Low Budget iPhone/Android App Marketing

After launching piffle connect, we wanted to try out different ad networks and see how many downloads they could get. With some research online, it was evident that a budget like $100 or $200 may get you a lot of views like 30,000+ but won’t get you many downloads (max 200 in some cases). Most companies that were successful spent something like $7000 every day e.g. an app case study for AdMob I read spent like $15000 over two days to get somewhere like 100,000 clicks. That's an incredibly low CTR but it earned them to spot in the top 18 on the app store which in turn doesn’t need much advertisement afterward because usually, that gives you a lot of visibility in the app store.

It was evident that this strategy works perfectly but the budget was something that I knew would not work for our products or any of our partners. Honestly, that's a budget for most of app developers just to get a basic app done. We knew $100, $200, or even $1000 spending wouldn’t be enough as far as ad networks are concerned. We decided to look for alternatives in $100, and $200 budgets, and I will go through some of the ideas that we tried and are looking to try.

• Give the money directly to the users. Sounds interesting? Well, the idea is good but how to implement it? The solution is simple and has been used by companies for decades. Contests. If you have applications like games that have leaderboards or that can have contests like the best photo, top player, and top scorers. You can announce rewards for the top 10, 20, and 30 users depending on your budget. We have tried this concept recently with a beat that is a competition app for sports lovers. We will be giving out $25 to the top 5 users who get 500 votes on their videos. This translates into $0.05 per download for each user who votes on the video which is a pretty good rate. Imagine doing this for a company that has a $15000 budget. The app is going to launch a day after I am writing this post so I will post the results later but I believe it's much better than spending it on ad networks that might get you nowhere after $125.

• Spend on paying people for posts who have a good following on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook It's good to have friends who have 20k, or 30k followers on their Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook pages. Most of us don’t have that but the good news is that many people have this dedicated fan following and would do a post for you for $10-20 per post (including repeated posts per day). The benefit of this over ad network is that even if they are charging you $30 per day, a post on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram would be there on their profile always and the ad on ad networks would just disappear after depleting your account. We tried this with piffle connect for the spin island and got 10 times to increase in downloads. I have posted about this here.

• Spending on getting paid reviews is the same as 2) but the difference is that many of these paid review sites have a big network with podcasts, youtube accounts with millions of viewers, well-ranked websites on google, and a good fan following on Twitter. They might do a nice video review of your app as well for something as low as $30. That's all for now. I will keep posting information on the results of different marketing activities performed and their results.