Marketing Mobile Applications
Tommi’s S60 Applications blog has a useful post entitled ‘Tommi’s quick guide for marketing S60 applications’. Tommi talks about creating great apps, free trials, being different, getting mentioned and the involvement of blogs where he even mentions me.
This made me think and write a few words on my experiences of mobile marketing over the last 10 years…
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Free trials help but not for all types of applications. In particular, games sometimes don’t gain much (in sales) from having trials. If not carefully managed, people download them and get a good enough ‘fix’ from the demo and then don’t download the full version. Also, the compulsion to have a game is often so great that people are more likely to do so when the first see it than when they have perhaps downloaded lots of demos and probably can’t even remember (or care) where the download came from.
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If you want to attract people, give something away. This might be information or a free program. As an extension of this, create a ‘honey pot’ web site to attract people (e.g. a links site or software listing archive) and get sales off the back of that.
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It’s sad for me to say but for the most people the best marketing is to list on Handango. Don’t even bother listing on other sites because their sales (and those via your own site) will be negligible. Instead, spend the time doing what you are good at - creating applications. Why is it sad? Well, I would like other sites to prosper and Handango to have a less prominent and dominating position. Handango’s commission structure has changed over the years to the point where they take a very large share and have alienated some developers. Perhaps it’s, as the saying goes, ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’.