Why You Should Have A Press Kit For Your App Marketing

We’ll talk more another time about the press page you can (should ?) have on your app’s website, and today it’s all about the one press-related element you need to offer to your visitors: a press kit for your app.

HAVING A PRESS-KIT IS BEING PRO-ACTIVE

Let’s say you’ve started working on your app, you’re making your first app marketing efforts and you built your app website. You manage to get some bloggers and journalists to stop by. Don’t have them hunt for information and screenshots!

Unless your app is famous already and they really want to write about you, they won’t bother making a screenshot and taking out your logo or app icon for their article. And you don’t want them to anyway, it’s much better to give them access to official visuals of your app.

Sure, you have all that on your computer and they could contact you, but be proactive and make information easily available for the ones in a hurry. If they need more, they’ll contact you (and the faster your answer is, the better).

WHAT TO PUT IN YOUR PRESS KIT?

The good news is it’s not going to take you much time, you should have all the stuff already. Here is what you need (be nice to them, create some folders !) :

• App Icon
  Put a high-quality icon of your app. Don’t use the one you uploaded on the iTunes Store, be sure to create one that looks like what people see on the iTunes store (with round corners). You might want to offer some smaller sizes to, so they don’t have to resize it. If you have slightly different icons for each OS, put them all.
• Screenshots
  Just put as many relevant screenshots as you can. Put the ones you used on your App Store page, and put some more. It should give them a pretty good idea of what’s in your app. If your app is available on several OS, create separate folders for each one so that bloggers and journalists can go directly to what they need.
• Press Releases
  Put all your app press releases, so that they can know the “history” of your mobile app and see that you don’t stop making improvements and updates. They’ll know you and your app better, and will have your contact info (because it’s in there, right ?).

Apple has always been pretty strict about the guidelines for App Preview videos: there are specific rules your video has to follow so it is approved during the review process.

And even though App Previews are device-specific (one resolution per device ratio), somehow over the last two years Apple has been approving landscape videos for portrait apps.

It is therefore something that you can now consider without too many risks (although Apple approval always have a part of subjectivity).

But what are the advantages of having a landscape App Preview? What are the drawbacks?

In this post we go through the main considerations to take into account to make your choice, and also present alternatives that are still pretty unknown to most of the clients we talk to.

Note: of course you can have a landscape App Preview if your app is landscape, and some of the things we talk about in this post will still be valid. But most of it is for apps mostly used in portrait orientation.

USING A LANDSCAPE APP PREVIEW WITH PORTRAIT SCREENSHOTS

As always, let’s start with where and how a landscape App Preview is displayed when used in combination with portrait screenshots.

This is often called a hybrid listing.

In the search results, the landscape App Preview is the only thing displayed (i.e. no screenshots) and it takes the full width.

On the Product page however, the landscape App Preview is displayed in a section called “A Closer Look”, below the screenshots and below the short description and developer name.

Keep in mind that for apps that are already on your phone or have been downloaded previously with your iTunes account, the way the Product Page is displayed is different. That’s most likely the case for the app you’re working on.

As you can see here the video is displayed below What’s New in that same “A Closer Look” section, before the gallery. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that everybody sees it this way!

HOW WIDELY ARE LANDSCAPE APP PREVIEWS WITH PORTRAIT SCREENSHOTS USED?

Thanks to AppTweak we have some data on how common hybrid listings are.

Clearly only a very small part of publishers use landscape videos with portrait screenshots. And it is more common for games than non-game apps. The category with the biggest representation of hybrid App Store listings is Casino games.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF LANDSCAPE APP PREVIEWS?

There are a few things that make landscape App Previews with portrait screenshots worth considering.

Attention-grabbing in the search results

Landscape App Previews take the full width in the search results, very much like a Facebook Ad.

This makes them really attention-grabbing vs. “small” portrait screenshots and video, as you have a lot you can work with.

Focusing the viewer’s attention

With a portrait App Preview you pretty much have to show the full UI of the app full screen. If you want to focus the App Store visitor’s attention on a specific part of your app’s UI, often the best solution is to do a “highlight” of some sort: circling that specific part, putting a rectangle around it or making the rest of the UI less visible.

Doing this, you are going to redirect the eye where you want. But there are still a lot of distractions remaining.

With a landscape App Preview for a portrait app, you can zoom a lot on the UI when needed, so people only see the part that matters at a specific time

Zooms on the UI in a portrait App Preview can be done, but they often look awkward because you are still working with the portrait orientation.

Easy to read copy

Texts on portrait videos and screenshots are pretty small in the search results, even when you make them as big as possible.

With landscape App Previews you can have much bigger text, either next to the UI (like the example in the section above) or by itself.

The assumption: getting more people from the search results

The advantages we described are important mostly in the search results, since this is where things are displayed the smaller and having more screen real estate to work with is helpful.

Leveraging these advantages, you might have a landscape App Preview that gives you a higher Tap-Through-Rate from the search results to your Product Page and beats your search results consisting of only portrait video and screenshots.