The phenomenal popularity of games on smartphone devices has made gaming apps one of the most sought-after niches for generating revenue. The mobile game category accounts for a whopping 75% of iOS App Store revenue, and for an even greater 90% of Google Play Store revenue.
Developing a game for any platform can be relatively easy these days, with the tricky part of a successful launch coming after development and release: marketing your game. The promotion of the app is critical to get right, and can be incredibly difficult to nail down for many app developers.
Before launching your mobile gaming app, make sure you have a solid marketing strategy in place in order to make your launch as effective as possible. Below are six effective ways to market your mobile game to help you reach your target audience.
1. Give your app a home on the Web.
Designing informative, beautiful landing pages are critical for both websites and apps, and giving your app a home on the Web is an important part of your app marketing campaign. You can use a landing page to reach potential customers in a location outside of the app stores as the webpage and download pages are independently geared toward specific audiences experiencing them in different environments, although they are connected by one main goal: to install the app.
In order to create a landing page, it is important to set your marketing goals for the gaming app prior to creating the website content. Your landing page should be able to help you turn up the volume on generating leads, collecting demographic information about your target audience, understanding potential customer engagement, providing fuel for additional marketing channels, and offering insights into the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
When you’re designing a landing page for your mobile gaming app, keep traditional website design in mind. A few key components of an effective landing page include:
- Gripping headlines
- Relevant keywords
- Easily accessible social sharing buttons
- Beautiful images
- Smartly placed CTAs
2. Ask for feedback and reviews to gain better insight.
The customers of today have become more aware of the vast amount of options available when it comes to gaming apps. In order to make a choice, many people rely on ratings and reviews by other customers. As an app marketer, why not use these ratings and reviews to your advantage rather than letting your customers speak about their experience with your game without your participation?
In order to make changes to optimize your app’s experience based on customers’ feedback and reviews, try to understand why they request the things they request, and improve your app accordingly. The more you truly listen to your customers and put their requests first, the happier your customers will be, and the better your ratings and reviews will become.
3. Create forums for customers to discuss your mobile game.
A forum can be created for your app in order to help your customers build trust by meeting other players and interacting with the game developers.
Your forum is sure to receive both positive and negative comments overtime, but it’s better to engage with customers in a place that feels like a common meeting ground rather than to not engage with them at all, or until it’s too late and they’ve already uninstalled your app. Negative discussions may seem disappointing at first, but there’s a huge opportunity in them to listen to your customers and to improve your app to better please them.
Customer support is another important area that cannot be neglected. It is necessary to help the customers experience your app in the best way possible, and is one of the most important steps to take when marketing your mobile game.
4. Be social with your game.
Social media marketing has become a proven strategy to gather customers’ attention. It is always recommended to implement social media into your mobile game’s launch campaign as a way to better connect with your customers and to drum up excitement, and even to integrate social media into your app so that your customers can share their gaming achievements. This will make your customers more comfortable around your mobile game and they will also build trust in the game through connecting with their personal networks.
You can also post the details of your mobile game on various social media channels in order to gather instant recognition for the game, and to extend your fan base in a location outside of the app. Connecting with your fans and customers on the social channels they already partake in can do wonders for word-of-mouth marketing around your app.
There are many different social media channels to choose from, and not all of them will work best for you. Be thoughtful around which channels to start with first based on the type of customers you’d like to target, and also allow their feedback to alter your strategy as your mobile game grows.
5. Partner with other global names in mobile.
Partnering with a leading mobile game’s developers or owners is a great way to not only learn about the app launching process, but to help expand the network of potential customers who may be interested in downloading your mobile game. The major advantage a partnership like this can bring to the table is that they have prior experience in grabbing the attention of a global audience and know they can help you improve your marketing strategies for better customer engagement.
A solid partnership includes allowing two-way access to existing communities and networks, so try to partner with a game that compliments your game rather than one that directly competes with it. Leveraging a partnership network will open up a whole new segment of potential customers you may not have been able to reach on your own, so choose wisely.
6. Share video previews of your game.
Videos are a great alternative to text-based descriptions of your game. You can share your videos across many different video sharing platforms, including YouTube, Daily Motion, Vimeo, and others to expand its views as far as possible. Advertising on these platforms has emerged as one of the fastest ways to promote new gaming apps as it gives potential customers a sneak peek into what they’ll experience in installing your app.
You can also share your video content across the above mentioned social channels and with many other distribution channels that could potentially lead to new customers. Video content is a wonderful way to quickly highlight the best pieces of your mobile game, so be sure to put quite a bit of thought into laying your video concept out before creating the content.
Author Bio
Keval Padia is a Founder & CEO of Nimblechapps, a fast-growing android game development company. The current innovation and updates of the field lures him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics.
