Pre-marketing Your App
By When you launch your app, those first few days are the most important. Thats when you’ll get the most exposure, you’ll appear high up in the “newly released” lists, people will want to write about you, and heck you might even get featured if you’re lucky.
That’s great and all, but if you wait until your app is launched to start promoting it, you’ve already lost the highly competitive race to the top.
If you want to win or even finish the race, you have to think about marketing and promotion before you even start building your app.
Pre-marketing your app is the process of generating interest and buzz about your app before you launch. Register the domain name, build a landing page, and start generating buzz while you build your app. When launch day comes, you want a mob of people in the hopper itching with excitement to install and try your shiny new app. Consider reaching out to online influencers with branded giveaways such as promotional calendars with your website and launch date marked on them. They will appreciate the useful gift and be more willing to share your app with their networks.
AppifyWP just released a free WordPress theme called AppifyWP Launchpad to help developers do just that.
It features a simplistic layout with templates for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Mac, and PC apps. Also included is a custom MailChimp widget so you can collect email address from people who are interested and notify them when you launch. You can add up to 3 slideshow screenshots or a video within the device to tease people of the awesomeness coming their way. If you want more than just a landing page, you can add WordPress pages or posts and link to them from within one of two widget areas included in the theme.
When you’re ready to launch your app, if you decide to upgrade to the full version of AppifyWP, all of your Launchpad settings will transfer automatically and you’ll get all the added features of a full blown website, more screenshots, the ability to select multiple-platforms (if your app is a hybrid app), and lots more ways to customize your site.
Having an effective landing page combined with the pre-marketing elbow grease will help set you up for a successful app launch and long term sales cycle.
