How and Why to do a Pre-Launch for Your iOS App

Matthew Campbell, June 22, 2012

Let’s talk about how to drum up interest, hype and buzz for your app weeks or months before you even release your product into the eager hands of your audience. What I’m talking about is the Pre-Launch.

First of – everyone knows that the first few days after an iOS app is released are the most important time in the app’s sales cycle.  This is that magic time when

  • the world sees you for the first time
  • your app shows up closer to the top of any new release lists
  • and it’s a your first chance to be featured by Apple (aka: the King Maker).

But, it’s really easy to miss this opportunity.

If you wait until your app is released to do promotion then you’ve already missed your chance…

What’s the answer?  You really have to think about promotion and marketing way before you even fire up Xcode.  In the marketing and product development time you can try your best to really target your market.  Soon after you have a vision in place you can start your pre-launch.

What’s a Pre-Launch?

Like the name implies the pre-launch is the promotional activity that takes place before the launch of your application.  What you are trying to do is warm up your audience so that when that fateful day drops you will have a group of eager customers already in place.  You’re hope is that your customers are so excited that they will rush out, download your app and start posting glowing reviews to iTunes.

Part of your pre-launch is about introducing your brand and opening up a line of communication with your audience.  For most of us, this means that we need to be online and in the same online places as our audience.

How to Get a Web Presence

Ideally, we would all have our brands plastered on TV, radio, flyers, magazines as well as the usual Internet destinations.  However, as a indy developer you will likely focus on getting the kind of exposure that you can afford.  That is: free exposure.

The hands-on best free exposure that you can get is via the Internet.  And you really need to be on as many channels as possible here.

The first channel is the most important and special.  It’s your app’s website.  This is your home and a place where bloggers can point their readers to for more information about you and your app.  It’s important that this looks nice and so I always recommend that developers use a custom WordPress them like AppifyWP ($49) to set up their websites.

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BTW AppifyWP also has a free WordPress theme that you can use to set up a Pre-Launch website.   The theme is called LaunchPad and you can click here to download that for free (requires WordPress).

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Website Checklist

How to Open Lines of Communication with Your Audience

There are two things that you want to do with this, especially at pre-launch.  The first is that you want to generated buzz and excitement by broadcasting things about your app to try and fire up your audience.   This content should be entertaining, inspiring or whatever you need it to be.

The second goal of this is to get engagement.  This will happen with only a portion of your audience and it will require you to reach out to them on their own turf.

Ideally, these will be people who will chat with your or exchange email or tweets.

Top 5 Places to Meet People On Their Own Turf

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • Forums
  • Meetups

These people can be invaluable to you:  they will become your super-fans, download your app and post reviews.  These are the people that you can use to “seed” your app by giving them promo-codes and giving them sneak peaks of your app by signing them up as beta-testers with services like Test Flight App.

Wow – there’s a lot of things that you can get started with right now.  Is there anything else that you can think of to warm up your audience?