How do I market my app? Should I hire a marketing agency? I’ve bet you probably heard these questions or seen them posted online. If you’re an app developer you’ve probably even asked them yourself. We have published a few games now and have tried many different marketing techniques. We actually make it a point to try new marketing “experiments” with each new app. We’ve hired marketing agencies before and we’ve also done it ourselves. It is our conclusion that if you’re willing invest the time and effort—marketing your app yourself not only costs far less, but also produces more exposure.
Hiring an app marketing agency can be costly. On the low end you’re going to be spending $3,000 and the high end runs into tens of thousands of dollars. Most of them have different packages that include submitting to review sites, tweeting, managing your Facebook page, putting out press releases, etc. To most independent developers an app marketing agency is not a luxury that can be afforded. Other developers, like us, even though we could afford an agency we choose not to because in our eyes increases the risk of developing the app. So what do I mean by that? The lower the cost to bring an app to market, the lower the risk to take of developing that app. If you spend $10,000 in real money or opportunity costs, your app has to make that money back before it is profitable. If you add a few thousand more dollars of marketing costs after the development costs you just added more to your total investment and risk.
Now let me be clear about one thing—you have to market your app. Marketing can have a huge impact on the success or failure of an app. It is not option, it has to be done. Before you point to apps like Tiny Wings and Bubble Ball let me point out that those are exceptions or flukes. For every Tiny Wings app, there are thousands and thousands of apps on the app store that no one has heard of. And they receive only a few downloads a year. You can’t just put out your app and wait on people to discover it, you’re going to need to invest in marketing. The good news is that investing in marketing your app doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money.
Before we talk about where to spend your time and money marketing your app, lets start with what doesn’t work. In our experience investing in ads doesn’t work. We have seen absolutely no up tick in our sales based on ads we have bought. It might work for larger developers that can afford to canvas review sites with their apps, but if you’re a little developer don’t waste your money. The only possible exception to this rule is what I’m going to call a payoff. There are some sites that offer a deal where if you purchase ad space they will review your app. That won’t guarantee you a good review, but it will get your app reviewed in more places and that has been worth it to us in the past.
So where should you invest your time and resources? First, we spend a lot of time making sure all our marketing materials are polished. This includes the app description, screenshots, trailer, and website. Writing should be brief and enticing, written for normal people and stripped of all marketing speak. A few sentences to a paragraph is plenty for the description. Include a bulleted list of the features. Screenshots and trailers go a long way to convince people to check out your app. The idea of a trailer may intimidate some people, but it can be as simple recording yourself using the app. If your app is a game this is especially true, people love to see game play footage.
Second, invest your time in trying to acquire app reviews. We believe that app review sites are the second place people go to find out about new apps. The first place is the app store. We have not control over the app store lists, but you can have impact on the review sites. Spend time compiling a list of all the top review sites. Here is a list of the top ten to get you started. There are many many more sites out there, put them in a spread sheet and include contact information/submission guidelines. Each site is different in how they want people to contact them for app submission/reviews, so make notes on the spreadsheet. Develop relationships with reviewers at these sites. Don’t overlook the lesser trafficked sites, many will jump at the chance to review a cool new app. Finally when it comes to reviews, don’t forget about youtube. Do a search on youtube for app reviews. You’ll be surprised how many individuals review apps—its not just companies. Make a list of those reviewers and contact them as well.
What do you say when contacting reviewers? When emailing reviewers it is important to polite, brief, and provide them with enough information to entice them into making a decision to review your app. Here is an example of an email we sent out for Float.
Would you like to review our new game Float for iOS devices? Its current on the New and Noteworthy list and its starting to get some good attention. Let me know and I’ll send you a promo code. Thanks.
Description
Float is a game that makes you feel happy. Try to keep the balloons in the air and off the spikes. Tap, bobble, and bump your way to fun. With multiple games modes, achievements, and leader boards there is something for everyone.
