Seems like nowadays everyone and their cousin is developing apps, but there is a difference in just developing an app and having a viable marketing strategy behind it. The saying goes, you cant get exposure without marketing and you cant market without exposure. As a result it is very important to think about how to have a pre-launch plan as well as a post launch marketing strategy. In this post I am going to explain some of the strategies you might want to consider prior to launching your application in order attain traction. Here at We Scored! We recently had our soft launch which saw our application hit the top 10 paid sports category within days. How did we do this in such short time? This post will explain some of the steps to take in order to have a successful marketing plan come launch day. Pre-Launch Before you launch your application you should start thinking about how to get the early adopters to sign up even before the app is live. One way to do this is to build a quick landing page. There are a ton of different app launch wordpress themes that you can quickly throw up and start telling your friends and family about. Check out http://launcheffectapp.com or http://themeforest.net to get started. Once you have your landing page, ensure you can easily showcase the features of your application. For example, checkout the front page of www.wescoredapp.com to see an example of how we showcased our application and also how simple of a website it is. Right of the bat you can see that we have a short 120-second Youtube video. Since our app is very media rich we decided to have additional ways to thoroughly illustrate and explain what our app does. Remember, visitors have a short attention span, so if they dont get what your app does, you will surely lose them. Another critical component of the website is to have a place where you can collect emails prior to launching. This allows you to reach out to your initial users the day you launch. We had been collecting emails for a few months before we launched, but because we built a list, it sent our initials users to the app store the day we launched which helped with the initial downloads. Another great way to attract people is to run some kind of contest where people who sign up can win free stuff. Everyone loves freebies, so it doesnt have to be too elaborate. Something simple as a gift voucher, or a free ipod definitely helps and incentivizes people to sign up. Once you have built up your marketing list, it enables you to blast out a launch email the day you go live which will help increase your rankings big time! We applied some of these strategies and we were the number 6 top paid app in the sports category. Check out the snapshot below! We were also picked up by a local tech news website and got featured on the front page which is always great for awareness, see the snapshot below! Overall, try to develop a effective pre-launch marketing strategy and you will definitely see a boost in your first days of being live on the app store which in turn will increase your rankings and hopefully get you more downloads! Good luck and happy app developing.
