The second panel today at iStrategy, the title of which was “Engaging Your Audience with Mobile Apps”. The panellists were:
- Moderator: Mark Curtis – CEO, Flirtomatic
- Panellists: Alex Musil – EVP Product Marketing, Shazam,
- Noah Everett – Founder, Twitpic
- Konstantinos Papamilitiadis – Product & Engineering, Taptu
- Mark Boerrigter – Digital Marketeer, Green Orange
Mark Curtis described his method at Flirtomatic named “the funnel” which starts with
there is nothing magical behind application marketing
Alex Musil from Shazam said that “it all starts with the value proposition of your app” and the next step is to ensure that the “people who are in the best position to promote your app, know about you”. Then Shazam works on Appstore optimisation (working on keywords). Partner promotion includes carriers he added, but that the most important thing is “word of mouth” which – he said – is the reason why Shazam is adding a million users a month thanks to Word of Mouth. This is what is going to pay out he concluded, in the long term.
“not everyone can get under Apple’s underpants!”
Yet not anyone is Shazam! Mark Boerrigter (Football Meister Dutch app) said that the death rate is high amongst applications. Mark Curtis agreed and said that this was an important statement. He also talked about “the death valley” which Mark is calling “the long tail of despair” and these are the apps which are never downloaded. 80% of apps are flops added K Papamiliatiadis, that is to say that they make less than 1000 downloads! He added that Taptu tested all sorts of things but the only thing that worked was the promotion ads on Android and Apple Appstore. Once you have convinced them, he commented, your adoption rate will be staggering. Yet, Mark Curtis stated that “very few people can get under Apple’s underpants” meaning that few of apps manufacturers can actually sell their business case to Apple.
is product design the new marketing?
“What we haven’t heard here” added Mark Curtis, is that there should be a huge reliance on advertising, which means that a lot of effort has to be put on product design and that “product design [might well become] the new marketing”.
Original Post: http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/80-of-apps-are-making-less-than-1000-istrategy/
