Software Marketing Creativity

Marketing is about creativity. Outside of posting
shareware on download sites there are numerous promotional
opportunities available to independent software developers.
The first thing that I’ll mention is developers need to
take full advantage of their existing resources. Marketing
or advertising should not be considered an expense. If done
effectively, sales should exceed any time or advertising
investment undertaken. Recently Dave Collins from Shareware
Promotions http://www.sharewarepromotions.com created a
graph to represent the increase in traffic that a customer
of his had experienced while using Dave’s services. A
picture is worth a thousand words and it can be very
effective in attracting new customers. Is your application
one that will save time? Will it help students learn
faster? Will it increase office productivity? Can that
information be represented in a graph? Do you have real
life testimonials, or information about how existing
customers are using your software to deal with their every
day business? White papers and customer testimonials can
often be instrumental in attracting new customers.

Software developers need not look far to find inexpensive or
free external resources for promoting their software. Buyers
Guides are excellent, yet underused promotional vehicles. A
number of different industries produce annual or semi-annual
Buyer Guides to assist their readers in finding products
that may interest them. Typically these guides offer a
generic free listing or upgrade listings for a fee. Buyer
Guides tend to have a long shelf life and can generate long
term traffic.

User Groups are another excellent promotional source. Most
User Groups conduct SIGs or Special Interest Groups. These
groups usually meet monthly and address a different topic
each month. Frequently they will distribute software
promotional material in exchange for a door prize or group
discount. Discounts are a great way to target specific
markets. Consider providing volume discounts or discounts to
specific sectors. The non-profit community, is particularly
sensitive to budget costs, and will often recommend or
promote software to others in the non-profit sector, if you
provide a discount.

Another great way to increase sales is to consider
partnering with other software developers that offer similar
or complimentary programs. The co-promotion can be as simple
as reciprocal newsletter promotion or as complex as
integration or software bundles. The promotion should be
designed to benefit both authors.

Additional items that are more commonly discussed that can
be used to inexpensively market software are affiliate
programs, link exchanges and newsgroups. Recently I have
encountered resources that assist with monitoring these
items. Name Protect monitors domain names and trademarks.
Reports are generated monthly and show the number of site
links, and the availability of similar domain names. Tracer
Lock allows Deja News to be monitored for specific keywords.
Email notifications are sent daily if indicated keywords
occur in Deja archived posts. Bravenet is another free
resource that has been very effective in generating referral
traffic. A "refer a friend” script can be added to websites
and Bravenet monitors the number of customers utilizing the
script during given time frame.

Overall there are a number of creative ways available to
software authors to promote their wares outside of the
traditional download channel, don’t be afraid to experiment
and consider other approaches, you might be surprised.

Resources:

Software Marketing Buyers Guide Listings
http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/buyersguides.html
Shareware Promotions Graph
http://www.sharewarepromotions.com/case-studies.html
Tracer
Lock http://www.peacefire.org racerlock/
White Paper Sample
http://www.notepage.net/whitepapers.htm
Name Protect -
http://www.nameprotect.com/freemon.html
Bravenet
http://www.bravenet.com