I used to think that when you have a good product, you will never need to do marketing, and I used to think when you create a product, everybody need to use your product. That was two mistakes I’ve made when developing my App, I am so naive to have that tought, also some part because I was inexperienced in doing business in general.
I want to talk first about marketing and what I did to advertise my App. In definition marketing the activity or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising. From the definition, I think we need to focus on the last part regarding market research and advertising. Market research is and activity you need to do before you do your business, sadly I didn’t do it but luckily my App filling a niche that has some customers. In market research at least you’ll find data about who is gonna be your customer, who are your competitors, what are the similar solutions that already available, what benefit you offer in your product that better or no other products has already offered. I think these general things need to be answered before we jump into a product creation.
After we got the insight, we can create the product in accordance to it. This basic knowledge should be possessed by everybody who inspired to be an entrepreneur, because failing to do this will lead to high chances of failure. In the short term all those activities can be summarize as Idea Validation.
As software developer I had read so many stories about failed projects because developers tend to see themselves as artists who create arts in form of softwares. So with that thinking in their minds, they would think that if a beautiful product has been created, the masses should admired it without question. It maybe true when someone see a beautifully designes software, maybe they will give admiration, but not guaranteed they will need it. So it happens usually in game developers who made games to what the want to make not what market wants.
The second thing is about marketing, or how to promote the product. As small team company, we don’t have a lot of resources especially fund to pay ads. What we do is creating articles like this to drive traffics into our websites. So far the result quite satisfying, after we do blogging, our store visitior at Play Store rises and with it the numbers of installation also goes up.
One last thing I want to mention is, still related with market research, do not ever try to shape your product for all people, but shape it in accordance to your target user. As an instance, my App used to have too many Ads because I want to increase reveney from Ads, but the outcome was the opposite, my Ad’s reveneu decreased eventhough the users are increased. Now I only use one type of Ads but in my mind, I want to target parents who really care about high quality software app, and the result speak for themself, I often got high rating and more frequently lately.