4.5 out of 5 – Appsmile.com
4.5 out of 5 – CrazyMikesapps.com
4 out of 5 – Appspy.com
Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxnH3aWf38
iTunes
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/float/id409855273?mt=8
Features
Multiple Game Modes
Retina Graphics
Open Feint & Facebook Leaderboards
Over 40 Achievements
Post Your Scores to Facebook
Increase Your Fun with Game Mode Packs
Price
$0.99
More Info
On some review sites there is another opportunity to market your app and that is in the fourms. One of the most vibrant hubs of app discussion is the toucharcade.com forum. Most of the app forums have dedicated channels where developers can announce their new app. Similar to the email example above, post important information about your app like pricing, screenshots, and trailer links. Encourage feedback in your post and don’t be afraid to give away promo codes. Don’t forget to subscribe to the post, that way you will be notified when someone posts a comment and you can keep the post activity going.
Third, get involved in social media. With over 600 million people on Facebook and 100 million registered users on Twitter these are clearly online hubs of communication. Since most people in your social circles are presumably interested in you and the things you are doing its low hanging fruit. But go the extra steps, especially in the case with Facebook. Not only setup a facebook page for your company or apps, but develop your apps with social integration in mind. In the case of our games, we give the player the opportunity to post their score to their facebook stream, compete against their friends in Facebook leaderboards, and like our company and the game. If people like the app and you give them the tools, they will market it for you.
Fourth, always develop a lite or free versions of the app. People want to try before they buy. Even if the price is only $0.99, there will always be a portion that people that just won’t purchase without trying it first. Like a digital drug dealer, give away a taste for free and then when people are hooked charge them for more. We have done both free and lite versions of games. Both work well it just depends on your strategy. We have made more money off the free version of Float that serves ads than the paid version in the Apple store. Our strategy going forward is to release the paid version with a lite version that drives them to the paid version. Depending on how well the paid version performs, we will then remove the lite version and put out a free version with ads. You can always put out a free version later, so hold off and see how well your paid version does.
Finally, consider doing giveaways. There are lots of ways to do this, as I mentioned above giving away promo codes through forums, review sites, twitter, etc is a great way to spread the word. Consider large giveaway programs and sites. Most of them require revenue sharing or a fee upfront, but they can get you a huge amount of exposure. One example is FreeAppADay.com. It has a large amount of followers and can be used as a calculated risk. We used them to promote Float Free. We paid them $3,500 to participate in their give away and it catapulted Float Free to the top of the free charts. This calculated risk paid off for us through $12,000 in ad revenue. Another great give away program is through Open Feint. If you use Open Feint in your app you can participate in their give away program. The terms for their program are revenue share or an upfront payment. If you don’t want to spend any money, you can always just change the price of your app to free in the store. Simply by making the app free will get your app on quite a few sites’ radars, which can lead to new reviews and increased exposure. All giveaways and free periods need to be thought out though. Making your app free will increase exposure and downloads, but your app’s ratings will suffer. People don’t value free so you will get a lot of people downloading your app just because it is free, not because they have any real interest in it. Bad comments and one star reviews are sure to follow, so be prepared going into it. One good strategy is to have an update ready to roll out after the free period to wash away the bad reviews and get your ratings back up. Calculate your risks and plan ahead to make the most out of giveaways.
Hopefully this has given you some ideas to try. Having little or no marketing budget doesn’t mean you can’t generate exposure for your app. We believe using these techniques that we can do a better job marketing our apps for far less risk, enabling us to continue to make games.
Nice article, but you forgot to mention that one of the reasons Float is doing well is because it got a lot of help with PR and news distribution from the folks at Ansca.
You are completely right. In no way did I mean to gloss over the fact of their immense help. We owe many many thanks to Ansca. They have been a huge huge help. Float would not have been as successful, let alone have been built without Ansca and their wonderful product and team.
Excellent post, Crawl Space team. Thanks for sharing.
Very nice article, guys! (I might actually have to use some of this stuff for my next app) :-)
You need think outside of the box. Most App’s just do the tried and true — keyword searches, a bit of online advertising, and a promotion here and there. You have to really do something bigger than the tried and true.
