As any startup knows, you have to be super creative with your marketing techniques. This is the same for my startup Swayable (web)and an iphone app . I wanted to share what I call “scrappy app marketing” Since I have an iPhone application, I figured the best way to get downloads and users to my app was to cross promote in other applications. Well that can be pretty expensive and click through and download rates from my testing were so low that I just wasn’t worth the costs.
So I decided to try appmakr.com and create my own applications that target my audiences. I have a large teen following so I created celebrity news applications ala Justin Bieber. In that applications I run inexpensive contest to win swag for that celebrity by using and engaging with Swayable.com I also have the ads within them only cross promote my own products.
Every time I do a push notification to any one of these applications Appmakr does charge a fee, but that’s my only cost and I get much targeted direct access to my potential customers in an application that they love, because I’m presenting them content about a topic they are passionate about. The engagement and downloads I get for the minimal push notifications costs is insanely high, I can’t find any other medium that gives me this much return on investment. The key is providing quality applications/content to cross promote in. Junk apps won’t do.
My goals with this were to simply get more users and more downloads of the Swayable application. In the first 3 months of doing this my traffic tripled each month and continues to grow at increasing rates. I can tell it’s in large part to these efforts based on tracking.
What applications could you create to help cross promote your products/services?
HELP GET SCRAPPY APP MARKETING SESSION INTO SXSW 2012! Myself and Maya Bisineer (founder of MemeTales)have pitched a session titled “Scrappy app marketing” for SXSW Interactive 2012, to go into more detail about how to do this technique and other nifty little tricks.
Please take a moment and vote for our session so we can hopefully be selected to present a full session on “Scrappy app marketing”
