We are about to launch an iPhone puzzle game. It’s called Balcassa. It’s an addictive cross between a slider puzzle and a Rubik’s Cube and has been designed exclusively to make use of the iPhone’s touch interface. In short, we think it’s got what it takes to be a reasonable success.
The problem is... how do we get it noticed? The App Store’s a pretty crowded place these days! The solution... we’ll have to do some marketing.
The ideas for a lot of the marketing we’re about to do came from the excellent podcasts produced by Scotty from the Mac Developer Network. We also did an App Store experiment a few months back from which we learned a few lessons.
Maximise the App Store
There are a few little tricks that can help make the most of your presence on the App Store.
Browsing the App Store is highly visual and having a top notch icon will help your app stand out and be recognised. We hired top designer Emanuel Sá to design the icon for Balcassa. Working with him has been an absolute pleasure. We’ve learned a lot about design and can’t wait to work with him again.
Make sure your blurb and screenshots are as good as possible. We try keep the blurb to a minimum and let the screenshots speak for themselves. I’m sure no-one really reads all that long text, especially if they’re viewing on the iPhone.
Then we need to make sure we get out the door on the right day! What I mean by that is getting onto the front page of ‘what’s new’ in the puzzle game category. And this appears to be down to managing the release date when the app is submitted to the App Store. Believe it or not, we’ve failed to achieve this twice already! The first time we submitted an app, we set it up for immediate release. Then we waited the two weeks for Apple’s approval and it ended up being given a release date the same as the date of submission - the result was it was on page 13 on the actual release day, not page 1. On our second experiment we set the release date for three weeks in the future. Again we waited two weeks for approval. Then another week until our chosen date arrived. And what release date did Apple give it?? The date they approved it - so once again our new release was buried several pages down. So this time we’ve set the release date way into the future and we’ll reset it on the day Apple approve the app.
New releases are also automatically picked up by various sites such as 148apps and included in their RSS feeds. So you should get on some people’s radar that way.
If you are very, very lucky some nice person at Apple will like your app so much it’ll get added to one of the featured sections in the App Store. But there are just a handful of spots available and 10s of thousands of apps. If it happens that’s great, but don’t expect it. As far as marketing goes, you’re going to have to take action.
Press Release
PRMac.com offer a press release distribution service for Mac and iPhone releases that is so inexpensive it’s almost crazy not to use it. Your press release gets sent to the big Mac Magazines and various places online. You can choose to write your own press release and just use their distribution services, or you can get them to write the release for you as well. For the first one I’d certainly recommend getting PRMac to write it because the press expect them to be written in a certain style, not just your typical iTunes blurb. You provide the details and PRMac craft it into a first draft of a press release and then you enter a cycle of review with them until you are happy. A great service at a great price!
Generate a little pre-release hype
We did a nice little video of Balcassa and uploaded it to YouTube. We kept it under one minute and added some cool music. We also purchased the balcassa.com domain and put up a little pre-release site with the video and a link to @balcassa on Twitter so people could follow the news.
We also posted some pre-release info and the video onto Forums at sites such as toucharcade.com.
Fusion
The final thing we decided to do is to spend some not-insignificant money on an advert that will run throughout September. On the recommendation of our designer, Emanuel Sá, we’ve chosen to use Fusion Ads. One of the main reasons we chose Fusion is that their ads appear inside Tweetie, a very popular Twitter client for the Mac, as well as several popular sites such as Cocoia and Ember.
Balcassa is now somewhere in the mysterious App Store approval process. We’re expecting approval later this week and then we start putting this plan into action. Of course if it’s rejected then we’ll have to rapidly rethink our plans! Stay tuned. We’ll be back to keep you up-to-date with progress...
3 Comments:
I'm close to finishing a kids game for the iPhone and am starting to think about the pre-release hype side of things. The prMac idea is an interesting one - I've been so focussed in how _I'm_ going to raise awareness that I've forgotten about the professional marketing people who'd probably do a much better job, and have far wider reach than I do.
Good luck with Balcassa :)
I don't think the prMac stuff helped from the point of view of sales, but I still think it was a good thing to do as hopefully we will start being noticed by the press. Hopefully by the time we release our next product people will be saying 'Hmm I've come across these guys before'.
Ray at prMac was also really helpful. I think he provides an excellent service for the price.
Yeah, I also went with prMac after reading this article. It's too early to tell whether it helped at all with sales, but I can now Google my name or "Pogg" and I see my press release everywhere, so they've definitely got a great distribution network. I'm even getting contacted by a couple of app sites as a result - usually asking if I'm interested in advertising on their site rather than "Pogg looks great, we want to review it", but hey at least it means that app review sites are getting the news and are interested enough in contacting me.
Ray at prMac was great, and it was good to see his personal attention and advice even for the cheaper distribution option.
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