Public Relations — it’s not just about blogs and sending out a press release. If your marketing & pr people don’t get this or don’t have the relationships to get media impressions, hire a public relations agency that does. A good PR firm has the relationships with newspapers, television news shows, blogs, news websites, magazines to get stories. Your inhouse team can manage the PR agency for you.
Sponsorship Marketing — There are plenty of great event opportunities from film festivals, music festival, tech conventions, comic-cons, non-profit fundraisers to more VIP/Press oriented events like parties associated with major award shows or sports events. These can provide for hands on demonstrations of your app and media impressions.
Celebrity Endorsements — celebrities promoting an app can make the awareness factor go up exponitially if you align with the right piece of talent. This may or may not be expensive. One way to reduce the cost is to do it in trade for some limited equity in the company. If you make money, they make money.
Event Marketing — Find an event company to produce regional events. If it’s a relevant market, do something that aligns to the app’s purpose.
Promotional Marketing – like street teams that hit your core consumer with something unique can be smart. For example, your app helps you decide what movie to see. Position them outside of movie theaters to show what the app does. Maybe work on a cross-promotion with the movie theater chain with the idea that your app purchases coupons for free drinks. If a person hears the presenation for the app, they get a coupon. If its a free app, if they download it right then, they get the coupon.
Superb article. Thanks for sharing all of the tips, there is a lot of good advice and information here.
Excellent article. Thank you so much for sharing such helpful advice.
Great Article! Would you mind elaborating on this statement please: “We have made more money off the free version of Float that serves ads than the paid version in the Apple store.”
I have seen studies that say the exact opposite. One person stated that in a months time, they made something like less than 20¢ on the ads, they basically would’ve made more by selling just one 99¢ app.
Did you make more money because people went ahead and purchased the free version or did they actually click the ads? What kind of ads were you serving? I for one, stay away from Lite and Free versions because I hate the ads so I am coming from a different place here.
Thanks again!
Noah good questions.
I should clarify about the free vs paid revenue. Since writing this blog post we have actually made more on paid sales because of the Nook Color, but on the iOS + Android stores we have made more on AdMob ads than through paid sales. We have made over $12,000 on ads and around $7,000 on ios and android sales. The reason we made money on ads was because of the install base. Over 1.2 million downloaded the free version, so at $0.01 a user we made $12,000.
Also, Lite and Free games doesn’t necessarily mean that the game has ads. But if you do choose to have ads, there are a ton of users who don’t mind ads. Its especially true on ipads and tablet devices. They ads usually end up being pretty small. I’ve downloaded several free games for my son that have ads on the ipad and to be honest, I would never have downloaded some of them if they were paid.
Thanks, I was not aware that you receive $0.01 per user installing the free app. I thought it was strictly on per clicks. I am new to this all but learning every day!
My daughter also downloads many games a week. Many of those are free as well. She loved Float by the way!
In our experience it works out to around $0.01 a user. Some people click and that seems to earn between $0.03 – $0.04. The number are different based on the the ad network, fulfillment rates, etc. But in our experience with Float it was averaging out to $0.01 per user.
How do you manage to publish the free / light apps? We recently tried publishing light versions which were – throughout – declined by Apple pointing to paragraph 2.9 of the license agreement:
“2.9: Apps that are “beta”, “demo”, “trial”, or “test” versions will be rejected”
The message contained the explanation that
“Rather than providing a lite or trial version, you may wish to use In App Purchase to provide access to purchasing additional application features. Rather than requiring users to find, purchase, and download your other application from the App Store, In App Purchase provides a seamless, in app purchasing experience for your users, and an improved selling experience for you. “
We thought that this might be a reviewer on a bad day, so we actually appealed to the ruling using Apple’s Resolution center and got turned down in all cases. Those were games and education apps, with the light version covering roughly 40% of the full version’s contents.
After researching on iOS development forums, many other developers seem to have the same problem.
Did you ever encounter this issue and if yes, how did you get around it?
Paul
Sounds like apple is really cracking down, we have not had a problem in the past. However, Float Free had an in app purchase to make it the full game and that worked out well for us. I think from a user’s perspective it is much more convenient to stay within the same app and simply press a button to purchase than force them to go back to the app store and download another app.
