Marketing In Code: PhotoCaps Plan

I’m pleased that my Warm, Clothed and Fed talk/podcast has been so well received. All the metrics I use to judge success — back links, page views, audio downloads, tweets, etc. — are telling me that there’s an audience of programmers who are interested in market- and marketing-hacks. This thrills me. Half the fun is marketing in code. So, in addition to our regular news content, tutorials, podcast and other content, I’m going to turn my Marketing In Code articles into a regular series.

For this article, I’m going to sketch out a code-driven plan for promoting PhotoCaps, an app that makes it easy to add Lolcat, FAIL and other captions to photos and to share the results on Twitter and Facebook. PhotoCaps is selling, but not well enough. After talking with the team behind PhotoCap about what I’d do to improve sales from within the code I’m posting my thoughts here as they should apply to other apps:

Self Promotion

At a first principles level, the app should be promoting itself. It exists to share cap’d photos; those photos should be the vehicle by which new people come to know it exists. So, when brothers Garry and Ken Seto first released it, they had the app put a small “made by” watermark in the bottom corner of the photos. The first two reviews in the App Store were negative, citing the watermark. They dropped the watermark; now the photos it produces lack any visible indicator that they were made by the app.

Instead of a watermark covering part of the picture, the app should take a page from the wildly popular — and widely shared — I Can Has Cheezburger and append a small ribbon as a footer to the photo. Unlike a watermark, a ribbon would have room for a full URL. It needn’t be irritatingly large, you could probably do it in under seven x-pixels using this very readable 3px x-height font.

People will still complain about the footer. That’s okay. First of all, and this is hard to do, it’s okay to ignore a small but whiny lot. Squeaky wheel and all that. It’s only a couple of bucks for the app — I’d raise it to $2.99, though other than a hunch I don’t have a shred of evidence to support a higher price — so stop whining. Also, and I should have probably lead with this, doing this creates the opportunity to offer a $9.99 no-footer/premium version. Very few people will buy it, but having it there effectively disarms the criticism.

I’d previously considered suggesting a footer-free capabilities in a single app with an upgrade using in-app purchase. Feels like the psychology works agains this, though. A bit bait-and-switch. Additionally, you risk Apple classifying the app as not fully functional without it and being ejected from the store. The only upside I can see is that anyone who first purchases the basic version and then upgrades to premium will feel cheated on the money they spent to get the basic version.

Twitpic supports including a note with the photo that’s apparently separate from the tweet. The app should use the note field to include a tagline and URL, though the impact will be somewhat diminished because Tweetie and other popular Twitter clients don’t show a photo’s note when they automagically fetch it.

At 360iDev I noticed that folks were tagging photos with Twitter handles. When someone posts a cap to Twitter, PhotoCaps should recognize @usernames entered in captions and automatically pre-fill them in the tweet-compose screen. The people tagged would see this in the @replies, they’d see the photo and possibly purchase.

Because of the extensibility of the Facebook API, the options for Facebook are even richer.

Meme, Sports & Seasonal Editions

Creating a set of free meme- and seasonal-editions would create a pipeline:

Timely seasonal editions that let you dress up photos in a limited way with Jack-o-Lanterns or Christmas trimmings would do very well in the online-mom demographic that my wife Kristy occupies.

Releasing lite editions for memes, one per meme, that let you caption a photo with LOL, FAIL and — more recently — “I’ma let you finish” might produce a bump. Even better, make a free edition whose caption changes over time to match the meme-of-the-moment (e.g., once did LOL, then went to FAIL, then onto Kanye).

Might also make a version targeted at sports team fans or, more broadly, anywhere area that supports large rivalries. Have a set of snarky canned captions that fans can use to label the fans of their opponents. E.g., “Typical Packer Fan”

For all of these, it’d be smart to have them pop up an alert prompting the user to buy the standard edition at regular usage intervals. Might make sense for these editions to post canned Tweets that include a URL that points to the full version of the app.

Decision Leaders

Finally, targeting decision leaders with free copies (via promo codes) makes sense. 360iDev attendees used the app extensively; giving free copies out to the speakers would pay dividends. I’d also look for places where ribbing ones peers is institutionalized and where you’re likely to find people doing embarrassing things — sororities and fraternities come to mind.

Wrapping Up

The PhotoCap guys are going to have a go at implementing these suggestions. I’ll post about the results.

Have further positive suggestions/tips? Leave a comment.

Have an app that’s special, clever, high priced but poor selling app. Think it’d make a good column? Email me!