Recently, I worked with a company to develop a strategy for a mobile app they’re developing. What follows is the advice I gave them on
- Making sure their app is laser-targeted to exactly the right market, and
- Getting the most exposure (and the most sales!) possible in the App Store.
I charged them $x,000 for this advice, but you, dear reader, are getting it for free. I advise you to pay attention to it as though you had paid full price!
Note that this post is focused on developing for the Apple (iOS) App Store, but the same principles will apply to Android apps on Google Play.
- Know thy market
Much of the advice I’m going to present here is absolutely dependent on knowing the people that you hope will buy your app. This is market research, plain and simple.
If your target audience is males between the ages of 18 and 55, you need to go back to the drawing board—an 18 year old has nothing in common with a 55-year old, and you’re going to stretch yourself thin trying to satisfy these disparate groups. Being all things to all people will stop you from really connecting with any customers. It’s much better to thrill a small number of people than leave a large number indifferent.
On the other hand, if you have found a particular point that all your target audience feels the same about, you can design your product to speak directly to that need. To take the above example, if your target market is gamers between 25 and 55 who have a certain nostalgia for Pac Man-style arcade games, you have your audience—that group has a very clear common desire that your app can satisfy.
Talk to your (potential) customers
With your audience in mind, you need to listen to them. (Programmers in the audience will recognize what follows as “requirements engineering.” It’s one of the most difficult parts of software development, and the savviest firms make sure they do this on an ongoing basis throughout product development.)
Listening to your customers includes some or all of the following:
- Find a handful of people in your audience (more than 5, fewer than 30) and talk to them about your app in person.
- Find out if they’ve tried or bought competing apps (and at this point, you can be nearly certain that there are competing apps!), and get their opinion on them—what did they love about those, what did they not love?
- Show them mock-ups of your app and see if they can poke around them intuitively. Ask them how they would do some task in your mocked-up app and see if things work like they expect. Make sure that your app includes features that are essential to satisfy their need, but lean enough to be tightly focused on that need. (Presentation software is great for doing these kinds of mockups. Keynotopia stocks a number of templates for doing mockups of Mac, iOS, and Windows apps in Keynote.)
- Ask them to describe why they would want an app like yours, and pay attention to the words they use—those same words are what you should a) have in mind when you’re developing, and b) use in your description on the App Store. That is, their language should inform both your development goals and your marketing. Hint: “Easy to use” is not a selling point (everyone says their app is easy to use). On the other hand, “makes me more confident when presenting to the boss” might be.
- Read reviews for competing apps.
- As in the above, pay attention to the language people use. How do they describe the benefits they get from the app?
- See if there are obvious places to improve. If half the reviews for a competing app complain about a lack of feature x, you have a good argument for making x high-priority.
- If one of your competitors dominates the others in terms of sales, find out why—is its App Store presence (including title, photos, description, reviews, etc.) stronger? Do the others have obvious flaws? Be sure to look at each app’s pricing history when considering this. (You can get pricing history from any number of sites, including App Shopper.)
[Aside: In most cases, it isn’t possible to get exact numbers on how many times a certain app has been downloaded. However, you can get a good relative comparison simply by looking at the number of reviews or the ranking. A pair of researchers from Carnegie Mellon (Rajiv Garg and Rahul Telang)
suggest the following formulas
for estimating the number of downloads for an app:
- downloads on iPad = 13,516 × rank –0.903, and
- downloads on iPhone = 52,958 × rank –0.944,
where “rank” is the app’s rank on the Top 200 Paid Apps list.]
- Choose your pricing model
You need to know what pricing model you’ll use before you build your app. This can inform what features you support, who your competition is, how the interface is designed, and more.
Is freemium an option?
According to the app marketing firm Distimo, “freemium” pricing models—which encourage free downloads, with paid upgrades to unlock the full feature set—have come to dominate the App Store’s most successful offerings. In 2011, half of the revenue from the 200 top grossing apps in the iPhone App Store was generated by freemium apps (compared to just 8% in 2010). By the next year, in-app purchases accounted for nearly 70% of that revenue. Moreover, those number don’t account for advertising revenue from the non-paying customers of those apps!
