Last week’s episode of the BBC show The Apprentice saw the two teams pitched against each other to create the most popular mobile app in under 24 hours. In this article, Patrick Mork, GetJar’s CMO, looks at how The Apprentice teams could have driven higher global downloads of their app, and what it takes to successfully launch an app in today’s competitive market.
Three key points The Apprentice taught us about marketing apps:
• The women’s team won, partly because their app had the greatest global exposure on Wired.com – proving that a distribution partner with mass global-reach is imperative
• Both teams gave away their apps for free, monetising later through in-app purchases – showing consumers want free content
• The boys failed because their messaging was unclear – demonstrating the power of effective app marketing and POS strategy
Last Wednesday’s performance from both teams on The Apprentice highlighted quite a few issues essential to consider when designing and planning the launch of an app. First of all, it’s key to understand who is your target audience? What are they looking for and what’s important to them? Although this sounds obvious, as proven on the show, many come up with a cool idea, build it and then figure out who they should sell it to. Successful ones usually do the reverse. They identify a need, try to understand who the customer might be, what they want, and then build something that will be of interest.
Second of all is distribution – this will make or break, not only an app but a company. Two points to consider: Firstly, apps are like consumer goods. No matter how much time is invested or how good an app is, it’s very likely that most consumers will only keep an app on their phone for a period of days or weeks at most. Consumers tend to lose interest quickly unless an app really becomes a mainstay part of their lives. So find as many distribution channels as possible. Use carriers, handset manufacturer pre-installs, app stores and look for business development deals with platform developers that can support your app – like GetJar does. It’s like selling Coke or Pepsi. The more outlets you use, the more downloads you will do. The more people download your app, the more they will recommend it to friends.
Word of mouth is also very important. Our recent app research showed that almost 17% of consumers discovered apps through friends or social media – one of the reasons why we launched Facebook Connect, a portal which allows users to share their app download activity and comments through wall posts and news feeds.
But despite some bad decisions, both teams did get the launch strategy right, offering the apps for free and then building in in-app monetization. Not even thrifty businessman Sir Allan Sugar would argue with this approach – free content is king when it comes to apps.
By Patrick Mork
Chief Marketing Officer
GetJar
www.getjar.com
