Your Bite of the Apple - Making the Most of the App Store
How can you get your newly developed app noticed and drive sales without spending money on marketing it? Ian Knapp. executive director of MCM Net Limited offers some advice.
You’ve probably heard a fair amount of App Store success stories. A quick look on Google will return plenty of tales of fortunes made through selling millions of copies of a 59p app. However, with the number of applications available now reaching over 425,000, whether you are charging for your app or not, getting it noticed is going to be a challenge.
The Holy Grail is being featured in some form or other by Apple in their App Store or other advertising. We’ve seen numbers of downloads increase on average by around 500% for featured apps, so it’s well worth trying to improve your chances of being noticed by the Apple review team.
Having a genuinely original idea for your application will help, but is easier said than done. If your idea isn’t unique then you need to ensure your app does what it does better than the competition. Research is the key here – download your competitors’ apps, read their reviews and see what features you can improve upon.
Aside from this, your app should be genuinely useful to more than just a handful of people. This may sound obvious, but we’ve had enquiries from people asking us to create apps which are essentially just digital business cards. Apple have started to reject these kinds of “limited functionality” apps.
Graphically, as well as concentrating on the app itself, you need to ensure you submit good quality, standout graphics for the app icon and the large image displayed in the App Store. Regardless of whether your app is featured or not, these are the graphics people will see when browsing so it’s vital they catch the eye.
A snappy, short title for your app will also help, free from promotional phrases like “Lite” or “Free”. Remember a lot of people search the App Store using the free text search so try to include a key search term in your title if you can. As well as this, categorize your app correctly. Poorly categorized apps are less likely to be found by interested browsers.
If you decide to charge for your application, the price you set is obviously going to have a big impact on sales. Again, look at the competition, and remember that Apple take around 35% of your income via the App Store, so you need to set a price which works for you with that in mind.
As an alternative to charging for your app up-front, it’s also worth considering in-app purchases. These allow you to charge users for additional content once they’ve already got the app installed. Using this method, you can give away a free app with limited functionality to get people hooked and then tempt them with extra functionality they have to pay for.
In terms of promoting your app, reviews will be crucial. Look at approaching key blogs and review sites focusing on apps in general as well as those related to the sector your app can be categorized in. Offering them promotional download codes (Apple give you some of these) will mean they can download a free copy of the app. Also try to get friends and relatives to review your app within the App Store. You need 5 ratings or more for a star rating to appear.
Finally, make sure you keep a track of your download stats. Apple’s iTunes Connect interface provides basic stats to all developers but something like Appfigures (www.appfigures.com) gives you far more information for a small monthly fee.