Although I’m not new to game development, I am new to taking it seriously. Recently I launched my first game on the iOS App Store and it’s having trouble being noticed. My first inclination is to invest in advertising, sites such as Pocket Gamer, banner ads through [iAd](http:// http://advertising.apple.com/), etc. Now, the biggest problem with doing something like this is that I have an extremely limited budget, say $400.00 ( which could purchase ads for a week or two ). Is it even worth investing in advertising, or should I be trying other routes? In my mind, the only way advertising would be worth it is if it could give me a sustainable rank within the app store. That means a substantial raise in downloads for a week, not just a bump up a few ranks.
I kind of agree with @Moonjump_1 with the best method to advertise being through other freemium games banner ads. At least you are targeting a market you know plays and is playing games
Thanks for the suggestions so far (I added a signature). Have you guys had experience with marketing on a free app? Can I expect to get reasonable results with a $400.00 budget?
I can’t speak to experience just yet. I’ve not spent $400.00 on advertising before. Previous conversations have led me to believe that you won’t recoup the investment with $400.00 in banner ads.
This is what was suggested to me. Use the couple hundred dollars to pay for the production of a trailer and maybe some art. You’d utilize these elements in a media package and send these on to people who talk about IOS games (reviewers, promoters, ect.)
A couple more suggestions would be to build yourself a micro site that promotes the game, gives people a link to you as a developer and a way for you to link to your potential audience. Build games that build an audience for you.
If you are not super comfortable design wise, hire an artist to do a bit of work on your screenshots. They are pretty plain at the moment and could use some nice spice to let people know what they would be doing in the game, or a general description of what is going on in that particular still.
Could you suggest any web developers who would be interested in this sort of thing? I’ll work on screenshots, and promotional images here. Thank you for a very detailed response!
Advertising, and marketing in general is something you have to take a sustained approach to. You have to be able to make a lot of tries that fail to find what works. Pretty much anything that’s a one shot thing where you blow all your cash is probably throwing money away.
Another thing is that the companies that spend the most on advertising set the price. Advertising is a high volume low margin game. If you can’t be as effective as the big boys you can’t make money. You need good analytics and experience in this area to stand a chance. You also need to be able to spend enough to get meaningful numbers, and you need at least another zero on yours to make it worth it.
A really good place to start is to get a grounding in how advertising works. The basics haven’t changed in decades, and one of the best books out there still is Ogilvy on adverting.
Personally I think mobile is just a tough place for indies. Less then 10% of the developers making money in that area are indies. Now look at how many indies are trying. You have to be better. What you don’t know you need to go out and research.
There are multiple angles you can take. One is maybe make a version of your game for the PC so you can leverage steam. Make a website, post your game on every forum you can find, contact game media, etc… You need to scratch and claw to enough traffic so you can actually measure the performance of your game and know how much revenue X dollars in advertising will even bring in. And it goes without saying you need good analytics.
Why would you advertise a free app?
For $400 and say that related to 1000 clicks on your advert and then 100 people downloaded your app and then 1 in 100 paid for an upgrade for $10. You’ve just lost yourself $390.
There are also marketing/pr firms that specialise in selling games that may be able to help. You don’t have to be an expert on everything yourself.
Just as you wouldn’t expect someone to walk off the street and code a succesful game first time around, it’s just as nieve to expect to get marketing right first.
You can spend a lot of time honing the craft and becoming a marketing guru. But having a third party that already has the skills and contacts and does it all day can be a great idea.
That is sort of why I made this post. I did come into contact with an advertising agency related to Pocket Gamer and other mobile review sites. They offered me a variety of packages, but I don’t know that my budget would actually pay off considering what they offered me.
$400 wont get you anywhere, nor will $4000. Your app doesn’t have any of the noteworthy features to turn impressions in to clicks (its not by a big name, its not topical, its not extremely pretty, etc), which means most of your clicks will probably be accidental clicks and won’t convert in to installs.
The best success I had with mobile ads advertising was about five years ago where a few thousand dollars was enough to make a mark in the (sports game) rankings. But the market has changed so much that I wouldn’t hold to that any longer.
Assuming your game is fun to play your best bet is to build and keep a target audience and hope it spreads by word of mouth. You may look to include some features to enhance this, for example by prompting users to share their achievements on social networks.
If you are looking to get in the mobile charts, the figure I have heard mentioned several times at conference talks is $100,000 in a single day burst campaign.
Happy you’ve asked this question, since I’m having a similar problem with my game - Have put a trailer together, and emailed around to reviewers, but so far have not had any uptake on that.
It seems a lot of the review sites want you to pay for reviews. This seems a bit off to me - has anyone tried using them before? To what sort of levels of success?
It seems the hardest thing about developing a game, is getting people to actually play the thing! Sigh…