How do you create a mobile game marketing strategy to make your game stand out from the crowd? In this article, we explore several ways of achieving this.
Mobile games have cornered the video games industry, taking nearly half of total video games market share in 2023. With games like Honor of Kings earning billions of dollars during their life cycle, mobile games clearly have ample opportunity to bring in revenue post-download from in-app purchases and ads. However, with hundreds of thousands of mobile games on the market, entering this arena can be daunting. How do you create a mobile game marketing strategy to make your game stand out from the crowd? In this article, we explore several ways of achieving this.
The first action in your mobile game marketing strategy should be to set out your goals. Without clear and measurable objectives, you will struggle to quantify your success or pivot if your strategy does not yield results. Start by thinking about what your priorities are: what are you trying to achieve with your campaign (increasing your number of users or increasing your revenue per user?), who is your target market, where are you most likely to encounter these people (TikTok or Instagram, Facebook or Baidu?) and which KPIs will you need to use to measure your success (ad campaign conversion rate, click-through rate, average revenue per user, daily active users, or number of downloads)? Your marketing strategy will likely change over time as your KPIs help you keep track of what is and isn’t working.
One of the key considerations in your mobile game marketing strategy will be who you are marketing to. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, so you will need to determine what sort of person belongs to your target market. Who is playing similar games already on the market? Where are they located, how much disposable income do they have per year, and what are their age ranges? Research your competitors to find out who’s playing their games, what they’re doing well and any areas for improvement that you could use in your own campaigns. Use tools such as Google Trends to help you identify key trends and conversations in your game’s genre. Carry out user surveys to discover your target market’s interests, habits and preferences so you can tailor your mobile game marketing specifically to them.
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Make sure your decisions are data-led—for example, according to the Mobile Marketing Association, female gamers spend 25% more time playing mobile games than men and comprise more than 50% of the mobile game market, and people aged 45 and older comprise 32% of the market.
Once you’ve determined your target market, investigate the best ways to reach these people and capture their attention. These will vary by demographic.
A winning mobile game marketing strategy cannot ignore app store optimization (ASO). ASO involves enhancing your game’s visibility and ranking in app stores so your target market can find, download and enjoy it. Critical steps in this process include:
Choosing a relevant title that contains the right keywords to improve searchability.
Selecting the appropriate app category for your game.
Creating and optimizing visual assets such as gameplay videos and screenshots to increase the appeal of the listings in search and browsing results.
Engaging with users directly by replying to app store reviews to build user trust and confidence in your game.
Dedicating resources to improving load times and performance across older devices to retain existing users.
Localizing your game to appeal and cater to a broader user base.
Optimizing your game’s metadata with relevant keywords.
Ensuring that you have clear messaging to enhance your conversion rates.
Customizing your icons, screenshots and even videos during global and local holidays to increase your game’s chances of being featured.
Try out and build on several different ASO strategies to discover what works best for your game. Cover all bases by uploading your app on all platforms, but bear in mind that it is more labor-intensive to change out marketing assets on the App Store (which requires a submission for each change, excluding updates to game descriptions) than on Google Play. The optimal ASO strategy will drive organic downloads, maximize visibility, and improve conversion rates, ultimately leading to all-around success for your game.
Like any other industry, mobile game marketing stands to benefit from advances in AI technology. There are numerous case studies demonstrating where AI can add value and save time in the ASO process, including keyword optimization, image and icon design, and data insight generation and summarization. Some examples include:
Trawling your market research to identify user personas for targeted ads or feedback sentiment, allowing you to focus on eradicating pain points and highlight positive feedback in your game’s description.
Finding the best-performing keywords based on your game description and other games in the same category.
Creating eye-catching icons.
Storyboarding videos and creating voiceovers for ad campaigns.
Carrying out data and market analysis to identify trends in the market and among your competitors.
Using insights to adjust your ad spend budget.
Analyzing user behavior to provide suggestions to improve your marketing strategy.
When technological advancements appear, new data privacy regulations are never far behind. Keep an eye on any developments in this space, as you will need to ensure that the way you use and collect user data for ASO remains compliant with any such laws.
Another ASO trend due to impact mobile game marketing strategies in 2024 is the evolution of app stores, sparking the need for marketers to prioritize the app discovery user experience. With the use of voice search and AI digital assistants rapidly increasing, mobile game marketers will have to consider how they will optimize their game metadata to ensure they remain discoverable and relevant.
Visual elements will be another cornerstone of the 2024 ASO landscape. Eye-catching screenshots, unique icons, and engaging short-form videos can all positively influence your conversion rate. For maximum impact, ensure these visual assets show off your game’s best features and are optimized for various screen sizes and devices.
Influencer engagement has become a stalwart of mobile game marketing strategies. Trust and credibility are decisive factors driving downloads—bringing in someone who has built a solid audience comprising members of your target market to act as your ambassador can give your players that extra confidence to click the download button and help increase your exposure and boost your engagement.
Before you get started, condense your value proposition into a media kit. This typically includes information about your studio and team, a one-pager that explains the game’s premise and USPs, some screenshots to serve as visual aids and potentially a trailer. There are two benefits to this: it will help keep your influencer search criteria on track and you can share it with influencers to show them what they would be working with.
