1. Have an app worth talking about
This point cannot be stressed enough. If your app doesn’t have a
clear use case or doesn’t get people excited about using it you might as
well stop here. You’ll be fighting an uphill battle. Sure, some good
marketing could get you some sales, but it isn’t worth the effort. Go
back and invest a lot of time and energy into creating a great product
and then revisit these steps.
2. Learn to communicate the value
Mike Lee talks about the idea of
creating the marketing video for your app first, before you even start
developing it. The reason he gives is that if you can’t clearly
communicate the value of your application in 45 seconds, should you even
be making the application?
I ran into this problem with Fluent,
a memory system iPhone application I released in October 2011. Fluent
manages the entire memorization process for flash cards, showing them to
you less frequently as you learn them, and more often if you need more
practice with a particular card. Though Fluent is very useful to me (I
use it every day), I couldn’t effectively communicate the value to
someone else.
Fluent has made me about $60 (it sells for $2) to date on the App
Store. Ouch! It has a clean design, doesn’t have bugs (that I know of),
and works great for me. I believe the reason it flopped is that I
couldn’t effectively communicate the value.
If I had spent the time to plan a video, or more specifically, plan
how I would succinctly communicate the value of Fluent, I would have
realized the problem before I spent any time coding. Tell your app idea
to a handful of people. If they don’t immediately get it in less than a
minute then you have work to do. Either refine your pitch until it is
quickly understood, or find a different app idea.
3. Design an effective app icon
When marketing an iOS app you have just a few items to grab a
potential buyer’s attention: the app name, the price, the app icon, the
app ratings, and your company name.
Out of all of these by far the most prominent is the app icon. It is
the tiny billboard that will help sell your app. Your first goal with an
app icon is to properly represent your app. If there are textures,
patterns, and colors that are prominent inside your app, they should
also be present in the icon.
Next you want to focus on grabbing attention. I wish I could say that
the best-designed icons always sell more apps than poorly designed,
brightly colored, attention grabbers. But that’s not necessarily true. I
have several friends who experiment heavily with their icon designs and
the better designed ones don’t necessarily sell any better. So why
should you invest the time and effort into a quality icon design?
An icon is the first introduction your users will have to your app.
Right away it will give them an impression of a quality, well designed
app. Just like books, apps are judged by their covers, in this case the
icon. So design a quality icon that accurately represents the styles
used inside your app. Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Test how it will look surrounded by competing apps. Does it get lost in the crowd?
- Use a clear icon that follows a metaphor that is easy to understand.
- Your app icon should match the design style of your app.
Learn more about designing effective app icons here.
4. Select relevant keywords
Inside iTunes Connect you are able to write 100 characters of
keywords that describe your application. This is used for searches
inside the App Store. While keywords are a factor it seems the app name
is weighted more heavily in the search results. This is why you see many
apps with a name like “BrandName – Additional Keywords.” They are
trying to have the best of both worlds by using a brand able name and
having important keywords in the name.
Not much is known about the App Store search system besides that
small changes can result in a considerable increase in downloads. Below
are a few tips.
- There is no need to include your app name as a keyword.
- Separate your keywords with only a comma, not a comma and a space. Writing them like this, “memory,language,card” will help you to make the most of your 100 character limit.
- Use tools like Google Keywords to research keywords.
- You may only change your app name or keywords with the release of a new version. So think through and research your decisions.
- If you don’t think a keyword is performing or being searched often, feel free to replace it with another keyword when you release your next version.
- Do searches inside the App Store to see how your app ranks for important search terms.
5. Understand the importance of a launch
All right, your message is in place, so it’s time to submit your app, right?
Wrong.
Since so much of your app’s success depends on a successful launch
you need to plan it thoroughly. First think through any marketing
channels you have access to already. This could be personal or company
Facebook and Twitter pages, any existing email lists, or friends who
would be happy to promote your creation.
Next, start identifying the websites that have an audience who would
be interested in your application. Start with review websites (here is a detailed list),
then think in more detail about sites specific to your niche. Beyond
app review sites, this could be major blogs like Lifehacker and also the
personal blogs of individuals who write about related topics.
