A successful software launch can be a critical component to the long-term viability of any new software, app, or service. How can you plan your launch to really boost your product’s success?
This article gives you six helpful steps to follow.
Keep in mind: as much time and energy should go into planning the launch and your ongoing software marketing strategy as goes into productizing and testing the actual product.
To help you plan, we have just launched our Go-to-Market Toolkit, which includes guides, templates and checklists to plan a successful software launch. The Toolkit is available now here.
If you’re bringing a new product, software or service to market, then you need to have a go-to-market strategy: what are your plans to launch your product and get customers and interest?
Below is a simple week-by-week checklist leading up to a new software product introduction that you can use to keep all those marketing & promotion details straight. If you need some help putting your go-to-market plan together, or just have a few questions, then sign up for a Software Marketing Consult session here.
Next month we will be introducing our updated Go-to-Market planning package which will include a more detailed checklist and timeline, GTM strategy template, PR templates, eGuides and more! Sign up for our newsletter here to be notified when it is available.
8-12 weeks before launch:
Product name finalized
Acquire domain name, social handles for product name
USP (Unique Selling Proposition) – what is the key value of your product to your target customer? why are you/your business the right choice (build credibility)?
Create a high-level launch plan:
Goals
Strategies (Who is the audience? What channels? When? What messages? How will the customer find it? Why should they act?)
Tactics – specific activities to accomplish the strategies
Metrics – how to measure success
4 weeks before launch:
Website ready (or new web page / sub-domain for product)
All social pages ready
Promotion plan done:
Plan for pre-launch, launch & post-launch press releases
Media/influencer targets identified, with contact info
Do you need to research the mobile application market but unsure where to begin? Worried that your mobile app idea may not be a great business opportunity? Don’t have time or money for a custom mobile app market analysis or an expensive research report?
Don’t reinvent the wheel. This article will give you some suggestions for doing mobile apps market research.
Check out the article below for:
a summary of the latest research on the mobile application market, which you can use to start your app market research,
a list of some of the latest mobile application market research reports, if you’d like to purchase a professional study,
a step-by-step process to create your own custom mobile app market analysis for your specific niche,
suggestions for affordable assistance if you just need a little help without breaking the bank.
With a good app marketing strategy you can make sure that your sales and marketing efforts aren’t in vain. Keep your limited resources focused on your business goals with these 7 tips to planning a strong software marketing strategy.
A focused software marketing strategy will decrease your time to market and shorten your sales cycle. It can drive the most effective app launch for your software.
To start planning your app marketing strategy, follow the 7-step process below:
Make sure you fully understand your market, including size, trends, and key players.
Segment your potential customer base.
Make detailed profiles of your customer segments.
Identify which of your segments are your early adoption targets.
Identify their key pain points and sales process needs.
Currently, the leading platforms for mobile app developers are iPhone and iPad (ie, iOS devices) and Android smartphones and tablets. As a developer of mobile apps, do you choose one platform to focus your app development efforts on, or do you support both? And what about the other mobile platforms such as Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, and BlackBerry?
In making that decision, do you look at which platform has the largest installed base? Or do you go by which platform is currently shipping the largest volume of units? Or what about which platform has the highest overall in-app usage time? The answers vary drastically depending on how you frame the question.
Most of the published data on mobile share focuses on platform market share, which shows a rapid increase of Android compared to iOS. However, an article published by Business Insider in March instead considered the amount of actual time spent online as a proxy for app usage, which paints a very different picture with iOS clearly dominating.
The rapid rise in Android smartphone market share compared to the iPhone is clearly indicated in Silicon Alley Insider’s chart of the day from November 2011 which shows Android smartphones at 52.5% of the market, while iOS is less than 20%.
At first glance, this type of data may give a developer of mobile apps pause: Should one be prioritizing an Android version over iOS or vice versa?
With all the talk of platform market share, what many of us forget is that the relevant question is the market share of mobile app usage time. After all, that is what users will ultimately pay the app developer for. Silicon Alley Insider’s chart of the day from March 13 2012 instead tells the real story of Android versus iOS.
The chart from ComScore shows the digital traffic market share of connected devices by OS in the US – it’s a very different story than what’s told by the device platform market share where Android shipments are now dominating. When you look at it by digital traffic – the actual mobile Web usage – the picture changes, with iOS dominating at 60% and Android far behind at only 32%. Similarly, Net Applications finds iOS has a 4.4x larger web share than Android. On top of that, a number of studies have also found that iOS users are much more likely to pay for apps or make in-app purchases. On average, developers make 6x more on iOS apps for the equivalent app.
This data seems to clearly indicate that the first platform of choice for a mobile app should still be iOS.
So if you develop mobile apps, what choices do you make? Please vote in our poll:
Software Marketing Advisor Blog 