A few days ago I had a simple little thought — nothing deep, just a succinct way of explaining something kind of interesting about our industry — and I tweeted it.

This morning it occurred to me that this little idea is more important than I originally thought.

A large percentage of the work we do is developing apps for marketing purposes.  Our goal, always, is not just to create a digital advertisement, but to create something useful, something users love to use, share, and reuse.  We believe this is the most effective way for an app to market something else, because the experience is engaging.  Contrast something like that against a television ad that runs during your bathroom break, or an intrusive web ad that is too busy annoying you to actually convince you to buy anything.

I have long felt that the marriage of marketing and software — notably games — is a great one.  As more and more developers and entrepreneurs realize that the app market is a tough one, less and less people are willing to commit the resources required to bring great products to that market. Amazon Product SEO is a big help with marketing lots of items at once, we all know that SEO is a great tool in general, but according to the Toronto SEO agency this one in particular is very helpful.

Let’s be real here for a moment: games — even the simplest games, even mobile games — take immense resources, both in time and money, to create.  But with a market suffering from depressed pricing (.99 – 30% isn’t enough to make a profit on pencils, let alone software), an insane amount of competition (are we at a million apps on all platforms already?) and an audience that views this software as bite sized, disposable entertainment… well you better have other ideas for generating revenue than simply “ship it and forget it”.

That’s not only not good for developers, its bad for consumers, because a lot of really great apps never get past the idea stage, once the reality of making one’s money back sets in.

Marketing solves this problem.  An app who’s sole purpose is to market something else does not need to worry about generating revenue inside the app store. It just needs to drive awareness of its product.  So the funding is in place to create great mobile experiences — users win, the investors win, and the (many) problems with the app marketplace become irrelevant.  Those great ideas that could have never become reality due to the high resource demand and low odds of profitability can now be made, if the idea can be retooled and repurposed for marketing.  We don’t need to charge $10 (or even $1) for a small game, we don’t need to waste valuable and limited screen space with ads and banners, and we don’t need to bombard users with crazy freemium schemes. We can just create great content and deliver it as close as possible to how it was intended.while driving awareness of a product, brand, film, artist, and so on.

Glowdot is not the first to figure this out, and consequently the majority of the work we’re doing now falls into this model.  But there is still the issue of marketing these apps.  And strangely, its an issue that many clients don’t think about coming in.  Yes, we need to actively market an app to successfully compete with every other app out there, even when your app’s sole purpose is itself marketing.

In a way, this really isn’t that different from any other marketing plan.  If you create a 30 second commercial, you still need to pay for placement, so that people will actually view it.  Simply creating it isn’t enough.  Same goes for radio ads, web ads, or any other form of marketing on earth.  There is the creation cost, and the placement cost.

And so its crucial not to overlook that step.  Newcomers to the app market have, oftentimes, been conditioned to believe that the creation of the software is the sole and total cost, when that is far from the truth.  You still must pay for placement, and in the case of mobile software, that means marketing your marketing app to get it in front of the right eyes.

And even if that sounds bizarre and complicated, don’t worry — it isn’t.  Marketing an app can be surprisingly easy, and we’ve been doing it a long time.