How To Get Your Program Professionally Marketed? 131
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ScuttleMonkey
from the doesn't-twitter-solve-all-problems-everywhere-now? dept.
from the doesn't-twitter-solve-all-problems-everywhere-now? dept.
one-man orchestra writes "I'm the sole programmer of a small, multi-platform, commercial audio program (a spectrogram editor). After over 6 months on the market, I realized that the program would never just sell itself, and that I need some real marketing done for it. Being a one-man orchestra is becoming increasingly difficult; I only can devote so much time to marketing, my skills in that department are lacking, and I'd much rather spend more time coding. Despite my lackluster part-time marketing effort, I still manage to make a modest living out of the sales. My logical assumption is that with someone competent taking care of that part, revenue could greatly scale up. But what's the right way to go about doing this? What type of people/company do I need to contact? What to expect? What to look out for?"
CPA (Score:5, Informative)
CPA [wikipedia.org] marketers are the perfect answer for you. They do marketing online full time and know how to reach the target audience for you, and you also wont be paying for nothing but the sales.
They generally get ~25% of the sale price, and you wont need to try to get converting users from adsense or any other ad service where you just pay for clicks or banners and have no idea if they will actually buy your product. With CPA model other people will do that for you. This works great for both; you get to do what you know, aka the coding and dont need to spend your time on the marketing, and they get their pay depending on their performance. It also works good for minimizing fraud, since you will be only paying for real sales.
CPA companies usually also have a good support managers that teach you what to do and how to go about it. After all, they'll profit also depend on how many sales their affiliates can deliver to you.
Some tips specific to audio apps. (Score:5, Informative)
Hi,
I can relate. I'm on the dev team of a multi-platform audio program (Renoise [renoise.com]), our community got a bit more serious in the last year or two, and the following has helped us greatly.
Listen to your users. If your users like your software, they will talk about your software. Word of mouth goes far. If your software gets feedback from an active community, you will go far. It's like a Moebius loop of good times.
Write press releases. This document [netpress.org] does a good job of outlining how to write on. The next step would be to get a list of contacts to relevant press and personally write them whenever you have something to talk about. (Examples: KVRAUDIO, Audio Magazines, Industry Websites, User blogs, Etc.) If they reply, write back.
Included user documentation. Renoise is a bit arcane. Up until version 2.0 we didn't include any documentation with the app; assuming the user would figure it out like back in the BBS/Mod days, or at least surf our wiki. The quickstart PDF introduced in version 2.0 was a big boom for us.
List your software with free online software listings. Is it really multi-platform? If so, list on Freshmeat for Linux and Apple Downloads / MacUpdate for Macintosh. These have generated significant traffic for us. Windows is all over the place, so I guess list in as many places as you want/can? Fair warning: audio-apps are niche software. You will get more downloads for a
registry cleaner than an audio app. The money we shelled out for an expedited listing on TUCOWS didn't do much except (maybe?) boost our pagerank? No significant human traffic comes from there... The world of windows is fragmented as far as we can tell.
Promotional partnerships. We got good results with MUPROMO, for example. Don't overdo/over saturate these types of promos, of course.
Other stuff specific to Renoise: We have a lot of community driven music competitions, an active IRC channel, a very lenient shareware model, and we're interested in doing hardware partnerships / have our software included with hardware. (In the works, hello world?) We are also keeping our eye on audio trade shows like NAMM / Musik Messe.
Hope this helps.
Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Informative)
Joel Spolsky's The Business of Software discussion group has tons of relevant info. I suggest looking and/or re-posting the question there.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz
Talk to someone knowledgable in marketing (duh!) (Score:5, Informative)
There are a heap of independents out there doing low cost marketing and can do things on the cheap.
Two possibles:
http://www.fullycaffeinated.com/main.htm [fullycaffeinated.com]
http://shoestringmktg.com/About_ShoeString.html [shoestringmktg.com]
Two independent marketing people that do it on the cheap.
There are others as well.
Its a starting point!
NAMM (Score:3, Informative)
If you are serious about selling something like this, hit Winter NAMM.
Don't have to have to have a booth or anything, just bring along a few dozen CDs and give them away to folks you talk to and get the big boys looking at it. While you are there, look for representatives looking for products...I have several friends that do this...generally, there is a honest to goodness analog bulletin board set up that folks leave Looking For Representation or Looking To Represent signs...
I've repped a few products in the past, but I won't do it anymore (I like being an amateur in the industry and not wanting to get sucked back into that hellhole! I like only having to visit lalaland a few times a year!).
Generally NAMM is mid to late Jan...Summer NAMM is probably going on soon, but it is pretty much a geetar show and doesn't geek out like the big one. Save some money and fly out to LA.
Re:NAMM (Score:3, Informative)
The Messe is in Germany (err...I think)...my general manager usually hits it at least every other year.
Honestly, I don't think it is as good as the NAMM show because *EVERYONE* who is everyone is there...Messe attracts a Eurocentric crowd. NAMM is global. Back when I was helping friends with their software sales, the US accounted for like 80% of the market...paying market. The European and Asian markets are a lost cause for software...statistically, you won't find many people that pay for their software there in a professional sense. The home market in the US will pirate anything too, but it really comes down to comparing markets of those who are actually the target user, not someone in a bedroom studio with garageband.
If you need any names, email me...I might be able to see who I know that's repping software these days.
Re:Exactly. (Score:2, Informative)
"One-man orchestra" is a name I just made up today as a metaphor for the situation I'm in. I didn't want to give out too much about the actual program because then usually the discussion drifts towards "I tried the demo and how do I do this and that?" when what I really want is an answer to my questions.
I really don't need that when already a majority of answers tell me how to do the marketing myself better when I was asking how to not do the marketing by myself ;-).
Re:CPA (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:VCLK [google.com]
ValueClick is the parent company of Commission Junction - one of the larger CPA (affiliate) networks, and the only one that I know of that is publicly traded.