The following are some notes taken on MoDevDC event last night on App Store Strategy, Todd Moore (founder of TMSOFT) gave some insightful tips on mobile app marketing from an experienced developer perspective.
Product development:
- paid app or free app, Which kind of app is more valuable? He prefers freemium model inspired by Instagram
- Using latest iOS features in the app will increase the likelihood of getting featured
App store strategies:
- top choices are Apple App Store, Google Play Store, and Amazon Appstore
- Try app in browser feature on Amazon Appstore is impressive because it reduces return rates
- Ranking has a couple of hurdles to cross, for example 51 to 50 is a key hurdle
- Strategies on improving rating: Todd felt that free apps are more likely to be attacked by distorted negative ratings than paid apps
- Naming your app in a search friendly way (shared by SavvyApps CEO): which means you need to put all important keywords into your app. However, usually you won’t know the best keyword after testing performance of a number of keywords on a search marketing campaign, but you may run into approval issue if you try to change app name at that time, also even if you change App name, the permalink will stay the same. So it’s kinda important to choose a good name at the beginning
Marketing strategies:
- Spend all your marketing budget in a way that can build momentum, timing is important (he prefers the time when the app already got some organic momentum for example, just got released, reviewed or new version upgraded),
- most of momentum building marketing dollars won’t come back in a measurable way.
- It’s not recommended to allocate low amount of marketing $ in a long time period
- Search campaigns: always come up a couple of slogan combinations (Todd usually comes up with 10), you will be surprised of how differently they perform even though they look the same to you.
- Top ad agency choice: AdMob