App Marketing Best Practices: The Do’s and Don’ts of App Marketing
Notes from the “App Marketing Best Practices: The Do’s and Don’ts of App Marketing” panel at the AppNation Conference in September 2010
Panelists:
- Vijay Chattha, VSC Consulting
- Mindy Hull, Distimo
- Eros Rosmini, Aurora Feint
Tips from Vijay of VSC Consulting:
1. Take a “sniff test” of your app
- ask “SWWC”—so what, who cares? what are you doing different, why would anybody care?
- ask people you know what their 5 fave apps are and why
- what’s missing? what holes are there? what niche can we fill?
- are you “presidential”—what’s your hook to attract interest?
- are you global?—go to other markets, real lack of local content in non-English speaking markets
- use focus groups and testing
- research your markets
2. The App Media is Booming, In Spite of the Traditional Media Decline
- 80% of target journalists have iPhone or Android, 20% have BB
- it’s not PR vs advertising, it’s both
- be sure to measure and use analytics
- most downloads happen after lunch, and on sundays - consider this for campaigns
3. Quality matters: being first is increasingly no longer as important as being the best
- The competitive landscape changes every day, stay on top of it
- Category placement on popular lists matters for download numbers
- Freemium works for revenues: free apps see 10x downloads of paid apps
- look at how segments can effect your pricing; for instance, there’s a class of business apps that can support high prices because users expense their cost to their business
- Plan out new features and updates—don’t launch and stop
4. Social media isn’t a marketing strategy, it should be core to your product
5. Pre-launch checklist
Tips from Eros of OpenFeint:
Momentum is key when thinking about developing your app.
Tips from Mindy of Distimo:
Android marketing channels are smaller than those for iPhone, with fewer bloggers covering apps. Also, rankings on Android aren’t as powerful at driving downloads as on the iPhone. The Android Market is really crying out for quality content.
- Do your sniff test
- Determine your business goal
- Determine your benchmarks
- Research the competition
- Make sure you have a roadmap for updates and upkeep
- Think about pricing and how you will use limited offers, lite versions, upsets and promo codes
- Model your cost per acquisition
- Set your launch date—which is different than your approval date!
- Think about media relations and reviews
-
Use keywords and SEO/SEM
- Success is measured by download charts, and getting on app charts generates the biggest impact on your downloads
- Target this through a mix of marketing activity and connecting your app to social mechanisms
- If you get 100 downloads, and all 100 of those are viewable on social networks, you can get a snowball effect that creates momentum
- Make sure proper in-app actions are carried to a virility mechanism/social network
- Marketing your app shouldn’t be an afterthought—think about it from inception and before coding
- Within app stores, quality and the amount of apps determine consumer choice—quality is extremely important
- the app market is highly sensitive to trends in culture and the wider world—for instance, vuvuzela apps were wildly popular during the World Cup
- It’s also hyperlocal, with a lot of variance among popular apps in different markets, catering to local tastes
- The number of developers who go cross-platform/cross-app store is booming
- Embrace growth across multiple platforms