With over 500,000 mobile apps published in Apple’s Appstore, app development companies face a tremendous amount of competition. In the last few months we’ve had the chance to help promote a Words with Friends Cheat App named Cheats & Words, created by Project Box and our client-partner MindSea Development.
So far we’ve learned the following while promoting iPhone apps:
- Pay-Per-Click marketing through traditional methods like Google Adwords and Facebook is difficult when promoting mobile apps that have small amounts of revenue (i.e. $0.69) per sale. In most cases the numbers don’t add up. Even with a very low cost per click such as $0.20, the average revenue per visitor (i.e. $0.30) is also low, and so it’s difficult to run a profitable PPC campaign.
- Enter Search Engine Optimization, where you can avoid the cost per click of PPC by investing in up-front SEO activities. This is a better model than PPC from a profitability perspective, however it assumes that customers are actively searching for the app in question, or entering search terms that relate to the app’s capabilities.
- Enter Social Media. For every one person who is searching for a program like Cheats and Words, there are many more who play Words with Friends™ and probably aren’t aware that cheating programs even exist. Social media activities are a great way to increase awareness through online conversations, without depending so heavily on a specific number of search queries every day.
- Mobile ad networks like Flurry’s App Circle can be an excellent way to drive initial adoption of an app on a pay-per-install model, which limits the risk of the app publisher.
- The App Store is only a marketing channel if you get featured by Apple. Getting featured can have a huge impact on downloads and revenue, however it’s unlikely for the majority of developers. Due to the high volume of apps in the store, unless you’re in a very niche category, we do not recommend thinking of the AppStore as a market place where buyers are likely to find you while browsing. It’s best to think of the AppStore as the mobile equivalent of a domain registry. Just as you need to register your domain before promoting your site and getting visitors, you need to publish your app in the store before promoting your app and getting visitors.
We’d love to hear your thoughts – what have you found to be most effective so far? Share your comments.
If you’re planning a mobile marketing project, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to share our latest findings and tactics.
Every day Google receives about 400 million searches, more than the population of the US and Canada. Google has 67% of the global search market, so 2 out of 3 of your searching customers are trying to find you on Google.
My first advertising campaign on Google was in the consumer tourism market in 2004. We did a series of campaigns – Google, classified ads, print ads, and channel partners – and we tracked the ROI of each one by linking each sale to its originating campaign.
The whole prospect of deciding exactly how much you’re willing to pay for a new customer is very exciting. I remember choosing how much we would be willing to pay per click for each new visitor to our web site, and what our daily budget would be. I was used to advertising in yellow page ads and classified ads, where we’d cross our fingers and hope for the best.
As part of our phone sales process we asked each buyer exactly how they found us. We found that our Google campaign was the ROI winner by a wide margin.
Since then I’ve spent thousands on Google campaigns to promote my own companies and those of my customers. You learn what works very quickly when it’s your own money at risk.
If you’re not advertising on Google today, then there are a few questions to consider:
- What are your ideal customers typing into Google when they go looking for what you sell?
- How many potential customers are searching on those terms every day?
- What if you could convert 1% of those searchers into actual leads? How many new leads would this be per day?
You can answer these questions in 5 minutes. Go to Google’s free keyword tool (link to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and find out now, or contact us and we’ll help you find the answers.
“Our average rate is $15 per hour. Our senior guys get billed out at $27 per hour. What sort of rates do you typically charge?”
This is a bad conversation. How did it happen? Your bluechip client knows that your firm delivers real value, but they also use overseas systems integrators, and they’re asking you to start “collaborating” with the Indian firm in hopes of cutting costs and boosting project ROI.
In other words, they’d like to have your senior resources modelling the solution and spec’ing requirements, and passing them over to the offshore firm for development, testing, and delivery. This looks great on paper. Standard IT resources like project managers and programmers are about 1/8th as expensive, so your hourly rates are competing with the overseas daily rate. Spend $120 in North America for 1 programmer hour, or spend $120 in India for 1 programmer day.
You have to expect that well-managed companies will be asking these questions and testing offshore capabilities on non-core projects.
And cost cutting is the obvious response to economic downtown, so these conversations are going on more than ever. I suppose Thomas Friedman predicted it when he wrote “The World Is Flat” in 2005.
But what do you do when a major bluechip client starts talking this way?
The only way to win these conversations is to avoid them. You can’t win on the cost argument. And your firm probably isn’t structured to make money with your best customer-facing resources defining solutions for off-shore delivery.
But how do you avoid the conversation? The trick is to position your firm as a solution provider and to sell your solutions to decision makers who want to make or save money through your solution. That’s it. Your margin should be a function of your solution’s value, measured in ROI.
On the other hand, if you price your solution using cost-plus pricing (i.e. you estimate the work effort, apply your desired rates, and call that your price), then you become susceptible to IT directors and procurement managers asking about hourly rates and wishing they were daily rates.
It’s a classic story: The high-tech entrepreneur has a creative idea that has huge potential. It’s innovative, it’s exciting, and it’s groundbreaking stuff. This magic technology, if adopted, could help companies to operate better and gain an advantage over their competitors.
So the entrepreneur brainstorms its awesome potential in a room of whiteboards and creative colleagues, captures it all in a business plan, builds a prototype, and secures funding to “take it to the next level”.
Fast-forward 6 months. Product development took longer than expected, but version 1.0 of the platform is finally ready to go.
Now What?
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