App Marketing Series: Your Groundwork For Success

There comes a time when your app has to leave your development process and enter into the wild. This can be a scary process, especially if you haven’t prepared for it. Your marketing efforts can make you stand out from the crowd and define whether you make a big splash or just a little wave. The size of your marketing campaign depends on your target market and how far you want your efforts to reach.

Photo by Miss Sandy

Define Your Goals:

When you decide to market your app, it is important for you to have a clear path to travel. Are you going to have a soft launch? Word of mouth? Twitter launch? A promo? All of these are things to consider when you start your marketing. Are you going to run teasers on your site somewhere, making your customers get more excited by the day until you launch? Or are you just going to blindside everyone and come out of nowhere?

When you think about the how, you also need to think about the cost. Are you going to design these ads yourself or is someone you know going to do it for you? Are you going to pay a designer for marketing? If you have internal resources, use them. Your staff designers are perfectly capable of creating some marketing materials.  After all, going cheap and bootstrapping is not too shabby. Now we’re not saying you have to go full-on and have a press kit, but you can make a teaser page, web page, twitter background or something like that to “announce” and market your app. If you are going to hire a designer, how do you decide how much to spend? This is something you need to decide upfront.

photo by James

What Makes You Unique:

What makes your app unique? Did you make your app because you needed a utility that no one else provides? Play off of that. If you are the first app to tell how many cows it takes to make a gallon of milk, play it up.  After all, that’s what makes your app unique. Defining your niche and what makes you stand out from the other apps can put you leaps above the competition. Maybe something about your app is that whoever purchases it will be entered into a raffle to win a new Ferrari. Find something unique and utilize it. You can do it. After all, you just came out with the next new kickass app.

Implementing your Strategies:

Remember that really cool and creative strategy that you came up with in the beginning? It’s time for you to implement it. Ask for favors from your friends when you launch. Ask them for tweets, have them blog about it or ask them to put you in touch with some of their key friends. Drawing on your connections when you launch something big is the whole point in having them. The reason you have their business card on your desk or in your wallet or their email floating around in your contact book is because you know them somehow and wanted to do something with them in the future. Ask politely and be sure to thank them for helping you out. Many people always “seem” busy, but you would be surprised how many would take the time to help someone when you ask nicely.

photo by lozzd

Monitoring Your Campaign:

Make sure that once you get your great app and your amazing marketing plan out the door that you keep tabs on it. If your app is great you will hear about it and if your app is horrible you will hear about it then as well. Use things like Twitter search and Google alerts to set up some monitoring tools. If you have a site they are visiting, you can always check out your analytics for the dates you have been marketing and trying to get people to your site.

While monitoring your campaign YOU WILL HEAR HORRIBLE COMPLAINTS! You are dealing with people. People are not easy to please especially when you try to please everyone. It’s important to remember NOT to let it get to you. Is it a valid complaint because something is not working? Fine. Log it and then move on. If it’s a nasty complaint, just let it roll off your shoulders. Learning to accept that not everyone will like you and your app will make your life a lot easier.

Updates:

It’s a good idea to have a blog or a Twitter stream. These tell people the company is being active in the public eye. These mediums give you a chance to address problems and a place for other people to come and read about them. If you are having bugs, you can tell the public you are having problems and you are working on it. The most important relationship you are going to have is with your consumer. Be open if something is not working correctly and try to fix it as soon as possible. Hiding behind excuses is not a good way to make your brand memorable or build a good relationship with the customer. Through your platform of choice, be it a blog or twitter, make sure that you keep them informed about things that are going on with the brand. If you are going to go to a conference, talk about that. If you are going to give a bunch of free apps out, talk about that. Being in the public eye and showing that you are indeed human is a great way to build brand loyalty.

Resources:

How to Build Massive Word of Mouth with Twitter Giveaways (The #SquareSpace Success Story)

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The Amount And Value Of Twitter Traffic

Jason Calacanis wants to pay $125,000 a year to have Twitter recommend him to other users, for example. He thinks that over time accounts with massive followings will somehow be able to pull in $1 million a year or more in incremental revenue, assuming they then have millions of followers.

Moonfruit’s Twitter Push Provides Cautionary Tale

Moonfruit, a U.K.-based company that offers free Web site building tools, saw a great opportunity to raise brand awareness on Twitter. The company last week kicked off a sweepstakes, giving away 10 MacBook Pro computers to Twitter users that include the #moonfruit tag in their tweets.

Convert App Stealth MacBook Pro Giveaway’s

Grab it now for a limited time at the introductory price of just 99¢. Be sure to check out the Convert promo video by MostlyLisa and screencast by Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline.

5 Social Media Lessons Learned From Whole Foods

As a company, Whole Foods has impressively embraced social media more than most, gathering over 1.2 million followers on Twitter and 123,000 fans on Facebook in the process.