App Building Do’s and Don’ts on Marketing by Marie Davis And Margaret Hultz
Perhaps you’ve been following two not-geekish girls’ (Wickedly Sisters, aka Marie Davis and Margaret Hultz) adventure into App building. This is round two of our G spot moments (genius and groaning). Our app, Spoon and the Moon is an iNovel – an illuminated novel with illustrations, a wild story, animations, and original music. It really is a hike into a completely new art form. Much of it was brought to life by the talents of Chris Johnson. Chris is a motion graphics artist and computer programming whiz.
With our App coming to life in Chris’ good hands, we began fretting about marketing. Marketing is its own art form, and neither of us is a marketing mastermind. You might say a brilliant insight came when we realized that truth. We choked back the embarrassment and set forth to find help. Online we found plenty of good marketing information, maybe too much and it was a tad overwhelming. However, we broke it down into three basic groups, 1. Build a great App. 2. Make a cool cover and icon. 3. Spread the word.
The App build was soaring along. However, the icon and cover were tough. We put together a variety of looks and hit the streets. We asked friends, strangers, anyone we could corral for a few seconds to get their opinion. Even at the local coffee shop, we got our gussie up, and asked the patrons. Still tentative, we phoned up a successful marketing company, took a couple of their best people out to an expensive lunch and pumped them for ideas. Gathering up all of the ideas, swallowing our pride a couple of times, we began to narrow down the field. Once we settled on a cover design look, we posted it on Facebook and Twitter, asking for even more opinions. Screech!
Do you hear the squealing halt! Opinions poured in and we found out that many people thought our App icon looked as if we were hawking porn. Oops! We wanted cutting-edge and risqué-but not porn. We made some tweaks, and tried again, the second time with better results. Here’s what we learned. Let people see what you are doing throughout the creative process. Ask everyone their opinion, particularly people who work in marketing, and then take it out to the market for a test spin.
Secondly, we are writers, but not Sales Copy Writers. How do we best explain Spoon and the Moon to visitors in the App store? Raging fear began to consume us. If we didn’t communicate the whole App experience well, the entire project might flop. Yikes! We tinkered with a few different sales copy drafts. When we couldn’t get happy with it, we sought help. Who?
Fortune came our way when we found Diane Ihenfeldt-Boerstler on TaskArmy. She said she would create us a sales page for our amazing application so that our customers could experience a taste of our delightful writing before purchasing our App. Happily, that’s exactly what she did. We had been too close to the project to do our sales copy justice. Diane had the distance and the talent. Here’s another tip, hire freelancers. A freelancer can bring a completely new perspective to your project, a fresh outlook.
All of these problems are thankfully in the past, but I have to say the process was an eye-opening experience. Having the ability to recognize your own inability isn’t always the best feeling. As creative people, we can be too close to our own work. However, getting others to look at your project from completely different perspectives is a fantastic way to get out of your own head and perhaps find the direction that is best for your app.
Email us if this article helped you: spoonandthemoon@yahoo.com. We want to hear from our fellow App entrepreneurs. We would love you to visit our website at http://www.spoonandthemoonapp.com. Tune in next time. We will be giving you ideas on how to manage the stress of a big project even though the computer goes kaput, naysayers circle, others decide they hate you, bills pile up, family members get sick, and in the middle of it all you are on the biggest deadline of your life. The app Spoon and the Moon is instantly available for your Android device or Kindle Fire in the Amazon AppStore. Spoon and the Moon is also available soon on the iBook Store.
About the Author
Two “Wickedly Sisters” share their experiences in moving from their traditional work as freelance writers, novelists, and internationally syndicated cartoonists to the new frontier of app building. Join them as they share new discoveries, mistakes made, lessons learned, and victories earned.
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