Posts Tagged ‘ iPhone marketing ’

Driving traffic to your app by launching free tools

LogYourRun is a site for active people – runners, hikers, and cyclists.  To generate interest and app sales for the paid version of the LogYourRun iPhone app I have decided to launch a series of free running tools.  The hope is that the target audience of LogYourRun will be looking for apps that can solve simple problems for them – such as measure heart rate and calculate heart rate zones and calculate pace based on distance and time – and they download these apps they will see advertisement for the paid LogYourRun app which will potentially dive sales of this app.

Here are the free apps:

  1. A free version of the GPS/pedometer app.
  2. A free heart rate measurement tool.
  3. A free Pace Calculator

All of these are tools that runners might look for on the app store and all of these apps have links to the full LogYourRun app and the YouTube video showing what a great app that is.

The LYR Free (GPS/pedometer) has been in the app store for several months but interestingly has not been hugely successful maybe because of the lack of brand name recognition or because the paid version is so cheap

The Heart Rate tool (HR) has proved to be hugely successful – probably because it is one of the few free apps that will let you measure your heart rate and calculate your heart rate zones.  I still need to integrate pinch analytics to see if this is actually driving traffic to the full app – but since the HR app has launched the sales for the full app has gone up 3 fold.

The Pace Calculator will go live this week and I look forward to seeing the response to this app.

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2010
03/16
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iPhone marketing
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Market your app online

There are several components to marketing your iPhone application online.  Below I try to give a comprehensive list of resources and strategies.  Keep checking back on this since I will add information as I think of other ways to promote apps online.

Submit your app to app repositories

Here is a list of sites where you can submit information about your application.  Most will provide links to your application and your website – great way to generate meaningful incoming links.  Before embarking on your submissions make sure you have the following ready:

  • A screenshot
  • Icon (128×128)
  • Link to your YouTube video (I used screenflow to generate my video)
  • App description that you can easily post into the forms on each website

The following is a list of good sites to submit your app to listed in order of importance and relevance:

AppSafari.com

Appolicious.com

148Apps.com

GotApps.com

FreshApps.com

I have seen a couple of sites offering to review your app for $100 or some other “nominal” fee.  I dont think that such sites will survive long – how can you write an unbiased review when someone just paid you $100?  This will erode consumer confidence in these sites and when they go out of business the review will disappear as their site is taken down.

Promote your app on forums

Figure out what your target audience is likely to be and find a forum that your audience frequents and register.  Take some time to figure out the tone on the board and if there are any users that seem to be influencers.  Send them a PM explaining that you would highly appreciate their input on your application and include a promo code if your application is a paid app.  If you cannot find a user to target you can always try to just post yourself – this will likely not generate as much buzz as if you get an influencer to post.

Promote your app on social networks

Integration with Twitter is easy through the REST API and integration with facebook can be quite easy also – facebook has a drag and drop library which can be used to add facebook connect to your iPhone app.

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2010
01/28
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iPhone marketing
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Promoting your iPhone app in print

Although promoting iPhone apps and web sites can be done efficiently through online advertising campaigns, the market for LogYourRun (runners, cyclists and other active people) is such that real world marketing can also be a highly efficient way to reach an audience that is unaware of LogYourRun and unaware that such a service even exist.

Historically, print advertising consist of designing a brochure with information about your product and distributing to potential customers.  Since a single sale of a $1.99 iPhone app brings in $1.40 and the free app has no revenue attached I have been exploring cheap print alternatives to promoting using a brochure.   I have found several places online that will print high quality business cards for very little money.  I was able to get 2,500 business cards printed with high gloss front and matte color back for under $150 using Vistaprint – that is about 6 cent per card so only one in 23 cards have to be effective at getting someone to download the app in oder for me to break even.

As it turns out the dimensions of the iPhone are such that it fits perfectly on a business card.  So on the glossy side I have a picture of the iPhone running the LogYourRun application so people can see what it is all about and on the back I have instructions on how to get the application.  And that is the hard part – since the main screen of the LogYourRun application does not contain the application name – I have to rely on people to turn the card over and read the name of the application.  It would be great if apple implemented something similar to the android barcode scanner where all you have to do is take a picture to download an app.  Maybe someone is already working on making such an application for the iPhone.

I have collected about 1 months worth of baseline data on downloads of both the free and the paid LogYourRun applications and one of my friends are going to Miami Marathon this weekend and will hand out about 1,500 of the cards there.  I will report back the results here after the weekend.

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2010
01/27
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iPhone marketing
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My strategy for improving ratings of the LogYourRun iPhone application

I am an independent software developer and I run a website called LogYourRun.com.  In April 2009 I decided to supplement the site with an iPhone app since the iPhone has GPS and the iPod touch has the capabilities of a pedometer.  I have always believed that the best things in life are free so I put the app out for free.  Since the app would increase the exposure of my LogYourRun brand I felt comfortable giving the app away for free.

However, as many other developers have experienced, giving apps out for free result in poor ratings from people that download the app but are not really interested in the functionality of the app. These people often delete the app shortly after installation at which point they are asked to rate the app and  give the app a poor rating. In addition paid apps maintain their ranking in the App Store better than free apps.

Since the first edition of the app was released I had been working on an improved version which would use the map feature of OS 3.0 as well as a feature which would allow users to download training programs to the device for offline viewing.  When I launched this version I decided that I was not going to give it away for free due to the ratings problem that plague free apps.  On the other hand I did not want to deter people from downloading the app since the app drives traffic to my site and I wanted loyal users to have a chance to get the app for free.

So I put the app out for free along with the message that it was only going to be free for the first 2 weeks.  This information was widely distributed to users of the website, posted on the website, and included in the description of the app.  The fact that the app was no longer going to be free meant that users did not delete the app after downloading since they knew that if they deleted the app they would then have to pay if in the future they wanted the app.  Also, this instills a feeling of “getting a good deal” which creates a positive attitude towards the application.

After two weeks of the app being free I increased the price to $1.99.  Downloads immediately dropped – but has since increased again – and now I am actually making money on the downloads.  I have since then also put out a free version with limited functionality which has helped drive traffic to my website as well as serving as a preview of the paid app.

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2010
01/20
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iPhone marketing
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