Here is a great strategy to determine if there is a market for your App before you build anything using Facebook.
This is also a great method to get followers before you launch. Then once you launch your App you will have a group of people who you can advertise your App launch to and drive up the installs from day one.
First, create a business page on Facebook for you new App idea. Obviously you will want to use high quality photos and the more photos you can post the better. Its best to build out the page, add posts for a few weeks and then run ads.
Once you have some content on your pages you can begin running ads to that page. I am not going to get into the steps to setup ads on FB but I can tell you it is very easy and you can Google or YouTube videos on how to do this.
The hardest part will be creating the copy and images for your ads. I would suggest searching and hiring someone off Fivrr to do this for you. If you haven’t used Fivrr it’s a great service and very affordable. For $5 you can hire people to create ads and do just about anything for you. If you use Fivrr you can hire 3 or 4 people and get different copy/photos/ads for under $30.
Once you have some ads ready go into the Facebook advertising page and start your campaign. You want to setup a “like” campaign. This just means you are going to pay for people to like your page. You can get these “likes” for about .05 – .15 cents per like. Not bad right. For about $50 you can get 500 likes.
For a very small investment you can see if people actually “like” your App. Which at this point hasn’t even launched.
The other upside is that you are going to see the types of users that like your App. You may find that females between the ages of 17-34 love your idea. Boom! Now you have a target market.
Now we get into the next level of determining your market. At this point you have 500 people. Now you can run a new ad group and when you are setting up that campaign Facebook has an audience selection call the “Lookalike”. What they did was take the 500 people who liked your page and created a similar profile of users. You can see below that my Shoe Swipe audience has a “Lookalike” of 1.9 million users. I’d say that is a good size market to target.
As you can see when I launch my App I have two things going for me. One is I can run free posts to the 500 people who have already liked my page and ask them for installs. And secondly I can now run an “install” campaign and target it to the “Lookalike” audience.
Contact Me!
Jeremy@jeremycallahan.com
Twitter: @jeremycallahan
Jeremy Callahan is a Mobile Commerce Expert, App Developer and Founder at Flip Shop Marketing