Getting your product in front of the right people at the right time ain't easy. Especially when you're a little fish swimming in a big pond. What can an indie mobile game developer do to get noticed?
Big Boy Marketing
After going to the Pocket Gamer Connects conference a few months back, we kept hearing about burst marketing campaigns and how effective they are to acquire users in those critical first few days of launch. As new mobile game developers, we were entranced by the presentations and stats of burst campaigns boosting apps to the top of the charts. Stoked by this newfound (at least for us) knowledge, we went back and researched this tactic to see how we could apply it to our marketing plan.
After some quick research online (this article was stellar – really in-depth discussion along with pros and cons), we soon realized that burst campaigns were likely not for us… or other enterprising, bootstrapped indie game developers like us. Why? They’re expensive! If you consider an average cost per install (CPI) of $1.43 (Source: Fiksu Index for July 2015), to acquire 25,000 users we’d be paying over $35,000. That’s more than our budget to produce our first game. So what’s an indie mobile game developer to do?
After some quick research online (this article was stellar – really in-depth discussion along with pros and cons), we soon realized that burst campaigns were likely not for us… or other enterprising, bootstrapped indie game developers like us. Why? They’re expensive! If you consider an average cost per install (CPI) of $1.43 (Source: Fiksu Index for July 2015), to acquire 25,000 users we’d be paying over $35,000. That’s more than our budget to produce our first game. So what’s an indie mobile game developer to do?
Indie Marketing
The benefits of burst are undeniable, namely ranking and exposure, but we as an indie mobile game developer need to focus on cost-effective, stealth ninja marketing tactics that will meet our tight budget. Here are some of the tactics (the Promotion part of the 4 Ps) that we’ve started implementing and/or will likely be implementing in the near future as we make more progress on our game.
- Website: Done.
- Blog: Done.
- Social Media Presence: We’re currently on Facebook and Twitter and will be on Youtube once we develop a trailer.
- Newsletter: Done, but needs to be promoted and developed.
- Game Landing Page: Once we have the game more fleshed out, we’ll create a dedicated landing page and start testing how to increase conversion rates.
- Trailer: We’ll need to work on a trailer to get people excited about our game. Easier said than done.
- Demo: As we get closer to release, we’ll need to provide demos for potential players and press to download and try our game.
- Press Kit: We’ll also put together a press kit with images and info about us and our game. Highly considering using presskit().
- Keyword Research and App Store Optimization (ASO): Research is still in its initial phases.
- Get Reviewed: We started compiling a list of publications that we’d like to be covered in. As we get closer to launch, we’ll begin reaching out to these contacts in the hopes of getting some press.
- Soft Launch: This was another practice that came out of the Pocket Gamer Connects conference that seemed pretty logical from a user acquisition perspective. The idea is to launch your game in a test market (e.g. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden) for several weeks to better understand and prepare for your official launch on the American App Store. Seems like it’s worth a try.
Resources
Here are a few great reads if you’re looking for more details, tips, and tricks to build out a marketing plan. And remember: making sure your game works and has cool features is important, but it's worthless if your audience doesn’t know your game exists.
Are there any other interesting marketing tactics that are worth a shot for indie mobile game developers looking to boost awareness of their game
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