Your Number One Marketing Weapon

Matthew Campbell, September 29, 2011

Here is the one thing that you absolutely must have in place to succeed as a mobile app publisher:

An audience

And not just any audience, but an audience of raving fans who want to buy all your products.  This is your number one weapon in the fight to become a mobile app superpower.

Duh

Ok, of course you know you need an audience because you want to sell your app and you know you need an audience to do that.

Or maybe you think you don’t need your own audience because Apple already has one and they should be more than eager to buy everything you make.

That’s sorta true but it’s not enough.

There are two problems developers have today when it comes to their audience: we don’t have a direct relationship with our audience and most of us don’t have an audience outside of the traffic that the App Store sends our way.  Before I get into that I want to talk about why you should even care about having an audience.

Top 5 Reasons Audiences Rock

  • Having a communication channel directly to your customer can counter damaging press like poor app store reviews
  • Knowing your customers means knowing what they’ll want to buy next
  • Getting into Top ### lists requires large volume of sales in a short period
  • Getting into Top ### lists requires legitimate positive App Store Reviews
  • Existing customers are more likely to buy (.05% vs 15%)

Having a modest list of 10,000 customers gives you some control over your app’s sales performance, press and overall perception in the marketplace.

Even If You Sold One Million Apps You Don’t Have An Audience!

You may already be a millionaire, but most of those people who bought your app will not have significant relationship with you at all.  If you don’t do something to reach out to those people then they are lost to you forever.  Unfortunately, for app developers reaching out to customers who bought your app is next to impossible because you can’t contact them.

This is the key – even though you made the content and support the app these people are Apple’s customers and not yours.  Apple can contact them (you can’t) and Apple can sell to them (you can’t).  The worse part is that when you want to promote your next app – you can’t.

So, instead of having a guaranteed first day sales volume of 150,000 sales (15% conversion rate) you will just have to take your chances like everybody else.

Having that audience connection can make a difference.

Chicken v Egg

Of course, this is always the problem.  You don’t have an audience and frankly building an audience is hard!  I like to take a long term view at this stage of the game.

Of course you don’t have an audience yet before you even have an app available.  What’s really important is to think of what audience you’ll have for your second, third and #th app.

You are trying to build a solid foundation here right?

What I suggest that you do is put the systems in place to build your audience and control your lines of communication with them before you even publish your first app.

Here are some of the systems that you can put into place today to start building your audience.  I’ve listed them in the order of effectiveness and engagement.

Top 5 Audience Builders

Mailing List

This age old standby is by far the best way to engage your audience.  This is the place were you will most likely see large conversation rates (% of people buying your app because of your email).  Maintaining a mailing list gives you complete control of your brand message and the timing of your audience receiving your messages.  Your audience can even reply back to you personally.

Mailing list tips:

  • Use a reputable mailing list provider like Aweber* or Mail Chimp*
  • Never spam your customers (they are your most valuable asset)
  • Don’t overwhelm your audience with messages (once a month is good for this type of thing)
  • Use your mailing list to warmup your audience ahead of a big product launch (duh!)

Branding

This one is a little bit less direct, but still important.  What you want to do is create a brand that is associated with your apps that customers will recognize and even search on to find your other apps.  Now this can be a real ninja move and few app publishers get this right.  To be honest, I myself have not mastered this.

However, I’ve been on the other end of this as a customer.  The only brand that ever got to me was TapBots.  These guys made such a great app (and their name was easy to remember) that I eventually bought another app from then and a few weeks later I literally had all their apps.  That is what you want.

However, this means you have less control as compared to the mailing list.  You are hoping that people will love your app enough to search either the web or the app store to look you up.

Branding tips:

  • Your app must be literally delightful
  • Come up with a short memorable name
  • All your stuff should use this name: your domain name, support email domain, blog, copyrights
  • NOTE: I don’t mean that your app should use your brand name (this should extend beyond one app)
  • Your brand is not your company so don’t expect customers to rally around a name like: Mobile App Development Technology Consultants, Partners and Publishers LLC – make it more snappy

Website with Subscriptions Enabled

You need a website anyway to publish your app.  Pay the $5 a month to get it hosted with your branded domain name.  Make sure to pick an easy to install and maintain website that uses something like WordPress.  Make sure that you turn on everyone option that you can to allow people to subscribe to your website: RSS, email notifications and anything else that you can think of.

You still get the contact and engagement with your audience here but you have less control of the timing of messages.  And your customers here get more control of how they consume your messaging.

Website tips:

  • Get a cheap hosting provider like Bluehost (as low as $5 per month) to start with a custom domain name
  • Don’t try to manage a web host yourself or waste any time with custom web server code and instead…
  • Use a CMS like WordPress (free) with a premium theme that looks good like AppifyWP ($50)
  • Set up all of the subscription options available (RSS, email)
  • Put content on your site that prospective customers will want to see: video demos, FAQ, value-adds, Contact, insider information, screenshots

Social Networking

This bad boy gets lots of press these days with Facebook, Twitter and now Google+ all vying to be the hub of our online social worlds.  Like email, you can use these technologies to build rapport with your audience.  It’s also more acceptable to message more frequently with social networks than email (so you can tweet 4 or 5 times a day without annoying people).

However, keep in mind that social networks are about being social and so to be effective you need to put yourself out there as a person authentically.  This will mean messaging more about yourself or commenting on topics that will resounate with your audience.  Basically, you have to

Be For Reals

When the rare time comes you can use this channel to build up some legitimate excitement about your app just like you would with a group of friends.

Inside Your App

Finally, let’s not overlook your app itself.  After all, you are engaging your audience at some level here right?  This can be tricky though because nagging your customer from your app can easily turn them against you.

Some things you can do are: sending notifications to users via a service like Urban Airship as a new app launches, adding an email opt-in form to your app (maybe in the settings area) and simply cross-promoting apps directly from your app UI (you can include a store area or something like that).

BTW: if you see an * after a link above that means it’s an affiliate link.

Do you have an genius marketing tips to share with us?  Please do so in the comments!