’t stop talking about it.
When it comes to contacting media outlets such as PRMac.Com, DailyAppShow.com or any other, I suggest you stack all of these efforts into one large push to try and get as much attention at one time as possible. This big push could result in enough sales to do further marketing to help you reach that critical mass. We have all seen apps in the top 25 of the app marketplace and wondered how they got there. This is probably due to a form of push marketing.
5. Get Other People Talking About Your App
If someone has an audience, get them talking about your app, especially if their audience is related to what your app offers. Here at DailyAppShow.Com, we are pretty general. We cover all app categories and it is a good idea to have your app listed on websites such as ours. However, it is even more important to have your app being talked about on websites that specialize in the area your app does. If your app is a Tower Defense game, get connected with a Tower Defense game website for Tower Defense lovers. If there is no such website, create it. If your app helps teachers organize their classrooms then find the best technology resource websites and get your app in front of it’s viewers.
Final Thoughts on App Marketing
Of course there is more than one way to skin a cat, or in this case, more than 5 ways. I have watched over 10,000 apps be marketed where we were part of the marketing process and many apps that I downloaded on my own as a result of some sort of marketing effort. With the pool of apps getting bigger faster than the need for new apps can support, it is more important than ever to market your product in the most effective way possible. Take the marketing of your app very seriously. Make a plan of action and stack those into one big effort. In marketing, a frequently replanted plant or tree yields little fruit, however one planted within the best soil has the best chance of growing and producing fruit for a long time.
If there are any questions I can help answer, please feel free to contact me directly through our website or through my email (jerad at dailyappshow.com).
