I have just finished reading part 1 of an excellent series of articles on Ray Wenderlich’s site entitled How to Market and Promote your Games and Apps. I expected the article to be a regurgitation or mash ups of ones I had already read, you know the type that seem to appear every week on the LinkedIn forums, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it goes much deeper than other articles I have seen.
In the article the author (Felipe Laso) discusses how you can start to market your app before you even start developing it. He suggests a fair amount of market research should be completed before you start. This isn’t new to anybody who has ever developed a product or service, but it does give clear guidelines of how to go about this from an app development perspective. The author also suggests that once you start work you can involve your potential users of the app in the whole process. By providing regular blog updates and utilising social media the users, or potential users, can follow your development progress as well as have the opportunity to provide an input into the design.
Although the blog is primarily aimed at developers a large number of the suggestions and themes could and should be applied by anyone who is commissioning an app development company to create apps for them. The blog has certainly inspired me. We had already decided to expand and update our existing iOS JobFinder app this year. Now we will complete that exercise but we will be following all or as many of the suggestions in the blog as we can.
As a result we have already started on our market research work and welcome any suggestions on additional and improved features you would like to see both in our iOS app and in our future apps on other platforms. In addition we will be providing regular updates on our progress. Our existing iOS JobFinder app has had over 100,000 downloads to date, with x downloads a week. This is despite the fact that we have spent very little time or effort on marketing, and have not provided an updated version since November 2009 . As part of our updates we will determine what effect, if any, our additional social media marketing has on the downloads of our app, and also analyse the impact, if any, on our website traffic. This should give us an insight into what does and doesn’t work for us and hopefully inspire others to follow a successful track.
…and I’ve only read part 1 of 4 so far…..
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