The number one question we get asked both in pre-sales as well as after we complete a project is, “how do I market this app and make some money?” Good question. Here’s a better one, why are you asking at all? Presumably you own a company, you sell products or services, and have been doing so longer than you have been reading this post. To this end, why is it that you don’t know how to market a product? There, I said it, this is a product. Yes, a product.
People continually confuse a new technology with the need to have an entirely new way of doing something. While execution certainly has to adapt, concepts don’t change all that much, if ever. I have a product, I have to sell it, thus, I have to market it. How? How do you market anything else? You open your mouth and start letting people know, you make a website to tout the benefits of it, you drive traffic to the sites through SEO, pay per click, you do a mailing, you make a billboard, you sponsor an event, need I go on? Learn anything new there? No, of course you didn’t. That’s the point.
I chuckle when asked because everyone already knows the answer. All to often though clients come to us thinking the magical internet will just take care of them. It won’t. A well crafted marketing campaign will though. This inevitably leads to the next part of the conversation however which usually begins with “Wow, I just paid for an app to be made and now I have to spend more to make a website to advertise it and promotional materials, and…”. Yup. You don’t have to of course but the hard truth is that if you don’t do something, no one will know it is there. Period.
In the end the best results we have seen from clients are those who approach this as they would any other product in their portfolio. They put the product on a podium and craft a campaign around it. The best part is you already know how to do that with your business as you likely do it every day. If someone comes to us under the false pretense that an app will somehow, on auto-pilot, take care of all of their financial needs, then the simple answer is, it won’t. The beauty of the marketplace is that it welcomes engaging apps and creativity. The bad news is, you actually have to work at it.
Here is the commercial. Remember, it all comes down to marketing 101.