You can certainly still make money using a standard (one-off) pricing model—Distimo’s 2012 data indicates that 35% of the revenue from the biggest publishers came from such purchases. However, if freemium makes sense for your app, you should strongly consider it.
The general expectation by freemium users is for some amount of advertising to support the free offerings, with in-app purchases unlocking features and removing that advertising. You can violate these expectations (either with more intrusive advertising in the free versions or some amount of advertising in paid versions), but I suggest thinking very carefully before doing so.
As an example of the potential success of the freemium model, one of my partners develops the X-Plane flight simulator app for Android. They used a one-off purchase model for the first 2 or so years of the app’s life, and wound up with a bit under 500,000 users. When they transitioned to a freemium model, they shot past 1,000,000 downloads in the span of about two months. Now, they didn’t include advertising in the free version, but they’re kicking themselves now—having a million or so users clicking ads on their loading screens could have been seriously profitable for them.
Consolidate apps to improve your rankings
Another, often overlooked reason to choose a freemium model is your improved ability to break into the Top Charts. The Top Charts, like the New York Times Bestsellers list, are self-perpetuating. Getting listed in any given category is hard, consolidating your apps helps.
For instance, if your “lite” version is separate from your full app, they’ll be ranked as separate apps, so a download of one doesn’t count toward the ranking of the other. Likewise, if you have separate iPhone and iPad versions, a download on one platform won’t count toward the other. Depending on your goals, this might be acceptable, but it’s worth considering consolidating them into a single app.
What’s in a price?
Whether you’re using freemium or a traditional pricing model, a few trends have emerged in the App Store. This analysis isn’t based on hard data, but is should serve as a good guideline for your prices:
- A free app indicates your primary revenue is coming from somewhere else (ads, improved brand recognition, etc.)
- A $0.99 price point indicates a very basic app.
- A $1.99 or $2.99 price point indicates substantial features beyond what might be found in a free app.
- A $3.99 or $4.99 price point indicates a premium app. For high-quality, full-size games, this is about the sweet spot. (Even big-name publishers like EA Games charge about this much.)
- A price beyond about $7 is an anomaly, especially on iPhone. Only a small handful of apps can successfully charge this much. (For the longevity of app publishers, I hope this changes in the future, but you aren’t pricing based on your hopes, are you?) At the time of this writing, there are just 4 apps in the Top 200 Grossing Apps list charging more than $7.
Analyzing the competition
As with your market research, you can get tremendous value from analyzing the competition when you’re trying to decide on a price. Don’t automatically decide you need to undercut your most successful competitor’s price, but you should certainly take account of that price when choosing your own. If you’re going to charge more, you’ll need to make a strong case for why your app is worth it.
The effect of price changes
According to data from Distimo, the average effect of a price drop (which in their data range from $1 to $4) is as follows:
- For iPhone apps, cumulative downloads grow by 1665% five days after the drop.
- For iPad apps, cumulative downloads grow by 871% five days after the drop.
When the price rises by similar amounts in the future (e.g., at the end of a sale), expect your downloads to drop back to the same level they were at previously within 5 days.
Note that this does not account for the potentially negative reviews that accompany these price changes (which may have longer term effects). Customers may be angry that they just bought the app at $x, but you’re now selling it for less. Likewise, they might be angry that you previously sold it for $y, but are now charging more!
- Build your app
This is the hard part. It’s also way beyond the scope of this article. However, bear in mind that you don’t always need to build your app from code.
Tools like PhoneGap allow you to build native apps using HTML, CSS, and Javascript—perfect for small development teams with experience in Web development, but not Objective C. Another option is “toolkit” style development like EachScape, where you get a collection of drag-and-drop building blocks from which to create your app. Or, if your app is just a portal for your existing brand (such as an online store or event center), you might be able to use a drop-in solution like Branded Business Apps.
