Software marketing is suffering from a typical market syndrome- crowding. There are literally millions of How To Market Your Software gimmicks and “determined to fail” options online. These approaches have absolutely zero chance of achieving major distribution. Whether you’re producing learning management systems, induction software or video games, the principles are the same.

The “apps for everything” market is saturating the market with software, and independent developers face a climb up a very unreliable ladder on these terms. Distributors couldn’t possibly care less about new products without a clear market base. Why would they? Who are they supposed to distributing to, for example?

Software and marketing principles

Actually, the best working principles for distribution are, not very strangely, marketing principles.

The main principles of marketing are:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

A good example of this very basic marketing is the iPhone, a reasonably successful product by most standards. The iPhone was a product with perfect placement, strong promotion, and a targeted baseline price.

Working with the market

The best options for independent developers are:

• Market placement: Software must connect with an identifiable market and user need. For some types of software, that’s easy, but in others the market is extremely crowded, and penetration is difficult.
• Targeting distributors in their field: The basic marketing premise, “Who needs it?” applies to distributors, too. If a distributor needs a product in a particular field, they’re going to be more receptive to the product.
• A full marketing plan: This is absolutely fundamental, and relates to promotion, both your pitch to distributors and to the market as a whole. It’s worth getting some expert help in creating a full, documented market concept. It’s not good enough to show up for a business meeting with no concept of the marketing issues.
• Market research regarding commercial prospects: This is a definite positive when talking to anyone in business, and relates directly to market planning. It’s also a very basic requirement for any form of software. The heavy user based types of market software are extremely competitive, and placement is the big issue here for any commercial interest in your product.

Creating a working business concept

The best approach is to systematically formulate a business concept for your software. The business people need to see figures, costing, and the rest of the production issues.

This is a general business template:

• Define the software functions
• Identify the market clearly
• Identify the competition, and your strategy to beat it
• Provide a price structure in dollar terms

If this is looking like a business planning process, it is one. It acts as an interpreter of your ideas to the businesspeople. Documentation and setting out your ideas clearly on this basis allows them to assimilate the concepts in meaningful terms. It could be the best software ever created, and they won’t necessarily even get the basics without this type of information.

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