How to Market Software

There all different ways to market software. Some companies choose to use the old fashioned way, which includes using Television and Radio Commercials, advertising on Billboards, and magazine or newpaper print ads.

However, more recently software companies are beginning to use alternative methods of marketing their software. One particular company markets their software by holding open online chats with parents that have small aged children. This allows the company to survey the parents and figure out what kind of software the parents would be most likely to buy. This practice allows a software business to brainstorm for new games and market new hames to ther consume, simultaneously.

-When a business decides to sell a type of software to the public, more goes into it than just placing the item on store shelves. How did the Oregon Trail become of the best selling games ever. How does the phenomenon of a Halo, Sims, or even LeapFrog occur?

-A business must follow 4 key rules to effectively market its software:

1.) The company must know its consumer. This means that a company must understand the person who is buying their product. For instance, a Software company that sells children's educational software, like the MECC who created the Oregon Trail, knows their consumers are parents with small children or schools that teach small children, not single middle aged men or teenage boys. This is important because this allows a company to focus its marketing efforts on a specific group which allows for better results instead of wasting marketing on people who have no reason to buy the product, no matter how good it is.

2.) A company must improve its customer relationships and refine the software that the customer is looking for: This is used as a way for a company to know it's consumer's wants and needs. Often companies attempt to gather this informations from consumers by polling consumers through Internet sites or e-mail surveys that many consumers consider annoying pop-ups or spam. A new way for companies to gather information on what consumers want is the less-intrusive "Chat-Meetings", where game creators can talk directly with the consumers about what they would like to see in the next installment of the software.

3.) A Software Company must highlight the new innovations of the software. Why should a consumer buy the product unless it has some new and improved way of supplying the service. For example, Microsoft came out with a new program in 2000 called Microsoft 2000 and in 2003 they came out with Microsoft XP. The were able to get consumers to buy the new software because it contained newer, improved programs, better virus protection, and jazzier appearance.

4.) Lastly, after defining your customer, improving your customer relations, and identifying the new innovations of your software, a company must advertise their product in places that their desired consumer will be albe to see it. For example, if a software company wants to sell a video game (Ex. Grand Theft Auto) and knows its ideal customesr are males between the ages of 14 and 25, they should not advertise their product in Seventeen magazine or on the Lifetime Channel, but rather the company should advertise in places that youg men frequent such as the MTV2 televison channel, ESPN, and Video gaming websites. This way the company will reach it's prime market without over exerting itself.

 

(Some ideas were spurred by http://www.itsma.com/News/commentary/4keys_000503.htm)