External Marketing?

Unity Engine
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1

Hey guys,

While I’ve personally been involved in advertising for years, I’m now wondering about the viability of advertising iPhone apps outside the appstore.

Obviously, features on places like TouchArcade etc are extremely helpful, but they’re difficult to ‘buy’ :slight_smile:

Has anyone successfully found a place to market their products?

I find it difficult to justify advertising a product that can cost as little as $1… Even a weblink (which doesn’t guarantee a sale) can set you back upto $3 nowdays :slight_smile:

Even pulling in 25,000+ views to a site per month arguably has no impact on sales.

Thoughts? Musings? Interpretive dance?

2

I saw Yappler has a deal right now where putting a Yappler tag in your app description will make it show up in an alternating banner add on the Yappler site. I don’t know if it brings in any sales (I haven’t tried it, yet) but it does look cool and doesn’t cost anything.

3

Looks to me like its an app portal site (they get a cut of a purchase, which is taken out of apple’s share of your sale).

There’s thousands of them, and as I understand it, not worth the time.

4

I held off because I didn’t want to put “Yappler-tag” in my app description - looks pretty odd in the App Store.

5

Apparently its not such a bad idea if you get a lot of sales through your site, to become such a portal yourself… So rather than 70%, you get like, 80% of the revenue :slight_smile:

Of course, you need some serious traffic for that to happen.

6

i wrote a simple page with links for marketing strategy.

EDIT Deleted old domain link

The big problem as you write is make marketing efford with 0.99 price selling.

Maybe viral and social marketing are good options.

Bye

7

Well my marketing budget for our next release is gonna be £750.

£250 I’ve spent on a PR guru who I know (at a discounted price). He’s been with us a week and we have the UDID’s and confirmed previews/ reviews for most of the major sites.

And £500 on a week long advertising campaign on Pocketgamer.

Will let you all know how it works out…

8

We’ve got an app (a 3D gun app, basically) that looked promising on launch, but it didn’t quite hit a list (was about 30 short of getting into the top 100 in the us)…

We figure on reboot with a few new features, it’ll get there…

I mean, it does 80 to 100 sales per day without being on any lists, so its not awful, but just a few more… :slight_smile:

We’re not talking about an awesome marketing job, just… simple stuff… We have videos, we have internal app promotion, just… that little bit more would be good :stuck_out_tongue:

9

I see some developers have Facebook fan pages (including Blurst). I don’t know how effective that is in spreading the word and increasing your market, but I’ve found it a convenient way to notify friends.