We have a mhealth app self managment app ready for ios submission this friday. How do we price our consumer beta version?

Here are some answers for you that I believe will help you. 1. You should implement a long term and short term strategy right at the beginning. What I mean is that there are essential parts to your marketing like SEO and content marketing that you need to implement right in the beginning, but will take a while to filter through, but these are essential if you want to have organic traffic. That would be L-T. The best for Short term for a newly launched site is ad's. Word of warning though. Know your customers demographics such as age, income, education etc, know your competitors demographics and then find the platform (such as social media channels) where your ideal customer is based on those researched demographics and then roll out targeted ad's for them. 2. You have to implement social media strategies right from the beginning of course, based on your demographic research. 3. Get busy Blogging - start with content marketing now. 4. Sweepstakes - start a giveaway to get traction with clients and create awareness. 5. Make sure you collect emails as these are like gold dust for future email marketing. 6. Video marketing is essential for competitive retail space and very powerful to get found on search engines like Google. Prior to me launching my digital marketing business 5 years ago, I built an online retail business and made many expensive mistakes. And they can be costly if not implemented correctly from the beginning. So in summary: SEO - very important, Ad's, Social Media, Sweepstakes, Blogging, Video & email marketing. I trust this will assist you. Let me know if you wish to have a call to discuss these or have follow up questions. Regards Kenneth

I have to ask why you would start an agency in an area you don't have much experience in. Perhaps you'd be better off getting at least a little experience first?

Hi there! In few words, the launch date does not matter a lot as long as you are following with a continuous marketing plan all the year. It is better to tune your lunch date according to your marketing campaign than connecting it to the seasonal event. The timing of your launch only matters if your website is already ranked or has a good authority associated to it. Launching a website is not like opening a local shop. The launch date is defined by the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. In other words, your question must be rephrased as: "When is the best time to launch my first marketing campaign for my newly created website?". In that case, you will need to describe in details what kind of website you have and how are you planning to market it. I would be able to give you a more accurate answer if you explain to me what kind of website are you planning to launch or what products mainly are you selling. Hope that helps!

I've been in the picture messaging space for a while now with my apps Lutebox (voted one of London's top ten most loved apps) and now Click Messenger. I've written a few articles about the space including a recent post about the Future of Mobile Messaging. Snapchat started out as an app called Picaboo, which pretty much did what it does now (prior to the latest update with chat and video calling). They quickly rebranded but saw a little uptake in user numbers and had quite low downloads for several months. Then around Christmas 2011 one of the founders' mom had told her friend about the app, who told her kid and her kid basically then spread the word throughout their high school in L.A. That was what really blew up their download numbers as it spread across teenagers at local high schools. As far as I know they didn't advertise in the early days, relied solely on word of mouth. Also it is assumed that they have a solid user base. Comparatively speaking, their user base may be in the low tens of millions, which may a great base of users, but nowhere even close to being as big as Facebook or Twitter. I'd be happy to speak about this in more detail or about the picture messaging landscape and what I believe to be the future of mobile messaging.

I don't even know how to answer this. Do you know what the difference between McDonalds and the local burger joint that is filing for bankruptcy is? It's marketing. McDonalds is worth billions of dollars not because of the quality of their food, but because of their marketing. Marketing is not an expense. A janitor is an expense. Your computer is an expense. Marketing is an INVESTMENT. Would you shop around for the cheapest heart surgeon? Of course not. Because you would likely end up dead. Why, then, do you shop around for a marketing expert? Are you ok with your company going bankrupt? Is that worth the small savings to you? No. Of course not. Hire someone who is good at marketing. Hire someone who knows what they are doing. Buy yourself a Lamborghini with your profit the first quarter. Get a beach house in hawaii. Grab a yacht. Or, try to find your business the cheapest heart surgeon you can and then spend the next five years wondering why such a solid business idea failed in the first 6 months. I'm passionate about this exact topic because all those statistics you read about "70% of businesses failing in two years" are solely because of horrible marketing.