Marketing at The App Store

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It is always nice when you got several million dollars to spend it all in a big marketing budget. You can do traditional advertising, a little TV ad perhaps. Unfortunately most app developers are not in that situation and usually it's a shoestring budget and sometimes with no money at all to spend on marketing their app.

So what they depend on is, what sort of traffic can they generate on the stores? You have to look very carefully at how the store is structured to run a series of experiments. Be willing to run several experiments and see what works best. Try it for about a week and see how it goes and will be to change it which means you need to be watching very carefully how the traffic is working, and how many people are downloading or using your app.

A lot of developers are making mistakes of changing things of several things at the same time which we do not recommend because you will not be able to tell which one one is actually working and which one is not. So one at a time, you can try strategies and then if it does not work go and try another one and see how it goes. So be willing to experiment and make sure that they are carefully controlled experiments and make sure that they are controlled the right way.

Second, is to look at the structure of the site and think about the process by which a customer is coming to you in deciding to get your application. Think of it kind of as though, people are standing in line for a movie and that you are always losing people out of the line. Maybe, they are vaguely interested at the start, but now it is not moving fast enough and they are going to drift off or get out of the line. And every point in time you will be shedding customers.

So you have to think of ways how to reduce that process by which you are shedding customers. How do you suck them in as quickly as possible? How do you keep them standing in line? How do you get them in lobby and make them sit as quickly as possible so that they can buy your popcorn?

Understanding how the users search for an app, that is gonna get you to a list. Make sure you are high on that particular list. So understanding the standard keywords that your users are likely to use for a search.