Marketing Your iPhone App
The iPhone is novel, the app market is novel, so why are developers rehashing the same games people have played forever and whining about low sales?
The iPhone has one of the biggest indie developer markets ever, especially in a new medium. They know how to make great games, utilities, entertainment apps, novelties and everything else under the sun. The problem they’re currently having is letting folks know their app exists, and this problem can be summed up in a word: Marketing.
The big success stories of late have been around flukes, strokes of luck, going viral or any other method of becoming a huge hit without actually doing anything. There needs to be a sustainable way to be successful in the app store, especially since there are (functionality aside) 100,000 competitors and more growing every day. I read a lot of forums and all I hear are people complaining that their ads accomplish nothing. The social networking followers aren’t big enough. Their press release went ignored. So on and so forth. We didn’t do the greatest job marketing our first app How Am I Feeling? - The Mood Analyzer but we’ve certainly learned from our missteps.
Not to use a business buzz word but Synergy is the only way to have sustained success with iPhone marketing. A lot of developers come into the game being great developers but bad businessmen. To use an example let’s look at the iPhone app Ramp Champ. It’s a great game. It looks great, plays great, it’s a lot of fun and is well made. The only problem is that it’s trying to be skee-ball with targets. What do people ultimately get when they’re looking for a skee-ball game? They get Skee-Ball by Freeverse. When The Iconfactory couldn’t get the rights to call their game skee-ball they could have either changed their game play or come up with a different way to market the game. This relates back to synergy because Craig Hockenberry has a ton of followers on Twitter (over 6,000 and he’s on around 350 lists), The Iconfactory itself was already wildly successful with Twitterific and people know who they are. The stage was set only to fizzle because of bad marketing.
So, can we avoid that happening? Yes. Ramp Champ had a leg up on those of us going in cold or without a widely known hit but we can still be successful. There are a few questions we need to answer before we even begin to code or come up with interface designs. They are:
1. What are we coming out with?
2. Who is going to buy it?
3. How many things like this exist?
If you can’t answer these questions, stop what you’re doing and answer them. If the answers are bad, maybe you should rethink what you’re working on. Does there need to be another tic-tac-toe game? Another fart app? Any variety of calendar or organizer? A calculator? A unit conversion tool? No, there doesn’t. Most developers don’t even think of these questions until their app is about to be released (or is already released and selling poorly). You need to understand your market before you make your game/app so you can make your game/app FOR your market!
Now, let’s say you have your answers and they’re good. You have what you know is a surefire hit and all you’ve got to do is let people know. What now?
Most developers are stuck in the “Top of the New Release List” mentality as their only means of marketing. I’ve been chastised several times for going against this mindset but bear with me. The top of the new release list means that you throw your app out as soon as the review is done and you make great sales - unless something messes up, a lot of apps are released that day or a myriad of other problems. Either way, your app will be buried in a matter of days and nobody will be looking for it. But what if YOU controlled the release date?
If you knew when your app was coming out (you CAN control this, it’s under Manage Your Apps, the availability date) you could give a review website an exclusive preview. You could get your press releases ready to coincide with your release day. You could do a week long build up for the big release day! You need to make a youtube video of gameplay, write up blog entries, post on Twitter, let websites know, write a press release and negotiate how it gets out there (prMac.com and prnewswire are great for this). There are even iPhone specific marketing companies willing to give you a hand such as Appency, Slapapp and Apprupt. You need to get the word out to the point that when your app DOES release, people are champing at the bit to get their hands on it!
Think bigger: is there a way to get your app mentioned in main stream media? Does it perform some novel task or is something the public at large would be interested in? There are over 40,000,000 iPhones out there and unfortunately 39,000,000 of them don’t read iPhone web pages. You need to get your app in front of their eyes any way you can. The app “Cry Translator” did exactly that and got in front of millions of people through dozens of websites. Will your tic-tac-toe game be able to do that? No. Which is why you need an original concept.
The iPhone is novel, the app market is novel, so why are developers rehashing the same games people have played forever and whining about low sales? Come up with a great new idea, utilize the features of the iPhone (accelerometer, tilt, etc. etc.) and get out there and make something great!
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Does there need to be another tic-tac-toe game? Another fart app? Any variety of calendar or organizer? A calculator? A unit conversion tool? No, there doesn't. Most developers don't even think of these questions until their app is about to be released
