iPhone App Marketing Thoughts
Posted by admin | Filed under iPhone App Marketing, iPhone Apps
Over the past few weeks we’ve been quietly working away on a couple of new apps for the iPhone. So far we’re quite proud of them and we believe that 1) Theres nothing already available on the app store thats similar and 2) They’ve got the potential to sell a lot of units.
Now i’m sure that almost every developer has thought along the same lines at some point only to find dissapointing sales on their daily trend reports. However, thats no reason to give up!
Like any other product, marketing is a key component to its success. And so we have been putting some thought into marketing our new apps. Over the coming weeks i’ll publish a few posts with more details of our marketing plan but first i’ll run through a few thoughts that have been on our minds.
Twitter Time
Whenever you research iPhone app marketing you’re almost certainly going to come across websites advocating the use of twitter for your marketing, but like any other marketing it needs planning and thought.
From experience with other projects we’ve found that twitter can certainly have an impact on sales but you need to think about TIMING. With the sheer number of ‘tweets’ being made on twitter its easy for your message to get lost, unless you’re a popular user with thousands of followers and hundreds of them willing to RT your messages.
So, looking at your marketing plan, what region do you think your app will be most popular in? Try to time your tweets to peak times on twitter for that country/region.
How do you know what the peak times are? We try to use a little common sense with some trial and error. We found we got the most response between 6pm and 9pm in our target country, our second biggest response was between 7am and 9am. There could be any number of reasons these times worked best but we think it worked because this is usually when many people are relaxing either before or after work and are browsing around, checking emails, twitter, etc. Look at your own browsing habits and use that as a basis.
Generating Links
Just like promoting a website, you need to get backlinks from others to start to get traffic. There are a few things to think about before you embark on a link building spree.
1) Do you try to get links to your website or straight to your itunes app page?
This varies a little but in general we found spikes in our sales when we linked straight to our itunes app page. Thinking about it logically this makes sense.
- We’re reducing the number of clicks to purchase. Remember the old rule of thumb that a user needs to find anything on a website within 3 clicks? 1 Click to open itunes, 1 click to buy, thats 2 clicks used already. 1 Click to get to the website with your link in the first place and thats it.
- In a way we’re pre-qualifying our customers. If they dont have itunes then the link will be useless, if they have itunes then it will take them straight to our app. We’re not interested in visitors who simply cannot buy our product.
- iTunes and the app store are trusted whereas a developers website probably isn’t in comparison. By sending customers straight to the app store they know they’re safe. If they went to our website first we’d have to convice them of this before sending them to the app store.
2) Where are the best places to get links from?
Aside from the obvious iPhone app review websites (we’ll publish our list of sites to contact soon) there are many other places to try and get links from. In fact, depending on the nature of your app, you’ll probably do better with websites other than app review portals.
Try and define a category (outside of the appstore) or topic for your app, what groups of people will find it interesting or useful? Now search around for associated groups and pages on facebook, myspace, linkedin, wikipedia as well as looking for forums and communities dedicated to your subject. Providing you have an app that these groups of people will like then these places are probably the best places to get links from.
One word of warning! Dont just post a bunch of links and then leave, while your app is in review with apple (lets face it, you’ve probably got a few weeks) start spending some time on these groups, contribute to forums and get to know people a little. They will be much more receptive to your links this way and are more likely to post links other places for you.
Anyway, that was just a few things we’ve been talking about, I know it went on a little but hopefully some of you might have gleaned something useful from it.
November 6th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Very thoughtful,as an indie developer myself, Im really having a hard time promoting some of our apps!
Great marketing techniques! Thanks!