NEWS AND VIEWS FROM THE CONNECTED SET

‘Failing to plan is planning to fail….’ The age old words that ring in the ears of anyone who has lived through a wedding.  They apply just as much with the promotion of your app.  Before we started our plan, we reviewed the strategy for our app by answering these questions:

1. What are the objectives for the app?
   • Promotional or profit based?
   • Engaging, functional or both?
2. What are the app’s unique selling points?
3. Who is the target audience?
   • Where will you find this audience?
   • What benefits does the app provide the audience?
   • What are your desired results, your KPIs?
4. What are your desired results, your KPIs?
   • Sales revenue?
   • Volumes?
   • Quality of audience?
   • Engagement levels?
   • Other achievements – awareness, rankings, coverage?
5. Who are your competitors, or who do you benchmark yourself against
   • Other apps
   • Other websites
   • Other services/products
6. What do your competitors do well and not so well?

With a strategy in place, planning becomes much easier.  We found that the plan should be as detailed as possible, including information about who will be doing what, when and how. We found it useful to include anticipated results.  It’s especially good for when you exceed them – or you can blame bad forecasting when you don’t! It may be useful to do this for each activity and include your desired conversion rates.  Perhaps an e-mail blast to 20,000 contacts would achieve a 2% conversion rate (a typical conversion rate according to the DMA) , which equates to 400 downloads.

The next eight steps I’ve listed are the kinds of activities we found effective to in our promotional campaigns that you might want to include in your plan. I’m sure you’ll have loads more ideas though.

Once you have a detailed plan, summarise it and move on to step 3,which is the next post.