Do you have a recipe app? There are zillions of bloggers whose
audience would find your app relevant. Travel related? Same thing. This
also gives you access to smaller blogs with a dedicated audience. Not
only will they respond well to your product, but getting access to the
site will be easier.
6. Pitch blogs for reviews and promotions
I like to write a couple of different pitches for my apps. First, I
use a more generic (but still interesting), “Please review this app.”
This is what I send to all the smaller iPhone review sites. They aren’t
as inundated with requests for reviews and also don’t have the traffic
to justify writing a personal email to each one. Write it well and make
it feel personal, but it doesn’t have to be specific to their site. Most
of the time you will just be copying and pasting this into contact
forms.
Next, you can write personal variations of this for each of the sites
you’d like to be featured on. Take the time to craft it for their
audience.
Finally, you need to approach your top pick of sites. For these you
need an entirely different method. Think about it in terms of how you
can be of help to this blogger, not, “How can I phrase this email so
that a blogger will write about my app?” Really try to think of what you
could do to make their life easier.
Relevant guest posts are a great option. Not a guest post advertising
your app, but something useful in a related area that could have a link
to the app along with your author information at the end. Whatever
topic you decide on should be unique to that site.
Write out a summary of your guest post or a description of your
offer. (Don’t try to buy a review.) A short email introducing your
suggestion with more detailed content below is a great option. Then they
can quickly read and reply to your email, but you’ve also given them
the option to read a summary of your post if they have time or the
desire.
Remember: you are trying to make their life easier. If you really
think about your approach from that perspective I am sure you can craft
something that will make them want to link to your application.
If at all possible get these reviews to come out on the same day (or
close to each other). Then your app will make a bigger splash and more
review sites will be inclined to write reviews as well.
7. Quickly get positive reviews on the App Store
Not only do you need your friends to buy it, you need them to review
it on the App Store. When an app is first launched it takes time to
build up some solid reviews. If you can get friends and family to write
your first 5-10 reviews, that can give you a good head start.
You can also write a feature directly into your application that asks
users to write a review. Typically you would want to do this after a
certain number of launches so that you can have a good idea that users
actually like your application. Annoy them too soon and the reviews will
be negative. Only asking the faithful users is a way to weed out
possible bad reviews before they are written.
This library is quite good, and used by many apps, to request reviews.
8. Report abusive or false reviews
If you get reviews that are abusive or blatantly false you can report
them to Apple. I’ve used this when a review makes a false statement
(feature x doesn’t exist). Both times I have done this Apple has removed
the review without any further follow-up.
9. Use giveaways to increase engagement
Once your application is live on the store you can give away copies
with promo codes. Apple allows you to generate up to 50 promo codes per
version of your application. You can then give away these single-use
codes to be redeemed in iTunes just like a gift card for a free download
of your app.
Any time a site is about to post a review of your app you can offer
to include some promo codes as a giveaway to their readers. With the
launch of Commit, App Advice
gave away a single promo code along with their review. They chose a
comment at random and emailed that user a code. The post received 96
comments from readers trying to win a $0.99 app! The engagement on the
post increased substantially.
It wasn’t so much about saving $1. That doesn’t really matter. But
everyone likes winning a contest especially one that is so easy to
enter.
10. Use affiliate links for conversion tracking and extra revenue
Whenever you link to the App Store from your website or within your
app you can use an affiliate link. Apple has an affiliate program that
will pay 5% of all purchases from that user until your code is replaced
by someone else’s code. You can learn more about it on the Apple
website, (http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates).
This really only adds value in a couple of cases.
First, if you have a highly priced application like I do, the 5% can add up. My application, OneVoice,
costs $199. So the affiliate fee for that referral is an extra $10. So
you can be sure that whenever I link to OneVoice in the App Store I make
it an affiliate link.
Second, if you have a large volume of users the residual sales from
purchasing other apps can amount to a decent chunk of money, though so
many apps and websites now use affiliate codes that yours will quickly
be replaced by another person’s.
Finally, the affiliate account can help you with additional tracking.
It is a way to know how many people who clicked a certain link (tracked
by Google Analytics) actually followed through with a purchase. It
helps to give a tiny bit of insight into the black box of App Store
analytics.