Thanks for this informative article. I appreciate you using real numbers to describe your ad revenue, though it has me a little concerned for my own future apps’ chances of ever turning a profit.
If I understand correctly you had over a million downloads of the free, ad supported version and have $12K to show for that, which, given the lifetime of Float, seems to work out to around $100/day for ad revenue. Is 1 cent average per user the expected revenue stream from ads, or is that result due to some inefficiency of the Corona adMob hack?
I keep hearing stories of free apps making thousands of dollars a week via ads, but given your numbers that would require downloads in the 10s of millions. I doubt even Bubble Ball saw that kind of download success. How do you run a profitable business on $100/day assuming CrawlSpace Games is more than one guy living in his mom’s garage subsiding on peanut butter and popsicles?
My most recent blog article, Making the Leap, answers some of your questions. We are a group of four trying to make the leap. We own a design studio that pays the bills right now.
I don’ think there is an inefficiency with the adMob hack, we have actually been very happy with the fulfillment rate, especially compared to other ad networks like iAds. To make thousands of dollars a day on ads we would need a few million more installs and/or longer play times and clicks. Our ads peaked around $600 a day.
I don’t know anything about your app, but I wouldn’t lose heart. The $12,000 mentioned is just part of the revenue from the game. We estimate making a little over $40,000 from Float this year. That number includes paid and free revenue on iOS, Android, and Nook Color. In baseball terms, Float is a double and I whole heartedly believe that you can make a successful app business off of singles and doubles. You just have to be wise with how you spend your money and spend your time. The article I mentioned before explains our strategy.
Thanks for the article and insights :) I’m currently programming a game with corona, but I’m loathe to spend any money on anything until its finished, and I’ve managed to find a whole lot of people to playtest it. Even the $100 apple license is out of my price range due to the earthquakes here in Christchurch New Zealand destroying everything I owned :) I estimate we are going to spend a couple of thousand man hours on code/art/sfx, so it looks doubtful the game will make minimum wage even if its as successful as yours :) I was wondering, has anyone heard of a bannerswap scheme for app homepages?
thanks for sharing. it is great information. Just wondering how you guys implemented the ads in Coronoa. Did you use the workaround web popup mentioned in one of the forums?
Yeah we used the web popup workaround and on the web page we used javascript to call a new ad every 30 seconds.
Thanks a lot for sharing. I will soon ( I hope ) have to use a lot of what you said in your post.
BR Bruno
Thanks Bruno
I run an app review site. I currently offer ad space & also review apps for many developers. The site is http://www.touchapps.biz – contact me at itouchapps.biz@gmail.com if any of you guys are interested.
Hi Guys,
Could you possibly share the code you used to refresh the admob ads? or point us in the right direction?
Thanks
The page we load is here: http://www.floatgame.com/ad.html
This is a fantastic web site, will you be involved in doing an interview regarding how you developed it? If so e-mail me!
Thank you for such an insightful article! I know that I am posting a year after the fact but I believe that this advice still holds true. I am not sure if you are checking this string any more, but how is the game doing now a year later? My wife and I are currently developing a game called Caveman Golf. We are doing all the marketing and legwork ourselves but have another company programming. We are just getting started with the marketing but we are trying to put a large effort into our apps Facebook page. We hope to generate a following and keep them enticed by releasing graphics, news, and tips before the app launches. That way we hope to have people download it right away. We definitely appreciate the advice you posted! Thanks again and if you have any advice on our Facebook page I would love to hear it!
https://www.facebook.com/CavemanGolf
Nick,
The game continues to sell, but definitely has slowed over time—which is to be expected. We are doing a huge grass roots shoe string marketing effort on our upcoming game Draw Breaker and I still believe its the way to go. The big thing I’m finding out is it has a lot do with who you know. The right contacts can make all the difference, so you have to keep getting your game out in front of people.
Thanks for the advice, Brock! We will definitely continue to make contacts and get our game in front of as many people as possible. I am curious, did you guys get a review of your app before the release?