Hello TA community, I'd like to use my first post to start a discussion about App marketing. Especially about doing it the right way: Consider the goal of 1 Million App installs for an iOS/Android game in a time frame of six months. How would you approach it? What strategies would you use? What marketing actions would you do to accomplish one million installs in half a year? Any ideas are welcome, Thank you!
My current aproach Let me continue with my own marketing strategy. Any feedback, advice or new ideas are welcome. In general, I consider the product itself as the most important marketing asset. At a first glace, the games most fundamental features are: * The player will enjoy a fun time while playing. ThatÂ’s for sure. We used a proven game concept with colorful graphics and happy background music and kept our focus on making it feel good. * Quality of the graphics, audio and code implementation match the quality of current top rated games. * The app is completely free, though some in-game items require payment. BUT: The player can get everything for free by just playing. The in-app purchasements target the instant gratification minded players. Then there are the marketing specific features of the App: * Facebook integration: * - The player gets rewarded with in-game items for logging in to Facebook. * - The player gets rewarded with in-game items for inviting friends on Facebook. * - Profile pictures of friends who also play the game are displayed. * - Score and Achievements are posted to the players Facebook timeline (if permissions are granted of course). * Ticker message, informing the player of the benefits of logging in to Facebook as well as other important news. * Local notifications: Every 42 hours, the player gets an in-game reward (21 hours if logged in to Facebook). Local notifications inform the player when it's time to pick up the free gift. This way we're giving the player a reason to return to the game. * Google Analytics to figure out any too challenging levels, so we can adjust accordingly. * In-game dialog offering the player the opportunity to rate the app. * In-game button to open our websites feedback form to make it as easy as possible to get in touch with the dev team. * Right now it's localized to English, German and Japanese. With Korean, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese and Russian to follow. Next, lets focus on the launch marketing: * We're gonna release in Japan first. Japan because it's very isolated in regards of the language barrier and therefore the perfect test market. The feedback and insights we gain from Japan will help us to further optimize before we release in Europe and the US. * We hired a high profile PR agency from Tokyo to get the word, i.e. press release, out to the right people. They will contact around 100 media from the gaming, IT and general news fields. Two third of them are directly related to Games and Apps, so I guess reviews should be covered. * I've put quite some effort in writing an app description. Mainly by following the instructions found in the book "Made to Stick" by Chip and Dan Heath (one of those rare MUST READ by any means necessary books btw). I don't know yet if it's a good app description, but at least it follows some proven rules. And that's it so far. The problem is, this will probably be insufficient. So what else should I do? The goal is to reach 1 million app installs in 6 Months. Any ideas how to accomplish that are welcome! What have you done? What worked for you? and what failed? Please share your thoughts and experiences. Thank you!
Show your app early in threads on sites. You will soon get an idea of if it will generate interest or not before you spend a ton on marketing a product which won't give you that return. If you really want downloads paid installs are the easiest way but it won't be cheap and your average person will need to be worth more than the cost of the install.
It looks like you have covered all the bases. I will give you a bit of first hand information about one of my teams recent games. The game was launched and got about 30,000 downloads in the first week and a half but still did not go viral. New modification are in the works. This game in our opinion is better than a game one of my team was involved in which did go viral. The difference is that the game that went viral was promoted by a company that had over a few million followers and the current game is going it on our own. Also we are finding that the return as far as advertising revenue is much higher with tencent in China. We have a few games published in that market and getting 50 to over 100 times what we are getting for google. We are getting ready to launch our first free / in app purchase game with advertising to test that market. Our belief is that we will need about 200,000 downloads to go viral if we are to go it alone without joining up with a publisher. However we are looking at a new publisher in China that has 10,000,000 in startup capital. They intend to only promote in China. Good luck with your game
It looks you're having a good time with your apps. Regarding China market you are very ambitious, though I'm wishing you the best. Mate, I want to launch my game in china. Can you help me on that? I need a real publisher who can buy me 10,000,000 download. How can i do that?
Nice advice, but still we need some marketing strategy to get a good download. maybe facebook advertising can help on this situation.
Thank you for taking the time sharing this! Just out of curiosity, have you tried sponsored tweets or other kind of celebrity marketing? Just out of curiosity, how high is the share of a publisher? Approximately, in %? I never thought about a publisher, but I'm interested at which value (%) the negotiation starts.
What game was it you released ? Edit - i forget. You never say what the game is, you just say you've had millions of downloads etc!
Thank you for your advise! That's the reason why we release in Japan first. Based on the numbers released by distimo, we're able to scale the the payed downloads for the launch in the US/EU.
Great info Thanks for all the great info guys. Much appreciated, as I am marketing director for Brute Force Games!
Some old-school ideas. Here are some more marketing ideas. Has anybody experimented with one (or some) of the following ideas? If so, please share your conclusions: * Advertising on EZines (Very old school, well almost ancient, but does it still work?) * Advertising on Email Lists (Also very old school and way too close to spam but well...) * Sponsored Tweets from Celebrities (What where the results?) * Posting on facebook groups * Spamming app forums (nah, not really..., but you get the point) * Review exchange * Classified ads? * Hiring app promotion agencies (Are there any that are actually worth their money?) * Banner ads - like for example here on TA. I'm particularly interested in the response rate that can be achieved with any of those. So please go ahead and share all of your insights. Thanks!
