The post below is an excerpt of a larger post I wrote during the launch of iCombat (iTunes link). The post is worth reading if you are an indie developer thinking about launching an iPhone application on your own:
I came across an interesting post on “How to use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to market your mobile games” and it reinforced what I have noticed since readying to launch iCombat – there are too many channels to manage when it comes to reaching the end user! This may sound like a high class problem to all of the game and content developers that have faced the gatekeepers of distribution over the years but the sudden blossoming of dozens of channels to reach users has created its own set of problems. Now the burden of brand management and marketing has fallen into the lap of the indie developers, where they must become “marketers” of their product if they hope to get noticed.
The rise of the fractured, multichannel market has created dozens of sites that developers now need to visit to build goodwill and help gain exposure, something that is fundamentally different from what they probably want to be doing. In our case this translates into 18-20 hours of work a day since launch to manage the marketing effort. While we have a dedicated team for this, most developers don’t have the luxury of even dedicating all of their own time to managing their launch.
I have compiled a list of some of the tools and sites I think necessary to run a solid app marketing effort:
Top Down channels – kissing the ring
- Bloggers – aka the “digital influencers” – sites with major traffic like Gizmodo, Techcrunch, GigaOM
- Targeted review sites – Touch Arcade, 148Apps, Pocket Gamer, etc. – we have counted 60+ serious ones in all
Bottom Up channels – connecting with your users
- Facebook – both personal status and group page
- MySpace
- App/ Development/ Gaming Forums - Touch Arcade, maybe iPhonedevSDK, etc.
- Product website & blog – here you need to have a demo, maybe a news section and your blog
- YouTube – a great way to communicate with avid gamers
- iTunes App store summary
Analytics Tools – monitoring usage, downloads, buzz
- User downloads – iTunes Connect – Heartbeat App or AppViz (super easy to use but less flexible than Heartbeat)
- Usage behavior – Pinch Media – gives you uniques, geo data, version & device stats, as well as unique data by action in your App (very cool)
- App ranking – AppRanking by Michael Dorn or Mobclix
- Web traffic - Google Analytics or Wordpress Stats
- Affiliate data – Linkshare – here if you are an Apple affiliate you can earn back 5% of your 30% cut that goes to Apple – and monitor clickthrough conversion data from your site
- Brand management – ScoutLabs or Google Alerts – Scout doesn’t really seem to work for small apps or early on in a campaign as it is, for these smaller apps Google Alerts is a great basic filter
While this list is not comprehensive this is basically everything we are using for the marketing of iCombat. I didn’t realize just how many channels and tools this involved until trying to post an urgent piece of news. When iCombat was reviewed in Gizmodo’s weekly roundup of iPhone apps we quickly wanted to update every channel we were using. (more…)