What does it take to make a successful iPhone application?

Before answering what does it take to make a successful iPhone application we have to define what makes an application successful. Sapient always asks why are we building something, what are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to measure it; so starting from top down, what are the business objectives, the key performance indicators, and all metrics. iPhone applications usually serve one of two purposes: drive brand or drive revenue.

Objective: Drive brand
Applications that drive brand most likely are free since they have to target a broad reach. Objective is usually increase awareness, brand recall, or word of mouth, and is traditionally measured based on simple downloads, usage, and extended with how many share with friends, stickiness, and engagement levels. A good way to take it one step further is tie in social media monitoring and analyze share and velocity of voice, general sentiment, and overall impact of the application within social conversations.

Now that we understand how to measure it, what will the application do? Nowadays brands cannot push messages to the consumers, they have to provide value and we generally call it brand as an enabler. Applications that drive brand usually fall under one of two categories: be entertaining or be useful. Entertaining applications usually have a wider adoption, more downloads, but less engagement as users open it just a few times before they get bored. Useful applications have a smaller reach but higher engagement; less users will download the application, but they will use it much more than simple entertainment applications. However the key for both types is simplicity.

Objective: Drive Revenue
Revenue can be driven directly by the application, or indirectly but multi-channel tie-in with retail and stores. Indirect revenue usually aims to drive users to store fronts, partners, or provide reasons for the user to purchase products or services. Whereas direct revenue is generated by the application. Measurement towards these objectives are always dollars.

Direct revenue can be generated from advertising or downloads, and both have different strategies. Revenue from advertising is similar to brand-driven applications: it aims to reach as many users as possible by providing free entertaining or utilities, and collect revenue through 3rd party advertising. However, download revenue can be a little more complex as it involves pricing strategy.

The secret to maximize download revenue is pricing. The most popular paid applications are priced between $0.99 and $3.99, with predominant 99 cent applications. These applications are what we call the big-fast-sales. Most users download them and use them once or twice; they’re predominantly entertainment and provide small value to the consumer, but the mass download provides great initial revenue and then stops. The most grossing applications are actually priced between $4.99 and $9.99 at 44% and account for 44% of revenue. These applications are downloaded less, but used much more often as usually they do provide value.

Here’s a simple framework to determine your iPhone application strategy

• Set objectives – what is successful?
  • Drive Brand – Free
    • Entertaining
    • Useful
  • Generate Revenue
    • Direct Revenue
      • Business models
        • Free apps
        • big fast sales
        • sustained sales
      • Revenue Models
        • Thru ads
        • Thru downloads
          • Pricing Structure
            • Most popular $0.99 at 50% and 0.99-3.99
            • Most grossing $4.99-9.99 at 44%
    • Indirect Revenue
      • Cross / Multi-channel
      • Point of Sale

Conclusion
So what does it take to make a successful iPhone application? You need a strategy, know what you want, how to get there, and how to measure. Keep it simple, make it engaging, and provide means to share and pass-along.

Infrastructure software giant Autonomy launched a new web content management tool under its Interwoven brand, designed to monitor social media content and allow businesses to act on the insights gleaned.

The Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis solution is a combination of the Autonomy Interwoven web content management system and Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). It is designed to provide organizations with the ability to understand and leverage the conversations happening in social networks to make some money.

The technology uses clustering, pattern matching techniques and probabilistic modeling to understand sentiment, and can present marketers with a richer and more contextual set of data than traditional keyword spotting tools may be able to, according to Autonomy.

Anthony Bettencourt, chief executive at Autonomy Interwoven, argued that marketers have not been able to keep pace with the rapid changes taking place in consumer behavior.

“Social networks, which are by nature dynamic and unstructured forms of information, do not fit neatly into traditional, database-driven analytics systems,” he said.

“Interwoven’s meaning-based marketing approach, which can derive meaning from human-friendly information, and empowers marketers to automatically act on those insights, will transform how organizations engage with customers in the years to come.”

Once marketers have determined the trends on which they can act, they can use Interwoven’s TeamSite and LiveSite web content management products to deliver dynamic, targeted and optimized content to cash in on these trends, the firm said.

The company’s Optimost tool can then be used to run multi-variable testing on any changes to the site, according to Autonomy.

The past year, although troubling and difficult for many people, has been a fascinating period in advertising. It has caused fundamental shifts in the balance of power between traditional and digital shops and, more important, changed the way that most savvy agencies approach marketing. Results are still king, but budgets are becoming more and more scrappy and if that wasn’t challenging enough, the client is standing behind you with a pitchfork just to make sure that you stay on form.

This new marketing climate has businesses and brand teams embracing blogs and open-source content-management system (CMS) platforms to drive their new sites. While this shift is being viewed as a reaction to tough economic times, using tools like Drupal, Wordpress, Ping.fm, Twitter, Facebook Pages and others doesn’t have to mean you’re trying to take the cheap route. The fact is that these tools embrace open architectures that have a lot of work (particularly social media integration tools) already built into them.
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This is TMTYL’s first guest blog post by Adam Needles. You’ll see us doing this more frequently as we find more and more people that we think bring some very interesting opinions to the table. Enjoy!

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The following is an excerpt from a recent piece, titled “A CMO’s Dual Imperatives – Driving Organizational and Technological Change,” on the Propelling Brands blog.  Click here to read the full piece.

No member of the C-suite has a riskier or more-short-lived term than the chief marketing officer (CMO).  The average tenure of a CMO at the ‘100 most advertised’ US brands is 28.4 months, according to recruiting firm Spencer Stuart in a recent Advertising Age column by John Quelch.  In fact, as a marketer, few things are as much of a sure-fire, eventual career killer as being named CMO.

The challenges faced by the CMO are not unique to this position.  In fact, they speak to many of the fundamental strategic problems underlying marketing organizations and marketing science today and that are linked to a permanent shift in power from brand-company to customer and to a proliferation of communication channels and information sources.

For CMOs to succeed they must sit at the top of a newly-agile marketing organization – balancing constantly-changing priorities, being technologically savvy and delivering closed-loop insights into the impact of marketing programs – but too often, such an organization does not exist.  The imperative for the CMO, thus, is to drive change.

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PART II OF THE “TREND WATCHING TO GAIN A COMPETITIVE EDGE IN MARKETING” SERIES:

True loyalty – and the word of mouth buzz that comes with it – evolves naturally from the great experiences you have with a company over time.

Notably great experiences are punctuated by a moment of “wow”. Sometimes it’s when the product or service delights,  or maybe when it anticipates the needs of a particular niche or a large group of people, or my personal favorite, for no legitimate business reason, when it pleasantly surprises a person.

Many of you have initiatives using all of or most of these methods, and so do your competitors. You’re creating great ads hoping that consumers will connect with you. These ads are in banners, on search results, on branded micro-sites, in company blogs, and perhaps you have even created a page in Facebook or MySpace. These are all good things, but ultimately we’re still talking about the strategies that have effectively worked in advertising for the last 100 years with just more mediums in play.

Reaching Your Audience

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