Hi,
So, I speak to a lot of developers and the most mentioned subject is promoting your app keeping up with questions, etc from customers/press, etc.
Since there are a lot of small developers out there, promoting your apps yourself can be time consuming and also confusing if you don’t know how (website, facebook, press releases, youtube videos, etc, etc). That time being better spent doing what we do best, making apps.
I was wondering if any developers on this forum pay a freelancer to promote their app and if it’s worth it? And how you measure this value (apart from more sales).
I’m talking specifically about bespoke freelancers who provide a personalised service to customers not ad networks ,etc.
Thanks for reading
Mark
Nothing, to be honest.
It’s exactly the opposite imo. Small developers need to use their personal story/behaviour/style to get noticed, at all. Wannabee businessmen are getting laughed at pretty easily. Why would a small dev give the pleasure of getting in touch with the press away to someone else who is totally unattached and not emotional to the project.
If you see the marketing process as part of the game development process, then it comes natural and you never ever want to give it out to a stranger. I would never outsource this process to a single person that is not attached to it. Bigger agencys prove they can do it with the right amount of money and are useful by daring to neglect an offered game. But if you can afford that I guess you’re not the typical “small dev” anymore.
It’s no wonder that so many socalled marketing experts come out left and right, nowadays. Smaller devs fall for it and invest money into something that is bound to fail from the beginning. This attitude of “Oh, I don’t know marketing, here can you take my last belongings and please run away with it ? I won’t notice you were useless to me, anyways”. It’s amazing how many of these “personalized services” popped up lately. It’s just a huge scam, catching the uninformed smaller devs that believe marketing can sell a mediocre game at best.
I mean honestly, if a small developer pays others to do the marketing, it can’t be that small of an entity, at first.
I’m sorry, I think that sounded harsh 
Totally not directed at you, just a general rambling, I guess 
Not at all harsh, seems fair enough.
But, if you knew someone and you trusted that person to speak for you, would you pay a certain amount so that A. You could get on with your next app and B. they would do a better job faster/better/cheaper than you could? After all, your time is worth money right?
If you find yourself with plenty of time and you know how to spread the word then of course, you should do it yourself (but if you have plently of time, are you being as successful as you could be?) In this age most of us are social media savvy but I’ve been reading up on what some promoters do and it’s quite a lot, it’s getting to be quite an art.
What I’m wondering is, I have friends who are now moving from PR to ‘something else’ and, since the skill set is the same, wonder how effective they could be for small developers. Personally, I’d rather make apps than respond to Twitter messages, or Facebook comments, i just don’t have the time. Maybe that’s a bad thing? Depends on the type of communication I guess. That’s why I think, if there was someone you trusted to speak for you, who had good experience doing this kind of thing, I would ask them to do it.
But then the question is how much?
Mark
I wouldn’t.
In the end I would have to explain why the app is soo cool, so good, why i decided to create it,… I mean how shall that person as an outsider understand why the app is being made.
If you made a significant amount of money, and I mean thiiiiiiiis much, and the projects are of a really big scale, then I’m sure there would be a person in the team hat has these skills and do just marketing .But that would not be a small dev team anymore.
I’m following lots and lots of devs that do their own “marketing/socialmedia” thing on twitter and I love to study how they get in touch with different journalists. Someone not being attached to the product in terms of being fulltime part of the team just seems weird and overthetop for a small dev.
I studied lots and lots of marketing efforts of socalled smaller devs but these were all coming from a very personal approach and an outsider could not think of something like that, imo. It would be to far away from the “soul” of the project.
If I would choose to take money for marketing it would be a wellknown service because marketing is quite personal. And I would want my marketing efforts to be heard. A newcomer no matter how smart in PR he is won’t get far without having build personal contacts with reviewers online or in person via game conferences.