Successfully Market An iPhone App
Marketing for iPhone apps is similar to marketing other products, although the marketing tools available have expanded recently - especially in the area of social media. The steps are still the same: develop a product that your customers need or would like to have (iPhone app), create and deliver a strong marketing message to attract a following, and continue to develop new products/features and upgrades to retain existing customers.
Step 1: Develop Key Value Proposition
What sets your iPhone app apart from all your competitors? Why would your target audience want it? You have to come up with ways to be unique. There are three key questions that you should attempt to answer as you define your iPhone app’s unique value. The answers to these questions become the basis of your marketing process:
1. What’s unique about your iPhone app? List all the features and functions that are unique to your app. This list will help you develop a marketing message for your app and keep you focused during app development.
2. Who is your target audience?
3. Who are your competitors?
Step 2: Deliver Your Message to your Targeted Audience
Demand for your app is created when you help a prospective customer see that you have a solution to their problem.
Delivering your message happens when you create powerful descriptions and visuals for your app on the AppStore and on your app’s own website and email distribution list. You must think in terms of showcasing your app on the AppStore and on a corresponding website/email. The email communications and website can be used to show videos of your app, provide additional screen shots and other content. Always display a “download now” button prominently on your own site that directs to your app on the AppStore.
Social media marketing can help you generate buzz for your app. Take a look at using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social media tools to help get the word out about your app.
Step 3: Marketing Your App
With the right message and the right audience combined with the right marketing tools and methods, you can create marketing campaigns that will be extremely effective in reaching your ideal audience.
For every app you see – there are hundreds of thousands more that you don’t. While interactive content discovery is, for the most part, driven organically, the initiation of mass access to the content through intermediary media (blogs, newspapers, content aggregators, word of mouth) is only ensured through a strategically planned approach that includes both paid and unpaid media tactics targeting your audience. Paid awareness (mobile display ads, in-app ads) then become not only a driver of adoption/download but a highly unique showcase of the brand. Organic seeding is effective as well as public relations.
- Maria Mandel
Step 1: Develop Key Value Proposition
What sets your iPhone app apart from all your competitors? Why would your target audience want it? You have to come up with ways to be unique. There are three key questions that you should attempt to answer as you define your iPhone app’s unique value. The answers to these questions become the basis of your marketing process:
1. What’s unique about your iPhone app? List all the features and functions that are unique to your app. This list will help you develop a marketing message for your app and keep you focused during app development.
2. Who is your target audience?
3. Who are your competitors?
Step 2: Deliver Your Message to your Targeted Audience
Demand for your app is created when you help a prospective customer see that you have a solution to their problem.
Delivering your message happens when you create powerful descriptions and visuals for your app on the AppStore and on your app’s own website and email distribution list. You must think in terms of showcasing your app on the AppStore and on a corresponding website/email. The email communications and website can be used to show videos of your app, provide additional screen shots and other content. Always display a “download now” button prominently on your own site that directs to your app on the AppStore.
Social media marketing can help you generate buzz for your app. Take a look at using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social media tools to help get the word out about your app.
Step 3: Marketing Your App
With the right message and the right audience combined with the right marketing tools and methods, you can create marketing campaigns that will be extremely effective in reaching your ideal audience.
For every app you see – there are hundreds of thousands more that you don’t. While interactive content discovery is, for the most part, driven organically, the initiation of mass access to the content through intermediary media (blogs, newspapers, content aggregators, word of mouth) is only ensured through a strategically planned approach that includes both paid and unpaid media tactics targeting your audience. Paid awareness (mobile display ads, in-app ads) then become not only a driver of adoption/download but a highly unique showcase of the brand. Organic seeding is effective as well as public relations.
- Maria Mandel
Maria, good post on a subject that isn’t as common a topic as it should be. I wrote a similar blog on promoting an iphone app (http://bit.ly/dlgIwg).
Social media is a good outlet, but something bigger is creating a press release and sending it to iphone app experts for review (sometimes they review for free). Getting a review on their site can really help to catapult your app and its popularity. Price promotions are another option. The Peggle app dropped their price to $.99 for three days to get themselves in the App Store Top 100. After three days they returned to $4.99 and the downloads kept coming in.