How to achieve 10 million downloads or "guerilla marketing" for mobile applications
On the day when my application ( AutoCAD WS ) crossed the threshold of 1 million downloads on the App Store, the first thing I thought about was - did I have something special to successfully sell it? I was an ordinary product development manager and never imagined myself in marketing until my application was on the verge of life and death.
The startup I co-founded (later acquired by Autodesk) developed a CAD B2B application for engineers. After the launch of our product, we began to promote it in the market according to all the rules of marketing - we were engaged in the correct positioning and worked with PR agencies to find an approach to bloggers. It did not work. We made a second and third attempt - changed our positioning, updated the website, added more features to the application and wrote to more bloggers. Again did not work.
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Gradually, I came to the realization that in competition with hundreds of thousands of other applications for the attention of users, marketing is not just one of the ingredients that influence the ultimate success of the application. He is the most important. We had a small team with a very limited marketing budget, so we entered the war with what we had with our knowledge of engineers and design designers. In the following months, we abandoned everything we knew about traditional marketing and began to look for new creative ways to attract new users. And since we were engineers, we measured every step along the way, right up until the last click. Today, our product boasts 10 million downloads worldwide and customers from dozens of Fortune 500 companies.
Here are some unconventional tactics that have helped us achieve such results.
Our product seemed to us the most exciting application in the world - it gave engineers and designers new opportunities for collaboration. Unfortunately, not many of those who wrote about him shared our admiration. The press and media resources classified us as a “niche” application and we had difficulties in drawing attention to our product.
The first important step for a vertical application is to realize that it is. Your amazing aquarium care application, SongPop with classical music or the firewood application will not interest the average person, but in order to get to your vertical users, you will need to use the main distribution channels. To get out of our “niche” we had to work hard to create fun, unusual and even touching content. Instead of praising our product and its new features, we tried to make people laugh, to make them feel certain emotions towards it.
Here is an example of how we worked, trying to make our product more interesting: when launching the Android version of the application, we decided to use what Android users definitely like - the Android robot character. We came up with our mascot - Andy Engineer, and created a special video in support of the application, which demonstrated the architectural version of Andy, with many proprietary jokes "from Andy." The video gained more than 1 million views - an amazingly large number if you consider that it tells about a CAD application. This kind of material helped us get into the main blogs devoted to Android, and Android fans, in turn, told our application designers about our application.
From the very first day we have heard wonderful stories about how people used our application for various purposes - from building theme parks to oil platforms. But each time when we turned to the company with a request to write our recommendations, there were legal questions on the way or “what will happen to me from this?”. Therefore, I decided that instead of intentional contacts with users, we will work with those who turned to us.
When I received requests for technical support by email from users from interesting companies, I just took the phone and called them. Yes, imagine, you sent a request, and the creator of the application personally calls you back after 10 minutes. After discussing their problems with users, I asked why they work with our application, how it helps them to work more productively and asked for permission to write about it.
In less than two weeks we have collected amazing stories about the design of mines in Brazil, the new children's hospital, the musical theater and many other objects. A little advice: the sooner you call, the more chances you have for fruitful cooperation. I had a “one hour” rule, I called users within the first hour after receiving a letter from them.
Every successful startup has downtime, bad versions, and terrible mistakes, and in such cases, you will need a direct channel to communicate with users. Requesting users to leave their email addresses during registration was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. Because of this, we missed about 10% of users. But, this decision fully justified itself - we had a long period of downtime, waiting for the release of a new version of the application and another one, during the long shutdown of Amazon. In such cases, most users don’t check the news on the developer’s blog or Twitter, but go straight to the App Store to put one star on your app. Using e-mail and messages in the application, we were able to directly share information about the problem with our users. To our surprise, the majority of clients not only entered our position, but also we registered an increase in user activity after sending a notification to users that the application was working normally again. It’s the worst nightmare for any developer to watch a drop in the 4.5 / 5 stars rating that you worked so hard for, due to a failure of the application.
It does not matter if it is a paid or free application - when you play on a mobile field, numbers are always important. Every download is taken into account, it does not matter if it is made from New York or from a Chinese village so small that it cannot be found on Google Maps. Localization of the application was the first step, but we registered an increase in the number of downloads by a factor of 2 after the localization of our marketing materials. We started by localizing each pixel of content on our page in the app store.
It is not enough to simply translate the description of the application - we wanted users from Russia to see a screenshot written in Russian letters, users from Brazil - images signed in Portuguese, and Chinese - a list of contacts of the application with Chinese email addresses. For each country, we have developed our own set of marketing tools - sending out to the local bloggers a description of the application, made in their native language, targeted illustrations for each region from the application, and exhaustive data on the number of downloads in their country. A word of advice: we saved all the language data for various devices so that we could later send the news to the users in their own language.
[ A few illustrations used in conducting national companies - straightening the Tower of Pisa to launch an application in Italy, and the appearance of an application from a nested doll - for our Russian version ]
Marketing helps to create a history of your product, and sometimes it can be difficult to promote it if you sell something more complicated than a photo-sharing service. Our application has always been an outsider - an attempt to transfer a product with a 30-year history of work on stationary PCs to a mobile platform and to the cloud environment does not make you "the most popular student at school." But we fought for what we considered important for ourselves and achieved the results we were striving for.
With hundreds of thousands of such “outsiders” applications that are looking for their customers in the App store, I hope to see more and more marketing battles won in new, unique ways and hear success stories told by their developers. And more downloads, many, many downloads.