To find the right influencers, search platforms such as Twitch and YouTube for those with a strong viewership who are already creating content relevant to your game’s genre. Make sure they post regularly. Tools such as Lurkit and Social Blade can prove useful if you would like some help with this process. Be sure to choose influencers across several platforms, as this allows you to adapt your marketing to each platform’s strengths to show off different aspects of your game.
Building a relationship with an influencer is best done organically rather than through cold calling. Make sure you’re following them on social media. Show genuine interest in their work—comment on some of their posts that appeal to you or tag them in a relevant post of your own. When you reach out to them, keep it short and sweet. A personal touch can make all the difference. Highlight what makes your game unique and why it would be a good fit for their audience. Avoid the temptation to use the same message for each influencer you contact—personalize your message to show them you’re interested in what they bring to the table. Mention something you feel they do well and point out areas where you have common ground. Remember that influencers are busy people and may not immediately see your message—patience will serve you well. If, after a few days, you have not received a response, send a follow-up message.
When you have found the right influencers who are willing to work with you and your campaigns are underway, remember that you still need to maintain your relationship with your influencers. Check in with them regularly to see how they are doing and how the campaign is coming along, but keep it casual—you don’t want to enter micromanagement territory. Allow them to feed back to you—they may have some ideas on better ways to shape your mobile game marketing campaign.
To get the most out of your mobile game marketing strategy, your marketing assets must capture people’s imaginations. The best way to do this is to create something shareable and engaging. The most engaging social content is tailored to the interests, characteristics and behaviors of the target audience, so make sure you do plenty of market research. Try and create something unique, intriguing or thought-provoking—generic posts will get lost in the crowd.
Via Pexels creator Zhang Kaiyv
As mentioned earlier, visuals are key—high-quality artwork that is consistently themed across all assets with colors that pop rather than clash will perform well. Test your content across various devices and screen sizes so you can be sure that everyone who encounters it can fully appreciate it. Ensure that any text in images and videos is succinct and large enough to read. Consider sound and sound tagging on platforms such as TikTok to increase exposure.
Keep track of and engage in current trends. Relatable, on-trend content stays at the top of search results and increases your reach. You should have a good grasp of the platforms on which your marketing appears so you can tailor it to that specific type of content.
A great way to spark engagement is to encourage interaction—create a challenge, ask a question or run a poll, enticing people to comment or share with their peers to invite them to join in. The ultimate tool to promote sharing is a call to action (CTA)—now they’ve seen your content, tell them what they need to do next, be that to comment, share, subscribe, or click on a link.
Any successful mobile game marketing strategy needs metrics to measure its effectiveness. There are several key metrics you can use to track and analyze the performance of your marketing:
(CTR): The proportion of users who see and click on your ad. In a nutshell, the higher the CTR, the more profitable your monetization strategy is.
Conversion rate (CVR): The proportion of users who see your ad, click on it, and then carry out your desired action (for example, clicking a button to download the game). This is the holy grail of mobile game marketing strategy metrics. Multiplying your CVR by your CTR will give you your overall conversion rate (oCVR), which should be increasing to allow you to buy installs at a lower cost.
Cost per install (CPI): How much you spend on getting a single user to install your mobile game. The lower this is, the more effective your campaigns will be, especially if your CPI is lower than your average revenue per user (ARPU).
Now you have some examples of key metrics to track, how do you leverage them to gauge the effectiveness of your mobile game marketing strategy? First, you’ll need to find an appropriate data analytics tool. The right tool for the job will be compatible with your marketing tools. Look for helpful features such as real-time data processing and user segmentation. Once you’ve selected a tool, integrate it with your game. The tool will allow you to choose the actions or events to monitor. You’ll need to regularly review the data generated and assess how well it aligns with your game and mobile game marketing strategy objectives. The tool may have this functionality built into it, but you could equally engage an AI tool to identify any patterns or insights for you.
An example may be a low click-through rate that may suggest that you need to adjust the time your ad appears or where it appears. Use these insights to adapt your strategy accordingly. Other changes may include updating the keywords, retargeting your ads to a more appropriate audience, reducing your game’s price or running a one-time offer. There are several different methods of analyzing the data:
A/B testing: Providing multiple versions of your ad or game to users to determine which yields the best results. This is best done when your game is already quite established, with significant amounts of data and a sizable budget.
Descriptive analysis: Looking at the numbers to facilitate quantitative analysis of the data. This includes, for example, taking averages of how long a user spends watching your video ad.
Explanatory analysis: Digging deeper into the data to spot relationships or patterns between two or more aspects. For example, the age ranges of people clicking on your ad compared with the platform where it appeared. Data visualizations, such as charts, are critical in this method.
Inferential analysis: Testing out theories on a sample of data, which will help provide some statistical information about your mobile game marketing strategy. This is a good starting point as it helps simplify and streamline this process compared to predictive analysis, which demands more time and resources.
Predictive analysis: Harnessing machine learning to look at the current state of play to predict future events. This is best done when you have gathered a sizable amount of data, as this will improve the accuracy of the predictions.
Remember to regularly analyze your data, even after your game gathers steam, as there will inevitably be peaks and troughs.
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