Here are 6 must-have tools to market your iPhone app. Together, and coordinated effectively, they can drive visibility for your iPhone app, visibility that will allow customers to discover how unique, fun, powerful, and/or useful your iPhone app is.
1. Draft a succinct description of your iPhone app that highlights the strengths and uniqueness of your iPhone app. The starting point for selling your app is telling potential customers how great it is and why. And the key to doing it successfully is being able to clearly and effectively communicate about the app and why it’s worth taking a closer look at in a sentence or two. Once you have a succinct yet effective description, you’ll use it in many different ways to reach potential customers.
two. Set up a website with your iPhone app. Unless you’re one of the lucky few with a featured app, the App Store is the place for customers to to buy your app – No the place to market it. A 2-3 page website that contains a link to your iPhone app on the App Store provides the building block you’ll use to give your iPhone app an online presence.
3. Leverage Google AdWords for online visibility. Go to AdWords.Google.com and open an account. Be careful here – you can spend a lot of money chasing the wrong people. Much has already been written about how to set up good AdWords search. Set a budget, develop effective searches, and use them to drive potential customers to visit your iPhone app website.
Four. Write a press release that effectively highlights your iPhone app. Use the statement you wrote as the basis for an expanded (but still accurate) description of your product. Visit http://www.mediacollege.com/journalism/press-release for a short but good tutorial on how to write a press release. Be sure to answer the following questions: What do you do? What is special about it compared to your competitors’ apps? Where can the reader get more information about it? Where can the reader buy it?
5. Submit your iPhone app to review sites. Sites like theiphoneappreview.com, appcraver.com, and iphoneatlas.com invite iPhone developers to submit their apps for review and then post reviews of the ones they like. This is another place where the description you wrote in step 1 will come in handy. Assuming they get literally tens or hundreds of pitches a day, to make sure you’re one of those paying attention, your description needs to be accurate, professional, and to the point. How do you choose which sites to submit your application to? Google “iPhone app review” (and possible variations of that) and submit your brief description to the first ten sites that appear in the search results. Re-search periodically to ensure your app appears on major review sites.
6. Viral Marketing Link to iPhone App. Key Principle 1: The best sales force in the world is a group of your highly satisfied customers who are desperate to tell everyone they know how great your iPhone app is. Corollary to KP1: Customers are more likely to tell everyone they know how great your iPhone app is when it serves their own interests. Translation: Find a way to encourage your customers to tell others about your app and make it easy for them to do so. Can your iPhone app be more useful, powerful, or fun when connected to one or more users of the same app? Can you make it easy for your happy customers to tell others about your iPhone app?