[ Translated by Apps4All.ru ]
The startup I co-founded (later acquired by Autodesk) developed a CAD B2B application for engineers. After the launch of our product, we began to promote it in the market according to all the rules of marketing - we were engaged in the correct positioning and worked with PR agencies to find an approach to bloggers. It did not work. We made a second and third attempt - changed our positioning, updated the website, added more features to the application and wrote to more bloggers. Again did not work.
')
Gradually, I came to the realization that in competition with hundreds of thousands of other applications for the attention of users, marketing is not just one of the ingredients that influence the ultimate success of the application. He is the most important. We had a small team with a very limited marketing budget, so we entered the war with what we had with our knowledge of engineers and design designers. In the following months, we abandoned everything we knew about traditional marketing and began to look for new creative ways to attract new users. And since we were engineers, we measured every step along the way, right up until the last click. Today, our product boasts 10 million downloads worldwide and customers from dozens of Fortune 500 companies.
Here are some unconventional tactics that have helped us achieve such results.
Make the vertical application horizontal (or, in other words, make the boring application interesting)
Our product seemed to us the most exciting application in the world - it gave engineers and designers new opportunities for collaboration. Unfortunately, not many of those who wrote about him shared our admiration. The press and media resources classified us as a “niche” application and we had difficulties in drawing attention to our product.
The first important step for a vertical application is to realize that it is. Your amazing aquarium care application, SongPop with classical music or the firewood application will not interest the average person, but in order to get to your vertical users, you will need to use the main distribution channels. To get out of our “niche” we had to work hard to create fun, unusual and even touching content. Instead of praising our product and its new features, we tried to make people laugh, to make them feel certain emotions towards it.
Here is an example of how we worked, trying to make our product more interesting: when launching the Android version of the application, we decided to use what Android users definitely like - the Android robot character. We came up with our mascot - Andy Engineer, and created a special video in support of the application, which demonstrated the architectural version of Andy, with many proprietary jokes "from Andy." The video gained more than 1 million views - an amazingly large number if you consider that it tells about a CAD application. This kind of material helped us get into the main blogs devoted to Android, and Android fans, in turn, told our application designers about our application.
Get feedback and recommendations from users - use guerilla marketing
From the very first day we have heard wonderful stories about how people used our application for various purposes - from building theme parks to oil platforms. But each time when we turned to the company with a request to write our recommendations, there were legal questions on the way or “what will happen to me from this?”. Therefore, I decided that instead of intentional contacts with users, we will work with those who turned to us.
When I received requests for technical support by email from users from interesting companies, I just took the phone and called them. Yes, imagine, you sent a request, and the creator of the application personally calls you back after 10 minutes. After discussing their problems with users, I asked why they work with our application, how it helps them to work more productively and asked for permission to write about it.
In less than two weeks we have collected amazing stories about the design of mines in Brazil, the new children's hospital, the musical theater and many other objects. A little advice: the sooner you call, the more chances you have for fruitful cooperation. I had a “one hour” rule, I called users within the first hour after receiving a letter from them.
Create a direct channel to communicate with your users - you will be grateful for this during the next shutdown of the cloud system
Every successful startup has downtime, bad versions, and terrible mistakes, and in such cases, you will need a direct channel to communicate with users. Requesting users to leave their email addresses during registration was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. Because of this, we missed about 10% of users. But, this decision fully justified itself - we had a long period of downtime, waiting for the release of a new version of the application and another one, during the long shutdown of Amazon. In such cases, most users don’t check the news on the developer’s blog or Twitter, but go straight to the App Store to put one star on your app. Using e-mail and messages in the application, we were able to directly share information about the problem with our users. To our surprise, the majority of clients not only entered our position, but also we registered an increase in user activity after sending a notification to users that the application was working normally again. It’s the worst nightmare for any developer to watch a drop in the 4.5 / 5 stars rating that you worked so hard for, due to a failure of the application.
Cut in the engines to the fullest! We are going to conquer the whole world!
It does not matter if it is a paid or free application - when you play on a mobile field, numbers are always important. Every download is taken into account, it does not matter if it is made from New York or from a Chinese village so small that it cannot be found on Google Maps. Localization of the application was the first step, but we registered an increase in the number of downloads by a factor of 2 after the localization of our marketing materials. We started by localizing each pixel of content on our page in the app store.
It is not enough to simply translate the description of the application - we wanted users from Russia to see a screenshot written in Russian letters, users from Brazil - images signed in Portuguese, and Chinese - a list of contacts of the application with Chinese email addresses. For each country, we have developed our own set of marketing tools - sending out to the local bloggers a description of the application, made in their native language, targeted illustrations for each region from the application, and exhaustive data on the number of downloads in their country. A word of advice: we saved all the language data for various devices so that we could later send the news to the users in their own language.
[ A few illustrations used in conducting national companies - straightening the Tower of Pisa to launch an application in Italy, and the appearance of an application from a nested doll - for our Russian version ]
Marketing helps to create a history of your product, and sometimes it can be difficult to promote it if you sell something more complicated than a photo-sharing service. Our application has always been an outsider - an attempt to transfer a product with a 30-year history of work on stationary PCs to a mobile platform and to the cloud environment does not make you "the most popular student at school." But we fought for what we considered important for ourselves and achieved the results we were striving for.
With hundreds of thousands of such “outsiders” applications that are looking for their customers in the App store, I hope to see more and more marketing battles won in new, unique ways and hear success stories told by their developers. And more downloads, many, many downloads.
[ Translated by Apps4All.ru ]
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/148357/
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