Blog – Mobile Game App Marketing [Lite Article]

Marketing an app is not an easy task so any help you can get as a small developer is essential.

Featured

The best way to get sales in Appstore is to get featured by Apple and to get featured by Apple I know a few things they look for.

1. Are you showing off the latest tech for their hardware? If you are, chances are you will get featured as it helps sell more devices.

2. Sales, are you making money? They don’t pay attention to user reviews or stars but simply put, are you making sales?

3. Get mentioned on well known and established big sites.

4. Timing, don’t release your app on a monday. According to our research most people do not purchase or even play games on a Monday, however business apps are used a lot on Mondays. So it depends on your type of app.

5. New idea, is your game/app something new and fresh?

6. Use your apple representative instead of normal channels. Most people don’t know that they have a personal apple representative, find out who it is and talk to them regularly.

Online Reviews

I know of a fellow developer who got featured by Apple simply because he spent around $500 in advertisement specifically in the UK which later got him featured in the US. So the three major markets you should focus on is UK, US and Canada.

Blogs

I have found bloggers to be a nice place to get PR as they work well as testers and do these things on sidelines. Compare to website reviewers they give a reasonable well feedback on the game itself too thus giving you something to improve upon.

Newsletters

A lot of website use newsletters and if you noticed these newsletters have ads in them, they are both inexpensive and useful and reach thousands of viewers whom are your targeted audience. You should certainly consider it!

Paid Services

Tapjoy, admob, freeappaday and so on. Let me be blunt, don’t bother using them. Most people have not had the desired results even though they have proven results it seems the number of failed results are even higher. Now, if they took paid per purchase instead of per click, in other words each time a purchase was confirmed on our side and THEN they took a little money it would be better. But paying per possible traffic, click and what not and MAYBE getting a sale is not worth it.

Comments

A part of marketing is also getting user feedback and comment, make sure you try and add an easy way for people to leave a review and comment. One of our reviews was 3 stars but the amount of feedback he gave was invaluable compare to comments that said nothing useful.

Social Network

This should be obvious! You should always incorporate twitter and facebook into your game, the challenge is making it interesting and less intrusive/spammish. I would recommend a challenge which works in the game itself, so users and challenge each other using twitter/facebook link. I would also recommend wordfeud/drawsomething strategy which is inviting users from facebook to join the game, it works like “word of mouth” and might increase your sales.

I would also consider game center, plus+ and openfeint. Because of game center I know openfeint became less popular on apple devices but has grown stronger on Android, especially with the recent purchase by GREE. Which basically means you should NEVER release an android version without openfeint. The picture below shows the openfeint button in Idyllic Android version.

A lot of cool features as has been added to plus+ and openfeint which increases cross platform marketing, so be sure to use it. I know a lot of people don’t understand why they should add it including some of our previous developers but really, it will most likely help your game and sales. We would also recommend a newcomer called HOOK MOBILE which basically send SMS to your friends that you purchased an app that they might like.

Anyway, that is it for now.

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