B2R | Back 2 Revenue

An App Store Isn’t A Marketing Strategy

Great article from Carlo Longino on MobHappy today.  Developers: An App Store Isn’t A Marketing Strategy

Mobile App stores are not a new science, in fact they  are no different to having your product listed on the Web, in a mail order catalogue or a retail store.

 First you need to get in store - oh how much fun this can be.
 Second you need to develop your sell through through awareness, good copy, search etc. In the case of app stores this can be self-fulfilling, develop sell-through - get a better chart position, sell more!
Andy lastly its about developing your brand presence within the store. Become a famous brand like Heinz, Apple, an author or U2. Go to any good retail store and see this happening in the world of atoms and then apply your learnings to pixels and bytes!

In retail you pay for position. Bets on which will be the first tier one app-store to let you pay for position?  GetJar and Mobango have built entire businesses around this!

Dell shaking the trees on Twitter

Just saw this on El Reg this morning "Dell tweets 3min revenues"

I was recently in a sales meeting at a client. With one week of the month to go it looked like they were tracking to be 10% under target.

I remembered when I worked in AutoCAD distribution business the end of month process of  "shaking the trees." Its amazing how this frenetic calling activity produced results. How many times have you meant to order something but not got around to it yet?

Shaking the trees can be accelerated with additional incentives i.e. get something extra for free. I prefer up-sell incentives to "Buy one get one free" type deals which can often result in a shortfall in next months numbers.  A quick study of mobile operators pre-pay top up incentives shows how the huge (apparent) extra value can often be delivered at no cost e.g. free evening on network calls and  unlimited texts to on network friends if you top up £15. This is a huge percentage up-sell of from average monthly top up of £11 or £12!

Best of all, the Web now enables us to execute these campaigns in private, at great speed and without huge manpower resources. They can even be planned in ahead of time and form part of a good CRM programme or even virally  as Dell has shown with Twitter.

What would Google Do?

I have been reading What would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis I like it. In fact I like it a lot! 
I have seen many of the concepts in the book in applied pre-internet e.g. Autodesk won the battle for PC CAD by building a Virtual Corporation of sales people, training centres and service providers, or as Jeff would put it "They built a platform and let others prosper!"

A few short blogs posts to follow soon.