How do I advertise my company's new app?

Hi, hope this is the right forum for this question!

The healthcare company I work for hired some developers to build this beautiful app for our customers who are surgeons. We're picking out the bugs over the next few weeks, and aim to be launching it in October. We're now trying to figure out how to promote or advertise the app. Can we advertise in the Apple store somehow? Does anyone have any insights?

A little about us and the app:
- The app is free.
- It's only going to be useful to surgeons.

Any input would be appreciated--even if only to point me in the right direction. Thanks!

Once you submit the application to the App Store, the staff might deem it Noteworthy that usually boosts the applications presence. You cannot, however, advertise on the App Store.

You'd want to promote the application using a mix of old-school and new media..so a nice website that describes JUST the app and it's functions. You can buy Google adwords or related advertising based on searches.

Being a fairly target-specific app, you want to find out what kinds of media/publications your target audience consumes and advertise there.

If there are websites dedicated to reviewing healthcare applications with the target audience in mind, you want to have them review your app..

Thanks for the input.

I was cautioned by our developer later today that we could easily spend more money on marketing the app than we did developing it, and that finding review sites that aren't bogus is going to be particularly hard. He suggested advertising it on relevant sites, and we've been considering a PPC campaign for a while now. Sounds like now's the time.

It is indeed true that marketing an app can cost more than making it and that's where new media comes in to make it more affordable. Especially if you have a free app, then just getting people to talk about it with some minimal PPC might get you the necessary exposure.

Reviews in publications and on sites that are favored by surgeons is probably the best and least expensive way to go.

See if you can get a 'tame' journalist to do a report on the app in a medical journal.