Promoting/Marketing your Apps

IITYWYBMAD

Folks,

any ideas on how to let people know about your Apps or increase the downloads?

We recently released an App for a client, and while they are very happy with the product, and have put quite a bit of effort into the marketing, the downloads have been quite poor.

What have you used in the past to increase awareness of your App? Any ideas welcome.

Mr E

Is it the app from your signature (visit London Bayswater)?

Have you tried working with people who can cross-promote it for you? Tourist Boards? Local Bars/Restaurants/Venues etc.? They could promote it within the venue, or maybe they'd be open to promoting it on their websites? (especially if it may help drive traffic towards them and increase their footfall...)

Unless people know its there, they'll never go looking for it.

IITYWYBMAD

Mr E wrote: »

Is it the app from your signature (visit London Bayswater)?

Have you tried working with people who can cross-promote it for you? Tourist Boards? Local Bars/Restaurants/Venues etc.? They could promote it within the venue, or maybe they'd be open to promoting it on their websites? (especially if it may help drive traffic towards them and increase their footfall...)

Unless people know its there, they'll never go looking for it.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, its the App in my Sig. We've designed and released a few Apps at this stage, and to be honest, never set ourselves up as marketeers, as we don't have the skills nor the resources.

All of our other Apps have quite healthy downloads, however while we retain ownership, management of the Apps has been passed onto the various clients.

With this particular App, for some reason and despite a really large marketing campaign by the client, downloads have been quite poor. The issue for us is that a huge amount of potential business rides on this being a success, hence our heightened concern.

Quite a bit of promotion, as you have suggested above, has already been done, but to little avail. It's baffling to be honest.

Ricky91t

I've looked at your store and noticed the rest of your apps are Northern and Southern Ireland, these are much smaller markets and I'd assume have less active developers, you have to remember that London has probably twice the population of Ireland and four times the population of Northern Ireland.

This firstly poses a problem because you're competing against a lot more companies in London, Looking at your app Timeout London came to mine, they've got a pretty big number of users on their site, so naturally they'd download their app.

You've then got the issue of the Charts, which alone can promote your app. I've noticed with my app in the free weather charts 8/10 downloads was enough to get it in the top 20 and 15+ got me in the top ten, The same number in the UK got me to somewhere like 300th place.

The issue is, you're expecting the same number of downloads as your other apps, but you're in a much bigger market now meaning your app will rarely make it into the top 10's your marketing will mean you'll get some downloads but only the people who see the advertisement will download it, others won't even know it's there.

BrianD

With no disrespect to you and your client. Many people get apps developed when they don't need one. Bayswater would have been better with a mobile optimised web site.

There's no incentive or reason for somebody to download an app that is as specific as the Bayswater one. Why would you bothered when there's dozens of other apps that cover London? It's a very small market that you are appealing to.

It seems to me that people prefer apps that they will use for small amounts of time very frequently. That's why news, radio apps, games and so on do so well.

AhrSkidar

Thought I'd give this thread a bump, as the central point (how to promote an App) is one I'm thinking a lot about just now.

We released a paid App yesterday. It's basically a finance/money saving app - not a game. As with the other apps we've put out, there are certain things I do.
- Update the company website and put the new app centre stage
- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
- Contact any journalists I might have had previous dealings with. Tell them about the new App and send on some promo codes.
- Send a press release to PRMac. First few times I did this (over a year ago) I thought it worked fairly well (i.e. I did notice a jump in sales for a few days). Lately it doesn't seem as effective. Still, it's only $20...
- I've used PRWeb once or twice and was a bit underwhelmed. The fault could be mine, but the Press Releases were well written and I thought of some interest. But, nada. Not sure I'll spend the $200 again this time.
- Finally (most importantly?) put the app on the Pimp Your Wares thread on Boards.

After that I'm pretty much at a loss as to what to do. Having a look on the App Store this morning I can see our app in the top 150 in Finance on the US store, so at least there are some initial downloads.

I guess I'm wondering if anyone can recommend any good review sites/press release agencies that they've used in the past. I'm thinking specifically about the US/UK market.

Also, do developers on here tend to make videos of their apps in action? Most of the ones I see in YouTube have <50 views, which seems like a lot of work for not much obvious return.

If anything works for us in the meantime I'll certainly post it here.