Thursday, July 26, 2012

Few Tips for marketing your game in app store

This is a very common question by app developers. Here are few steps that you can follow for marketing your app. Some of them are very common and obvious, but still people tend to ignore them:

1. Make your app/game worth marketing. If you think its not good enough, don't waste your time reading further.
2. Integrated Twitter & Facebook in your app:
     Make different interesting events in your app so that people can tweet about it. For example in a game if user achieves some badge, he can tweet about it or if he finds something funny he can post it on Facebook.
     Make as many followers as you can (both on facebook and twitter). Because it will help you in next release.
3. Localize your app description in app store. 
    Use google translate and give it to someone for review. Cover as many languages as possible.
4. Submit the app and hold it before releasing. 
    Why? Because the first day its release its on top of new apps. So you can control the your best chance better. (You must have taken so much time in developing it so you can wait just 1 more day)
4. Upload youtube videos.
5. Submit your app/game at different review websites.
    Why? Some people say this step will not be effective. But sometime it is necessary because:
  1. This will generate a constant (but low) download traffic for long run. 
  2. Some websites publish a free-app-alerts (or some other list) everyday. So when you make changes to your price, they will publicize this in their list, it can generate traffic bursts. And traffic bursts can improve your ranking in app store.
  3. You can give your Facebook/Twitter links there and people can follow you.
While submitting to review websites make their work as easy as possible (by giving them the promo-codes, descriptions about your app, screenshots). Some of the websites are:
www.148apps.com
6. Weekends have higher traffic than weekdays in the App Store. Plan the release for friday/saturday so that you can get maximum traffic in the starting.
7. Now you can release your app. Send a reminder to each of reviewer about your release.
8. On first day your app will be on top of newly released apps. So get as much traffic as you can.
9. Tell your  followers (or friends)  to review your app as soon as it releases. If people see 5-Star rating on first day, they will download more so you will get high ranking.
10. Keep updating your app. And let your followers (on Twitter/Facebook) know about it.
11. Dropping Price/Discounting can improve ranking. Keep changing the price every 2 weeks.
12. Cross Promotion: Promote your app from your other apps. You can give a burst of downloads from existing users. This is actually the best way of marketing your app.  As you introduce new apps, launch by leveraging your existing apps popularity with an in-app promotion.


SEO for App Store
KeyWord Selection:
1. Itunes search is a exact search: you have to put both singular and plural of your important keyword (E.g. "page" and "pages", "reivew and reviews")
2. You can use google keyword tool selection tool to find the related most popular words. 
3. Including words like "free","lite" can be beneficial.
App description:
   Include the name of popular apps which are related to your game/app. For example include a line like "The lovers of xyz app, this app will be fun in a new way in old fashion".

Nobody knows how exactly the app-store works. These are just the conclusions drawn from observation.