Successful Marketing Techniques for Promoting Mobile Games

Designing and developing a mobile game isn’t enough. You need to have a marketing strategy in place that will help you push your product to as large of an audience as possible. While this may sound daunting, especially if you’re on your first app or video game, there are plenty of cost-effective solutions and techniques that will help you effectively promote your mobile game.

1. Identify the Target Audience

What you want, before you get started with any other marketing effort, is to know who your target audience is, their age range, preferences, and so on. This will help you save a lot of money and time. A good technique here is to check out your competitors and replicate their campaigns. For example, if you have a strategy game, check what the top 10 strategy games are doing for promotion, and replicate that on a smaller scale. Odds are that if one of the top 10 games is doing it, it’s effective.

2. Build a Homepage

Not all of your user base will come through the app store. If you intend to use a wide variety of marketing channels, you will need a website and landing pages for your mobile game. The landing pages themselves should be built with a specific target or objective in mind. What do you want from your landing page? Do you want to drive up app installs right away, or do you want to gather more information about your prospective customer? Where is this particular landing page within the sales funnel? Landing pages can be used for generating leads, understanding user engagement, fuelling different marketing channels and, of course, driving up downloads. It’s a good idea to have more than one landing page if you have a large enough sales funnel.

3. Leverage Feedback and Reviews

Appstore reviews drive up downloads, and as such they should be a part of your marketing strategy. The simplest, most straightforward way to get reviews is by asking for them. If you have a good game that people love, they will be glad to review it if you ask them. This can be done through in-game pop-ups, but make sure that you do not use them too intrusively. You can also ask for in-game feedback, which will give you invaluable insight into what you can patch, further increasing user engagement and their willingness to give your game a positive review.

4. Create Forums for your Users

A forum has two benefits. First of all, it will help develop a community. A strong community can float a game through hard times, and it can also draw in new users. The second benefit is what you get from interacting with your users as a developer. You will gain both direct and indirect feedback on your game. You will know what works and what doesn’t, in sometimes brutally honest discussions. However, do not look at negative discussion as something to be avoided. It can lead to the greatest insights in regards to how you can improve your game.

5. Use Social Media

Social media is a proven promotion channel for apps and mobile games. You can use social media to promote your game in one of three ways: engagement with fans, in-game implementation and advertising.
Using social media to engage with fans is a great way to increase user retention. For example, a funny tweet, a teaser screenshot of an upcoming expansion, or a contest run-trough social media, can remind users of your game, and bring them back to the fold.

If you have the resources to implement social media into your game, you will draw even more benefit from this channel. If you give players the option to tweet about an in-game achievement, you will be able to spread your brand awareness at no cost.

Finally, advertising on social media can be very effective, with major platforms offering app-specific advertisements, which allow users to download an app directly from the ad. Social media marketing can also be done through shareable content and content marketing in general.

Conclusion

Promoting an online game has some rules which are specific to the medium. In general, you want to draw in an audience and remain engaged with them, since gaming is a hobby and a passion for many people. If you manage to capture a core audience and expand from there, you will be able to build a loyal user base.