App Marketing Rule #1: Get Featured By Apple

Our feature this week is by Robleh Jama, star Dad developer from the team at Tiny Hearts. Their award-winning app, Pocket Zoo, dominated the charts on the iTunes App Store earlier this year and is still going strong. His article details a behind-the-scenes look at specific steps they took to ensure App Store success. Consider this a must-read for developers world-wide who share the same goals. Thanks for sharing RJ!

When my wife and I set out to create a fun and educational live zoo app for animal lovers we naturally felt excited, a little nervous, and wondered like everyone else “how in the world are we going to shine amongst the hundreds of thousands of apps?”  Our goal was simple: make an awesome app that we’re proud of and get featured by Apple on the front page of iTunes! We knew this was going to be quite a process, but just how adventurous was about to set in.  It all came down to one thing for us as we created the app we dreamed of: paying attention to every last detail.

 We were fortunate enough to receive a global New & Noteworthy feature in June, less than a month after we launched Pocket Zoo with Live Animal Cams. The feature helped propel us into the Top 50 overall paid apps list and the #1 Education spot in the US. Our zooperb app has continued to be featured since then and is now a What’s Hot app in 14 European App Stores. Here are 5 things we did to help ensure our app got noticed by the ever elusive iTunes editorial team.

Build An All-star team

We knew it would take a very talented and creative team to bring our vision of a virtual zoo to life. We put together a nimble group of friends and talented creatives to compliment our skills. The team included my artist wife, two illustrators, a motion graphics and UI designer, a programmer, and myself as the quarterback and creative director. I had worked with most of our team on previous projects which helped speed things along. We learned that amazing things can happen when you combine a talented group of people and extremely tight deadlines. The App Star Awards were two weeks away, which meant we had less than two weeks to make a prototype complete with the UI, illustrations, sample content and demo.

 TIP: Team work makes the dream work as they say, and embrace constraints.

Design A Must-Have App

It all started with a unique idea of combining a virtual zoo with live animal cams. We asked ourselves “Is there an app for that?”. The answer was no, so we set out to create one that lived up to our high expectations. We designed our app to have all the components of a truly playful zoo experience. For the animal content, we included only the most brilliant animal photos we could find along with animal sounds and fun facts to bring them to life. We combined our animal illustrations and content with live zoo cams to pull it all together – kind of like having a zoo in the palm of your hand!

TIP: Design for delight, design for differentiation. It’s much easier to get noticed when you make something that doesn’t exist. We highly recommend this talk by John Geleynse Director of Technology Evangelism at Apple titled The Ingredients of a Great iPhone App.

A Name That Says It All

 The name, Pocket Zoo, was relatively easy to come up with. It was the first thing that popped into our heads. It’s very descriptive and illustrates our value proposition extremely well. The only problem was that there were already two other apps with that name. Plan B was to call the app Zoowee; more abstract but fun sounding.

Descriptive names are much more effective, especially in a hyper-competitive environment like the App Store. We looked at the two other Pocket Zoo apps and noticed that they were very limited in their features and scope. We went with our gut and stuck with the name that we thought suited our baby best. We added additional copy to the name to give the user a better idea of what made our app unique and ended up going with Pocket Zoo™ with Live Animal Cams.

 TIP: Descriptive > Abstract names

An Icon That Pops!

We placed a great deal of emphasis on the icon and demo video. The icon is the face of our app, small as it is, it’s key to getting the attention of our primary audience (and the iTunes editorial team).  We thought only the most popular animal should be the star of our icon, and based on the highly successful online panda cam, the choice for a panda was easy. To highlight the main feature of our app, the live animal cams, we gave the background of our delightful panda a Live video-recording theme that was consistent with the UI of our app.  When it was featured on the front page of the iTunes App store and we saw our panda smiling at us, we knew we had made a good choice.

Pocket Zoo™ with Live Animal Cams from tiny hearts on Vimeo.

Our 45-second video featured all three components of our animal content: photos, sounds and facts, and our favorite panda cam where you can see the star of the show live!  Our video demo resulted in a runner up spot in the App Star Awards. This attention to detail paid off with mentions on TUAW, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb; and perhaps this is what got us noticed by Apple.

TIP: Stand out from the crowd with an icon that stands out! Remember, you will be judged by your icon.

Send Steve Jobs An Email

When all else fails send Steve Jobs an email. No, I’m kidding, that’s not what we did. But we did want to do something “different” and nice at the same time. So we sent Steve a gift via iTunes. That gift was Pocket Zoo with Live Animal Cams. We can’t tell if he redeemed our app for sure…but we’d like to think he accepted the gift, it’s the least we could do.

TIP: Think different

www.tinyhearts.com