- Name your app (a.k.a. SEO in the App Store)
Search engine optimization (SEO) in the App Store is a misnomer. There’s no such thing. In the past, Apple allowed you to use keywords to describe your app, and when a user searched for one of those keywords, your app would show up. That’s no longer the case, though.
Today, the only way your app will appear in the search results is if a user’s search terms include words in your app’s name.
This is an easy point of failure. For instance, I worked with the company that develops the X-Plane flight simulator, including the iPhone/iPad versions. They were unaware that a search for “flight simulator” in the App Store never matched their app—its name was simply “X-Plane 9.” The only way a user could find it, then, was by knowing to look for X-Plane!
So, make sure your title contains relevant keywords. In the example above, “X-Plane 9” needed to be renamed to “X-Plane 9 Flight Simulator.” Just be sure to keep your app’s name natural—“X-Plane 9 Flight Sim/Simulator” would be an awful name, despite matching more keywords.
- Describe your app
You’ll need a description of your app in the App Store. There have been volumes written on how to write copy that converts (i.e., drives sales/downloads), such as the excellent books from Copy Hackers. However, a few things tend to trip people up in the App Store.
First, note that only the first 4 or so lines of your description will be visible initially (both on desktops and mobile devices), so make those lines count. They need to entice the person to stick around—whether that means clicking the “More” link to see the rest of the description, browsing your photos, or what have you.
For instance, Real Racing 3 does a great job of this. The first line begins “Hyper-realistic. Pure fun. And FREE.” The final line viewable on iPhone is “Trailblazing new features include…More.” You can bet plenty of people say “What?! What are these new features?!” and immediately click the “more” link. The situation on iPad is less enticing, but it still provides a strong reason to stick around—the last visible line lists the manufacturers whose cars they feature, so you see “Porsche, Lamborghini, Dodge, Bugatti, and Audi.” After reading that, anyone interested in a racing game is ready to see more.
Another successful tactic is to use some of these top 4 lines for social proof, including quotes from great reviews (either in the App Store or on a prominent Web site) and accolades your app has received. This might include something like this:
★★★★★ Award Winner from MacWorld
“This app has made my life measurably better.” — Steve Wozniak
(Note the special “★” character allowed in the descriptions!)
- Create your screenshots
Depending on the device used, your app’s first 1 or 2 screenshots will be visible immediately—your first screenshot is even visible before clicking on your app, thanks to the new search format.
Like the first lines of your description, you need to make these screenshots count. They should capture the essence of what your app is about. That means no screenshots of your settings pane, and probably none of your startup screen.
You can add text to your images (and even make them not based on screenshots) as you see fit. Just because your user interface is intuitive in actual use doesn’t mean that people will “get it” when they see your screenshot.
Calculator+ is a great example of where a description can be useful. The app has a handwriting recognition feature, but you have to stare at their first screenshot awhile in order to figure that out—in other words, they’ve violated the rule of “don’t make me think.” A small amount of explanatory text—like “No buttons needed! Write your equations by hand”—would go a long way.
- Create your icon
Your icon is the last piece of the first-impression puzzle (together with your name, description, and screenshots). This should be professionally designed and, like your first screenshot, should make it immediately obvious what your app is all about.
Calculator apps do this very well. For instance, “Calculator for iPad Free” has an icon that’s clearly evocative of a physical calculator, and “HD” and “FREE” give you two reasons to choose this over competitors. Real Racing also gets this right—it’s nothing but a photorealistic sports car, exactly the sort of thing a potential customer wants to race around in.
- Publish your app
At this point, you have a strong start for marketing your app in the App Store. Make sure you’re also taking advantage of the many other ways to market your app, such as:
- building a brand (possibly based on other successful apps),
- encouraging great reviews (possibly by prompting within the app),
- A/B testing new features and designs for improved user engagement, and
- encouraging social sharing (for instance, by prompting users to invite their friends to user your app via Facebook or email).