App Marketing, The Appy Entertainment Way, Part 1
About Our App Marketing, Development Community Initiative
In efforts to grow a community around app marketing and development topics, W3i is excited to bring guest bloggers from the “app battlefield” to you to share their successes, their defeats and the lessons learned along the way. If you think you or someone you know would make a good subject for a blog/podcast/video etc., feel free to email ryan.ruud@w3i.com with the details. You can join the conversation on twitter by using the hashtag #appschat.
We kicked off our guest series with a post on the return of Facebook notifications from the CEO of Mad Turtle Media, now we’re turning to mobile to learn tricks of the trade from Appy Entertainment’s Brand Director, Paul O’Connor.
App Marketing Success, The Appy Way Part 1
The launch of our game Trucks & Skulls for iPad and iPhone/iPod touch was the most successful in the two year history of Appy Entertainment. Trucks & Skulls roared out of the gate and quickly became the fastest-selling game we’ve ever made. It was a product design and marketing triumph, largely because Apple featured our game in the very first week on iTunes!
That’s right, sports fans — the key to a successful launch is to get yourself featured on the top banner on iTunes. In other news, water is wet, and the earth orbits the sun.
It’s difficult to write any kind of report or appraisal of our Trucks & Skulls launch due to our very good fortune in being featured as Apple’s iPad App of the Week in the United States on launch day (and then being named iPhone Game of the Week pretty much everywhere in the world two weeks later). This is what is known as a “happy problem to have”.
But it is a real problem for writing this article because that Apple feature was so gigantic that it overshadows everything else we did to launch Trucks & Skulls.
And we did do a lot for the launch. Here’s an overview.
Early Press
Our first marketing of Trucks & Skulls was an informal debut at Austin GDC in early October. Appy Entertainment has attended this show a couple years in a row, and it has earned dividends for us not so much for the programing as for the networking.
Compared to the San Francisco show, GDC Austin is “human scaled” and an excellent venue to meet other developers and members of the press. It was at Austin that we first got our near-complete build of Trucks & Skulls in front of key press, resulting in hands-on pre-release impressions articles from Slide-To-Play and 148Apps.
IGN Editor Levi Buchanon also took an interest in the game, and while Levi didn’t run a pre-release report on the game, we did correspond through the completion of the title, and IGN later gave Trucks a rave review and named it their iPhone Game of the Month for November.
It’s nice to bring your game to the attention of players early, but we feel the impact of previews is muted in the buy-it-now world of the App Store. It’s great to build awareness, but it’s better if the reader can buy your game right after reading the review, rather than having to remember to buy it at a later date. Where these previews helped us most was in help bringing Trucks & Skulls to the attention of “Customer Zero” — Apple.
To be continued . . .
Find out what it takes to appeal to Customer Zero and the checklist Appy uses to launch their apps.
Paul O’Connor, Brand Director, Appy Entertainment
Paul is a 25 year veteran of the video game business, having designed games and directed teams for Electronic Arts, Interplay, Oddworld Inhabitants, and High Moon Studios. Paul commands Appy’s marketing, advertising, and public-relations efforts, landing Appy’s games in the pages of Entertainment Weekly, in high-profile reviews at Macworld and the Huffington Post, and in spotlight features in Apple’s iTunes store.
December 8th, 2011 at 11:34 pm
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