Marketing iPhone Apps
Well, I am not a marketing expert (by training I am a scientist), but after releasing 3 applications (2 approved, and one ‘in waiting’) for the iPhone and iPod Touch (App Store Links – bodyCal and chemCal), the mind does tend turn towards marketing and ‘getting the word out’, but how?
I have a number of years of experience of marketing (or attempting to market) Mac OS X applications, so I know a number of methods to get the word out – write blogs, post to blogs, send out press releases, AdWords, write to review sites, search engine optimisation (SE0), etc. I have tried them all. But marketing iPhone Apps? That is another story, or is it? The iPhone App ecosystem is new. Are the old ways still the way to go? And there is an added wrinkle, namely the iTunes App store and the ‘keyword’ problem.
The App Store
On the iTunes App Store Apple says you have 700 characters to describe your application. That is not many. How do you hit the right keywords, and does keyword density have a role?
An example, one of my Apps, chemCal, is a chemistry calculator aimed at students at school, college or university. The calculator is designed to help students understand concentration (moles, molarity, moles per liter) and dilution calculations (chemCal Blog Post). And yet this morning I discovered in the App store that a search on molarity did not return chemCal. A quick look at the program description revealed that in my attempt to get below 700 characters I had missed the word out. So, my fault, but it is difficult to write about an App in so few characters.
Dedicated Websites?
Will people look for iPhone/iPod Touch Apps using Google? I think not. I don’t. So, is a dedicated website for an application necessary or worth the effort?
For the iPhone/iPod Touch calculator applications produced by MMISoftware I have put together a website called cal.culate.it. It has a blog, I have tried to SEO the site, it is ‘registered’ with Google, Yahoo etc., it is using sitemaps, and has been ‘live’ since the 1st April, but only really been in use for about a week. The site has served around 5,000 pages, but so far I haven’t seen any significant traffic from the search engines. The site has been crawled by Google, and can be found on Google, and searches such as iphone bmi calculator and iphone molarity calculator return cal.culate.it around the middle of the first page. Most of the traffic seems to be coming from iTunes. So, I guess the site is serving a purpose.
Demo Videos
The way the iTunes App Store works means the old ‘shareware limited demo before you pay’ can’t be used. So, to get around this problem I created two demo videos of the calculators in operation.
The bodyCal video has been viewed around 30 times (it has been online for a week), and chemCal about 15 times (and has been online for a day). I guess they are worth the effort of producing.
Advertising, Press Releases and Review Websites
Not yet explored. As we have a number of calculators to produce it has been decided to wait until all the calculators are available.
Going Viral?
I guess the best way to ‘get the word out’ is to go ‘viral’. But how? You need to achieve ‘critical mass’ for the ‘word’ to propagate.
At the moment I am experiment with ‘micro-blogging’ news on App production/development via Twitter….
Conclusions
Don’t know. I guess time will tell. I have no illusions. I have come to the App store party late, and I am not producing games (which are the biggest earners), but there is a need for what I am producing. The question is, how do you get heard (noticed) above a background noise of some 30,000+ Apps?
