Man marketing is hard. Our product is an Augmented Coloring book app aimed at 4 to 11 year olds. It's quite a unique app in that it's the first augmented reality app that uses a real coloring book page (as in one that is printed.) What amazes me is how hard it is to post in teacher and parent forums. They are gated communities. Twitter is worse lol. Billions of people talking no one listening and accounts full of bot followers (sometimes 20K plus.) I am only just now understand the power money has to open the right doors. Anyway, all respect to this forum and anyone who has achieved success Outside the normal facebook, email list, twitter, posting in forums, blogs and review sites, and paying for review sites what options do I have left in terms of marketing on a shoe string? Tell me the secret
Did you try http://momswithapps.com/ ? They're a very good and powerful community of developers, bloggers, review sites, users... who are very interested in educational mobile applications. If your app is good and unique, they will be willing to share it to the world, and it's very effective.
You can use promoterapp.com to get a huge list of news and review sites, in which you'll find dozens of sites aimed at parents and kids. Seriously, it's a goldmine.
We had similar problems with an app just like yours (coloring game for little kids). Most of reviews websites for iOS apps for kids all work on a pay-per-review basis, it's really a strange little world. We contacted every websites and the only one who made a non-payed review was iMore http://www.imore.com/discovering-colors-animals-iphone-ipad-review
Kids apps are some of the hardest to get noticed. The reason is exactly as you pointed out. It takes a long time of relationship building to get noticed in that parenting/teaching world. There really isn't any hidden trick, unfortunately.
Your target market, the children, are not the ones that buy the devices...and most of the parents/teachers won't go see the reviews on such websites, unfortunately. So your marketing is kind of pointless to say the least. The only way that I would see this happening, is if you went directly in person, meeting with the school director/teachers and present your app... you know...the old fashion way
I do not agree with that. Many parents are on Facebook. So you could target your marketing on Facebook. Another thing could be Google AdWords. Think of parents that google "Games for kids" and get your product as result.
1, Buy installs via Facebook Mobile Ads for App Installs - they're still cheap and you can target those campaigns with hell of accuracy. But beware, if you have never done any Facebook ad campaign, ask for help. Be sure to target every country separately and don't go below 100k target group. 2, Buy installs via mobile ad networks on websites parents could possible visit. 3, Buy installs via mobile app cross promotion services. Without money, it is really hard. Try contacting web admins of those sites you mentioned directly. Offer them an affiliate deal, percentage of revenue from users they brought to you. Here is my guide about mobile app marketing, however it's too general for your special case. I'll probably write one about children apps soon.
Hey katykelly, Have you tried mommy bloggers? We're going to be releasing our app soon and I've compiled our marketing list to include mom blogs in addition to dev review sites, parent sites, etc. I'd be interested to hear more about your experience - where you've had luck, where you haven't as our game is an educational app targeted at ages 2-5.
